Do you want to know how to get discounts almost anywhere? Travel hacks, spending hacks, medical hacks? If there’s one thing that Chris Hutchens has learned, it’s that everything is negotiable. And each year, new financial opportunities come. So we are excited to hear the way our dear listeners should be looking out for big savings in 2025.
Mindy: Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my not a hack co-host, Scott Trench.
Scott: Thanks Mindy. Always appreciate you bringing strong fundamentals to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. BiggerPockets has a goal of creating 1 million millionaires. You’re in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you’re starting, but it’s especially attainable for those who are willing to invest the time to learn about all of the hacks that can save you tremendous percentages of your annual expenditure and make you some extra money on the side as well.
Scott: In case you don’t know, Chris Hutchens is the award-winning host of the podcast All the Hacks. You may remember him from BiggerPockets Money episodes 355 and 473. And he’s also been on the Fire series with Mindy because we all love him that much. Chris also, fun fact, moderated the fierce, bloody debate that Dave Meyer and I had with the Fool folks about real estate versus stocks back on the BiggerPockets Real Estate podcast. So Chris, welcome back to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. We are so excited to have you and chat with you once again.
Guest: I am excited to be back here.
Mindy: Okay, Chris, for those who haven’t heard of your podcast or listened to any of our previous episodes where we’ve had you on, can you give me a quick little overview of who you are and how you came to know about literally every hack on the planet?
Guest: Yeah, so I’m Chris. I’m kind of one of those crazy optimizers, spreadsheet for everything. I kind of just don’t like taking no as an answer. So, but I also don’t like spending money. And so I had this long history of, well, just because I don’t want to spend money doesn’t mean I don’t want to take a nice vacation. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to drive a nice car. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to and insert everything in the world that costs money. And I’ve spent the last 20 plus years getting creative at finding ways to do all those awesome things without having to spend as much.
Mindy: That is awesome because I am not that kind of person. I love hearing you are my cheat code. You go out and find all the cheat codes and then you are my cheat code, so I don’t have to spend all this time doing it. I just I feel like I can’t figure out the answers to some of these things. So if you are also like me and you don’t know how to do all of this stuff, you don’t have to because Chris knows it all. Chris, what’s the best hack you found for 2024?
Guest: This is pretty tough. Right? I I wrote down a list of like 15 of them, and then I’m working on an episode that by the time this comes out, maybe it will also be out of my top 2024 takeaways. So there is a lot. I think that if I had to peg just one thing, I did an episode with this guy named Kai who runs a podcast called The Daily Churn. It was episode 181, allthehacks.com/181. And he does all these little deals every month, and ever since talking to him about them, he’s probably making $30,000 a month or some insane amount of money. Uh, like I would say getting, you know, when he got started, it was like a couple thousand, but like, it’s just everything from, how does he just use meal kits and find the right deals to be able to never pay for food? How does he, you know, find these different things? And so I’ve been picking up some of them. Um, I’ve been buying and reselling gold at Costco. I’ve been like finding discounted gift cards and reselling them. Like I’ve just been picking up all these side hustles. And so I think the biggest financial hack if I summarized it would be finding the right little side hustles to kind of get excited about that don’t feel like work, but generate a profit.
Scott: Are we going to dive into some of those? Let’s start with the one that that stuck out to me here of buying and reselling gold bullion at Costco. How does this how does this work? What do you do?
Guest: So, for anyone watching on video, this is like a little gold bar. It’s way smaller than you’d think. And it costs about $2,600. Um, but yesterday I was at Costco with no intention of buying any gold, and gold bars were $2,669.99. So 2669. And I just looked on an app uh called Pure, and it’s marketplace. So I look and I’m like, what could I sell this gold for? And it was like, oh, I could sell the gold for like 2650. So I’d lose $19. Right? But Costco has an executive rewards program where you get 2% back on all your spending for the year. So that alone covered that. But they also let you put on a credit card. So here I am buying this gold bar losing $19, but also making 2% in Costco executive rewards and 4% or more on a credit card. And now all of a sudden I’m like, well yeah, I’ll take five five bars of gold.
Scott: So so just math here. So so 2% of 2600 is going to be $52 plus a little bit of change. Uh, and and you’re going to get um what was the other part of that?
Guest: Whatever your credit card gets, right? Like maybe maybe you open a new card and you’re going to get a 200,000 point sign up bonus. Maybe, you know, you’re earning four points per dollar on the new US Bank Smartly Visa. Like I can’t pretend to tell you which credit card you have, but I would say if you stack things up, maybe you’re earning 6%. What’s 6% on five $2,600 bars of gold, that’s $780. You know what? I spent less than that on Costco. So like, I just paid for my groceries.
Scott: Okay, so this is this is sort of scalable, but then you have to have a large amount of gold that you’re storing at home.
Guest: Oh no, no, no. Like I’ve got FedEx boxes on the ground. I sold it while I was in the like while I was walking before, I picked it up before I got to the door at Costco, you all know where they like look at your receipt and you’re always wondering what they’re really doing. In that period of time, I’d already sold it.
Scott: But you still have to you you still have to mechanically…
Guest: Yeah, I got to put it in a box. They send you a free label.
Scott: Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
Guest: Take it to the, you know, the FedEx, drop it off, gone.
Scott: Awesome. Okay. All right.
Mindy: Okay, hold on, hold on. Chris, you said I’ll take five bars. Does Costco limit you to five bars or did you just…
Guest: Five bars per account.
Mindy: Forever?
Guest: You know, split up. I don’t know that woman. They also limit you to $62,500 of spend a year before the 2% ins. So, you know, you and your partner can have an account, you get a business account, you know, you could take your parents to Costco, use their account. So that’s just like one example. But basically, there’s stuff all the time that’s on sale in limited quantities. And what I’ve realized is like, there are a lot of interesting opportunities. Black Friday, there’s a bunch of electronic goods that are on sale for prices that people overseas would love to pay. So there’s these buying groups where they’ll buy these products for a small margin, but you get to keep all the rewards of any purchase you make and, you know, we’re not going to do an episode on the taxes that come with credit card points because that could that could get a little interesting. But I think that anytime you see an amazing deal, you can kind of be the person that maybe I used to be, which is like, oh, this thing’s on sale, I should buy it in case I ever need it. And now I’m like, oh, this thing’s on sale. I should buy it and sell it immediately because someone out there is probably interested in it. So that’s true about gold. This morning I bought 200 or $750 worth of gift cards at Finish Line. I’m not going to Finish line. 30 seconds after I bought them, I sold the gift cards for like a two or 3% spread. And it’s like if you stack these things up and every day you’re finding an opportunity to spend 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 and you know, you’re taking a two to 3% margin on that, whether that’s in the form of margin or Costco rewards or credit card rewards, you know, if you could spend 1,000 bucks a day taking 2%, that’s like almost 10 grand a year. How can you how much can you scale that up? Can you get it to $10,000 a day? Well, now you’re making 73,000. Can you get it to 5% margins? Now you’re making like over $150,000 a year. I love it. So I think what takes the cake is going far enough to understand all the things that are happening so that you can diversify because you never know, right? Costco doesn’t sell gold, like it’s out of stock sometimes. Or sometimes you go and the price is like you’re losing 4% just buying it. So it’s not a good day there. But sometimes you go to the grocery store and gift cards are 10% off and you’ve got a Safeway coupon attached to your Safeway account and all of a sudden you could buy a Best Buy gift card for 20% off and you could sell it for 5% off. So like, I’d say diversification wins and just kind of going down these rabbit holes.
Scott: The best hack is is just always paying attention and always keeping an eye out for these opportunities to make a few points of spread. Um sometimes you win 2%, that’s a win. Sometimes you make $1,200 in a day on a um and what is that a 40 40% spread? Yeah, on a $2,800 uh purchase for the $4,000 sale. And that’s that’s really the the way to maximize what you’re talking about here.
Guest: Yes, I think the big hack is just realizing that when you find a good deal, it turns out there are marketplaces of people who will buy gold, who will buy gift cards, who will buy products and ship them overseas. So like a friend of mine bought 1,000 HP laptops on Black Friday. Um and made like $15 on each one, plus probably made like four points per dollar buying them. So like you buy 1,000 laptops and you make $15, but you also make 4%, like that’s like probably $20,000 in a day.
Scott: All right, we’ll be talking about gold and gift arbitrage and we’ll even be covering saving money on insurance after the break. Stay tuned.
Mindy: And we’re back. Let’s jump into some of these hot button topics.
Scott: And and one doesn’t have to have $800,000 in liquidity to take off take take on this opportunity. Is that correct?
Guest: It depends. Like if you put $800,000, you know, if you had $800,000 of limit across all of your cards, right? But how quickly can you get paid back? So I I sent some gold yesterday. They’ll received they received it today. They’ll probably get me the money by Thursday and my credit card bill is probably due in 30 days. Like the statement hasn’t even closed. So like, you need the limit and you need to like be willing to, you know, there’s some risk in anything you’re doing, right? You could buy a bunch of gold bars and drop one in the sidewalk and like that’s going to burn. That eats your profit for the year. But I would say, yes, like I would not encourage anyone to go to Costco with 20 friends and buy that quantity of gold and then be like, I’m going to start huge. But like the more you kind of dabble and understand how different things work, and realize that any deal you find might be a deal for someone else. Like that’s where it gets interesting.
Scott: Well this is why I love talking to you so much because it it’s you can tell my brain just does not work the same way that yours does. Like like this this this these concepts are so foreign to me. It’s this it’s just not it’s not in my wheelhouse to go to Costco and buy $12,500 plus whatever and change worth of gold bullion, arbitrage it uh for a small loss and then take the points um on there. Like I I’m just like, okay, that’s how like I don’t even like oh then I got to ship the gold, I’m going to be thinking about it for the next three and you’re like, no, I’m going to go take that on. I’m going to go make that spread. I’m going to make 5% on this $700 bucks and that’s my Tuesday.
Guest: But but okay, so you’ve been to Costco though, right, Scott?
Scott: I go all the time. Yeah, I’m going tonight.
Guest: Okay, you know those gift cards? You got like in Instacart, 80 bucks for 100 bucks. Uber, 80 bucks for 100 bucks. DoorDash, 80 bucks for 100 bucks. Um, I was talking to a friend the other day and this is a person who spends a lot of money on DoorDash, like five grand a year, and never goes to Costco. And I was like, hmm. So what if I could just get you $5,000 of of DoorDash gift cards at 10% off, right? And they were like that’s a great deal because I spend $5,000 on DoorDash all the time. If you could save me 10%. And I was like, just to be clear, if you want to drive to Costco for $200 a time you could buy these for 20% off. But I could probably just reach out to a bunch of people I know and say, hey everybody, go buy these, I’ll buy them for, you know, $5 over, every time you go to Costco just start collecting them. And that’s what other people are doing online. And so, you know, everything you see, most people are paying full price for DoorDash and Instacart and Topgolf and Cinemark cinemas. Like if you want to get old school, I was at Costco and they had Cinemark gift cards. Go buy them at Costco and stand outside the movie theater and just sell them on the street for, you know, half the margin. Like I just every time I see a deal, I’m like, there’s got to be a way to build some business around this.
Scott: How does this translate to your investing approach? Like, how do you think about investing separately from this this gold flip? I’m going to term it here. Like, how do you how do you actually think about like long-term wealth creation?
Guest: All my money is in VTI. So like…
Scott: Okay. So, we have we have a boring old school, never touch it, VTI passive index fund investment approach coupled with I’m going to take a 10% spread on Costco gift cards and multiply that out as much as possible.
Guest: Yeah, and sometimes it’s maybe it’s not to make money, right? Maybe if I could forget the spread and find a really good friend and save him $1,000, maybe that relationship building practice is worth more than taking a few basis points off that deal. Um because one day maybe I do a business deal with that person. I don’t you know it’s there’s lots of currencies that aren’t all USD or or, you know, troy ounce gold. Um but yeah, so so that’s kind of like been the really exciting thing that I’ve been messing around with if you will this year is just finding these little, call them side hustles, call them whatever you want that have been just kind of getting me really excited whether it’s buying groups and reselling things, whether it’s gold, whether it’s gift cards, I don’t know.
Mindy: So this all sounds awesome. I hear how excited you are about it. It sounds super fun, but I’m going to be honest, I am not going over to my Costco, even if they do have gold bars. I’m not going to grab these and sell these because that’s a lot of mental bandwidth that I just don’t have. What are some of your favorite hacks that are a little less, you know, I got to do it right now kind of thing, because my whole life is frantic and I’m trying to calm it down. So this like I I could hear how excited you are. I would love to be able to be that excited about this kind of thing, but it just it’s giving me a little bit of anxiety to think about all of this mental bandwidth that I would have to spend in order to make sure that I sold this gold because I don’t want to get stuck with gold.
Guest: I like to think of saving and making money as kind of two different directions. If you want more money, you can spend less or you can make more. Like those are really, it’s it’s a simple equation. Um and there are probably two big levers there. One, you could look at all of your spending and find out if there are ways to make that spending less. So I would argue if you’re spending a lot of money on travel and you want to go learn the ins and outs of, you know, points and miles and credit card rewards and that kind of stuff, you could cut your travel costs way, way down. You want to cut your food costs down? Like go try every, there’s like 20 meal kit companies that are all going to offer you like a free meal kit every time you try it. Go try all 20 of them in a 20 weeks in a row and you’re basically going to have free groceries for, you know, a quarter of the a third of the year. You know, pick whatever area you’re spending a lot of money on and and I think you’ll find some creative solution and I think you’ll probably be more motivated to save money, like to cut back on what you’re paying than you would to just make a little extra. So great example, we’ve got two kids, we’re saving for their college and I found that if you stack all these different ways that you shop online. So I don’t know when this is coming out, but holidays, people are shopping online and you’re like, well I’ve got to spend a lot of money for the holidays. Go look at your credit card, your Chase, your Amex, your Bank of America, what deals are there. Go look at, you know, cashback sites like cashback monitor, see what Rakuten’s offering. Look at picking the right card and stack it all up. And sometimes you can save 10, 15% on something you’re already buying. A and there was a case this year, I did this episode on um saving on college and turns out that you could buy gift cards for college 529 investing for like 10% off and it felt easier to save money on a thing I was already going to spend on than to try to go make a little extra money. So that would be one approach is is focus not, if it feels like a lot of mental overhead to try and go make a little bit more money, would it feel like less mental overhead if you were cutting back on what you already spend? Um and I would say focus on the big things. A massive bill that funny enough is due today uh in my county is property tax. So our property tax is pretty high. We live in the Bay Area. And I was looking online and it was like, hmm, you can appeal this. Interest rates are high. I went in and just appealed our property tax and we brought the value of our house down by 25%. And you know, for anyone who knows the area real estate, I assure you that saving 25% on your property tax bill for the year is a massive win, like travel budget for the year kind of like level win and that one took me a couple hours. Like to save, you know, four figures. So I would say look at where you’re spending money and focus there because it’ll probably be easier because you’re like, God I got to I’m going to get money back that I otherwise will spend.
Mindy: Okay, I love that tip. I have uh successfully argued against my property tax increase multiple times simply by following the rules of whichever municipality that I happen to be living in at the time. That’s a really great tip though for everybody. If you have a property tax bill, appeal it and see what happens because you could save a lot of money.
Scott: I think that’s great awesome that’s great advice and it’s an awesome win if you can do it. But how do how should I think about that, right? I’m I’m the CEO here at BiggerPockets. I have 40 hours that are very busy every week, uh during regular work hours, I’m putting in time on top of that. Do I have to physically go to a courthouse for example, in order to appeal my property taxes in person, or can I do this over the… How how can I mechanically fit these hacks into my life?
Guest: So here’s here’s the great thing. And it’s funny because two of the biggest ones for me, if I look at the dollars saved this year, appealing my property tax and like travel rewards were the two biggest ones. And on one hand, property tax, you can, and by the way, you can do it all online in the Bay Area at least, but you know, you go fill out a form and I sent it in and then I emailed the email on there and said, hey, here’s a quick spreadsheet of how I came to this new value. And I just looked at the comps on January 1st. And the fun thing about our home is that it’s almost 100 years old. It’s been renovated a lot, but you it’s from like 1920 something, 1930 something. So you got to compare it to other homes that are that old and it’s like, you know, what how do you value other homes? Square foot, it it it was really nice to have an old home in this process. And I was actually surprised in California, I I did this last year and I was about to appeal it again this year and they emailed me and they said, actually, we we just did it for you and we found that it was even lower this year than last year. Is that cool? Can we just use this new even lower number? And I was like, yeah, go ahead. Um so it was like the gift that keeps on giving. But but there’s companies out there, right? There’s people that will send your send you an a letter. There’s a company called Ownwell or ownswell.com and they’ll do all this for you, 100% of the work and they’ll just take I think 25% of whatever the savings is. Not the like so if they save you five grand on your property tax bill, they’ll take 1250. Um the same thing goes with points and miles, right? You can go and learn the ins and outs of how to use your points and miles to book an incredible vacation or there’s these award booking services where you might pay them 150 or 200 bucks a person and they’ll look at all your points and miles and you say, I want to go to Europe this summer, they’ll put together the perfect itinerary that makes points that maybe if you’d redeemed them in the travel portal or cash them out for you know, statement credit, you would have gotten, you know, $1,000, they make it worth $10,000 of travel and they charged you, let’s say 400 bucks. So you need to decide how optimal do you want to be because if you don’t if time’s the important resource, well give up 25% of the savings on your property tax. Give up $400 on booking your you know dream vacation and let someone else who’s a an expert in that area do it. So one, I don’t think it’s as much work as people think, but it’s also, you know, not really that hard to find someone else to do it.
Scott: All right, well we’ll take a quick break and then we’ll be right back with Chris Hutchens from All the Hacks.
Mindy: Welcome back to the show.
Scott: I’ve been thinking a lot more about the prac there’s a there’s an incongruity that we’re trying to attack here in BiggerPockets Money with respect to the fact that fire, a lot of people build this up as a number. I need 2.5 million so I can withdraw four, you know, 4% or 100 grand a year to live on it. But your ability to fire has a lot more to do with how much you spend than how big the pile of money is right right now. But let’s take the paradigm of somebody who’s listening to this who’s like, nope, I’m going I’m going to hit the 4% rule plus some. How do I make that happen sooner and practically retire? There’s something in your world that can help them do that, right? Because the big expenses are going to be your housing, your transportation, and your food expenses. And you’ve already alluded to hacks if you will, that can bring those expenses down dramatically, right? One of the biggest expenses after your mortgage is going to be your tax bill. You just like, go go contest the tax the their their their the assessed value uh at the courthouse or fill out the form, make that a thing. That’s 25% savings. That’s actually huge in the context of someone who’s trying to to finish the play there. You bring that number down, that’s that’s really important. Do you have one for insurance? I want to go I just want to go down the list here.
Guest: So, I I put this one quote on if you go to allthehacks.com, the first quote is a review someone left me on iTunes it says like, I saved $15,000 a year listening to episode and now I’m going to forget the episode number. Uh an episode I did on insurance. And and and basically episode 104 saved me $15,854 a year. So one hack, go listen to episode 104 uh of all the hacks because I had someone else save $15,000 a year doing that.
Scott: Can you save us 1,000 of those 15,000 in the next like three minutes and then we’ll go listen to 104?
Guest: No, no, no. Yeah, I’m not going to not I’m not going to gatekeep all the information. But the short answer is a lot of people get an insurance at one point in their life, whether it’s car, you know, home, whatever it is. And then they just assume that because it was the cheapest rate in, you know, 2014, that it’s the cheapest, most competitive rate forever. And I try to, and this is not perfect because there is not a great website to search all the insurance rates. In fact, most of the websites that claim to search all the different insurance companies don’t search all of them. So three minutes, I’m going to say no. Maybe maybe block off 45 minutes and go to the 10 major kind of insurance companies. Go to Progressive, State Farm, Geico, USAA if you’re eligible, you know, I I’m going to miss some so I’m not going to try to go through all of them. Uh, Amica or Amica, I can’t remember how to pronounce it. Like there’s a handful of these insurance companies and and some might be better rates if you’re an AARP member, a AAA member, a Costco member, that kind of thing. And and go price them all out. And I found, I was at State Farm for a long time and I had this like legacy, you’ve been a customer for 10 year discount and then I went to USAA and I was like let’s just price it out. And I was like, I’m going to save 30%. And I and like I’d never been a customer of USA. So that legacy discount, these bundling discounts, like it feels good to get a discount, but know that many of those discounts come at the expense of like, I’m just going to charge you more and give you a discount.
Scott: Perfect. So So, just shop it out. Do you think that you should that that do you think there’s credibility to that bundling discount? Or do you think you should price out every insurance policy across all of you like, I’ve got home, I’ve got auto, I’ve got an umbrella, I’ve got a landlord policy. I should go and shop every single one of those separately, or should I get the bundle discounts or how how do I efficiently conduct that shopping process there?
Guest: Yeah, so when I when I ran this, I shopped the bundles all together and they usually give you the price like the separate prices. And yes, depending on the carrier, sometimes they only discount one. So I think at USAA they don’t discount auto, but if you have auto, they discount your home. And so you can kind of like, I just made a quick spreadsheet that was like the different policies I have and the like carriers I shopped at and what are the prices and just kind of ran through that pretty quickly. And it was pretty compelling, uh you know, I would say going through that process. Uh and so we ended up at USAA. There was a window where I think that if I kept one policy at, you know, State Farm, three at USAA and one somewhere else, I was like going to save 20 more dollars every six months. And I was like, that’s just not worth it. Like I’d rather have all my policies in one simple place um for 20 bucks, but to save 30%, I’ll move around. Uh you know, I kind of I I I want to read some reviews. Like I would say go, you know, get the consumer reports or or go to your local library and like get access to consumer reports if you don’t want to pay for it and and see which carriers are actually good because you don’t want to have a cheap policy that’s going to be a headache if you have an issue. The other big one with insurance, for your car, if you don’t drive 10 to 12,000 miles a year, which I know many of us in this post-pandemic world don’t because maybe we’re working from home, you know, five to, you know, one days a week, you can go and tell your insurance company I don’t drive 12,000 miles and they will drop the price. Like significantly. And so we don’t draft that much. So our our two policies are rated for like 4,000 miles a year, and every year, unfortunately, the insurance company needs to have you report your odometer so that they can know that they’re that’s real. So you have to redo it every year. But every year I get a new price for auto insurance and it’s gone up like 30% and then I call in and say, hey, here’s my new odometer and they say, great, we’ll redrop it 30%. And so if you’re not driving as many miles as, you know, your insurance is, then you’re just giving away money.
Scott: This is perfect, right? This is this is what I’m talking about. But like this is real tangible stuff. You can reduce that expense. Like you just gave us 25% savings on your tax bill and 25 to 30% savings on your insurance on there, which is very real dollars. And that is an activity that you can conduct every year easily after financial independence here. Now, Chris, how do I cut 25, 30% out of my utilities?
Guest: That’s a tough one. I don’t know about like I I would say you could go get like a sense monitor and figure out if you’re overusing on a lot of things and there are a lot of like little half a percent gains here and there that I’ve been reading about when it comes to utilities where it’s like, oh, if you wash your stuff on cold water, and if you turn your water heater down like a little notch, and you know, I think if you stacked all of those things, you know, if you want to pay your utilities by credit card, a lot of utility companies, you can pay through PayPal’s bill pay feature and they won’t charge the fee that a lot of utility companies charge for paying with a credit card. Like, you know, a little subtle ways to hack your utilities. You could go get solar, right? Like you could like you could go go make a big investment that might pay off over 20 or 30 years. You know, you could bundle up and not turn on your heat. You know, but I I don’t think that that’s going to be an area where you can have a huge impact without sacrificing a lot of quality of life and so I haven’t found one there. So I don’t have a, I don’t have a good one.
Scott: Okay, I got I got two more questions because you already covered transportation to a large degree with the insurance discussion here and then travel rewards um that you touched on briefly. And that’s an area that we’ve covered before and and folks need to go look into it. You’re one of the best resources around for that. The next category is food. You kind of touched on on that one. Do you have any more tips besides getting 20 free meals from other meal providers to keep those expenses really low?
Guest: I mean, look at where you spend money, right? If you if you’re cooking and you’re doing groceries, like look into meal prep. You could save a lot of money just not, you know, on a whim buying ran, you know, a bunch of groceries for one night. you could prep meals out for the week and probably save a little there. If you’re going out to eat a lot, I mean, I come back to gift cards in a in a somewhat ridiculous way, but, you know, let’s take, you know, Cheesecake Factory, California Pizza Kitchen. Like if you go to places like that, those gift cards are pretty regularly like 20 to 30% off. And so if you’re going out to eat or you’re ordering from DoorDash, we already talked about that. Go to Costco, $200 DoorDash, $160. Uh you order from Instacart, $200 Instacart, $160. You order from Uber Eats, $200 Uber Eats, $160. Like you could cut 20% off your, you know, delivery budget by buying gift cards for whatever place you deliver from. You know, going out to eat is tough, right? Like there aren’t that many restaurants that have such crazy deals, but there are some. There’s this uh restaurant app called inKind where you can basically like pre buy credits and use them and depending on where you live, there might be restaurants you go to all the time and there might be nothing. But there were some promotions on Costco where it was like $60 for $100 of credit that you could use at local restaurants that were not necessarily um, you know, like chain restaurants because not, you know, some people are like, I love a Cheesecake Factory. Some people are like, I want a little local restaurant. That’s the best I’ve got there. Um eating is a place where I’ve just decided to not try to optimize it too much because I enjoy going out to eat, I like good food, and just because I can’t find a way to save at my favorite restaurant, doesn’t mean I’m not going to go there. But I don’t know, like if you have a a Bilt card, for anyone who’s renting, you know, you have the Bilt card and you’re earning points on your rent, they do rent day where normally it’s 3X points on dining, but on the first of the month, it’s 6X points on dining. Go to your local restaurant and buy a gift card that you at a restaurant you love on the first of the month and now you’re going to get six points even if you dine on the second or the fifth or the 10th. Uh so there are like little subtle ways to to really knock that out of the park. I don’t know, 6X points on dining is pretty good.
Scott: Yeah, and all this adds up, right? Like we have the taxes, we have the insurance. We uh uh someone else will have to invent the next hack or you’ll have to get them on the show about utilities uh for that next piece. But the food, all this stuff, I mean you could cut literally 20% out of your current budget if you’re working and and busy or haven’t put the mental energy into all all of these savings in that post career phase. That that makes the number way easier to achieve.
Guest: If you spend $80,000 a year and you’re you’re looking at the 4X rule and you need $2 million and you can cut that down to $60,000 a year, now you need $1 and a half million. Like you just saved yourself the need to save half a million dollars.
Scott: That’s my point. That’s how powerful what you’re talking about here is and the issue is I think a lot of people are like, oh that’s too much, that’s that’s much work, it’s too much. Well, that’s something you will have easy time for. That’s not this is only a few hours a week that may be overwhelming right now while you’re in the throws of the career or whatever around there, but this is something that in a world future state where you retire is super accessible for you to do if if it’s not accessible right now even while you’re busy. um like what you’re saying. These are not huge intensive things that are going to disrupt your life. These are easy tactics that you can deploy with a little bit of planning to save save big. So last one I want to ask and then I’m going to shut up is health care. Uh have you solved that one with uh with a hack here and uh uh if you’re not if you’re not an employee, you’re not getting that through your employer. How can we gain that system, hack that system, whatever it is that you you you want to…
Guest: So this is going to be an experiment next year because I I came up with what I think is the the hack and I’m going to try it. And if you buy your health insurance on the exchange, which uh you know is unfortunate because a lot of the exchanges don’t have as great of a plan as you’ll get at an employer, but it’s expensive. Like I didn’t realize how expensive health insurance is until we both quit our jobs and we’re like, oh now we’re going to buy it and in California for a family of four, if you want the the top policy, like the platinum PPO in California, we’re going to pay about $3,900 a month.
Scott: A month. Wow.
Guest: Yeah. So like a massive line item.
Scott: Is that an HSA compatible plan?
Guest: No, no, no. that’s like no HSA.
Scott: Okay.
Guest: So an equivalent plan that I’m still I have like a couple months left on Cobra is like $2,300 a month. And I would actually argue that I would take the $2,300 a month plan over the $3,900 a month exchange plan if they were all the same price, not just for the price, but it’s just a better plan. So the exchange plans are much more expensive for for something that unfortunately, at least in my case, is not as good. Now, I looked at the other end of the spectrum, the bronze high deductible health plan, which was like $1,900 a month or something, like half the price. And I thought, wow, this this plan, yes, it’s HSA compatible, that’s cool, but I think it had an out of pocket maximum or sorry, a basically no insurance kicked in other than preventative care until you spent $14,000. And I thought that’s going to be tough. But I’m going to save $2,000 a month picking this plan, which over the course of a year is $24,000. And once I spend $14,000 on medical care, 100% of everything is covered. So, worst case, I have more than $14,000 of medical bills and I save $10,000 on the year. Best case, we have like $3,000 of medical care for the year and I saved something like let’s see, 2,024, I saved $21,000. Plus I get to put money in an HSA, which has benefits I’m sure you’ve covered. Um so the only thing that I don’t like is now if my daughter is sick, I need to decide, even though I’m going to save $24,000 a year just in premiums, like going into it, I’m going to save $24,000 a year. If my daughter’s sick, I need to decide do I want to take her to the doctor and pay $300 to see a doctor? And I think it will be psychologically hard for me to say, look, I I know I’ve already, like in just one month, I’ve set aside an extra $2,000 of savings. Am I going to be able to take her to the doctor which anyone with kids listening or even without kids, 50% of the time I go to the doctor, I’m like, well that was a complete waste of time. Like the doctor’s like, you’re sick. Like, go get some rest, drink some water, like hot fluids, get get sleep. So I think it’s going to make care tough, but there are there are also tricks for that. There’s an app called Summer Health and Blueberry Pediatrics which are like subscription services that include free consultive care for children. So it’s like I think it’s like 10 bucks a month or something and you can message them any time and they’ll you know send a prescription. So if your kids coughing you could do a video call, they can hear him coughing, send a prescription and you know to the pharmacy and you’re paying 20 bucks a month. So I think I’m going to probably pair some of those things with um with this. We’re trying out uh like kind of direct primary care where you pay a couple thousand dollars a year, but all of your primary care visits are free. This this practice doesn’t take children. So it’s like we’re going to combine these like 10, 20 a month pediatric care on demand, direct primary care for more like hundreds of dollars a month for adults, will probably spend $3,000 a year on those, but we’ll save $20,000 a year um on getting the expensive plan. So I think the biggest hack is that dollar for dollar, psychology aside, the cheapest, quote unquote worst plan is the financially best plan even if you have the means, the only downside is you’re going to pay for the first $14,000 and psychologically, that might be really tough.
Mindy: Yeah. Well, and you said you’re you’re saving $14,000 by or you’re spending $14,000. No, you would have already spent that $14,000 just spread out over the premiums.
Guest: Yes. Yeah, I know that. I know it here.
Mindy: That’s the hard part. So I can tell you I have a high deductible plan. I have the concierge service for my husband and I. I don’t have the on demand for the pediatrics because my kids are much older. They’re almost adults. And the concierge service is awesome. It’s so easy. The hassle factor is what I’m trying to remove from my life. So yes, I’m saving money over traditional um traditional insurance premiums anyway, but I’m also getting rid of the hassle of going to the primary care and they’ve got, you know, 86 million patients that you’re trying to all get in there at the same time. So uh do I want to take my kid and pay $300 because I think she’s I know she’s sick and I’m not sure what it is. No. But also it’s a lot easier to pay that $300 and then be like, you weren’t sick or you know, you you just have a cold. That’s what I told you. And then that goes a really long way with my kids.
Guest: Yeah and by the way, health care is negotiable, right? Like I did this great episode almost two years ago. I think it was episode 34 on health care bills. And people were like, oh I owed $10,000 and I negotiated it and brought it down in half. So like, you can fight medical bills and when you’re paying out of pocket with these high deductible plans, you say, oh what’s the cash rate? And they’re like, oh, you’re paying out of cash, it’s no longer $800, it’s only $400. And like, they have to go through a lot of hassle to get money back from your insurance company. And so I think that you can negotiate a lot of these things. If you have outstanding medical debt, it can be negotiated. Go look into it. Listen to that episode. Um I don’t know. I think if you stack all this stuff up, you could probably save 20 to 30% on your life and the impact that will have is amazing. And and like you said, got like each category, like my goal is to do an episode on every category if I haven’t already and like walk you through each one and so I don’t know, go search the archive, I’ve probably done it.
Scott: The way I think about it, right, I, you can tell, I’m asking the questions here is, okay, what’s the biggest expense in life, it’s housing. Okay, great. Like for most, like the average American, you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics where they spending. Okay, housing’s first, then it’s transportation, then it’s food, then it’s health insurance, then it’s, um, there’s a bunch of other categories there, but those are by far the biggest four and those comprise about like 60% of the household spending right there. So everything else is this minority here around it and I’m like, okay, how can you reduce all of those expenses as low as possible to live the lifestyle you want? And that’s the biggest hack if you will to retiring early, right? If you can get those expenses low, it reduces the balance needed to retire at the 4% rule dramatically by by hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars um as you can get those numbers down and you’ve got them all all here. Healthcare is the big one though. I mean even with even with what you’re your hack there, you’re out $24,000 a year in premiums on it, you know, that’s that’s what, $700,000 in in in in asset in an asset base you needed just to cover that first expense at the 4% rule. I mean that’s an enormous, enormous enormous problem um that somebody somebody needs to go and figure out like in a really comprehensive way like, okay, how do what is all the components of what he just said there to game out here? We’ve also heard from some ones that I think fewer people will be comfortable with, but are valid. Um one is if you travel internationally for a year, like there’s ways to get health insurance really cheaply on an international basis. And the second is um these health share ministries, right, where you can sign up and be part of uh uh a group that’s not really an insurance even though they use a lot of similar sounding language um for that. But those are not very popular for various reasons.
Guest: Yes, I’ve heard a lot about the health share and people seem to people either have an amazing experience or like a horrendous, it’s like a five star, one star kind of thing. It’s like, this is great. I pay a lot less money, I get great care. And then there’s the occasional like, I had this catastrophic thing and they said for what some reason it wasn’t covered and now I don’t have insurance and I don’t know, it’s just a little bit or like my lifestyle, I did this thing but I was drinking and like because it’s somewhat a religiously affiliated, like you know, they’re not going to cover this thing.
Scott: Yeah, there’s a whole bunch, you know, and then you know you get the people that uh are in the healthshare ministries reaching out to you with nice comments explaining why you’re wrong on those things whenever you mention. So there’s a whole thing there, it’s not for a lot of folks. It is certainly we’ve covered it in previous biggerpockets money episodes but it’s it’s certainly not a uh a popular option among FIRE folks right now. It’s not it’s not very common.
Guest: We forgot one thing though. For people who haven’t fired yet, I’m going to assume you have a job. And I think one of the lowest hanging fruits in terms of increasing your net savings, meaning either money in minus money out, go to your boss and say, hey, what would you need to see from me for me to get a raise or a promotion? Don’t say just give it to me. Like no one wants someone to come and say, can you just give me more money? Like I’ve had I’ve had employees do that to me in the past. They’re like, hey, I’d like to have more money. And I was like, great me too. Like but but say, what would you need to see me demonstrate for you to level me up, increase my salary, move me up in my comp band and then just go do it. And then come back and say, hey I did that thing you told me I needed to do. And so, you know, it depends on your salary and you’re spending, but if you’re making, you know, a six figure salary and you can increase that by 10, 15% or some, you know, meaningful amount by getting a a serious promotion, that’s going to have a similarly huge impact on your savings for however much longer you’re working. And so and can be as simple as, hey, what do I need to do? Three months of doing the same thing I’m already doing. Sometimes it’s like companies just aren’t always thinking, how do we reward the people that are doing great? Sometimes you have to put that in your own hands. And so I wouldn’t be afraid to think of that as another option.
Scott: I love it when folks come with that because then you can say, well, I need this number to move from X to Y. And if that number moves from X to Y, I’m so happy to give out more money um uh on that front. So like that’s yeah, I wish more people would do that all over the place from both sides. I’m sure you loved it when people came to you with that. We’re like, yeah, well the way I can make my division look great is with this, yeah.
Mindy: Okay, Chris, one last question before we let you go. On the first episode that we we recorded with you, episode 355, you gave your history of hacks and hacking uh concert tickets for free in high school, selling pizza by the slice in college so that you could get free pizza. You’ve always been looking to hack your system, which is awesome for people like me who are not looking to hack their system. Has there ever been anything that you were not able to hack or you hacked but it wasn’t worth the time?
Guest: I mean right now, we’re in holiday season and I have not found a great way to make it easy to just like be healthy. Right, like you just have to put in the time and energy to work out. There’s no hack. like come to my house while I’m sleeping and like give me some magical pill and work me out while I would. Like I there’s nothing. Like if you want, like what is all of this for, right? We’re we’re trying to save money so we can retire, so we can enjoy our lives. Like if we don’t have our health and like we we die early or we can’t run or we can’t move, like it’s kind of not a good life worth living. And I don’t think there’s a great hack for how do you live longer. Like it takes eating healthier.
Scott: How do you get free hot yoga classes?
Guest: I’m sure there’s gift cards for some chain of hot yoga classes. You just got to go find them. Um but but I actually speaking of that Barry’s boot camp, someone told me they pre-buy all their Barry’s boot camp for the year on Black Friday or something. So like there there are ways. But um I have not found anything. Like it just takes, you know, discipline and not eating that 13th holiday cookie that you want. Like there’s not a trick other than some mindset stuff. So I always tell myself I’ll I’ll I’ll get another one in five minutes and like that way I’m not saying I’m not depriving myself of cookie number five, I’m just I’m going to give my I’m going to give it to myself in five minutes and then I get distracted and I don’t necessarily want it. So there’s some subtle mindset shifts, but I think when it comes to health, it’s like even if you hire the nice concierge doctor, it’s not like they’re giving you a magic pill, right? You still have to work out, you still have to do strength training, you still have like you have to do all these things that are not nearly as fun as like binge watching Netflix and like eating ice cream. But you know, if if we’re going to do all this work to try to build up our wealth so that we can have the freedom to live the life we want, like we want to be physically capable of living that life for as long as possible and I don’t I don’t know a lot of hacks to make that easy.
Mindy: Chris, this was a super awesome fun show like always because you just have so many great hacks that I am not thinking of, I will never think of, and I just I love the idea that I am going to go out and save a lot of money on certain aspects of I like the insurance. I actually did save some money on my insurance and in Colorado, our insurance property taxes are being reassessed on the odd year. So next year we get a big reassessment again and you can bet that I am going to go and fight that. And thank you so much for the tip there. All of this is just so much fun to talk to you about and I really appreciate your time today.
Scott: Thanks so much for coming on today, Chris. always learn a lot every time we talk to you. Really appreciate it and your energy is unmatched. Your enthusiasm for all these hacks uh just never ends it seems like. So thank you for bringing the fire every single time to everything you do and every time you come here on BiggerPockets money.
Guest: Thanks for having me. I love it.
Scott: All right, that was Chris Hutchens from All the Hacks and that was just another fantastic bit of fun, Mindy. I learned a lot and there’s something there. If we if we just kind of go through each of these categories and don’t just think about like the basics of fundamentals, but also think how do we layer in some hacks? I think there’s a lot on the table that could be explored here for a lot of folks in the BiggerPockets Money community. There’s lots of ways I bet you to reduce rent, to reduce electricity bills, to reduce your property taxes, to reduce your property insurance. Um all like there’s a ton. Probably almost in every single category of expense that can save 10 to 25% if you’re creative and actually put the time and energy into it. And that’s a project that I want to undertake with you over the next year or two. Uh and and I hope and and learn from Chris on these is there there’s a way to do this in a way that can really change up the speed to approaching retirement here.
Mindy: Yes, and I want to make a note to anybody who is, you know, in my position and feeling a little bit overwhelmed by all the stuff that Chris threw at you. Chris threw a lot at you. We only have him for a short time and he has, I don’t know, another 700,000 hours worth of ideas in his head. So you don’t have to do all of these. You could focus on one or one aspect of one that he shared and start small. Every dollar you save is a dollar that’s not going out of your pocket. Maybe start with the insurance and just, oh my insurance is up soon. I’m going to take some time and I’m going to call all of these different companies and find out how much it’s going to cost at each one of these places. Now, I had insurance with a company who shall not be named and I did that exact same thing. I got more coverage on my auto, more coverage on my home owners and added an umbrella policy for less than what I was paying for the lower coverage on my car, the lower coverage on my house and no umbrella policy. That’s real giant savings. I mean it’s only like $100 less than what I was paying, but I’ve got so much more coverage and you know the only time you need insurance is when you need it. You know, you you don’t you can’t predict when you’re going to get into a car accident. Oh, I better up my coverage because I’m about to get hit. That’s not going to happen. So you just you have it, you have the peace of mind that you have the insurance and now I’m paying less and getting way more coverage. So he’s absolutely right. Your insurance company is not going to reward your loyalty. So don’t reward them with yours. Go and find a company that works. Now I will recommend that you stay with one of the bigger agencies. Bob’s insurance company is probably not going to be there for you should something really catastrophic happen, or maybe they will, I don’t know. But go with a bigger name because that’s just that’s just giving you more security than some little known name company that you’ve never heard of. But yeah, all of these ideas might work for you, a couple of them might work for you or you might not like any of those in which case go listen to his show because he’s got 100 million more ideas too. So he’s just a wealth of information and I love having him on the show, but I do want to I do want to caveat that you don’t have to do them all. Maybe they don’t all apply to you or maybe you’re just not interested. Like I’m not interested in buying gold. So you know Scott if you want to buy gold, come over to Costco with me, uh I’ll let you buy some gold for me.
Scott: Yeah, I think I think I’m out on that. you know. I I don’t want to I don’t want to have you know 25,000 worth of gold in my house. You know, uh right now if you robbed my house, the most valuable thing is probably a suit that’s 20 years old um on there. and he was like, that’s that’s it, you know. just uh so there’s not there’s nothing there for for for from a robbery perspective. I don’t want to have like, that that’s one of the fears that I have with with our approach like that. I get it, you only have it for a few days, but some of those are are for other folks to take advantage of and and get that that spread. I’m gonna uh I would rather do some things digitally I think.
Mindy: Right, but even if that specific item isn’t for you, here’s the idea that you could buy low and sell high or buy and sell at a slight loss, but because you’ve got all these different things going on, you’re actually coming out ahead. So I love the idea. I could look at that and say, oh, I bought it for this and I can sell it for less than, no, I’m out without even thinking about the other things. So that’s what Chris is here for to give us all these different ideas to think about. Absolutely love having him here. He’s always so much fun. So Scott, should we say thank you to Chris and get out of here?
Scott: Let’s do it.
Mindy: All right, that wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast. He is the Scott Trench and I am Mindy Jensen saying, gotta bolt, Colt.
