Guest: Welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast where we interview Chris Hutchins and talk about all the hacks. 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 this works in the US, but off 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. You might find that property somewhere else and it could 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, uh, and you could save even more.
Mindy: Hello, hello, hello. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my hack fanatic co-host, Scott Trench.
Scott: And with me as always is my cyber secure Mindy Jensen, co-host. Well, co-host Mindy Jensen, whatever it is.
Mindy: Scott and I are here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else. To introduce you to every money story because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you’re starting.
Scott: That’s right. Whether you want to retire early and travel the world, go on to make big time investments in assets like real estate, start your own business or accumulate a large number of tactical wins that help you advance your financial position, we’ll help you reach your financial goals and get money out of the way so you can launch yourself towards those dreams.
Mindy: Scott, I am so excited to talk to Chris Hutchins today from the All the Hacks podcast. He is filled with tips and tricks for making your life a little bit more optimized or a lot more optimized and getting things done in the easiest way possible. He was just an absolute delight to talk to and literally the whole episode is tip after tip after tip and I just loved this show.
Scott: Yeah, I mean, he he’s fantastic. He can just rattle off great tips one after the other for the entirety of this show. I mean, he is a wealth of information and definitely encourage folks to to learn more about Chris because he’s, he is an expert in this space.
Mindy: Before we bring in Chris, let’s take a quick break.
Mindy: And we’re back.
Mindy: Today’s guest is Chris Hutchins, 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.
Mindy: Today, we’re going to talk with Chris about all the hacks. Chris, welcome to the BiggerPockets 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 of your background before we look at some of your favorite hacks. Where does your journey with money begin?
Guest: Ooh, 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 can 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 were a bunch of random little like, ooh, I’m gonna create a magazine to pretend that I’m in the press to go to concerts for free but 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 and and printed it out on paper so that I could just kind of like go and be like, oh, I have this cool zine about music. Can I come to this concert as a press person? Um, and it worked for shows that were 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 still got you free tickets to a concert. That’s a so your life hacking skills started when you were in high school.
Guest: Yeah, 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 and this credit card that allowed me to do whatever I wanted. But I loved pizza and everyone was always ordering pizza. And so what I did was I would just order Domino’s 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, so I don’t know, so I and then I could curry favors because I was like, oh, I can unlock the mail room after hours if you didn’t get your package. Um, so, uh, you know, 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, ask friends, what’s the best job? And they’re like management consulting investment banking, I was like, I’ll do those. And I hated both of them. So nine months into the first one, I said, ah, 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’m screwed. So I was like, I have to save every dollar and find a way to be very optimal because otherwise I’m gonna be stuck doing a job I don’t love. Because my naive self was like, well, I’ve only had two jobs but 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.
Guest: Yes.
Mindy: 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 wa 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 to ever 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 the 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 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 can 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 says, come up with a catchier 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 a ballet class. We’re like, should we be sending our daughter to like a class 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 yet. 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@allthehacks.com and I can, I can get some feedback. But the conversation I had with Sarah Stibitz, 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 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 get going here. So this is awesome. Um, uh where where is a resource or what’s something that we could link to in the 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 a 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 at least a landing page or something. If you subscribe to the newsletter, uh, I put together, I’m going to write a newsletter to test this out, uh, but it might be a couple of 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.
Mindy: 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.
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 whatever they want and Lufthansa is like, yeah, you already buy a like 5000 tickets a year, so whenever. But I only buy three tickets once on Lufthansa. So 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 a to Lufthansa 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 I’ve done the tally, it’s probably 65, 66 countries at this point. Um
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. I mean, we hit a lot of places once when we took a trip. Uh, we flew one way to South Africa. We quit our jobs and we just said, we’re gonna 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.
Mindy: All the way?
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’re 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 and 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 Japan is awesome. Namibia was one of our favorites. Um, Thailand, the whole Southeast Asia circuit was amazing and so cheap. Uh, so it’s like once you get there, if you can 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 mainstream like I was joking with my wife, we’ve been all over the world and and we 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 rewards 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: Yeah, so I think 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 is 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 the there’s not a one size fits all solution for everyone. 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 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 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. and just, you know, oh, there’s a new card, it’s got 100,000 points 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 gonna outweigh the, you know, the 17, 20-5% 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, 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.
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 Card Pointers. 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 crib sheet for what to use where.
Scott: Probably helps with categorizing expenses as well because they’re all the same buckets of spending that are going on one card.
Guest: Yeah, I think if you go to allthehacks.com/deals, there’s a card pointers 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 helped set it up for my mom once, I was like, hey, you have three cards, here are the settings for you. Yeah.
Mindy: Okay. This is 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’ve shared this with you before recording. I know you love it is, 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 and you have one kid and then you have less free time, but there’s only one kid, so one of you can slip away and then we have two kids and we’re like, now we have no time because, you know, when we’re not working, we’re like, we have to be on the kids and so what are we gonna do? And we started going through what are all the things in our life that take time, uh, that we could outsource. And there were 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 helped clean the house but we didn’t, you know, 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 outsourced your meals? And I was like, well, we’re not gonna 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, no, there are 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 in the show notes of like, here’s the the ad I made. I got like five or seven people wrote back and for, I think I did the math, about half the cost if I were to like order door dash for dinner, uh, for about half of what Door Dash 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 lunches. And so basically sell it, it was this woman who just like, I like to cook, it was, she was not a professionally trained chef. She’s just like, I like to cook and I can follow directions, uh, you know, in a recipe and sometimes she’s like, oh, I have some ideas, could 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, for 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 and 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 gonna 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 takes 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. You know, like you could 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 Paprika, 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. 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. So that’s something we’re we’re gonna 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 a vet. Can you just call around and find a vet that can get him in this week? You know, like little tasks like that that’ll, 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 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 want to fill them all.
Mindy: Okay, the most surprising thing that you just said is that you have not yet hired a virtual assistant.
Guest: Is that something you guys both do and I’m just like late to the game?
Mindy: No. No, I’m just way behind you. I just, we have virtual assistants at uh BiggerPockets 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 I had the virtual assistant call my mom uh, 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, like I’m looking at Fancy Hands and it’s like three requests a month, five requests a month. Like you don’t need to go hire a full time assistant. And you could have people do everything from research to scheduling things. Um, you know, I could have done when I described earlier trying to research all the class that, you know, our daughter could go to. I that probably took me 45 minutes, but you know, I I could have found someone that could do that. Uh, so I don’t know, I’m I’m starting to think about whether I’m going to have enough tasks that it would make sense. So outsourcing things, 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 that 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 in 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, you know, that’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 2000 hours per year at $50 an hour gets you to $100,000 um in 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 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 gonna give me more money if I work a little more. So the thing that I finally did was I signed up to be a Lyft driver and I I did one ride and I was like, oh, my wife had worked at Lyft. So I was like, oh this is kind of fun. I get to go do the thing that and 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, 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 gonna 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 go, you know, I’m foregoing $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 you’re an economist.
Guest: Yeah. 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 of 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 Travelocity, they kind of don’t really get that opportunity because the channel between the consumer is with Expedia Travelocity. 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 wanted 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 posts of people who’ve gotten upgrades, gift baskets, wine, uh, free cocktails at the bar, their parking comp, 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 a hack that’ll get you something for nothing, it’s just send the email to the hotel and see what happens. I’m not gonna promise it’ll work every time, but if it’s the kind of hotel that has room service and could deliver, you know, chocolate covered strawberries or a bottle of wine to your room, I I think it’ll probably work if I had to peg it 40, 50% of the time.
Scott: That’s awesome.
Mindy: And you could hire a VA to do that for you.
Guest: I probably could have. Yeah, I’ll add it to the list of tasks. Every time I book a hotel for the confirmation, have that person go and send that. Yeah, so I’m 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 is 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 of cool travel ones. Uh, one, if you’re booking a villa or like a house, if you’re booking on Airbnb, here’s what you got to do. You take the take you’re on you’re on Airbnb and you see the picture of the house. You basically take that picture and you can go to Google Image Search and you upload the photo and you go find it and uh, uh, that property is available on other sites. Like a lot of these houses or villas are available on other websites that are brokers for booking that same property. I like this. I got it written down. Uh, if you’re booking a villa or like a house, there’s always the primary image that when you load the page for the listing, like that’s the one that they put there. If you download that image and you go upload it to Google image Search. So you basically do a reverse image search. Chances are that image and that property exists on five or seven other websites. Sometimes they’re local. If you’re going somewhere overseas, they’re like the local version of a booking site for that style of property, sometimes they’re run by brokers. Uh, sometimes they’re run by the owners themselves and when you strip away the middleman, there’s not the fee from Airbnb and sometimes you can get it 20, 30, even less percent off what you’re paying. Okay, so this is like, all right, if you’re booking a villa or like a house, the first thing I would start with is on the Airbnb website, download the best picture of that property to your computer, then go to Google image Search, upload that photo and search. And chances are, there’s probably three or four other websites that that image exists on um because that property is gonna be listed anywhere from the owner’s website to another broker of villas. Um if you want a great example, there’s a site in Cabo called Cabo villas and they just do villas and you can book it. Sometimes it’s cheaper than Airbnb. Uh and I think that just removing the middleman, uh can be really, really powerful. If you’re booking international flights, don’t always, this one is maybe the most valuable of the bunch here. If you’re booking international flights, I don’t always look from where I’m flying to the final destination I want to go to. I always do my flight research on Google flights and they’ll let you do like open-ended flights where you can just be like, I want to fly from San Francisco to anywhere in Europe for a week in July. And they’ll show you a map of the prices and it’s fantastic. But if I want to go from San Francisco to Santorini, right? I want to go to Greece, but not Athens. The number of airlines that will fly San Francisco to Santorini with all the flights in the one ticket is pretty slim. But the number of airlines that will sell me a flight from San Francisco to Athens is massive. So I think these are called positioning flights a lot of times where you’re like, where can I get to that is close by and then I’ll just buy the final leg of the flight for $50 because there are all these low cost airlines in Europe and in Asia. And then all of a sudden, now the options are, you know, way more uh abundant than if I had to find an airline that happens to have a relationship with the airline that flies the last leg. So always consider that. I also love the site AutoSlash, which will just keep tracking your car rentals to find a cheaper option. I got that on a travel episode. My guest found it for me. I love that one. Um, and then just make sure that you’re using a credit card for travel that includes trip delay and insurance and baggage delay because you are owed a lot of money when things go wrong and I want you to get that money that you’re owed. If you get a flight cancellation or delay, wait to cancel the refund. Wait to refund the ticket because you can just like um if your flight’s delayed, you might actually be entitled to a full refund because the airline broke their half the contract. So I always wait till the minute before to cancel any anything I’m not going to be at or on for in case it works out in my favor.
Guest: I got a few fun ones on money and spending. Uh one is Amazon Smile, so if you go to smile.amazon.com, it’s just a way where they’ll donate like half a percent to charity when you buy stuff on Amazon. Which is awesome.
Guest: Libraries have I’m a big fan of the library. A lot of libraries are connected. So if you check out your local library but you live near other towns, you might have access to a bunch of other libraries. And then there are a few browser extensions that if you install, when you search on Amazon for a book will just pop up and be like, oh, by the way that book is available at your local library for checkout right now for free. So, you can save money on books.
Guest: This is another favorite of mine, you can go to this website for unclaimed money uh for your state. So if you go to uh I forget the specific one because I think every county or city has one. So if you just Google like unclaimed money in Chicago or in Denver, you can probably find a government website where you can search your name or your family’s name or your friends names and uh it’ll tell you if the government or some company that couldn’t find you owes you money. So I always like to do this when I’m like going to a friend’s house for dinner, I’ll be like, oh I know their address and their name. I plug them in and I found, I’ve had friends where I’m like Verizon owes you $32 and they’re like what? So you show up with a party hack and uh bottle of wine, but a fun party hack is like I found that you might get a check in the mail for $32. So just uh unclaimed money is a great one.
Guest: I love the zoo and the museum and most of them have family passes you can get and they’re non-profits. So when you buy their expensive family pass which maybe costs $200 and maybe to go to the zoo would cost $100 if you factor in the money you would save on your taxes for your charitable donation, it almost always is less expensive to get the family pass if not just like a little more. And if you have a family pass for that zoo or museum, you can often go to other zoos and museums in other cities because they have this like reciprocal agreement. So we get a family pass to our local science museum, which is half zoo half science and now like almost a lot of cities we travel to, we can just go to the zoo or the science museum for free.
Scott: That wasn’t an ad but let me make an ad for this one more time. That’s a huge tip. So you can get it. Many museums have a reciprocal agreement across the country. You’re saying, you’d find a local museum, pay for the membership and then that potentially gets you in to to dozens, if not hundreds of others?
Guest: Hundreds, yeah.
Scott: So you’re in Denver, if I go to the Denver Zoo and I buy a family pass, I can go to the Denver Zoo all the time. But now if I go to Chicago, the Shedd Aquarium or whatever the Lincoln Park zoo might be included in that family pass I have back home and I can go for free without having to pay the full price.
Guest: Yeah百 and a lot of times it’s not even a discount, it’s just free.
Scott: Yeah. How do you find which ones have the reciprocal agreements? Is there a central list?
Guest: Yeah So whoever you’re getting your pass with will just have a list of all their member like partner zoos and museums. So, you know, we always keep a little email, you know, the welcome email they send you. We have it in a label in our email called like discounts and deals so that any time we travel to a new city, we’re like, oh maybe we can go to a zoo for free and we just pop it up and check the PDF.
Scott: What else you got?
Guest: All right, you asked about health bills before. There’s a book called Never Pay The First Bill. And the idea is that whenever you get a medical bill, there is almost always a reason why it could have been cheaper. So if you’re not paying the bill right away when you get it and you’re fighting for whether it should be, you know, whether it was coded correctly or the insurer needs to cover more or it’s a surprise bill and that wasn’t allowed or, I don’t know, it’s uh, you know, I could do a whole episode on this on all the hacks but definitely don’t pay the first bill you get.
Guest: I love hiding unhealthy snacks. So instead of banning snacks that I like, which is just kind of a bummer. Um just put them in places that are less convenient or in like opaquely colored containers. So there’s some cool research from Google where they found that if they just took the unhealthy snacks and it’s not that they removed them from the snack rooms at work, they just like hid them in an opaque container instead of a glass jar that like, you know, dramatically reduced the number of times people would reach for them.
Guest: One last thing on this is just give yourself five minutes. So if you’re like, oh I really want a cookie. Just say, you know what, I can have the cookie in five minutes. And 90% of the time, five minutes go by and you just forget you wanted the cookie. Um and it keeps you happy because you weren’t like, oh I’m never allowed to have that cookie.
Scott: Chris this has been fantastic. I mean there is, I mean, you are a gold mine of information about 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 could probably search for all the hacks. Uh that’s my show. It’s also at allthehacks.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@allthehacks.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. That that’s what’s great.
Mindy: This was an awesome show, Chris. I knew about uh auto slash and that’s the only one that I already knew. Everything else was 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 Hutchins from All the Hacks podcast and that was fantastic. We didn’t share this during the recording, but our producer was sitting on this episode and she found $183 on unclaimed money just from listening to Chris. So uh she’s gonna invite Chris over to her house for dinner too. Nice job, Kaylen.
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 gonna follow that tip to look Google your state’s website, you know, your state dot gov and follow their link to the unclaimed property because there are some sketchy sites out there. But if you do that, um you may find you’re owed some money.
Mindy: Yeah, that’s a great tip. I thought this was a lot of fun and 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 BiggerPockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench and I am Mindy Jensen saying, take care, polar bear.
