My New Routine, Timeshare Pitches, and All the Hacks Plans for 2024
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and today I want to go over a few topics that were a little too small to be their own episodes, but I really wanted to share. That includes a major change to my daily routine that's been a huge unlock, a story about our trip to Mexico, and the timeshare pitch that came with it.

And then I want to share some of the feedback I've gotten from all of you and what plans we have for all the hacks in 2024. If you like this short mini episode, you can always let me know, podcast at allthehacks.com. Okay, we've got a lot to cover, so let's jump in right after this.

When it comes to our personal finances, Amy and I are making some really intentional changes with how we want to spend in 2024. And we are so excited about it. And what made that whole process possible is our sponsor today, Copilot, which is one of my all-time favorite apps that makes it seamless and easy to track your spending. And in the case of our 2024 plans, boost our savings.

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If you want to do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive of OCI at allthehacks.com slash oracle. That's allthehacks.com slash oracle. Allthehacks.com slash oracle. I've recently been focused on getting healthy in 2024. I think it's working. I've been exercising two to four times a week. I've been doing strength training, which I haven't done in a while, and it feels great.

But a big issue was when do we get that exercise in with two small kids? Well, a few years ago, I actually met this guy in Austin named Joel, who goes online by 5am Joel because he wakes up really early at 5am. And All The Hacks guest Sahil Bloom, who's been on the show a few times, is also pretty well known for going to bed early and waking up early.

So one night, Amy and I were talking and it was about 8pm and we were a little tired and we thought, what if we just went to bed really early? The hardest part about waking up at 5am or 4am or 6am or anytime really early for me has always just been that I was so tired. It was usually because I was going to bed at my regular 10 or 11 o'clock bedtime and setting the alarm early, not getting a lot of sleep.

But the importance of sleep seems to be so high. So if I wanted to wake up early, I really needed to go to bed early. And I thought, if I could just go to sleep at 8.30, surely I wouldn't be that tired. And I'd get a full night's sleep. Honestly, when I thought about all the things that Amy and I did in our house between 8.30 or 9 and 10.30 or 11...

They were not nearly as productive as what I'd probably be doing if I woke up early and was a little bit more intentional. So we went for it. And for the most part, it stuck. I can't tell you how amazing it's been to wake up fully refreshed at 5, 5.15, 5.30, and then get stuff done. And some days that's exercise. Some days that's a little work. Some days it's organizing things around the house, etc.

And all of it is happening before the kids wake up. We get about two hours now of our own time. And sometimes Amy and I just sit in the kitchen, make a little breakfast, have a coffee or a tea, and just chat with each other. I was actually talking to another couple the other night, pointing out that they never have time for each other. And I said, what if you guys just woke up early and you spent the hour before the kids wake up together and...

And their reaction was a little bit like, I can't believe we never thought of that. And hopefully the next time I see them, I'll get a debrief on how it worked.

Now, waking up early isn't the only part of the routine. So I actually think I'm going to do a whole episode about my routine, everything that goes into it, a lot more detail than just how many hours we're sleeping and what time we wake up. So stay tuned and let me know if you think that'd be interesting. But I would definitely encourage anyone listening who's even a little curious to give it a try.

Worst case, you just stop doing it. But best case, you found a totally new way to time your day that could be a really, really big unlock for you, just like it's been for me. That's the routine part. Next, I want to talk about this trip we took to Mexico and a little bit about timeshares. And it was actually a really, really interesting trip because we went to a property that I hadn't been to for 20 years.

So back in 2004, my grandparents took our entire extended family on a trip to Mexico to a property. At the time, it was called the Grand Mayan. I didn't know anything about what went into it. I just remember that it was a huge property with a lazy river and water slide. And it was so much fun hanging out with my cousins. Everything was great.

Fast forward 20 years later, we were looking at options of where we could go for a vacation. At the end, I'll talk about how we actually booked it. But we came across this property called Vedanta. And little did I know until I did some research, Vedanta is maybe one of the most massive resorts I've ever heard of and been to. It's

It's about 2,500 acres. There are over 40 bars and restaurants and 27 pools, thousands of rooms, six different actual resorts on the property. And they have these little wooden plank pathways that lead all over the property to different places. You even need an app to sometimes figure out how to get directions.

But it was really, really impressive. And on top of the entire property, they're building a second part of the property that's another 2,500 acres. It's going to be an entire theme park with two more resorts. If massive properties is not your thing, this would not be interesting to you. But we decided to book it because we've got two kids. We weren't looking for a vacation where we'd be running around town. We wanted something pretty chill, pretty relaxing where everything was on site and we wouldn't have to really go anywhere.

We're pretty excited. Now, I knew that Vedanta is a property that you can't just book on TripAdvisor. It's a timeshare-only property. So you can really only go if you're an owner or an owner sponsors you or you buy someone's ownership week on a timeshare exchange site.

I knew that if you go as a non-owner, going to the timeshare pitch is not the requirement, but it is part of the trip if you want it to be. Amy and I went in thinking, well, we're not going to do it. Why do it? I think maybe for the sake of we had this podcast and we wanted to talk about it, maybe for the sake of the incentive to go was pretty compelling. We thought, why not do that? It's funny because I probably would give you two different reviews of Vedanta if I did and didn't go to the timeshare pitch.

The I didn't go to the timeshare pitch version was food was great. It wasn't overly expensive compared to some resorts. Obviously, if we'd gone into town, it would have been much cheaper. But great breakfast buffets, great activities. We took the kids to the beach for fire dancing. There was live music every single night. There were kids clubs with pools. And it was just...

really a great place. It was a little controlled or programmed in a way that you kind of feel like you're in Vegas where each different resort had a smell and there were little smell diffusers around there. So you felt like you were walking into a very consistent experience every time. The service was incredible. Only caveat would be I don't think there's a lot of empowerment there. So if something goes wrong, people can't necessarily fix it. But as long as things aren't going wrong, things are great.

If you had the opportunity to go, especially as the guest of someone else, and you're not doing the timeshare pitch,

By all means, if that kind of a property sounds fun to you, I would definitely encourage it. However, the timeshare pitch is where things kind of took a turn for us. I think I knew what I was getting into. We've probably done two or three timeshare pitches in our day, often when someone said, hey, come to this thing and we'll give you anywhere from $300 to $500 and it'll be one hour of your time. And before we had kids and we were somewhere for a week, we said, why not?

So this time, we didn't know what we were going into. But I will say, had I done more research on the timeshare pitch, I probably would have gotten a better indication.

But it is definitely maybe the most aggressive timeshare pitch I've found ever. They said it was an hour, but then the clock didn't start until we had breakfast. We got there. We waited. We went to breakfast. We came back. By the time we were done, it was almost three hours. And it was more high pressure and hard to get out of without...

just kind of creating commotion than you could imagine. Now, on the upside, they had a whole childcare center where someone would watch your kid and draw with them and show them stuff. So that was great, except, you know, when you came to Mexico, not to do this. To do it for an hour was one thing. To do it for three hours was a lot. I honestly wanted to see if it would be a good deal and understand the product.

But saying no just felt like you were offending everyone in their entire family. I started doing the math just to be able to share with you all what I thought. Honestly, it seemed like it was a good deal if you knew that for the next 30 years, you wanted to go to this property every single year.

Otherwise, you can go online to sites like Redweek and you could book a week of someone's timeshare at this property or any other timeshare property without having to own it. Usually, there are people who are trying to sell a week that they're not going to use and the prices are pretty compelling. So if you go to redweek.com...

And you look up where we stayed, Grand Luxe, which by the way is funny because they have different tiers of properties. And the higher the tier, the more access you get. They start at Grand Mayan, Grand Bliss, Grand Luxe. They have the estates. I definitely encourage you to pick Grand Luxe or higher in terms of level because you just get access to everything. I asked them to confirm this and they wouldn't, but I'm convinced that they actually increase the temperature of the pools at the properties as they get more expensive.

But if you look, you can go into Redweek. And yes, you have to create an account. And you can book a week for a one-bedroom at $2,600, for a two-bedroom at $3,000. And that two-bedroom was big. We stayed at a two-bedroom at the Grand Lux.

And we had a room for us. We had a room for our au pair. And then we had another room that was like a mini living room where we were able to get cribs from Vedanta and a pullout and set them all up there for the kids. We had a full kitchen. The whole property had a market. So that was great. That's the level I would go. So I don't see why you would want to buy into this and make this multi-year commitment that has a lot of costs up front and recurring costs when you can just book it online. Now, the only downside to booking online is...

Supposedly, when you book online as a non-owner, it's like a marketing week or something where the purpose of you being able to go is to be able to experience the property. And you could only do that every four years. If you really love the property and want to go every year, sure, you might need to become an owner. But you could also book it in your name one year, in your spouse's name the next year, maybe invite your parents one year and book it under their name, and then book it under the other parent's name. So I see a way that you could even come back

regularly without having to become an owner. So honestly, I don't see the benefit of buying. It just didn't seem to make sense when I tried to run all the numbers. And when I showed them the numbers of just buying weeks online, they just started throwing all this other stuff at me about how you could use the points to go other places and you can stay at their other properties. You know when someone's just trying to throw everything at you that it's not sticking. So

When we tried to leave this pitch, it was like, well, I've got to get my manager to sign off to let you leave. It was very high pressure.

So the great thing was you weren't required to do this pitch. So take it from me, skip the pitch, and I think you'll have a much better vacation. Why did we do the pitch? Well, the compensation this time was actually much, much higher than anything I'd seen before, which is I think what brought us into it. I'm not saying we would do it again, but I think maybe it was still worth it, even though it kind of left a little bit of a bad taste on our mind. We

We went through a partnership with a company called Third Home. And so if you own a second home, or even a fractional part of a second home, Third Home is kind of like a home exchange for those second vacation homes. So I've talked a lot about this on the vacation home episode I did, which I'll link to in the show notes. But basically, if you own a second home or a fractional home, you can put a week...

at a time up on this other platform and earn a virtual currency called keys that allow you to book other people's second homes. And the reason they limit it to second homes is because for most people, their second home isn't filled with all their stuff. And it's a little bit more of a turnkey property to share. We were able to put in one of our weeks at our place in Napa.

And that got us a handful of keys. From time to time, they even have stays that you can book without keys, which this Mexico trip was for us. So we actually got our week at Vedanta for about $1,200 and none of our virtual currency of keys, which was a great deal.

These keys are worth anywhere from about $700 to $1,000 each to book a property that would otherwise be, let's call it $5,000 for a week. You probably need five to seven keys. So the reason we did the timeshare pitch was they offered us five keys through third home if we went to the pitch, which is worth anywhere from $3,500 to $5,000. So it seemed worth it for the hour. It maybe seemed worth it for three hours, but...

It's hard to put a price on the emotional toll of feeling kind of... I wouldn't say lied to, but feel like someone was just treating you just a dissatisfying way. And it just put a big sour point on the second to last day of our vacation. So obviously, that's a great price. If we didn't have kids, maybe it wouldn't have been as frustrating to want to get out. So my takeaway is...

Don't do the timeshare pitch. And if you're open to a vacation that's kind of all in one property, you're not going to experience the local culture of Mexico, but you are going to a beach resort. You are getting to relax and disconnect and be away from home and have access to so many different things. For those reasons, I would recommend a trip to Vedanta. So that was our trip to Mexico. If you are interested in Third Home, there is a deal for all the Hacks listeners, allthehacks.com slash thirdhome. I'll put that in the show notes as well.

It seems like every week there's a new data breach to expose your personal info, like how in November pretty much the entire population of Maine had their personal info exposed. And once your info ends up in one place, it's like playing whack-a-mole to get it taken down from all the other data brokers.

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Finally, I wanted to talk about all the hacks, plans for 2024, things we've learned, not necessarily takeaways from the podcast, but from hearing from you all. So we did a survey last year. And a huge shout out to the 400 people who responded to that survey who've been listening since the beginning. That means so much to me. And I'm sure there's far more of you than just the people that filled out that survey. So thank you so much for all your support.

A few of the takeaways that I thought were really, really interesting and worth sharing. One, 47% of you said that solo episodes were your number one pick. Here I am doing one. We've got a handful more slated this year.

Followed up behind that was about a third of you loved interviews as number one pick, about 15% for the mailbag episodes we've done with Q&A, and less than 10% on country episodes. Now, it doesn't mean people didn't like those other things because it asked people to stack rank. So that was just something interesting that's going to have some influence on the future. And another big thing that I learned was there was a question for people who didn't subscribe to the newsletter, why not?

And 44% of people said, you don't subscribe to the newsletter because you thought it was the same as the podcast. Well, it turns out that's not true. And I just wanted to talk a little bit about that briefly because it's actually changed a lot.

We started the newsletter as more of a long-form piece of content that drew from one or even two or three different episodes and broke things down in a bit of a long-form essay. So I could see how that felt similar to the podcast. But right now, the newsletter is starting to focus a lot more on sending out...

All the top deals, interesting articles or videos, could be credit card signup bonuses that are happening right now. It could be deals on different products, services, or sometimes deals on flights. Could be an offer to sign up for a change to the transfer partners of a credit card or anything like that. So that newsletter is going out, aiming for every week. But as we start ramping it up, let's say at least every other week...

And the content is going to be very different from the podcast, especially because we can put together that newsletter just a few hours before we send it out. So some of these last minute deals, some of these short term opportunities aren't going to show up on the podcast like they will in the newsletter. So if you want to sign up, allthehacks.com slash email will take you there.

A little bit about the demographics, which surprised me, was that our audience, mostly in the US, and above average income and net worth, even for podcast listeners, which already skew a bit higher than other types of content. So first off, nice work to everyone listening for just being overall above average savers and...

more on top of your finances. No surprise since we talk about those topics on the show a lot, but I just wanted to say congrats to everyone that falls into that bucket. If you're not there, hopefully you will be soon. And that's partially because the number one topic that you guys requested was personal finance.

So we went through all the topics that we could talk about on the show and finance was number one. So you will find some more finance topics coming up on money investing. But I will say we've covered a lot in the past in the archives of this show. So first off, if that's a topic you're interested in, go back and look on the website, allthehacks.com. You can actually click the episodes by category and go look at all the money and finance related episodes.

But I am very curious for the 82% of you that said personal finance is a topic you really want to hear about. What specific topics? I would love to create more money topics, investing topics on the show. So even if all you send is a short email with just the subject line is a topic idea and nothing in the body, I would love to hear from you. Podcast at allthehacks.com. Send your personal finance and money and investing topics you'd like to hear on the show.

After that was points, miles and cards, then investing, news, deals, travel. That will continue to be a part of the show. And then in the smaller categories were productivity, health and fitness, personal development,

Those things will still happen. Like we'll still dive into those topics because they're fascinating to me and I can see from the data they're fascinating to you, but it's not going to become the main focus of the show and take over all of the other stuff. Going forward, I think you'll see about a third of the content focused on travel and points and miles and optimizing that. About a third in the money and investing camp and about a third in the life, work, other personal categories, whether it's communication or negotiation or anything like that.

I'm going to try to ramp up this year to about 30-40% of the episodes as solo episodes, doing research and sharing things. Those episodes are a tremendous amount of work. I will try to do as many as time allows. If there are topics you want me to go deep on again, email us. When it comes to those mailbag episodes, I'm going to start incorporating those answers into

into two places, into their own episodes, whether those are long episodes or even short episodes like this, or I'm just going to start answering questions on the member community. So if you have questions you want answered, I try to give an answer to every single question in the member community within a couple of days of it posting. So that's a place you can go if you have questions you want answered that aren't a good fit for the podcast.

And then travel episodes like the ones we've done on different countries. I'm going to keep doing those from time to time, but I'm going to air them as bonus episodes because I hear you that if you're not looking to go on a trip to Japan, it's probably not something that relevant to you right now. Even though that episode had tremendous success, people loved it, I'm probably not going to make it a regular Wednesday episode, it or any other country episode.

So again, if you have specific topics on anything, podcast at allthehacks.com. I do still want to do a topic on kids.

But I'm trying to figure out how Amy and I might do a little mini series on the side. I know that the majority of you don't have children. And even among those who do, they're not all at the same ages. So I definitely want to make sure we're not creating too much content that's not relevant to everyone while still being able to share what we're learning as we go through this journey. Because even if it's not relevant to you now...

Maybe two, three years from now, it will be, and that content will still be there. Last on topics, I will continue to cover high net worth topics from time to time, things like alternative investments or hiring an assistant.

The goal is not for this to evolve to a show that's only relevant to an audience of high net worth individuals. That's not the goal. That's not the plan. But those topics are interesting to me. They're interesting to a lot of the audience. I get a lot of great feedback on them. So you will continue to see those topics from time to time. But to anyone that thinks that that's the focus of the show, it's definitely not the case. I could list so many episodes that are relevant to people across every spectrum of income and net worth.

So those things will come from time to time, but they won't be the focus of the show. Okay, a few other things. I've gotten a lot of feedback from people about the pacing of the show sounding as if we're almost removing all of the breaths people would take and firing through everything as quickly as possible. We do actually remove some filler words on the show, like ums and ahs and you knows. And the reason we do that is because

I don't think they add a lot to the conversation, to be honest. And when I'm listening to a podcast, I personally would want to compress the podcast to not include a bunch of these filler words. That said, I'm not here to listen to the show. I'm here to create the show. And I've gotten feedback from some people that it sometimes just feels a little too rushed, like people aren't even taking a breath. And so we've actually dialed that back down in the last three or four months to try to give it a little different pacing.

For anyone who has had that feedback, I'm curious what you think. For anyone who likes the content the way it is, likes that faster paced, I'd love to hear from you. Right now, the only feedback I get is make it a little slower, put the breaths back in, put the filler words back in. So I am very curious how you all think about that if you're on the other side of that question.

Next, I want to touch briefly on our partners. The main reason we have ads and sponsors on this show is because Amy and I want to be able to focus on all the hacks full time. And we quit our jobs to do this. Life costs money. Our goal is to take the products and services we love and we use and reach out to them to become sponsors.

We're not looking for sponsors that are just interested in paying to promote their products. We're looking to work with brands where we can get behind what they're creating, the services they're offering, and because we already love their products and would talk about them anyways. And so I ran through the list of all our partners and the vast majority of them were ones where I used the product before we even reached out to the brand and

And in some cases, even though I use the product, I also went ahead and did a bunch of research trying out competitors before we talked about them just to make sure that we were picking a company that we felt really, really great about. For example, when I did that budgeting and managing spend episode, it wasn't a paid ad for Copilot. In fact, they didn't even know I was doing the episode. It was me sharing the results of a ton of research, trying all the different app,

which led me to pick Copilot, which I've been using for years now, and which led me to reach out to them to partner because I thought it was the best product. As for the number of ads we have in the show, I've thought a lot about this. I've heard feedback from everyone. The best data I've found says that somewhere between five and eight ads for an hour-long podcast is the right balance of making the show sustainable, both for listeners and the company and the host. And I think that's a good thing.

And we're on the low end of that. So I feel good about what we're doing there. I feel great about how we're picking the partners we work with. I think we have a great balance to make all the hacks sustainable for us and an incredible show and give us a lot of opportunities to do even more in the future. So thank you for listening. And hopefully that makes sense to you. As I think about other things you want to see from all the hacks in the future, I want to go back to last year when we did an episode on Iceland.

With Brandon Presser, who's been there 40 plus times. At the end, we talked about maybe planning a trip. And we had so much interest that we decided to do it. And it makes sense. Who doesn't want to go on a dialed in trip with an expert on the country? I know I do. And I know I'm going because the trip is happening in September. And we shared it with all the Hacks members first. And it very quickly filled up.

That said, we've only taken deposits right now. Nothing is finalized. So if you do want to check out the itinerary and get on the wait list to join in case someone drops out, you can go to allthehacks.com slash Iceland to learn more. And if this trip is a success like I hope it is, I think you'll see us doing a few more trips next year to different destinations.

So if you want to join a future trip and have input into where it might be and when we might do it, go to allthehacks.com slash trips. It's a quick survey so we can get a sense of where people want to go. That list is a list we'll be emailing after emailing members with all future trips.

So finally, speaking of that membership, it's been about a year and we've learned a lot. First, we have an incredible group of over 300 members and I'm so thankful for all of them for joining and most of all for participating. In our community, people ask questions all the time. I try to answer every single question I can, but our community is jumping in and answering them and sharing their experience as well and it just makes it such an awesome place.

From the member survey we did, I learned that many of you primarily joined just to support the show. But I know that's not the only reason because we've done a bunch of stuff. I know a big one is that we've set up a bunch of member-only deals and perks that could easily pay for the membership itself.

You get a free year to Kubera's net worth tracker, which is normally $150. You get 50% off Trust and Will's estate planning services, which could be worth up to $300. You get 20% off 50-50 gear, projection lab, any day cookware, and up to $7,500 in travel credit from Third Home. We even added free wine tastings at Hall, Walt, and

and Baca wineries up in Napa, and a few more perks as well. We also have a monthly call that's been everything from AMAs with me to member discussions on topics like health and fitness, to more recently, we've been inviting the founders and CEOs of products like Point.me and Aways to come and do a detailed workshop on using the product, answer questions, and they've been doing giveaways at the end with members for free memberships to their products.

Like I said, there's also a great community where you can get feedback and tips from everyone. So if you're interested in the All the Hacks membership, you can find out more and join at allthehacks.com join.

I think that's it for this little bonus episode. If there are topics you want to see in other short mini episodes that might not be enough for a full one, please reach out. Podcast at allthehacks.com. I love getting feedback. I read all these emails. Thank you so much for listening and supporting me in the show today. I will see you next week.