Mindy: Hello, my dear listeners, and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. Thanksgiving Weekend Edition. Today, we have a very special encore episode for you. Last year, we aired an episode with Chris Hutchens from All The Hacks podcast. We talked about travel hacks, meal and grocery hacks, money investing hacks, and so much more. That episode was so popular that we are rea-airing it today. On Monday, we actually have Chris coming back to the show, where we discuss holiday hacks. We hope you had a safe and happy holiday, and we will see you back here on Monday.
Mindy: Today’s guest is Chris Hutchens, the host of the All the Hacks podcast. Chris has an impressive resume filled with big names like Google, Grove, Milk, and Wealthfront and has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. But it’s his ability to master ways to hack his life and come up with the easiest way to get something done that truly caught my eye. Today, we’re going to talk with Chris about all the hacks. Chris, welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. I am so excited to talk to you today.
Guest: This has been a long time coming. I’m so excited to be here.
Mindy: So, let’s jump into a little bit of your background before we look at some of your favorite hacks. Where does your journey with money begin?
Guest: Oh, my journey with money. It’s one of these things where I always try to pin it down with my parents and I never get a good answer. I’m like, come on, tell me the childhood story that I could come on a podcast and be like, I had the lemonade stand and then I hired my neighbors to run it and I don’t have a perfect, uh, like childhood money story. There are a bunch of random little like, ooh, I’m going to create a magazine to pretend that I’m in the press to go to concerts for free, but they’re like little, little stories.
Mindy: Wait, what?
Guest: I wanted to go to concerts as a kid in high school and so I just made like a fake magazine on and printed it out on paper so that I could just kind of like go and be like, oh, I have this cool Ze about music. Can I come to this concert as a press person? Um, and it worked for shows that were like 500 people shows, like in a church basement kind of shows. It was not it was not like I was going to a, you know, a giant stadium concert.
Mindy: But it’s still got you free tickets into a concert. That’s a So your life hacking skills started when you were in high school.
Guest: Yeah, I but but there’s not like a journey. It’s just like a random thing that I was like, hm, how do I get into this thing? Or in high school, another one was, I went to boarding school and there are a lot of people that go to boarding school that have a ton of money. My parents didn’t give me this allowance or this credit card that allowed me to do whatever I wanted. But I love pizza and everyone was always ordering pizza. And so what I did was I would just order Dominos pizza and I would sell the slices at enough of a markup that I would get two slices every night. So, I feel like my whole life was just like, boarding school was a good example because everyone had their parents’ credit card except me. So I had to find ways to make money and and kind of keep up. And so I convinced the school to hire me to run the mail room because I was like, then I can make some money. Um, I don’t know. So I and then I could curry favors because I was like, I can unlock the mail room after hours if you didn’t get your package. Um, so, uh, you know, I my life is full of these like random things. But the kind of broader, bigger picture financial story kind of came after college, I took a job in investment banking and management consulting. I took two jobs because I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I had two offers that started nine months after each other and I didn’t have the time to figure out what career path I wanted because I was late to the game. So I was like, asked friends, what’s the best job? And they’re like, management consulting, investment banking. And I was like, oh, I’ll do those. And I hated both of them. So, nine months into the first one, I said, I’m not going to do this and I took the other offer that I’d already accepted. I went to work there. And I was like, wow, if I don’t love working, what am I going to do? Like I have 50, 60, 70, 80 years left in my life and if I don’t like working, I I’m screwed. So I was like, I have to save every dollar and find a way to be very optimal because otherwise I’m going to be stuck doing a job I don’t love. And so not knowing at the time that there was a fire movement, not knowing all of this stuff, not having read Mr. Money Mustache’s blog, I was just I need to find line item by line item a way to reduce all the costs on, you know, my spending so that I can save as much money as possible, so I don’t have to work a job I don’t love. Because my naive self was like, well, I’ve only had two jobs. Well, I didn’t love either of them, so I must not like working. What do I do?
Mindy: I disagree with you. I think the broader story is you going back to high school, always looking for ways to figure things out instead of playing by the rules. Yes. Because the rules are you work for 40 years and then you retire at age 65. And the rules are you pay for concerts and the rules are you buy a pizza or you don’t eat a pizza. You don’t sell it by the slice. Why would you do that? There’s I love that you are always looking for ways to I don’t want to say like get well, you’re looking for ways to hack your life. You’re looking for ways to hack the system.
Guest: It’s funny. I I I was working with this woman to, I hired someone who helped me figure out what are my like life principles? Like if I were ever going to write a book, what, how do I distill everything I think about the world into something that is not just, you know, a five-hour rambling story. And over the course of a month and a half, we kind of came up with like, what are the principles of living an optimized life, mine. And the first one is that conventional wisdom sucks, which I think is where you’re going. It’s like I I always, when someone says, oh, this is how it works, even when it’s like normally accepted, I’m just like, is it? Like, is there another way to do this? Like, maybe that’s actually not correct. Maybe uh, this other thing will work. And that’s like the guiding principle and then there’s a bunch of others uh that we kind of came up with after talking about this. And now I’m like, oh, now I have nine principles for living an optimized life. Uh, now I gotta figure out how to put more of them into into pros and and something that someone could read.
Scott: Can you roll through a couple more of those principles, please?
Guest: Yeah, so the the next one was question the outcome you think you want. So, I think a great example of this is someone says, you know, I need more money. It’s like, well, why do you need more money? Oh, I need more money so I could retire early. Well, why do you want to retire early? Oh, I want to retire early because I want to spend time with my family. It’s like, well, what if you found a way that you could, you know, find a job that gave you a little bit more time now and then you had time to spend with your family? Or hypothetically, maybe you decide you want to be a teacher and you get summers off and you spend all the summers with your kids. you don’t have to so like there are, if what you really want is that you want more flexibility to spend time with your family, like the only way you might get there is questioning the original outcome you thought you wanted, which was, oh, I need more money to retire early. And so that was one. I another one I think is I really believe in structured information gathering. We have a note on this one that’s come up with a catcher way to say this, but um, whenever I’m collecting information about anything, I try to figure out how I can structure it before I do any research. So, my wife and I were deciding, gosh, our daughter’s two, you know, our neighbor has a daughter and she’s going to ballet class. We’re like, should we be sending our daughter to like a class or or something, gymnastics? I don’t know. And so I was like, well, let’s figure out what all the options are. But instead of just doing casual research, I was like, let’s build a page in our notion board and let’s like figure out what we want to collect. How often does it run, how much does it cost, like how far away is it, uh, you know, how old are the kids in it and all that stuff. And now we have this little like mini database that when I go to my wife, she’s like, oh, well, what could she do on Wednesdays because she doesn’t have preschool? I don’t have to go back out and do all this other research. I’ve already kind of like collected in an optimal way and it forces me to think about what I want to get out of learning when I’m trying to do research, and then I end up finding more optimal outcomes because I just I’ve been able to collect more information in a structured way. So that’s three of them.
Scott: Where can people find all of the the the principles that you have here?
Guest: Nowhere, yeah. That’s the like these are fresh. So, one of my jobs actually, you know, if you want more, email me. uh, you know, chris at all the hacks.com and we can I I can get some feedback. but the conversation I had with Sarah Scks, who’s this person who’s excellent uh at helping people distill their thoughts on the world into, you know, principles or a framework. We just came up with them. These are like draft form days old and I’m still supposed to go and test them and see what how they should be iterated. So this is not something ready for prime time, but, you know, you heard it here first.
Scott: Well, for for a show on hacks, we really started with the deep core fundamentals, uh to to get going here. So this is awesome. Um, uh where where is a resource? or what’s something that we could link to in a show notes where people could learn more about this concept before we move into some of the other discussions we want to have today.
Guest: The concept of coming up with these like life principles?
Scott: Yes.
Guest: I I wish that I had a place. Maybe I’ll come up with uh like allthehacks.com/principles and I’ll put my draft principles there. I don’t know if I’ll get it done, but, you know, I’ll put it I’ll lease the landing page or something. If you subscribe to the newsletter, I’ve got I’m going to write a newsletter to test this out, uh, but it might be a couple weeks. So, um, I don’t know, this is so fresh on top of my mind. I don’t have a place for it yet.
Scott: For now, it’s something to consider, life principles, go Google it and try to figure out ways to research if you’re interested in learning more.
Guest: Yeah, I mean Ray Dalio wrote wrote a book about life principles that I think, you know, was a little bit of inspiration of just like, what would mine be. But for me, it’s less about life and more about optimizing your life. Like the thing that I feel like is my thing.
Scott: Yeah. I think that is your thing.
Mindy: Let’s talk about optimizing your life. What is your absolute favorite optimization under any category at all that you have ever come up with, besides, you know, the free concert tickets in high school, that would have been my favorite.
Guest: No, no. Oh man, it’s really I mean, there’s like the obvious favorites and the the like kind of obscure favorites. So like the obvious favorite is that my wife and I have traveled extensively on credit card points, but I feel like that’s not like unique enough to to come out and be like, oh, my favorite life hack is like earn points and take trips for free. Though.
Mindy: Well, it doesn’t have to be some brand new thing that nobody’s ever thought of. That’s a really great life hack is I just spent this year $6,000 on airfare because I was going to Germany with my daughter, but she was going on a school trip and the school trip gets a huge discount and they can book whenever they want. and Lufthans is like, yeah, you already buy like 5,000 tickets a year, so whenever, but I only buy three tickets once on Lufthans. They’re like, you can pay full price. So, if I would have thought about it in advance, I could have gotten a Chase ultimate rewards credit card and started earning those points and transferred them over to Lufthanza when it was time to buy with three weeks notice even though I knew that I was going on this trip for 18 months. So um being able to travel extensively for almost nothing is a great life hack. I think that’s one of the best life hacks out there. Where where have you gone? What have you done?
Guest: Yeah, I mean, I I’ve done the tally. It’s probably 65, 66 countries at this point.
Mindy: Oh my god. That’s Okay, so that’s not just to grandma’s.
Guest: No, no. Um, we’ve we’ve been all over. Um, I mean, we hit a lot of places once where we took a trip, uh we flew one way to South Africa, we quit our jobs and we just said, we’re going to figure out where we go. and we ended up mostly overland trekking from South Africa to Singapore. Um, on trains and buses and hitchhiking and all kinds of stuff.
Guest: Yeah, all the way up Africa, through the Middle East, through India and Southeast Asia. and so, but but for us, travel was the thing that we wanted to do that, you know, wasn’t in the budget, right? If you look we were trying to this was early on. My wife and I have been together since 2004. So a long time and when we were just kind of living on our post college budgets, we’re like, well, how do we do all the things we want to do and not run out of money? And you know, there are ways to hack housing, you know, house hacking. I’m sure you’ve had plenty of episodes on that. Like there’s ways to, you know, eat for cheaper, but travel was this thing where it’s like, there’s not really a way to get a flight to Europe or to Asia for $7 unless you play the points of miles game, which is why I think that that became this one huge item on our budget that the only way to get rid of was either to not do it, which we didn’t think was what we wanted, or to play the game. And so, that one for us has let us take, I don’t know, all kinds of things. We’ve done, you know, I we’ve been to so many places. Like, I, Japan is awesome. Namibia was one of our favorites. um, Thailand and the whole Southeast Asia circuit was amazing and so cheap. Uh, so it’s like once you get there, if you could use your points to just cross the ocean and land there, then all of a sudden it’s really cheap. So I think most of our travel has optimized around going to places that once you’re there where it’s not as easy to use points and miles, it’s a lot less expensive. So, you know, my wife and I have never been to the UK, you know, we’ve never like a lot of these like main stream like I was joking with my wife, we’ve been all over the world and which she’s never been to London. And I’ve only been because I went once as a small kid, but like we we haven’t gone to the expensive places. Japan aside, we’ve been to Japan a few times because it’s just like our favorite place.
Scott: Can you tell us what you did to earn all of those points? How you optimized them? And what if anything is available today? because I know that the the reward systems change and so that many of the hacks you probably used um are not available and then there are new ones that have taken their place.
Guest: So the biggest thing is there’s kind of like two main ways to earn points. One is just make sure that every time you’re spending money on a monthly basis, you’re putting it on a card that optimizes where you spend money. So if all your money’s being spent on groceries, uh the Amex gold card gets four points per dollar on groceries. Uh there are a lot of cards, you know, the Amex Platinum card, which someone might be like, oh, that’s even better, it gets one point on groceries. So like it’s not there’s not a one size fits all solution for everyone. Um and so I always say look at where you spend the bulk of your money. If it’s travel and dining, Chase Sapphire preferred, reserve, great options. You know, it kind of depends. If if you spend all your money at Home Depot, there’s not like a great option. Uh so you might get a card like the Capital One venture or venture X that just earns two points on everything. Uh so that’s one. And then the other is that credit card issuers, banks, you know, give massive bonuses to try to lure new customers to use their products. And so if you sign up for a credit card, you know, you can get anywhere from if if you’re picking the right opportunities, let’s say anything 75 to 150,000 miles or points to open a new card and spend, you know, some number of thousands of dollars in 90 days. And so a lot of my points have come from that. just, you know, oh, there’s a new card, it’s got 100,000 point sign up bonus. Let’s sign up for that one. Um, and I’ll say before going any deeper on this, no amount of points is worth paying interest on any of these cards. So if anyone listening right now is like, I need to pay off my credit card bills, do that first. This is not going to outweigh the, you know, 17, 25% APR at all. So, um, if if that’s the circumstance you’re in, this is not the game for you yet. But I promise there’s another episode of this wonderful podcast that will help you think about how to save and pay off debt.\Mindy: So, I have one little tip about your credit cards. You just said that the Amex gold gives you four points for groceries, so now I need to go get one of those. Um, but you can have more than one card at a time. And what you should do is, if you can’t remember, especially if you have like 50 different credit cards in your wallet, write on the top of the credit card what you’re using it for. I have a card that has um an address on it because it’s for that house. That is the only thing I use that card for is to put purchases for that house on that card. I don’t want to mistakenly use it for another house or another project. So I don’t. and I’m going to get this Amex gold and write groceries on there because I want to make sure I use it for groceries. I’ve got a Costco card that’s I think three or four points per dollar for gas when you’re at Costco. So write on these cards so you’re using them in the most optimal way. But what I do is I have a hotel points card, I have a Costco card, and I think we have a Southwest card as well just because that’s where we travel the most, so we’re constantly earning points for these things that we are using anyway. Yeah.
Guest: Yeah. And I’ll say in with the advent of Apple Pay, I feel like, you know, I’m not carrying all these cards around anymore. So, I’m going to give a plug for an app that’s really fantastic called CardPointers. And it’s basically load all the cards you have in. The one great thing that I know anyone that cares about, you know, information security or privacy, this is not an app where you go link your accounts and they like pull down all your spending data and you have to share your passwords. This is just I have these cards and they’ll just say, okay, here’s the card of your arsenal of cards that is best for each category. Uh it works really well if you’re trying to do this with a partner that’s maybe not, you know, as excited as you are. You say, hey, let me just load this up and then you have an app, they can open the app and it’s like just a a crib sheet for what to use where.
Scott: Probably helps with categorizing expenses as well because they’re all in the same buckets of spending that are going on one card. Yeah.
Guest: Yeah, I think if you go to allthehacks.com/deals, there’s a cardpointers deal there, if you use their pro product, if you sign up for pro, but, uh, it’s a great app. I use it. I pay for it. It’s um, I think it’s an easy way to give and I I helped set it up for my mom once. I was like, hey, you have three cards. here are the settings for you. you know.
Mindy: Okay, this is the obviously the best hack is the travel hacking. What’s the most unusual hack that you love?
Guest: I think one that it seems so obvious, but somehow it just never came to me and I I I I’ve shared this with you before we recorded. I know you love it. We were trying to go through this process after we had a child. We’re like, gosh, we don’t have time. Right? We used to have all this free time. Then you have one kid and you have less free time, but there’s only one kid, so one of you can slip away. And then we had two kids and we’re like, now we have no time because, you know, when we’re not working, like we have to be on the kids. and so what are we going to do? And we started going through what are all the things that our life that take time uh that we could outsource. and there are the obvious ones, you know, you probably all either have or know someone that has someone who could help clean your house or you could drop off your laundry uh to get it washed and these things. And you know, we had someone help clean the house, but we didn’t we did our own laundry. I think my wife would never want someone else deciding what gets dried, what doesn’t, what never never in a million years. And then someone, I don’t remember who, was like, well, what if you outsource your meals? And I was like, well, we’re not going to outsource to a chef. like, we’re not we’re not the kind of people that have the money to just have some chef come over and cook us fancy dinners. And someone had told me, oh no, no, there’s people that’ll just like prep meals for the week. Like you send them five recipes, they’ll go to the grocery store, they’ll make them, they’ll put them in tupperware and drop them off at your house. And I was like, really? So I made an ad on Craigslist. and I’ll even send you guys a link if you want to put it in the show notes of like, here’s the the ad I made. I got like five or seven people wte back. and for I think I did the math, about half the cost if I were to like order door dash for dinners, uh for about half of what Doordash would cost someone went to the grocery store, bought all the ingredients, cooked meals, and dropped them off twice a week so that we had each time two days of enough food for two dinners and leftovers for lunch. And so basically sell it was this woman who just like, I like to cook. It she was not a professionally trained chef. She was just like, I like to cook and I can follow directions, uh, you know, in a recipe. And some days she was like, oh, I have some ideas, can I try this recipe or and it was the best thing ever. So for like six months, and my wife and I love to cook, but for six months, we just didn’t have the time and we were just trying to get into the right routine. and we didn’t have to think about it. and it was the best thing ever.
Mindy: That is my favorite hack because I’ve never heard it before, first of all. Like the the travel points, I love that, but like like you said, that’s not a new hack. This I’ve never heard before and I absolutely love that because it can be so hard to find the time to cook sometimes. You’re like, well, I don’t want to go out to dinner, but you kind of that’s the only option or, you know, door dash, which is also very expensive. or, you know, we’ve had meal plans that sponsor the show. Those are awesome, but if you haven’t already ordered those, what are you going to eat tonight?
Guest: Or you have to cook them. Like if you have meals delivered, even if they chop up the ingredients for you and get it all ready, you still need time. This, it’s take something out of the fridge, put it in the oven for 15 minutes and you know, you don’t have to sit and watch the oven cook, you know, like you can step away. Um, and so that was just amazing. And then we started thinking, gosh, are there other things? And unfortunately, we couldn’t find any other like huge unlocks in our life, though I’m now thinking, you know, I’ve never been one to hire a virtual assistant, but what we’ve been doing is cataloging various tasks that could make sense for an online virtual assistant. And one that sounds so silly but takes like 20, 30 minutes is we put now we’re cooking and we have this app called Peprika, which is like a recipe manager app and a meal planning app because my wife and I were like, gosh, we kind of miss cooking. Let’s bring that back. And we might, you know, go back and forth, cook for six months, go back. and I was like, we have all these recipes. I just need someone to go through all the recipes and put them all in a list and then just add them to our Amazon fresh cart. And I’m like, I wonder if that’s a task for, you know, a virtual assistant or these sites like fancy hands where you buy like five, 15 minute tasks a month or something for $20 or so. That’s something we’re we’re going to experiment with next is, are there little kind of research driven tasks like, oh, we need to get our dog vaccinated. We haven’t found vets. Can you just call around and find a vet that can get them in this week? you know, like little tasks like that that will, you know, maybe they take you 15, 20 minutes, but those things add up and, you know, at the end of the day, if you spent 15 minutes three times, you know, you almost spent a whole hour of your day doing these things that you could have spent, I don’t know, working, reading, hanging out with your kids, relaxing, sleeping, all, you know. So, for me, I’m trying to find these these things. I’m trying to catalog them so that I can kind of really feel like I I have something to fill fill the time if I had five tasks a month. I’m going to fill them all.
Scott: Okay, the most surprising thing that you just said is that you have not yet hired a virtual assistant. I
Guest: Is that something you guys both do and I’m just like late to the game?
Scott: No.
Mindy: No. I’m just way behind you. I have we have virtual assistants at Bigger Pockets, but I don’t have one um for my personal life.
Scott: I I have experimented with personal assistance in the past including uh um back in college um a few times. So.
Mindy: What was what was the funnest one that you had your virtual assistant do, Scott?
Scott: I had the virtual assistant call my mom for me. and and and hear about her day. That didn’t go over too well. I don’t advise that one.
Guest: But now that you can break it up into like I only need an hour of like I’m looking at fancy hands and it’s like three requests a month, five requests a month. Like they you don’t need to go hire a full-time assistant. and you could have people do everything from research to scheduling thing. Um, you know, I could have done when I described earlier trying to research all the classes that, you know, I could our daughter could go to. That probably took me 45 minutes, but, you know, I I could have found someone that could do that. Um, so I don’t know, I I’m starting to think about whether I’m going to have enough tasks that it would make sense. So outsourcing things, you know, I like to calendar audit. So like where am I spending my time? Am I spending a lot of time on things that someone else could do that would give me more leverage on my time to do the things that I’m like uniquely capable of doing. Ideally they could earn money so that I could make up for the fact that I just hired someone to do these other things.
Scott: I think the framework here is whether or not you articulate it like this, you have a very clear understanding of the value of your time. And you know, these things are below that threshold and value and these things are above it. And I am generally at max capacity. Therefore, if I have a good handle on that, everything above below the threshold needs to get outsourced in some way, um to somebody else. And if you can do that, that’s great. And you know, for for those listening, a great a great tool for that is if you earn $100,000 a year, then you can compute the value of your time at $50 per hour. Um Now, it’s all pre-tax. It might be a little less than that after tax, but that’s a great way to to to compute, you know, that’s a 2,000 hours per year at $50 an hour gets you to $100,000. um of annual income. So if you’re if you’re doing tasks that are $10 an hour or $15 an hour like going to the store, shopping and cooking, um perhaps, then that may be a good arbitrage like it was for Chris. Otherwise, you may you you know, you’ll need to do that. and that that number should move over time.
Guest: So I really struggled with that because I was like, well, but it’s not like my employer is going to give me more money if I work a little more. So the thing that I finally did was I signed up to be a lift driver. And I I did one ride and I was like, oh, my wife had worked at Lift. So I was like, oh, this is kind of fun. I get to go do the thing the company you work at. So I gave a ride and I was like, oh, now at any point in time, I could open an app and flip a switch and start making in the Bay area right now, I think it’s like $30 an hour or something. So now, I struggled with could I really value my time at $50 an hour? Because if I spend this if I don’t spend this hour researching, you know, activities for my daughter, I’m not actually going to make $50. Now, I signed up for lift and now I know if I’m not like if I want to make $50 or $30 in the next hour, I have a way to do it. and that immediately made me think, okay, every hour I’m not turning this on, I’m with going, you know, I’m forgoing $30 an hour, which means that I should be able to spend $30 an hour for someone else to do something. So for me, it needed that one extra step of actually creating a simple way to show myself that I could go make that money at an hourly rate, even though that might be lower than my hourly rate at my job, it at least put a floor that was like, if I’m just hanging out doing nothing, like I know that I could be making $30 an hour. And so that changed everything for me. and now I’m like, well if it’s if it’s not worth $30 an hour to pay someone, then why am I not out there earning that $30 an hour? So that helped me get comfortable.
Scott: Love it. You just take that a step further and go to the marginal value of the additional of the next hour worked. So. Yeah. You’re an economist.
Guest: I try. And and and I just want to loop back quick because I don’t know if we’re going to get back to travel, but there are a couple cool fun travel hacks I want to throw in there. One of my favorites is when you book a hotel, book it directly with the hotel. And here’s the reason. So hotels are still in the hospitality business and they love building relationships with customers because the loyal repeat business is what drives a lot of revenue for them. So and if you book on Expedia travel velocity, they kind of don’t really get that opportunity because the channel between the consumer is with Expedia Travel velocity. So you book directly with the hotel, you get their email, either on their website or call the front desk and email them and just say, hey, here’s my confirmation number. I’m coming on this day. I’m really excited to stay with you. If you’re celebrating anything, let them know. Then a few days before, reply and just say, hey, just want to follow up. We’re still on track to be here in a couple days. really excited. I have gotten hundreds of emails, Twitter messages, you know, Instagram foot posts of people who’ve gotten upgrades, gift baskets, wine, uh free cocktails at the bar, their parking comped, free breakfast, all the way to my favorite, which was their initials embroidered on the pillow in the room, all for sending an email. So like if you want to hack that’ll get you something for nothing, it’s just send the email to the hotel and see what happens. I’m not going to promise it’ll work every time. but if it’s the kind of hotel that has room service and could deliver, you know, a chocolate covered strawberries or a bottle of wine to your room, I think it’ll probably work if I had to peg it 40, 50% of the time.
Scott: That’s awesome.
Guest: And you could hire a VA to do that for you.
Scott: I probably could have. Yeah.
Guest: They’ll, I’ll add it to the list of tasks. Every time I book a hotel, forward the confirmation, have that person go and send that. Yeah. So I I’m a big like nerd on the the travel hacking, I think is like the core. I always tell people the podcast, all the hacks, it’s like one third all about travel, one third about money and one third about life. And life is career, it could be hosting cocktail parties, it could be anything you do. um, but the travel side is like where I think I find all these kind of weird crazy things.
Scott: Chris, these are these are fantastic. Let let’s go, let’s fly through a bunch more of these tips. What else you got for hotels or other travel tips?
Guest: Okay, I got a couple cool travel ones. Uh, one, if you’re booking a villa or a, you know, like a house, you know, you’re looking on Airbnb. If it’s in another country, sometimes it works in the US, but often really great in Mexico and overseas, take the image that best represents the property, save it to your computer, go to Google image search and upload it and chances are, there’s probably three or four other websites that are a broker for booking that same property. So you might find, you know, some local version of Airbnb in Mexico. there’s a site called Cobo villas, which is like great for booking villas in Cobo. Like you might find that property somewhere else and it can be 20, 30% cheaper. You might even find a website that the owner themselves has set up, so there’s no extra commission going to the booking agency and you could save even more. So that’s one. Um, if you’re flying international, don’t always look from where you live to where you’re going uh when you’re searching for flights. First off, I do all my flight searching on Google Flights. I think it’s the best tool. You don’t book there, you go book on the airline’s website, but Google Flights is where I start when I’m using dollars to book a flight. If you’re using points, it’s a whole different ball game, but if you’re using dollars, Google flights, you can put open-ended things like San Francisco up to one stop, go anywhere and look at a map in July for one week trips. Like you can do all this crazy stuff. But if you were trying to get from where I live, San Francisco to Santorini in Greece, there’s like three airlines that fly all the legs necessary to get you there. But if you say I want to go from San Francisco to Athens, there’s probably 15 airlines that can get you to Athens. and the flight from Athens to Santorini is like $50. So, if you’re looking to go anywhere that’s a little bit off the beaten path. It’s not a major city, maybe it’s an island, maybe it’s a small town. just try to buy your ticket to the like the closest destination. People call these like positioning flights. Get yourself really close to where you want to go and then just do that last leg separately because the way all these flight searches work is they’re all looking for some carrier and their partners that will get you the entire way there. Very few of them will pair up like, you know, in the US, like a Southwest flight with a Lufthansa flight. like you probably never seen that happen. So if you were in Germany trying to do this and you’re like, I want to get to Seattle. It’s like we’re only looking at places that United and Lufthansa work together because they’re partners. So that’s one. Um, I love if you’re booking car rentals, uh auto slash is this great website where you can go in and just say like, here’s where I’m booking and even if you’ve already booked separately, they’ll just continually monitor for you. And if they find a cheaper price, they’ll say, hey, we found a lower price. And because most all car rentals, you can just cancel the reservation and book it uh book it again, um they really help with that. And then if you’re not booking with a credit card that has all the travel benefits, uh you know, delayed bags, lost bags, trip delay, cancellation, evacuation stuff, make sure you do that. Um and then just stay on top of, you know, if you have something come up, make sure you cancel it. If you have something come up, there’s a little tiny hack that doesn’t always work, but if you need to cancel a flight, if you know you’re not going to take that flight, I always wait until like 12 hours before to cancel it because every now and then there’s a schedule change or a delay or something and then you get to cancel it for free. Um, a lot of the airlines now will let you cancel for free, but you get credit. But we were in Hawaii and we kind of wanted to come back a day early. And so we booked a Southwest flight for a day early, but we didn’t cancel our other flight and until we were ready to leave. And sure enough, they changed the flight and they’re like, hey, if you need to cancel it, no cost, you can. Uh because they pushed it back by four hours. So, um, I always wait to cancel flights. That’s, hey look, I’ve got a whole, I probably have 15 episodes on travel hacking. So we could probably do the next three hours on this. Um, you know, I’ve got go check out more there, but I don’t know, those are some of my favorite travel hacks.
Scott: I’ll call this like spending money. Uh it’s it’s pretty broad, but uh I I’ll put it in the money category. Um there are a few ones that I love here. So one, Amazon smile, it’s like this site where you can basically if you buy everything through Amazon smile, it’s basically you get to buy the same stuff that’s on Amazon, except Amazon will donate 1% to charity. Um, so that’s a cool one. Help other people. Um, I think that if you have a family and you look at the cost of buying memberships to zoos and museums, it’s because most of them are all nonprofits, when you join the membership to the zoo or the museum, it’s a taxable, it’s a tax deductible donation to a charity. And if you factor that in, most zoos and museums, and we’re talking like science museum or history Museum or art museum, most of them end up costing about 25% more and sometimes even as little as less when you factor in the tax deduction. So we had family in town uh a year ago for Thanksgiving a year ago and we all wanted to go to the Oakland Zoo and to get a membership to the Oakland Zoo that included four guests and kids was the exact same price after you factored in the tax deduction as just buying all the tickets. So we just got the membership to the zoo and then for the next year, we’ve been able to go to the zoo for free.
Mindy: Um, I do want to tag on to your zoo tip with my museum tip that I think I got from Jillian Johns Rude from Montana Money Adventures. Your nature and Science Museum membership is good at something like 360 Science and nature museums around the country that are more than 90 miles outside of your home Museum. So uh we are close to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. so any museum within a 90 mile radius, my membership wouldn’t get me into. But there’s a list of more than 360. I’m on their website right now. There’s a list of more than 360 science centers and museums that you can get into with your museum pass. and I think actually somebody up in Oregon told me this as well. There’s a Portland Museum that’s pretty interesting. Um, so and it doesn’t work with zoos, I don’t think, but it works with uh science museums all around the country.
Guest: There there’s another version of that a lot of zoos have. So if you’re in a if you have a science museum, you might be able to go to the science museums. If you’re in a zoo one, you might be able to go to the zoo ones or there’s actually a museum in the Bay Area called Curiosity that’s like half zoo, half science and I think they’re in both. Um, so we have a membership there. Uh yeah, it it’s it’s wild and you know, it’s I don’t know, kids love it. So it’s like anytime you’re traveling, you’re like, oh, what’s the free museum we can go spend the afternoon in because we met, you know, we made one-time donation, you know, in the last year at our local one. The other fun one, library extension, uh, you know, you install this browser extension and when you’re browsing Amazon, it’ll just tell you whether your local library has the book that you’re looking at either available in digital download right away format or check out at the library. So, um, you know, you’re looking at a library, you’re like, oh, I’m about to buy this book or you’re looking at Amazon, you’re about to buy a book. It’s like, oh, I could just literally download the Kindle version of this book right now for free from my local library.
Mindy: Oh, that’s a good tip.
Guest: Unclaimed money. I don’t know if you’ve talked about this a lot, but there’s a website for every state where you can just go search uh whether there’s money owe to you. and anytime I’m so, you know, that’s probably like the version one of it. go see if any money owes you money. Um I I just cashed a check for $1. So sometimes you get a check in the mail that’s not really, you know, might not be worth your time to cash it, but uh on the flip side, that website’s also a place where people can go find your address because they just need your name and your city and they confirms your address. So I like to clear all my unclaimed money out. But I also anytime I’m going to a friend’s house for dinner or something, I’m like, oh, I got your address. I got your name. I go look them up and I show up to dinner and I’m like, ah, I brought you a bottle of wine, but I also found that Verizon knows you $35. So if you want to go to this website, you can get a free $35. And so that’s my like party hack is is bringing unclaimed money.
Scott: What what is this website?. It’s
Guest: So every state has a website where you can go search a database of unclaimed money or unclaimed property. So California has one like that I’ve gone to because I live here and you can search by last name and city and find out whether you have unclaimed money anywhere. So, you know, what while I get to any other ones, go look and see if you find any unclaimed money. We can have a live report.
Chris: Yeah.
Scott: I’m doing this right now.
Mindy: I found $1,000 once. I don’t remember what it was for. But I was like, how do I not remember $1,000? It was it was really crazy.
Scott: By the way, no one knows me money.
Guest: So so one of the reasons, I don’t know if this was your case Mindy, but uh one of a lot of the reasons a lot of people have unclaimed money is like you go to the hospital and this is something I learned. I did a whole episode on this if it’s interesting, um about paying your medical bills, and there’s these crazy things that happen where your insurance might only cover a certain amount and so they’re only allowed to bill you for that amount, but it’s legal for these companies to send you the bill for the rest. So, I fractured my foot and they gave me a walking boot and it was like the crappiest, crappiest walking boot you get at the hospital relative to the really nice one on Amazon for $50. and I got a bill in the mail for $350. And I was like, I could buy a better version of this for $50. This is crazy. and I had been in touch with this person who eventually came on the podcast, Marshall Allen, who wrote this book, never pay the first bill. and I reached out to him and he was like, oh, well here’s what can happen. Your insurance might have only covered $50. So it was a $400 boot and they could make up whatever price they want. There’s a $400 boot. insurance says, no, no, we’re only paying 50. It’s legal for them to send you a letter that says, hey, the rest of this boot was $350 that your insurance didn’t cover. Now, what they don’t make clear is that the letter actually says, if you out of the goodness of your heart want to pay the rest of the $350, you are welcome to, but you are under no legal obligation to. The letter shows up, it looks like a bill that’s like, your insurance didn’t cover the rest, you Os 350. And so, uh over the course of getting shingles, uh I went to emergency room twice because I had no idea what was going on and it was excruciatingly painful and I got all these medical bills that my insurance covered most of and people are just like, oh, do you want to pay the extra fee? you know, your the doctor at the insurance, even though the ER was in network, the doctor wasn’t. And so if you want to pay this extra, you can. and through a series of, you know, following his book and playing through these tactics, I ended up owing nothing extra, but I got bills for hundreds and thousands of dollars. And one of them I thought was legitimate and I paid $52 and they gave it back to me once the insurance company finally settled it all. but a lot of people if you have gone and paid these and your insurance company eventually settle it all, that’s where you could might be owed money because the hospital might be like, oh, we couldn’t find them. and eventually they have to hand that money over to the state and then the state holds on to it.\Mindy: Well, I just checked all three states that I have lived in recently and nobody owes me money anymore.
Scott: That that was a great tip about the the the legal or the health bills. That that’s awesome. I had no idea that that’s the case.
Guest: Yeah. on the health side, like never pay the first bill. I mean like Marshall Allen wrote the book. I’m not going to coin the phrase, but like if you get a bill from a medical provider, there are like 10 steps you can follow. I did a whole episode with we walked through all of it. There’s a book, do not pay the first bill you get. There’s like 10 reasons that we don’t have time to get into about how you could argue not paying that bill, getting your insurance company to cover it. Uh you know, there’s some laws in different states about not being able to charge you for out of network things at an in network facility that just changed. Um, so that was a great one. On the health side, uh I I learned this trick when I was working at Google. Um, just like hide the unhealthy things at your house if you feel like you have to have them. Google basically at one point was like, well, we don’t want to get rid of the M&M’s because people like M&M’s and we don’t want to get rid of the Coke because there are people that really want this and we don’t want them to be mad. but they would black out the fridge, the section of the fridge would blacked out with the Cokes behind it and then above that where there’s like waters and and other things it was not blacked out. And then the jars on the counter with like, you know, healthier snacks were clear glass and the other one were completely blacked out. and they found that they just massively reduced the uh amount of unhealthy snacks and drinks people were consuming without having to remove them. So, if you have healthy unhealthy snacks at home, you know, don’t get you don’t have to get rid of them though that’s probably the best move. You could also just obfiscate the cover of them and and hide them in less it less convenient places. Or my favorite on there is just give yourself five minutes every time. So if you see this cookie and you’re like, oh, I really want that cookie. just say, you know what? I can have the cookie in five minutes. Don’t tell yourself you can’t have it because now you’re depriving yourself and that’s depressing. But if you tell yourself you can have it in five minutes, you feel really good about walking away because you know in five minutes you can eat it, but 90% of the time in that five minutes, you’ve gone and done something else and forgotten about it.
Scott: Love it. By the way, um now since since me and Mindy are continuing giving you updates, my wife is owed between 11 and $49. You are welcome as a dinner guest anytime, Chris. Okay.
Guest: Look at that. I hope it’s on the 49 side, you know.
Scott: No uh bottle of wine necessary. So.
Guest: Right? I want an update with what what it was. Yeah.
Scott: We’ll have to figure it out later.
Guest: back back to the spending. Um, this kind of goes in line with, with kind of my, my shopping strategy. If I’m buying something online, you know, a lot of people know that you can go to Raton and you can sign up and get cash back and there’s a bunch of other sites to do that. I love cashback monitor because it basically just says, here’s all the cashback websites that you could get. So the way it would work is, you want to buy something on a website, you go see if they have the ability to click a link on one of these shopping portal sites and then you earn cash back or a lot of the credit card companies. So Chase has a portal. You buy it through their portal, you earn one or 2% back in points. So that’s like level one. I kind of go a little crazier sometimes. So, if I’m trying to buy something, I will go as far as to see if I can find or even buy coupons. So, there’s this website that’s like, I think it’s save letter N deals.com, I think. I I’ll double check. But um, I I buy Home Depot and uh Lowe’s gift cards online. Um, and so you can basically go to the this website and you pay, they have like crate and barrel coupon. I I bought it for crate and barrel. this couch in the background. Uh, I I got like 10 or 20% off by buying a crate and barrel gift card on the internet. Um, and so I’ll always look to see if there’s a way that I can find coupons or buy coupons because if you’re buying a couch, spending $4 to get uh, you know, a coupon that saves you 15% is totally worth it. Uh and then if that doesn’t work, I will go and buy gift cards for the retailer, but I’ll do it wherever I get the most points. So for example, if I needed to buy a we just bought a, we just renovated a bathroom so we need to buy a toilet and uh I really wanted to splurge for like a little Japanese toilet, built-in toilet seat, heated seats, all the all the good stuff. and so we wanted it at Lowe’s and I was like, okay, I need to buy this. So I bought a Lowe’s coupon, that brought the price down by 10 or 15%. And then I was like, well, how do I get the rest of it? So, I went to the grocery store where I get four points per dollar on my MX gold card and I bought Low’s gift cards because if I use my credit card at Lowe, I’m just going to get one or two points per dollar. But if I use my card at the grocery store, I’m getting four, and then so I’m getting the four points on the gift cards. So then I buy the toilet with the coupon I plugged in the coupon, I went through the shopping portal link to get one or 2% back. I’m paying with gift cards that I got four points per dollar for. and at the grocery store you usually don’t get variable amount gift cards. um, and so, you know, that brought it down to like, there’s still $75 or $80. Then you can go to Amazon and you can buy an $80, you can buy a gift card to the exact amount you need and it gets delivered and fulfilled instantly. I got the Amazon gift card for or I got the Amazon credit card for 5% back on Amazon. So all in, I think it was like 25% off by stacking cashback portals, buying coupons online and then using the right gift card. And then my, if you can’t find a coupon online, my hack there is just pop up the live chat on any website and just ask for a discount. Like 50% of the time I just say, hey, I’m shopping on your site. I really would love these floor mats. We got a new car. there’s another floor mat that’s a little less expensive, but I love yours. What can you do? And I’ve gotten, hey, here’s a gift card or hey, you know, refresh your cart by clicking this link and you’ll see that I’ve discounted your price. or one time someone was like, I can’t do you anything, but if you search social media for someone’s referral link, you’ll get 20% off. So I’d go to search.twitter.com and I’m like, you know, referral, name of company, and I find someone who is inevitably posted their referral link on the internet. So, anytime I’m buying something online that’s over, I don’t know, $50 or something where I all this is worth the effort, I I try to stack as many of the things as I can to earn as much back or get as much of a deal as I can.
Mindy: I’m just speechless at all the ways that you can, I mean I thought I was frugal.
Scott: Yeah, this is pretty impressive.
Mindy: I’m not getting, I’m screwing up left and right compared to you. So.
Guest: you can go off the deep end here, right? Like I I could do this when I’m like, I need to buy a hammer and like, how could I get my $11 hammer down to, you know, $9 and spend 45 minutes saving $2. And honestly, I think maybe the satisfaction I get from saving that $2 is probably worth an amount equivalent to 30 or 45 minutes. But now that I have two kids, maybe that’s gone down. So, I will say you can go too far. Um, I think a good example of this is I I realized when part of this unclaimed money thing, I was like, gosh, my my my information’s on the internet. We have kids. Like, I have podcasts. I don’t really need the whole world knowing where I live. And if you Google yourself, you’ll find, oh wow, there’s probably your address and your phone number and your email address are probably available on the public internet for anyone to find. Um, and so I was like, I got to get rid of this. So I started doing some research and there’s like 600 data brokers who sell your personal information to each other and publish it all over the web. and I was like, you know what? I’m not going to pay a service to go do this. And then I was like, let’s go find the 600 data brokers, go to each of their websites, request to remove my information and like five hours into it, I was like, what am I doing? And so I found this company delete me. I went and signed up and for like $100, they contact all 600 data brokers and have them all remove all of your personal information off the internet everywhere. And now, um, you know, I challenge you to find uh my personal address or phone number on the internet because it’s been scrubbed. And then, you know, in true optimization fashion, I went one step further and I emailed them I was like, hey guys, I love your product. I just used it. I got rid of all my information. I have this podcast, I want to talk about it. Do you guys want to be a sponsor through the podcast? And so now they’re a sponsor. alllehacks.com/deleteme, get 20% off. Um, but I thought like half of my sponsors ended up coming from me just finding a product I love and reaching out to them and saying, I love your product. Can I talk about it to my audience? Um and and most of those products are ways to to optimize your life in some way shape or form. and so that was a great example of it was not like figure out how long something’s going to take, find out if it’s going to be worth your time and whether there’s a service that’ll do it. So, my wife got caught in this trap once. We have a a small children and she was thinking, oh, it’s time to start feeding our children food. We were like, there what are we going to cut it in? What are we going to serve them? How do they get a variety of foods? And she was doing all this research and I was like, gosh, it’s it wouldn’t be great if someone just made a meal plan for like the first 100 days your kid eats and it just has all the ideas and everything there. and she was like, oh, I found one on the internet but it’s $30 or something. I was like, you just spent the last like seven hours. I was like, can we just pay the $30? So I think we went, you know, the swing swings both directions. We it’s like not optimized, now it’s so optimized and now we’re finding that middle ground where it’s like, you know what, this is either worth our time or at the end of the day, the incremental value from picking the best of the three incredible hotels we could stay at in our budget is just not worth it. All three are going to be fine, pull the trigger. And that’s where we balance each other out because we can both find ourselves going down rabbit holes, but if you uh, if you just kind of think, okay, let me bounce this off my wife and she’s like, yeah, stop. Just just we found a hotel, we pick any of the three, it doesn’t matter. Um, for food, I’m always the optimal person. like, what’s a best thing on the menu? someone told me he’s like, narrow it down to two. I don’t wear a watch, but conceptually, pretend you wear a watch, narrow it down to two, call one right, call the other left, look where the second hand is and pick it. Like, don’t try to get to that last level, you know, that that Prado 80-20 rule. Like don’t don’t feel like you have to optimize the last little bit. Unless it’s a huge thing, you know, if it’s like buying a house, you know, yeah, figure out how to optimize it because it’s a massive purchase. But if it’s what you’re going to have for lunch, you know, maybe don’t spend 30 minutes reading Yelp reviews trying to get the most optimal thing because you’re probably not even to remember what it was three weeks from now.
Mindy: I ask the waiter, what would you choose? the bison burger or the chicken sandwich? and he’ll be like, oh, the chicken sandwich is great. The bison burger is dry. Great. That made my decision.
Guest: We did that one time and I was like, I asked this waiter. I was like, how are how’s the beat salad? he goes, oh, I hate beats. and I was like, okay. like and then that’s kind of scarred me from like, well what does this person’s uh personal view on certain types of foods. Like, you know, you ask that sandwhich to a vegan and they’re like, both of these are terrible you know, so but that that is my go-to by the way, but I I’ve been scarred a little by by people who have strong opinions about certain foods.
Scott: Well Chris, this has been fantastic. you I mean there’s I mean, you are a gold mine of information about little ways to save a large number of little ways to stack enormous savings and save yourself a lot of time as well. Um this is really impressive. What’s the best way for people to learn more about you and go deep into the rabbit hole of these little tips and tricks?
Guest: Yeah, I mean if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably in a podcast app. So you look you could probably search for all the hacks. Uh, that’s my show. It’s also at all the hacks.com. Um, we have a newsletter and a podcast uh each week and you know, my goal is to help you upgrade and optimize your life, your money and your travel. And if you want to get in touch, you can find me on social media, you can email me Chris at all the hacks.com. I love to hear from people and I hope I can help you save money, live a happier, healthier, wealthier life and, you know, feel like you got a little a little back the next time you’re trying to buy something or take an adventure.
Scott: Nice, that’s awesome and I’ll tell you what, I’m definitely going to sign up immediately following this recording. This was great.
Mindy: Yeah, this was an awesome show, Chris. I knew about uh AutoSlash, and that’s the only one that I already knew. And everything else is brand new information and I am super excited to listen to your show every week that it comes out. I appreciate your time today. Thank you so much. and we will talk to you soon.
Guest: Thanks for having me. This is fun.
Mindy: All right, Scott, that was Chris Hutchens from All the Hacks podcast and that was fantastic. We didn’t share this during the recording, but our producer was sitting in on this episode and she found $183 on unclaimed money just from listening to Chris. So, uh, she’s going to invite Chris over to her house for dinner too. Nice job, .
Scott: Yeah, that was, that was really cool. I mean, all of us found money, I think, or for either us or our significant others within a few minutes on the on the search. the unclaimed property thing is is legit. Do encourage you, if you’re going to follow that tip to look, go Google your state’s website, you know, your state.gov and follow their link to the unclimbed property because there are some sketchy sites out there. but if you do that, um you may find your owed some money.
Mindy: Yeah, that’s a great tip. I thought this was a lot of fun, and pretty, you can make money just by listening to this episode. That’s a bonus. Scott, you ready to go?
Scott: Let’s do it.
Mindy: That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench and I am Mindy Jenson saying, Take care polar bear.
Scott: If you enjoyed today’s episode, please give us a five-star review on Spotify or Apple. And if you’re looking for even more money content, feel free to visit our YouTube channel at youtube.com/biggerpocketsmoney. Bigger Pockets Money was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench, produced by Calen Bennett, editing by Exodus Media, copywriting by Nate Wine Troub. Lastly, a big thank you to the Bigger Pockets team for making this show possible.”}
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