Making an Easy $3k/mo from Online Deals with Kai
01:09:55 Share

Today, I want to introduce you to a side hustle you might not know exists, but you might need. The secret world of finding profitable deals, some of which are repeatable and that any one of you can use to generate thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars of side income all in your spare time.

Things like bank and brokerage bonuses, meal kits, buying groups, gift card reselling, cell phone porting, and more. Last year we made $36,000 along with 2.5 million points. Just from deals that we did online, spending about 10 to 15 hours per week. The year before was $32,000 and a million points.

Hello, I'm Chris Hutchins. This is All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. Today, I'm talking to Kai. He is an expert that runs a private Discord and podcast dedicated to finding these repeatable profitable deals.

He's not only going to share how you can do all this too, but also how you can make even more playing in multiplayer mode. If you sign up, get $100, and then you refer your spouse, they get $100, but you also get $100 for signing them up. So now it becomes $300 instead of just your $100. However, it could be also your cousin or your friend. All right, so let's learn how to find all these deals right after this.

If you're feeling guilty about procrastinating on your finances, don't worry. You're not alone. But don't assume you have to choose between doing it yourself or working with a guy in a suit that looks like your parents' financial advisor. You have other options. Check it out.

Check out Facet. When I shut down my financial planning firm a few years ago, we did extensive research on what financial service company to recommend to our clients, and we landed on Facet, so I'm excited to have them as a sponsor today. Facet makes financial planning accessible to everyone and addresses one of my biggest frustrations with the industry. I've long hated how so many financial advisors charge a high percentage of your assets, but not Facet.

They only charge a flat annual membership fee, which means you actually keep more of what you invest. Through their tech platform, you'll get access to financial experts and a team of specialists across investments, taxes, and more. So don't miss Facet's limited time $450 kickstart offer when you go to allthehacks.com slash facet. That's F-A-C-E-T.

You'll get $200 into your brokerage account if you invest and maintain $5,000 within your first 90 days, plus the $250 enrollment fee will be waived for new annual members. Again, that's allthehacks.com slash facet. Facet Wealth is an SEC-registered investment advisor. This is not an offer to buy or sell securities, nor is it investment, legal, or tax advice. Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance. Offer expires September 30, 2024. Terms and conditions apply.

Hi, thanks for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me, man. Been excited to do this. So when I first found your content, the thing that really blew my mind was this fundamental shift in the idea that deals could replace income.

I've talked to lots of people about side hustles and starting businesses to make a few thousand dollars a year, even more than that, and grow it into a real thing. And I've talked to lots of people about finding the best deals. What you've done, and it seems so genius to me, is you've actually turned the deals into a side hustle so that you can generate income. And from my quick looking to the tune of like tens of thousands of dollars a year. So first off, where did this idea come from? And can you give a little bit of overview of how you think about it?

Sure. It's been a couple of decades of doing this, but primarily really ramped up when my wife and I did the FIRE, the early retirement thing. And we wanted a way to supplement our income because you're on a kind of a tighter budget when you do FIRE. Profitable deals, it's one of those things where you can tackle a whole plethora of things that people often don't think about.

Credit cards, I think, are the main things people think about when it comes to sign up bonuses. But there's this whole avenue of bank bonuses, brokerage bonuses, meal kits that you can do that can really make you a lot of money. And that's for us, like in the last couple of years, 2023, we made somewhere around

$36,000 doing these profitable deals and 2.5 million points. The year before was $32,000 and a million points. So it's been slowly climbing up in that sense. And I think we're on track to make even more this year. You write these great summaries each month and you do an episode about them on your podcast, The Daily Turn. And this year, I summed up

4 months in, you're already at $32,000 and a million points. So what you did in 2022, you've now done in 4 months. So definitely looks like you're on path to eclipse everything you've done in a year before. So my question though is...

How much time do you need to be spending per year to have a side hustle of these profitable deals that generate tens of thousands of dollars? Yeah, I think that's kind of the beauty of it is that it's really a choose your own adventure thing. How much time you want to dedicate is going to be based on your priorities. Because there is, as you said, pretty much an endless stream of these deals ranging from massive things that can give you thousands of dollars to really small things that

So depending on what your goals are, I think it's really important to hone in on, is it that you want to fly first class for free and stay at really extravagant hotels? Maybe that's your priority and you can focus on those. Or it's, do you want to have side income that helps bolster your budget, whether you're doing fire or for other reasons, or you just want to save money on groceries. So it's really important to figure out what it is that you actually want to get out of it and then focus on that and then

spend an adequate amount of time. So for us, 10 to 15 hours a week is what we do to make $30,000 plus. So the sky's your limit though, because I also know people that spend 40, 50, 60 plus hours a week doing this and it becomes a full-time job where you could be making six figures easily doing profitable deals. But is that what you want to be doing? That's going to vary based on person.

And for us, it's more of a side hustle versus a full-time job and trying very hard to keep it that way because so many of these deals keep coming up and there's always a temptation to do more and more of them. Is there a power law in these deals where you look at last year, $36,000, was it about slowly spending 10 hours a week

getting through these deals? Or was it about making sure that when the two or three really big ones happen, that you were aware and ready to go? Definitely a little bit of both because I think 80-20 rule definitely applies here where doing just 20% of the top deals is going to yield 80% of the income that you're going to get that year. But at the same time, if one of your priorities is I want to cut my grocery bill down by 90%,

and that's one of your goals, then doing something like meal kits could be a good thing to pursue. Even though it's not the most profitable thing, it meets the goal of, well, I only spend $100 total in a month on food now, thanks to one of these things. So it can really vary. Can you maybe give an example, just so people get a sense of what some of these deals are? We came up with this term profitable deals because that was the closest thing, but there isn't a perfect descriptor. Exactly.

Exactly. It's so diverse. I think people may think of credit card bonuses. That's the first one that comes to mind. And I think credit card bonuses are very lucrative. And I think even on your show, you've extensively covered the points and miles game. But an aspect that people often don't think about that's also very profitable are bank signup bonuses and brokerage signup bonuses. Those can yield a lot of just stricter

straight cash, liquid cash that you can use as a buffer for your finances. But then there's also a plethora of other little things, saving money on cell phones. I mentioned meal kits. You can find ways to try and generate spend

for your credit cards so that if you're someone that's not spending a million dollars a year on your credit cards, you can still meet a lot of these signup bonuses and get a lot of points and cash that way. There's just so many things. There's like buying groups you can participate in, reselling gift cards. It's hard, I think, to pin it down. So I think profitable deals is a good descriptor for it.

It would be good for us to go into some of the more specific ones if you feel like people would be curious. Yeah, let's jump through some of these categories and give people a good understanding of what kinds of deals are out there so they can figure out what might fit their profile. And I think starting with banks makes sense. We were just talking about it.

The society we live in is like, these companies always want to attract new customers. And so they offer lucrative signup bonuses for you to sign up and deposit money with them. In the past, Wells Fargo was offering $2,500 to move over to Wells Fargo. Right now, Bank of America is offering $1,000 if you deposit $30,000 with them and you leave it there.

for 60 days. And that's really the essence of bank bonuses is like, do you value getting cash versus doing credit card bonuses where you get miles and points?

Yeah. So I'm thinking $1,000 on $30,000 in 60 days is like 20% interest. Exactly. Better than anything you can get. I mean, it's like 5% right now in a CD or a high yield savings account. 20% is about as good as it gets. And with a lot of these bank bonuses, I see them all the time. I get a letter from...

Chase that says open up the checking and savings and combined you're going to get $900. I think there is a Wells Fargo $2,500 one right now still. What are the requirements here? It varies basically

based on bank bonuses, usually it requires you opening a new account with the bank and not already having an existing account of that type. But the way to get around that is once you do one of these bank bonuses, typically within a year, you want to try and cancel that bank bonus so that you can do it again a couple of years later. These are very repeatable deals.

a question I often get is, aren't you just going to run out of banks? And the answer is no, because first off, there's a lot of banks in the US, but two, you can keep doing these. They have a limitation and it varies again by bank, but typically within 12 months to 24 months, you can do the same bonus again if you close the old account. And unlike...

credit cards where you have a credit score and banks, one, every time you apply for a credit card, they're adding an inquiry to your credit. Every time you're opening an account, they're checking your credit to see, oh, how many cards do you have open? Do any of those things apply here when it comes to opening up a new bank account? Yeah. So banks also have a checks system, which is like credit scores for banks. Most banks are

are pretty lenient with your checks record, especially with the more fintechy app banks that you see nowadays. They don't check your check score at all. But the more traditional banks like a Bank of America or like a Chase, they will pull it. For the most part, unless you're opening like 20 plus bank accounts in the period of a year, my success rate is very high. I rarely get denied and I have been opening 20 plus bank accounts in a year.

Okay, so I'm looking at a doctor of credit post right now. It's best bank account bonuses for May 2024. The list goes down. There's easily over 150 banks with bonuses and all the way at the bottom, you're down to $100, $400. What's the average return for opening a new bank account? And what would you say is the average requirements to do it?

I think it depends on how much effort you're willing to put in because there's a lot of really easy ones. Sometimes those can be really lucrative because it's an app bank that takes two minutes to open on your phone and you get $100 with very minimal requirements. That could just make sense from just the time value of money standpoint. But the bigger ones, typically, I try and shoot for ones that are in the $500 range.

plus range, because those are the ones coming from the big banks like Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase, etc. And those ones are going to require you to deposit anywhere from $5,000 to $30,000 in order to get that bonus. And what about moving over your paycheck? I remember when I was helping our au pair open an account at Chase, part of the bonus required that you got a regular direct deposit.

Yeah, exactly. So it definitely helps if you have an employer that lets you change direct deposit options easily. But even if you don't, there are workarounds for that because when they say direct deposit in the requirements,

They prefer it to be employer direct deposit, and a couple banks are pretty strict about that. But for the most part, any kind of like ACH direct deposit from another of your bank accounts will trigger a lot of these bank bonuses. But it can vary. And so that's where a doctor for credit is really kind of like the Bible for this stuff, because people post their comments. And in the comments, they're going to be like, oh, I just moved over money from my Chase account to my Ally account, and I got the bonus.

Whereas someone else might have been like, no, this bank really required an employer direct deposit payroll to come through. And that's kind of your filter for it.

If I'm just doing the quick math, you said you shoot for things that are over $500. You did about 20 of them. That's about $10,000. And it lines up a little bit right now. I'm looking at 2023 at your total. It was about $7,500 between you and your player too. So this seems pretty lucrative. This is a great option. Opening these accounts doesn't take that much time. I will just mention the one cost is depending on where your money is...

And I don't know if you factor this into your tracker. If you were earning 5% and you dedicate $30,000 to moving into different bank accounts for bonuses, you're not earning that 5% anymore. So there is a little bit of cost of whatever interest you would have otherwise earned on that account. But like you pointed out, if you're earning 20% APY equivalent with these bonuses, it's totally worth it.

Exactly. And I think it's transitioned to this thinking of money in terms of keeping it static in one place where it's earning interest, or thinking of the monetary gains from the velocity of money moving to different places. So if you keep that money moving and you keep tackling bank bonuses, you're going to get much higher yields at the cost of time on your part. How much time do you want to spend versus leaving it parked at wealth front for 5.5%.

I'll link to the doctor credit post. There's a website called bank bonus. I know the guy who started and he set up a page, all the hacks.com slash bank bonus that lists out a bunch of them. If you use those links, it supports us. So if there's anything there that's as good as other deals, by all means, we'd love you to use them.

If there's not, go to the Dr. Credit post, go deep in the forums. I want everyone to get the best deal, but I'll just share that. They do allow you to sort. And sometimes they've managed to negotiate exclusive bonuses just for their site that you won't find in other places. And I won't get to the nuance of how they do that, but it's pretty interesting. So that's banks. What about brokerages? I look at last year and your brokerage total was $23,000.

Yeah. So brokerages last year was particularly good for a separate reason, which I think we'll get to as well, which is referrals. And I had a lot of brokerage referrals because one of the brokerages was offering some crazy referral bonuses. But even outside of the referral aspect, I think it was about 10 grand from brokerages. In my opinion, I think brokerages are like the sleeper profitable deals that everyone should be doing, even above like credit cards and banks. Because with brokerages, they pay you bonuses to transfer your

your stocks over to their brokerage. You're not selling these. They literally move the stocks over. So your stocks are still invested in the market, but then the brokerage pays you a cash bonus on top of that. So you can think of that as just an additional yield on your market returns, which anyone giving you a free percent point or two on your market returns, that's a no-brainer, right? Yeah. Right now, the current bonus that Robinhood is offering is 1%.

unlimited, no cap, anything you transfer over. And I've moved some brokerage positions around different institutions, not actually for the bonuses. I've moved them in the past to qualify for lower mortgage rates or just to consolidate. But I'm looking at this and I'm like, wow, my expectation for what I'll return from the market in a given year is probably about 6%, 7%. Obviously, we've had better runs, but 1% would be a massive boost. And

And you probably know better than I do. You do have to keep your positions there longer than about 60 days, right? Exactly. They typically require anywhere from six months to two years. I think the most recent Robinhood 3% bonus on your retirement funds required a five-year lockup. So holding your retirement funds at Robinhood for five years, in return, they would give you 3%.

free immediately after you transfer. So if you're someone who moved over $500,000 to Robinhood from your traditional IRA, that's $15,000 that Robinhood gave you immediately just for doing that. And it took literally two, three minutes for us to move all of our retirement funds over. I mean, I think the thing with Robinhood is people have mixed opinions, obviously, with Robinhood. And I think

That's probably the main reason that some people haven't done it. But from a pure profit perspective, it's such an easy deal and it was so lucrative. Sadly, the 3% is gone, but they are now still offering 1% on brokerage transfers as well as traditional IRA, any retirement funds really.

Like so many of you out there, I love Notion, our sponsor today, and I use it every day. It's where I brainstorm ideas, track my projects and tasks, manage this podcast and more. I don't know how I'd run my business without it, but it's not just for business. We're planning a summer trip and keeping track of everything we want to do, flights, hotels, and more in Notion.

Even better, I used Notion AI to take the first stab of drafting the top things we want to do in each city, which is amazing because I didn't even have to leave to jump to another AI tool. Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play for getting inspired or being creative. Whether you're organizing your next big project, managing your daily work, or you just need a space to capture creative ideas, Notion has you covered.

Best of all, Notion is for everyone, whether you're a Fortune 500 company, a freelance designer, or neither of those, and you just want a place to organize all your notes, docs, projects, and more. So try Notion for free when you go to notion.com slash allthehacks. That's all lowercase letters, notion.com slash allthehacks, and start turning ideas into action. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show, notion.com slash allthehacks.

Yeah.

It's easier than ever to be a target. When I first looked, I found hundreds of pieces of our personal info online, but I quickly started using Delete Me to automatically get all that data removed, and I am excited they're a sponsor today.

DeleteMe is an amazing service because they don't just remove your personal information from hundreds of data broker websites, but they'll continuously scan for new data that shows up and get that removed as well. In fact, on average, they find and remove over 2000 pieces of personal data for a customer in their first two years.

And it's not just for you. You can now extend your protection and peace of mind to anyone you want within your Delete Me account, which I've done for my wife and both sets of our parents. So if you want to get your personal information removed from the web, go to allthehacks.com slash delete me and get 20% off a plan for you or your entire family. Again, that's allthehacks.com slash delete me.

And I'm looking right now and I hate to bring up deals that will probably not be around when we publish this. But just to give people an example, the brokerage platform Webull right now for the next one day and 15 hours, unless they extend it again, is offering you 3.5% on all transfers of retirement accounts.

So Webull and Robinhood have been going head to head with their promotions. These companies try and outdo each other. And this is why things have been escalating over the years. But Webull is better than Robinhood. The downside is they were paying that 3.5% out over the course of five years, whereas Robinhood was paying that out immediately. Yeah. And then clawing it back.

In the form of if you tried to withdraw more money, they would claw it back. But this isn't limited just to fintech banks, right? I can imagine some people listening or thinking Webull, like not a public company, not a longstanding company. I'm not sure I really trust them with all my retirement savings. But even like Schwab City, E-Trade, Tasty Trade also have brokerage bonuses. And so have you seen good brokerage bonuses outside of the fintechs as well?

Yeah. So it depends how you define good. I mean, free money is always good and they're always offering some amount of free money. And so the issue with them is like the major institutions, they'll give you a nice juicy bonus for moving over $5,000 or $10,000. They'll give you like $100, $200. That's a good return on that $10,000. But once you scale up to higher amounts that you can transfer over like $1,000,000, that's

it starts to not look as great. They'll give you $1,000, $2,000 for moving over a million, and that's not nearly as good as a percentage-based one like Robinhood. However, I think these institutions are a bit more trusted. And I've also heard that if you call in sometimes and you're saying that I will be willing to move over a million dollars, they will often extend you an offer that isn't publicly available because now you're sort of in their private premium client user base.

Yeah, that's super interesting. Where would you go online to find people's reports of that to kind of get some ideas? Is there a doctor of credit comment forum similar? I think doctor of credit definitely plus boggleheads often has discussions around brokerages and people with high net worth will sometimes comment being like, I got offered a better one over the phone. They're not really publicly displayed. Some of the more public...

quote unquote, private client ones are ones that you can find online. Like with Chase, they have a private client program. I think that gives you up to $3,500 if you move over a million dollars. So definitely in the high net worth category. Yeah. I'm looking at the tasty trade bonus right now. And

At $100,000 moved over, you're going to get $2,000. It basically looks like it's about 2% up until that threshold. And then it scales back down to half a percent. But I don't think you have to leave things there for two years like you did

for the Robinhood deal, right? Is it important to also compare the time horizon? Robinhood might give you 1%, someone else might give you half a percent, but in a shorter period of time? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, again, comes down to where you fall in how hard you want to go with these things. One of the attractive parts about leaving your money with Robinhood for five years is you don't have to tackle any other brokerage bonuses for five years. They pay it up immediately and you don't have to worry about it. Whereas if you're someone who wants to maximize things, you

yeah, it's going to be more profitable to move over every six months, every year to a different brokerage and get another bonus. And you may, over the course of five years, end up making more than what Robinhood's 3% was going to pay you. But that requires you to do that work. And that takes time and energy. And maybe that's for you. Maybe it isn't. Yeah, I'm looking right now at this TastyTrade one. If you could find five brokerages that would offer you $2,000 to transfer over $100,000...

over five years, you'd make 10 grand. Whereas Robinhood, you might only make $3,500, but you don't have to think about it. Exactly. And yeah, everything just comes down to how much effort you want to put in because there's literally an endless supply of these profitable deals. And so it's so important going in to figure out what are my goals here? How much money do I need to make from this for me to feel good about it as a side hustle, or for me to book this vacation that I want to do? Whatever your scenario is.

Obviously, one of the challenges here is if you don't have a huge portfolio of stocks, it's really hard to take advantage of these brokerage bonuses. On the bank bonus side, for the most part, you mentioned some up to $30,000, but there are plenty of bank bonuses under there. Let's move out of the deposit accounts, banks and brokerages, and talk about other profitable deals you can find. I think a fun one is talking about meal kits.

Yeah, meal kits. I kind of stumbled into this during the pandemic, basically, because we're all getting our food delivered. And it turns out there's a lot of meal kit companies, and these meal kit companies are fighting really hard for you to use their meal kit service. And

And for you to do that, they're trying to attract you with these promotions of, hey, come join us and we'll give you the first box free and a discount on later boxes. I think the mistake people make with meal kits is that you keep the meal kit past the first box.

And what I mean by that is the first box discount is usually the box that you're going to get for free. All the other discounts, sometimes you'll see Blue Apron, here's $200 off the next eight boxes. The discount keeps scaling down and down as these boxes progress. The first box though is typically free. And so you want to just join for the first box and

and then cancel. And then once you cancel, they start sending you mailers being like, hey, come back. And the mailers are often also quite lucrative. So it's this cycle where you need to do the first box cancel and just repeat that and keep doing the signup offers that they keep sending you and spread that across different meal kits. I think we did over a thousand meal kit meals over the course of three years during COVID. And paid about how much of them?

I think typically, sometimes they'll charge you a shipping fee of like $10, but sometimes they even waive that. So for the most part, they were free or $10 per box. Wow. Okay. So you saved a ton of money on groceries. Any favorites in the meal kit camp?

Absolutely. We've tried pretty much all of them under the sun at this point. HelloFresh, I think has the best offers to taste ratio. They have pretty decent meals that you can pick and their offers are really good. Their comeback offers are particularly good. Green Chef as well. I think they're owned by the same company. If you like more vegan food, Green Chef has amazing meals. They're a little pricier than HelloFresh, but it doesn't really matter if your first box is free. And

And then the most recent one that we've kind of stumbled on is Marley Spoon, which is, I believe, being sponsored by Martha Stewart. The meals are really good. It's like equivalent to going to a farmer's market and buying a box of food, like box of like potatoes and all of this like fresh ingredients that comes in the box. They're not even individually packaged. It's literally just a box of vegetables and meat. And then you cook the recipes and they're like Martha Stewart quality. They're really good.

I love it. Yeah. So I'm one of the people who did not do the proposed path you chose. We signed up for Green Chef and we've just been paying full price each week. Now, I will say it's so easy that each week, three of our meals come in the mail. We never have to think about it. Some weeks, we don't even pick the meals. Their default selection has been good. For people who've listened for a while, we partnered with Green Chef for a while. We still to this day get a Green Chef box each week. But what we're not doing well is trying other things out and

and seeing what kinds of better deals we can get. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to get you to share whatever the best deals are out there right now for new customers. And I'll just find a link for each of those and put them in the show notes so people can go and get started. And then it's on you guys to do the retention offers and cancel and wait and see what they mail you. So I love that you've cooked.

a thousand meals for what I'm going to say is probably pennies per meal. Yeah. It's like sometimes I read the lean fire forums where people make fun of lean fire, you know, retiring early with a limited budget because you're like, you're going to just be eating rice and beans and all this stuff. And I'm like, yeah, that's true. You could be traveling extravagantly. You can be eating meals that as good as restaurant quality, you just have to cook them yourself for less than a dollar per meal. So there's just so many hacks that you can do to supplement your income that way. Love it.

Love it. What about cell phones? Yeah, cell phones. Cell phones is an interesting one because I feel like a lot of us have this weird preference for Verizon, AT&T as like the big carriers. And they've really sold us on the idea that like it's worth paying $150 or $200 for two people per month on one of these carriers. And we were those people. We were paying almost $200 per month.

month on Verizon because we'd grandfathered into their unlimited data plan and I didn't want to get rid of it because I'm like, "What if I needed unlimited 5G data?" Which I never did. And eventually we were like, "Let's try some of these smaller carriers, these MVNOs, these sub-carriers to the big carriers like Mint and Visible." And they have amazing deals, particularly during Black Friday, where you can get cell phone service for as low as $10 a person

And you also get deals on the cell phones themselves. So with these cell phone deals, it's twofold. Are you looking to get a brand new iPhone 15 Pro for basically free? Like you just want to upgrade your phone? Or do you want to save literally thousands of dollars a year on your cell phone plan? You can do both or either. And the kind of deal you tackle depends on what's your priority there.

For anyone not familiar, so one, I did an episode 138 on cell phone plans. I went pretty deep on some nerdy stuff, but also how a lot of this works. And all these MVNOs are just the same carrier, right?

So if you're on Mint Mobile, you're just using T-Mobile's network. If you're on Visible, you're using Verizon's network. There's some nuance to how you might not have the same priority if you're at a major sporting event or concert or something like that. But for the most part, it's pretty comparable. What are some of the requirements here that people should be thinking about? Is it wait till November? Can you do this throughout the year? What if you need a cell phone right now and you're under contract? What are some of the options?

Black Friday definitely is going to be the best time for you to either buy a new cell phone or switch cell phone plans. You can do it at other times during the years. You can also time it with when a new iPhone is released. Typically, everyone does sales when a new iPhone is released. But that also typically lines up with Black Friday because Apple usually does iPhone releases in September. So I would wait would be my advice there. You can do some deals where like

For example, Costco used to have a T-Mobile stand where you could get $800 back if you buy an iPhone and sign up at the Costco stand with T-Mobile. And T-Mobile doesn't have any contracts. So you could just sign up

buy the iPhone, get $800 back from T-Mobile, which takes two, three months. You're paying two, three months of T-Mobile. And then you just cancel T-Mobile and move to whichever carrier you want. And they've basically given you $800 for free. If cell phone service is the cheaper thing, then Mint, I think they do a...

buy three months, get three months free around Black Friday. But even without that, if you pay for a year, I think it is like $10 per line for five gigabytes of data, $15 per line, I think for 15 gigabytes of data. So that's a difference too. The shift is away from quote-unquote unlimited data with Verizon. But if you just examine your cell phone bill, I think it's

It's going to be pretty surprising how little data you actually use compared to how much you think you might need from an unlimited plan. So just gearing towards a data allotment that makes sense for you and your family, I think, is a better approach than paying $100 for an unlimited plan that you're not really fully maximizing anyway. And as someone who had one of those overpriced big carrier unlimited plans, where are you now in terms of which carrier and what are you seeing? Are you noticing any difference in quality?

Yeah, so we're with Mint. I love Mint, by the way, because it's so cheap and it's part of T-Mobile and T-Mobile in our area works quite well. The only complaints really, I think you mentioned this earlier with MVMNOs is if you're in a big city with a lot of congestion or you're going to these events, that's when you have lower data priority and it affects how quickly you can pull up websites. But outside of that, it really has made no noticeable impact on my life to be on Mint versus being on a premium Verizon plan.

I love it. We switched some lines to Mint and some lines to T-Mobile. And it's been fantastic. T-Mobile, I would say, has the better bring a line over and get a cheap phone. And Mint has the better pricing. We partnered with Mint on the show. So if you're going to switch to Mint, allthehacks.com slash Mint Mobile. Are there any requirements for some of these carriers that have these great deals to get new phones that might be relevant things people need to do in advance? Yeah.

Yeah. Often they will require you to port over a number from a quote unquote real carrier. They don't want to see you port over a number from Google Voice, but a real carrier where you're paying a monthly bill. If you port a number over, that's how you're eligible for some of the free phone deals, like on Visible, for example. But it's pretty easy to just get a free number if you don't want to move over your main line. If your goal is just to get an iPhone and you're pretty happy with...

let's say being on Verizon, but you really want to do this visible deal that gives you a bunch of money off an iPhone and they require you to port over a number, what you could do is you could just go to Target and buy a SIM card for like $1, $5, and that will get you on

a quote unquote real cell phone plan. And then you just port that over to Visible to get the offer so that you can get the cheaper iPhone and you never have to leave your main carrier. So for those that are like concerned about this is the line I use for everything. I don't want to be moving that constantly. You don't have to do these deals, but you do have to do like an extra step in that process to activate some of these workarounds.

Where do I start? Help desk software, payment software, email marketing tools, CMS and blogging tools, SEO tools, deal management tracking, pipeline tracking. You do not need more tools to get more out of your business. You just need HubSpot. Their all-in-one customer platform is the ultimate business hack for all your customer-facing teams. You can create best-in-class campaigns and automate outreach with workflows that will generate more qualified leads for your business.

HubSpot will also keep track of every prospect with category-leading pipeline management so you can close more deals. Finally, you can use powerful AI chatbots and develop a knowledge base to scale your support. HubSpot is built to deliver results, drive more revenue, and to help your business grow faster than you ever thought was possible. Try it for yourself today at HubSpot.com. Again, go check out HubSpot.com today.

This year, I'm trying to level up everything, and that includes my fitness routine and clothing. The routine does require a bit of willpower, but when it comes to the clothing, our sponsor today, Viore, is making that so easy. Viore makes performance apparel that's incredibly versatile. Everything is designed to work out in, but doesn't look or feel like it at all, and it is so freaking comfortable, you will want to wear it all the time. I know because Amy and I are actually wearing Viore all the time.

I've long said the Sunday performance joggers were my favorite, but I wear my core shorts and strato tech tees almost as much. But I really love that Viore keeps adding some amazing new collections of jackets, sweaters, and more. Their products can be used for just about any activity, whether it's running, training, yoga, but they're also great for lounging and running around town.

Honestly, I think Viore is an investment in your happiness. And for all the hacks listeners, they're offering 20% off your first purchase, as well as free shipping and returns on US orders over $75. So you should definitely check them out at allthehacks.com slash Viore. Again, go to allthehacks.com slash V-U-O-R-I and get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet.

I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com slash deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. I love that you can save on cell phones. I went deep on that episode a few months back.

What about other kinds of discounts and freebies? Yeah, that's a big category actually each month because I'm a person that likes scrolling slick deals. So if you use slick deals, there is an infinite supply of discounts and freebies every month that you can do. It's more if you're already inclined to be like, hey, it'd be cool to get a free burger. I want to know that Starbucks on some Fridays, you can get a free Starbucks if you buy one of their drinks. But on a bigger scale, I think something that

everyone should do with discounts and freebies is at least download and use a cashback portal extension. A really easy one, a very reliable one is Rakuten. Just install that on your browser and you will get cashback when you're just shopping organically. There's no additional effort needed. And Rakuten constantly runs sales during holiday weekends where they increase the cashback amount.

PetSmart, they were going up to 20% cashback. You can buy PetSmart gift cards at a 10% discount elsewhere. They'll

They'll give you $20 off of your auto ship. And so you end up saving over 50% on anything you buy. And that's just an example of one retailer. But it applies across many different ones where Rakuten really just juices up the returns on things that you're going to shop for anyway. There's 2 double bonuses I'll mention on Rakuten. One, if you get a referral, depending on the time of the year, they always switch their referral program. Sometimes it's $30. Sometimes it's an extra 10%. And sometimes it's $40.

And so you'll get a $40 referral and whoever referred you will. I'm not sure what the referee gets right now, but I just looked at my referral link and you get an extra 10% cashback right now. But I would say if you can sign up during one of those windows where it's an extra $40, it's an awesome boost. So... Exactly. Those windows happen all the time. They're really good about it. Usually, whenever there's a $40 boost, I'll put it in the newsletter. So keep an eye out there. Or...

or just keep refreshing allthehacks.com/rakuten, which is just my referral link and you'll see when that happens. The other thing is if you do have an Amex account, you can link Rakuten with your membership rewards account and instead of earning $10 cash back, you'll earn 1000 points. Depending on how you value Amex points, hopefully it's more than a penny a point.

then you'll actually be getting an even better return from Rakuten because you can earn points. Exactly. And we like to get cash back just because one of our priorities is to have more of a financial cash buffer for the FIRE thing. But I know a lot of people that go the Amex route instead with their points.

Well, I mentioned in a points versus cashback episode, were you to open the Schwab Platinum card, then you could still convert those points to cashback for a bonus 10%. I've just been stuck in a...

Amex pop-up jail on that card for a long time where they don't give you the signup bonus for it because I've opened too many Amex cards with them. But if you're willing to forego that bonus, you can still get past the pop-up and still get the 1.1%. So that is on my list to do. That's a good reminder. What are some other fun discounts and freebies? I know for the last almost two months, there's been a great Shake Shack deal where you could get free food every week.

Exactly. And even just this weekend, we went and got free burgers at Wendy's because it was National Hamburger Day. And before that, it was National Cheeseburger Day. And then Shake Shack was doing some, I think, March Madness promo. I mean, literally every day, there's something in the discounts of Freebies Land. If you just go on Slick Deals, guaranteed, even if you just go right now, you're going to see something that you can get for free. I just went to it right now. And there's just so much stuff.

that I don't need. It just seems like you could get lost scrolling indefinitely. I just scrolled like seven pages down and I'm barely through today.

Yeah, that is the curse, I think, of this endeavor is that there's this constant FOMO of things that you could be doing because there are so many things. And then it's like, how do you filter out the ones that matter to you? At least with slick deals, you can set up alerts. So I would definitely recommend doing that. On my end, both my wife and I, instead of like scrolling social media, going on Instagram and scrolling that, we get our dopamine hits scrolling slick deals and doctor of credit. That's sort of like

my bathroom activity. For me, it's like the same kind of dopamine. You're scrolling a thing, you get the same reward system. But you also have the potential of making money through discounts or with doctor credit, just far bigger deals. My substitute for playing crosswords is I scroll deals and then I record a podcast episode on the deals that I do. So here's one thing I'm going to start doing. I'm at least going to start scrolling these deals and

And we send a newsletter out on Saturdays. I'm going to start posting deals that are relevant. We already do this in the newsletter. We got a section for latest deals. I'm just going to spend a little bit more time for the next month or two scrolling for deals. So allthehacks.com slash emails, the newsletter, it's free to subscribe. I'll start sharing some deals as I find them. And let me know if you find that valuable if you're listening. So there's a couple categories left. And one of them was credit cards because...

We could talk at length about, oh, sign up for credit cards, get welcome bonuses, earn points and miles. And we've certainly covered that topic on the show. But there was one particular thing that you did that made me realize that you're playing this game a little bit differently. And you talked about opening up a few U.S. bank credit cards. Talk about that and how you generally think about credit cards and earning points.

Yeah, I think the different way we think about credit card points is that a lot of people think of it as what card should I open that gives me the best percentage rate on my regular spending? You know, am I getting 3% or 4% back? With us, we take a different approach, which is every dollar that we spend, ideally, is going to be put on a credit card where we're earning a sign-up bonus. Because the sign-up bonuses are...

far, far larger than the percentage that you'd get just through your usual spend without a bonus. Because these signup bonuses are like, "Hey, spend $5,000, get let's say $500 back." That's a 10% return, which is three times higher than any other cash back that you'd get just through regular spend. We try and focus on opening cards and always having a card open that has a minimum spend going on. And with the US bank cards recently, they increased their signup offers by quite a bit.

And so I needed more cards to do the minimum spend on. And we ended up opening, I think, three of those. And we applied for three of them in a single day. And all three of them ended up getting approved. I think you could have actually applied for four of them in a single day. I just forgot about one of the cards. That's the only reason why we didn't get four at a time. But yeah, we're constantly opening new credit cards.

You could take it even further because one of the cool things about a lot of these US bank cards was one, they were business cards, so they don't show up on your credit report. So they're not going to impact your ability to get other cards, at least from other issuers. They might impact your ability within US bank. And they only hit your credit once for four cards. So...

The only real impact doing four instead of one would potentially have is your ability to get another US bank card in the future. Is that probably fair? And even then, they're pretty lenient. And again, this varies wildly between different card issuers. But US Bank will even let you have the same card.

multiple times and get the same bonus multiple times. They don't necessarily advertise that, but in practice, that is what you can do. And yeah, they will combine your card inquiries into one inquiry if you do them all on the same day. So the cost of doing four applications versus doing one application, there is no cost other than the fact that now you have four cards that you need to meet

minimum spend for, which could be challenging if you don't have other ways of generating that amount of spend in the course of three months. What were the bonuses, for example? Because I know a lot of times people feel like cashback bonuses aren't that exciting.

No, they're pretty exciting. I think the US Bank leverage card was $900 for spending $7,500 in three or four months. So US Bank actually gives you a longer timeframe depending on the card. It goes from three, four, five, even six months. Triple Cash, I think, gave $600 for spending $4,500 in three,

Four months, I may be butchering the timeframes, but you kind of get the rough idea where it's at least a 10% spend to bonus ratio. And so opening four cards and hitting the minimum spend probably netted you a few thousand dollars. Just over $2,000 worth of bonuses, provided I could spend about $20,000. We'll come back to the spend $20,000 because I know that as someone in the middle of financial independence, you're not just...

spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year of your own money and buying things you don't need. But I know a fear a lot of people have is just opening up too many cards. It just doesn't work. And now you're stuck. And then you actually find a card you want and you can't get it. How many cards would you say you've opened up in the last 12 months? Yeah, I think I tallied it before. It was definitely over 30. I think around 35 cards between myself and my wife. After 30...

You were still getting approved for those other five. So I think a common misconception is that there's a cap that is much smaller than most people think about the number of cards they can open. So I think this could be a whole episode. Maybe you can come back and we can do it together. But thinking about what are all the card application rules? How do you want to sequence things if you want to open up multiple cards? And then the follow-up, which we can talk a little bit about today, is how do you generate the spend so that...

you're not stuck having to spend the money, right? If you opened up 35 cards, let's say on average, they had a $7,000 minimum spend to get the bonus. We're talking about $245,000.

I know that you don't spend $245,000 a year because we've talked about your fire lifestyle. It's probably a fraction of that. How do you think about that? Yeah, I think that's what trips a lot of people up when they're pursuing these cards is they feel like it's limited by how much income and how much expenses they have.

there are so many avenues for just generating that spend to meet the bonuses that you may not initially think of, but are pretty obvious in hindsight. Let's just go through them at a high level right now, just because I think it's really important for people to understand where this comes from. And then I think it would make sense to do a deeper dive on the topic. So stay tuned for an episode on welcome bonuses and meeting minimum spend.

Yeah. So the high level ways, I think the most obvious one, let's start with paying taxes because I think you've mentioned that before as well in your show where you can pay your taxes using a credit card at the cost of, I believe it's like 1.8% to use one of their credit card processors. And

And so if you have taxes to pay, definitely should be putting it on the credit card because a 1.8% cost is a fraction of the 10% or 20% return you're getting through the signup bonuses. Yeah, I think that's something that was interesting as I was talking about paying taxes on a credit card in the past was, if you look at it through the perspective of using a credit card and...

and paying taxes to earn points, not a welcome bonus. You're like, well, VentureXCard is going to give you 2x points, but you're going to pay 1.8 cents for every point you earn. Maybe if you get enough value from your points, you're earning on the margin. But is that really great? When I looked at the top welcome bonuses a few weeks ago for the points versus cashback episode, the average return was 16 points per dollar.

So if you're earning 16 points per dollar and paying 1.8 cents for them, or like you've done with some of these earning 10 or 15% cash back, paying 1.8 cents for every 15 cents, well, you could do the math there and say that's a really good deal. And so as long as you're paying taxes to earn these welcome bonuses, it seems like a no brainer.

Absolutely. Yeah, it's such an easy thing that anyone can do. And the thing with the IRS too is if you end up overpaying your taxes, they will refund you the money. And so keep in mind though, they will be keeping your money until the tax filing deadline. But that's also an option too, because you can pay quarterly taxes. And I think there's three different processors you can use. So you can pay your quarterly taxes through three of them. If you end up overpaying because you need to spend, you'll get the money back during the tax refund season.

Yeah, you can even go into your employer and potentially reduce your withholdings so that you're able to have more money that you put on a card that doesn't actually need to be refunded. So you actually get more paycheck back each pay period and then make those payments to the IRS. It's going to make your tax filings a little more complicated, but not that much more complicated. So taxes is an easy one as long as you're going for welcome bonuses.

Exactly. And then outside of taxes, it's an easy one, but it's not my preference because of the 1.8% fee. It's a small fee, but I would rather not pay it. And so there's other avenues as well. Ones that come to top of my mind are like funding a bank account, buying groups, gift card reselling. So we can dive into any of those if you'd like. Yeah. Maybe let's just give a quick overview of a few of them. The

The best way to think of a buying group is like a reselling business. If your friend wants an iPad and you buy the iPad, then you give him the iPad and he pays you for the iPad.

You've basically generated $1,000 of spend at no cost to you because your friend reimbursed you. And so if you scale that higher than just your friend, there are companies that just want to buy iPads and other goods from you because they're limited to how many of these iPads they can buy. Using iPads just as a generic example here, but you typically can't buy more than four of them at a time on Amazon when they get released because Amazon doesn't want to sell directly to these resellers. But

But a reseller might want to ship like a thousand of these iPads to Dubai where the iPad hasn't been released yet. And so they source people like you and I to buy these iPads for them and they reimburse you for it. And the advantage for you is that they're paying usually at cost. So if the iPad costs $1,000, they'll reimburse you $1,000. But if you're putting it on a credit card that earns 4% then or 5% on Amazon,

you're essentially making a 5% profit on all of the things that you're buying through there. Plus, if you're trying to meet a minimum spend, that's even more lucrative on top.

Yeah. And depending on where you live in the country, this can be an even better deal. If you live in states with no sales tax, I had the pleasure of going to one of these buyer group warehouses from a company called Max Out Deals. And I walked through it and it was wild. I'll put a picture up or I'll link to it in the show notes as well. It's like you're walking in the storeroom of either a Best Buy or an Apple store and they're just...

thousands and thousands of products that are getting geared up to ship out. And so this warehouse was right next to the LAX airport, presumably because it's really easy to ship things out. It's a low cost industrial part of town with a ridiculous amount of security. And so I tried this once, right? I went into the buyer's group site. They were looking for AirPods. I bought some AirPods while they were on sale at Costco. I shipped them to the buyer's group warehouse. And a couple of weeks later, they sent me some money.

And I didn't make any money, but I didn't lose any money. If there was a profit, it was incredibly small. But I got all the points from the purchase, especially if you have a card like the Amex Business Gold card, where you can get some elevated points from electronic stores, I think. Or if you're buying on Amazon and you're using Amazon Prime card, there are some options to get anywhere from 2% to 4% points and 2% to 5% cash back and then sell something at cost.

So you're making a little bit of profit and getting all the points. And even better when you have a minimum spend that you're tackling with a credit card. I think one thing I want to caveat to with the buyers group that comes up when I introduce my friends to the concept is the more savvy ones are like, do you have to pay taxes on this? Because you're buying and they're paying you out money. And the short answer, unless you're in a couple of very specific states, you don't because you're not, again, making actual profit on

on these shipments because you're shipping direct to the buyers group. It's not even often coming to your home first. You just enter their address. And some of these buyers group, I think Buy For Me Retail, which is a really popular one, they've got four or five different locations across the US in no sales tax states. And you just ship directly over there and you don't owe anything from a tax perspective because you didn't make a profit. What you made a profit on were your points and the points

as the IRS have ruled, are not taxable. So it doesn't end up impacting you unless I think you're in like Washington state or some other one where they like are trying to tax every kind of sale. It's a little complicated, but just try not to be in one of those states if you're doing it. I was listening to another podcast

He was either churning life or Turner's digest. The host was talking about how he ordered something like 200 Amazon echo dots and loaded them in his car to try to go take him to the warehouse. And I was just like, at some point it felt to me like maybe this was too far.

But I think that it's basically his full-time... It felt like it was his full-time job. So you can choose how far you want to take this. Do you want to get a sign-up bonus around a season where new iPads or iPhones are coming out and be able to meet that minimum spend easily and do that once or twice a year? Or do you want to be driving to a warehouse in Oregon three times a week,

filling your car with iPads, Echo Docks, Fire Sticks, and whatever other products are hot for resellers. Fundamentally, I think that's sort of just how this whole game is that it's a broad spectrum of how much effort you want to put into it. And at the

the high end of the spectrum where you want to put a lot of effort, it really is just a full-time job where you're starting pretty much a real business. Legitimately, people start reselling businesses on Amazon, not to make money on Amazon, but to just be able to generate spend buying the stuff so that they can then resell on Amazon to recoup the cost. So it's really just like, how much of an investment do you want to make into your side hustle? And do you want it to become a full-time business?

I talked to this guy who has a reselling business that he operates at basically no profit. Best you could tell, it's an unprofitable, terrible business. However, he puts millions and millions of dollars a year on a credit card. And for him, it's focused on living his life. So he's earning cash back. And I think he was doing it all on the Bank of America premium rewards card, earning $2.625 cash back on everything. And...

If you stacked it all up, I think he said he was doing like $10 million a year. And so at 2.625% back, he's earning a couple hundred thousand dollars to live off of.

that by the way, is tax-free because it's treated as a rebate. Exactly. It's crazy. It was a really interesting mindset shift of run an unprofitable business so you can generate enough spend so that you can generate credit card rewards that would pay your lifestyle, which surprisingly, had his business generated $265,000 of profit, he would have had to pay taxes on that. But had he taken that profit and...

allowed him to increase volume so that he generated more spend, he wouldn't pay taxes. It was really interesting to read that story and think about this and how it could become more than a side hustle.

But that's not what you do. You're keeping it at 10 to 15 hours a week. Trying to. Because a lot of these buying groups and these gift card reselling buying groups and all these, they started as that guy that was like, how do I scale up? And they ended up becoming a broker essentially, because that's the next level in scale. But for us, yeah, we're trying to keep it a little more low key at 10 to 15 hours a week.

And so you mentioned gift cards. My understanding is that similarly, gift cards go on sale all the time, right? Every time I'm checking out of the grocery store, it seems like there's some deal or coupon in the Safeway app for 10% off this one type of gift card. And so you could just buy gift cards and then sell them to gift card buying groups, one of them's aligned incentives. Is that the general premise there?

Exactly. Kroger will often have like a 4x fuel points thing where you get their fuel points, which is their reward system. And then you buy gift cards and they run that promo all the time, which effectively ends up being like a 10 to 15% discount.

on the gift cards. And most of these gift card buying groups, like Adline Incentives, they'll pay in that 90% range of how much a gift card's face value is. And that can vary based on gift card. But the same concept, you buy the gift cards, you send it over. And this has been happening a long time, this gift card game with Staples and Office Depot. And it used to be more physical. You have to go into the store and it can be kind of a pain to go buy the gift cards. It

Every year, there's a new app on the block that comes around thanks to VC funding. Pepper is the one that everyone's been hammering recently because you can buy these gift cards at a 10% discount just on the app. So you never have to leave your couch. And then you can send those gift cards over to a buying group who then reimburses you and then you're earning your cash back and your points and your minimum spend.

I love it. And then the last one you mentioned that we can hit on and then wrap up is on bank funding. So that's my personal favorite, actually, because it's the least amount of effort at zero cost.

The beauty of bank funding is that you can just fund a bank account using your credit card, and then that money shows up in your bank account immediately, which then you can transfer out to go pay the credit card. So it doesn't have this period of time where your money is held up elsewhere, and it doesn't have the 1.8% cost because it's usually free to fund your bank account.

The only friction I think there is that there's not many banks that let you fund bank accounts. Sometimes a unicorn will come around where they allow unlimited credit card funding. And that happened earlier this year. There was a credit union that allowed unlimited

Amex credit card funding into the bank account directly. And as you can imagine, that only stayed alive for about a month or two because people started funding. I think someone mentioned they put over a million dollars funded through a credit card, which they could just then withdraw. And so that's the rare scenario. And if you come across one of those, definitely go hard and heavy on that. But there's also ones where right now you can open a US bank business bank account and

and fund that with $3,000 on your Amex card. And anyone can do that. You can open a checking and do it, a business checking and open a business saving and do another $3,000. So if you just need to hit $5,000 on an Amex card, you could go on US Bank right now and do it. But you got to find those and really scout those out. And the top ones that allow unlimited ones, those are the ones that people don't really share outside of their very small private groups.

I've been working to try to get into these small private groups. They seem tricky, but with huge payoff, right? If you could put a million dollars in, you just earned a million Amex points and it costs you nothing because you fund your account, use that account to pay off the Amex, you fund it again, and then you just go through this cycle.

It's pretty wild. Stay tuned as I learn for more rabbit holes to go down and how to find these things. I think I would probably get it shut down if I put it in the newsletter, but it's the kind of thing that maybe I'd share with members in all the hacks. All right. Thanks for running through a few of those. We could probably go really deep on gift cards and other ways to meet minimum spend. So stay tuned for an episode on all of that.

I do want to come back to the point about doing this with a partner. Because when I looked at your table, it looked like somewhere around a third of all the money you're making from all these deals is...

is from your partner. And so how do you think about the value of a player two in this game? And how do you think about doing it maybe if your player two isn't that excited? I think getting a player two on board is probably the biggest thing you can do for tackling profitable deals from just the sheer monetary benefit perspective.

because so many deals have referral bonuses where it ends up being a situation where it's not a one plus one equals two situation. It's now one plus one equals three. And what I mean by that is if you sign up for a bank that has a referral bonus, let's say $100, you sign up, you get $100. If it's

If someone else signs up, they get $100. But if you sign up, get $100, and then you refer, let's say your spouse, they get $100, but you also get $100 for signing them up. So now it becomes $300 instead of just your $100. And that's how you can scale things quickly.

quite a bit. And yeah, I think last year, about a third, over $10,000 was through my P2. And the way I do it with my P2 is that she's not very excited about the deals in the way that I am. She appreciates all the benefits that come from it, but doesn't want to do the management of that, which I totally understand. And so I do a lot of these deals for her. And you can easily do that if you have access to their address, their social security number. So this is where a partner or a spouse makes more sense.

because you're just sharing your social security number is probably not something you should do with random strangers on the internet. However, it could be also just like your cousin or your friend. There's so many ways to acquire a player two or a player three or player four. There's some people that I chat with that have 10 plus players

for them, it really is a full scale business where they're managing multiple players, doing multiple bank bonuses, all these bonuses. Because if you imagine I'm just making $36,000 between me and my P2, if you had 10 players, that's over $150,000. And maybe you're working on this 40 hours a week instead of just 10 or 15. I love this. And this is something where yes, you could do it with friends, you could do it with family. I know my parents probably don't want to play this game. But maybe I say, "Hey, you know what?

If my immediate family all lets me manage their deals for the year, maybe I'll pay for the vacation we all take, which might come from a fraction of that cost. So that'd be really cool, especially when it comes to referring for some of these things. I know you mentioned $100, but there are a lot of times where whether it's Chase or Amex, some of the referral bonuses are just wild. So we didn't really talk about referrals above, but maybe highlight a couple of the kind of crazy referral bonuses you've seen.

Yeah. So the one that really paid off last year was the MooMoo brokerage referral bonus, because they were giving $300 for each party for bringing someone onto their platform. And that person only had to deposit like $1,000 or $5,000. It's like a pretty small amount. And you didn't have to leave the money there or anything. It was just like, I think in 30 days, they were going to pay out $300. And

And so on my end, I ended up referring, I think, 40, 50 people. And so that's why my brokerage number is so much higher from last year, was that I think I made over $10,000 just referring folks on the MooMoo app. But obviously, me having a podcast obviously helped drive a lot of those referrals.

But you don't have to have that. I was making a lot of money even before I started the podcast during the pandemic through these referrals. And they're going to vary a lot based on the institution offering them. The most recent lucrative one that everyone was doing was that Amex was offering...

a 10x boost on your points earning when you spend on dining if you referred someone to an Amex card. So if you referred someone, they open an Amex card, the card that you referred from gets a 10x boost on dining up to $25,000. So if you were able to spend $25,000 on dining, Amex was going to give you 250,000 points for free just because you referred one person to an Amex card.

Yeah, it was a shame that didn't stack and you could refer 10 people and get 100 points on dining. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's amazing. And I'm actually going through just as a recap in my mind, all these categories as they apply to a P2. When it comes to bank accounts, you might not get a referral, but that means for every awesome bank account deal, you can open it twice. For brokerages, you might have a shared brokerage to transfer your positions, but it means double the retirement accounts for those bonuses.

For meal kits, do the meal kit companies catch on to the fact that you have the same address, but maybe you and your player too can order meal kits to your home? It depends on the meal kit company. But for the most part, the meal kit companies, I'd say like 95% of them don't have a household restriction. So you, in theory, could have as many roommates or pets as you want in your household, and you can order meal kits to them. And they don't care that you share the same address. The exception to that, I think...

is Marley Spoon, who does care a little bit about how many people you have living in your home, like HelloFresh, Green Chef.

no issues whatsoever. So having a P2, having roommates, having pets like that really can scale up how many of these things you end up getting. Yeah, I will say in the past, I found that sometimes it helps to use a different credit card when you sign up for you and your player too. So keep that in mind. And another hack that I learned in the past was if you're trying to sign up for a deal twice at your same address,

I just think back to the fact that I used to live at a home where it looked like a normal address, not an apartment building, but there was like an apartment one and apartment two. Maybe you have three apartments at your home and you just add unit one, unit two, unit three. They're all going to get there. So it's not too big of a deal. So those are a couple little tricks to get around some of those restrictions. I went through, you know, cell phones just means you can get two iPhones. Discounts means you can get two times the freebies if you have two people.

Two times the burgers. Yeah, two times the burgers. And then on the credit card stuff, the referrals are really lucrative. You mentioned 10x points, but pretty regularly, there are referrals where you earn anywhere from 10 to 40,000 points for referring a partner. I always tell everyone listening, look, allthehacks.com slash cards, we have links, they support the show. They're how me and Amy are able to do this full time.

but I want you to get the most points. And so if you have a referral link from a partner, use that, get more points. If you don't, would love the support. But...

That's true across the board. And finally, while I wouldn't call a business a player too, in the credit card space and in the bank account space, if you wanted to earn points from Chase, you can do that with a business and without. And I just want to flag that having a business might be a lot more accessible than you think. I know there are a lot of people that think, Oh, I'm not eligible for a business card because I don't have a business that I've registered. And I'm like, well...

Have you ever done any consulting? Have you ever sold anything on eBay? Have you ever started blogging? Do you post on social media? Is there a requirement that business is profitable today? No. So I'm not encouraging people to lie about having a business. I just think there are a lot of people that might have a business and not really realize it.

So that business, for a lot of people, might be creating content online. And one day, that'll turn into a thing like it has for you and I. I don't think you and I started posting things on the internet with the intention of it being a business. And that just happened. And so in those early days, that was a business. If you...

do any 1099 work, that's a business. So honestly, if you want to go drive for Uber for 1 hour a year so that you qualify as a business, then that unlocks a ton of deals. So I'm curious, actually, right before we wrap, how much of the money you make of the $30,000 plus do you think came from business versus personal? And how important do you think it was for you guys to be able to have a business?

That's a really great question. I don't think I tallied that. But if I were to guess, I'd say probably half of it is through businesses because the business bonuses are often so much more lucrative than personal bonuses because companies want to attract businesses, whether it's through bank accounts or credit cards. But

On top of that, the business ones don't affect your credit card status. So opening these business credit cards means that you're not capped by how many credit cards you open. So outside of getting a P2, I think a business is the next one, maybe even on par in terms of things you can do to improve the amount of profitable deals that you can tackle and how much money you make from them.

This is amazing. We went through so many different ways to get profitable deals and actually build income with it. I think anyone here who's thinking, how do I add a few tens of thousands of dollars to my income each year can hopefully do that and scale it even further with friends, family or a business. And so this has been awesome. You have an incredible podcast that opened me to the world of this called The Daily Churn. I hope everyone checks it out.

It's really incredible. Anywhere else you want to send people? Yeah, I think a couple of the ones we mentioned today are going to be really useful if you want to get into the game. Doctor of Credit is sort of the Bible of all the deals you could tackle under the sun. Slick Deals is great if you're into discounts and freebies.

Miles Earn and Burn, if you're trying to get into how to generate spend more effectively, they focus on that. And a couple of podcasts you mentioned, Churning Life and Churners Digest are great for also the generating spend side of things. And of course, my show, The Daily Churn Podcast, where you can get these monthly recaps, have like a live tracker on the website that I update in real time with

notes and data points. And so that way you don't have to wait for one of those episodes. You can find that plus the newsletter, all that stuff from my end on thedailychurnpodcast.com. It's a great lesson. Everybody check it out. Kai, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Chris. Appreciate it. I really enjoyed this.

Such a great episode. Thank you so much for listening. I really hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, please consider clicking that follow or subscribe button if you haven't already. It really helps us out. And there's no better way to support us than doing that or sharing the show with a friend, colleague or family member or even a random stranger is totally appreciated.

Also, links to everything in this and all other episodes are at allthehacks.com, where you can also find all the deals we find, as well as links to the top credit card bonuses. Finally, if you have any feedback, want to get in touch, or share a question you have for a future Mailbag episode, you can email me at podcast at allthehacks.com. That's it for this week. I'll see you next week.