Top 50 Ways to Upgrade Your Life, Money, and Travel from 200+ Episodes of All the Hacks
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If you're looking to optimize your life without spending more time or money than you have to, this episode is just for you. Because after 230 episodes and thousands of hours of research I'm doing, I've pulled together the 50 most impactful things I've learned, tested, and used, spanning travel, money, points and miles, investing, productivity, relationships, and more.

These are real strategies and tactics I rely on every day to earn and save more and be more intentional with my time. Some are quick wins, others are deeper mindset shifts, but they're all actionable and they're all designed to help you level up. I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with a friend or leave a comment or review. And if you want to keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, click follow or subscribe. Now let's get into it right after this.

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It's hard to believe that it's been four years since I started this podcast, but I'm really loving it more than ever. And in the past 230 episodes, I've been lucky enough to talk to some of the smartest people I could ever find and meet about building wealth, leveraging cards, points and miles, traveling better, optimizing time, living a more intentional life. And I've tested a lot of those strategies myself along the way. I've shared some of that in the

the 55 different solo episodes I've done, which I'm really enjoying. You'll probably see a lot more of them on the podcast coming forward because I really like being able to take the hundreds, thousands of hours of research I'm doing, all the tinkering in my life and share some of that with you, as well as using those episodes to share some of the questions you all have. So keep those coming and some of the hacks you've picked up and you share. I love doing that as well. So in this episode, I decided I was going to go back in time and

and find my top 50 hacks from the entire journey, spanning travel, points and miles, money, investing, productivity, relationships, and a lot more. So these aren't just going to be generic tips. They're the exact ideas, tools, mindsets, tactics that I'm using to get more out of life without spending more time or money than I have to. Some of them might be really quick wins. Others might be big mindset shifts, but I think all of them are grounded in action.

And I really hope that at least a few of them become a part of your own life strategy also.

Throughout this episode, there are going to be a lot of references to other episodes, so I'll include links to all of them in the show notes. And just so you know, when I mention an episode number, it serves two purposes. One, if you're on a podcast app, it makes it easy to scroll back in time. The episode number should be in the little summary for each one. But also, if you go to allthehacks.com slash 91, it'll jump straight to episode 91. So you can always use that number as a way to get to the episode page.

where on that episode page, you can find links to the episode in your favorite podcast app or YouTube. So I'm going to start with travel, which I'll split into credit card points and mile side first, and then general travel after. The first thing is that welcome bonuses always win.

So it's fun to sometimes think about what credit card is the best one for earning the most cashback or points or whatever you want when it comes to a category you spend a lot on like dining. But I think the most important thing to remember is that there is hardly a welcome bonus on a new card that earns anything less than 5%. I would say the actual average of the top welcome bonuses when I did the analysis for episode 170, which was about cashback versus points, was

was around 17x points on the average welcome bonus. And not the average of all welcome bonuses, but the average, I think, of the top 10 or 20 at the time. So yes, you can earn 4x points on dining or 5x points on flights, but the average welcome bonus is going to give you 17x points on all of your spend on that card up until you hit that minimum spend. So welcome bonuses always win. The next one is that in math, we've learned from the time we were kids that 1 plus 1 equals 2.

But in the points game, one plus one is definitely able to be more than two. And that's because you can play this game with your spouse, your partner, your parents, your family, your friends, your children. And in addition to both earning welcome bonuses, when you refer people, you can usually, for many card issuers, earn a referral bonus as well. So if you were going to say open a card that had a

80,000 point bonus and then refer your partner to a card that also had an 80,000 point bonus, you could get not only the 160 plus maybe 20,000 points for the referral. I'm using some round numbers to make this easy, but it's somewhere in that order of magnitude. It also means that you can take advantage of a really huge opportunity multiple times.

If you are playing this game with a partner, maybe you are also helping your parents. That's four people that could take advantage of a 100,000 point welcome bonus, not just one, plus any referrals that stack on top of that. So I know one of the pieces of pushback I get a lot of time here is that if you open up tons and tons of cards, you go for welcome bonuses, you do it with your partner. What is that going to do to your credit?

it. In episode 221, I did a deep dive on credit and credit scores, but one of the highlights I'll share is from a story from someone who posted online pretty publicly, but said they opened 26 credit cards in 2017, and the entire time they tracked their credit score for them and their partner, not only did the two of them accumulate 2 million points, but their credit scores both went up, and his partner's score went up by

over 100 points. And they ended this in the high 700, low 800 range, starting from below that for both of them. So this is not necessarily something that will ruin your credit. In fact, in many cases, it will improve it. Next one is that every one of us can be a travel agent. And I say this because one of the challenges with earning points and miles is that most of us don't want to keep spending more and more money that we don't need to spend. So what I'm

I love doing is anytime I'm taking a trip with family or friends, or maybe it's a reunion or a bachelor party or even something at work, I've always volunteered to be the travel agent for the group. I'll book the hotels, I'll book the flights, and I'll go as far as to reach out to the airline and try to get a group fare or the same thing with the hotel. Turns out most people hate doing that kind of work. I'm guessing if you're listening to this podcast, maybe you like that. And if that's true, this gives you an opportunity to say, I

I will take all that logistical overhead off of all of your plates. All I ask for in return is I'm going to book it all on my card, and then I'm going to ask you to Venmo, Zelle, PayPal, whatever it is, the cost of that trip. I've used that to get lots and lots of travel bookings on my cards that weren't necessarily for me and accumulate a ton of points. The next big one in the points and miles world is to take advantage of award search tools and their alerts.

In episode 166 and 167, Greg from The Frequent Miler and I went down and looked at every single hotel and flight booking service there is out there. So I'm not going to recap all of them, but these tools have gotten so good and made it so easy for you to really maximize your points that

If you're not using them and you have points and miles, I think you're really doing yourself a disservice. And there's a massive opportunity for you to take advantage of tools that make it so easy to find flights that can give you such outsized value for your points.

I know in a couple of weeks, I'm going to do an episode on probably somewhere around 15 or 20 different award search tricks to make it easier for you to book flights with points and miles. One of those is award search tools, but we'll cover a lot of things. And then the other thing is these tools also come with alerting. So not only does it make it easy to say, help me find a flight from California to Asia, but also help me set an alert so that if a better price comes up or a better route comes up, you can send me a notification and I can rebook it or book it then.

Next one is not all of us have points. Some of us have been playing the cashback game for a really long time. Some of us just find an amazing points deal but don't have the points to do it. Well, you can buy points. In episode 170, I did cashback versus points and talked about the difference between the two. And one of the biggest takeaways for me is that points go on sale all the time. And so there are opportunities to buy points even if you don't have them.

them so my favorite example of this is we stayed at this incredible resort called caprocat in the island of mallorca in spain and it's part of the small luxury hotel group and that's part of hilton and so hilton had this hotel available for 120 000 points a night now the cash rate was something around three thousand dollars so already this is an amazing value for hilton points which are often considered worth around half a cent or six hundred dollars so this is like five times the normal value

but not everyone has 120 000 hilton points and yes you can transfer from amex but maybe you don't have points that can go to hilton well at the very time we were booking this hilton points were on sale something that happens at least six to twelve times a year if not more frequently and so you could just go to the hilton website buy a hundred twenty thousand points for half a cent each or six hundred dollars and then immediately book that hotel so if you're ever

If you're ever on a hotel site searching for hotels, even if you don't have enough points to use, you might as well toggle that little thing that says use points and see what the points price is. And if you notice that the points price is such a better deal, take a look at buying those points if you don't already have them. The same thing is true with airlines.

I know Avianca LifeMiles, which is a Star Alliance partner of Air Canada, United, Lufthansa, they often have points on sale for such an incredible price that if you were to find an amazing flight on United going to Europe, there's a decent chance that if you were to buy Avianca LifeMiles points, you could get a way cheaper price than the cash price for that flight, especially if it's like a long haul international business class flight.

So keep that in mind anytime you find a great deal with points or maybe you want to look for a great deal with points, even if you don't have them.

Next is making sure you take advantage of all the credit card benefits that you have. Now, some of the most common ones are purchase protection. Things break. Your credit card company will often cover that. Lots of travel protections depending on the card. I did an episode a few years ago, number 113, that went through all the different hidden benefits of your credit card. But I realized in prepping this episode, that one was a little bit out of date. So I'm going to be redoing that episode in the coming weeks. So keep an eye out for that.

But there are so many benefits and I would be blown away if almost every single person listening didn't go download their guide to benefits from their card issuer. If it's a Visa card, there might be a Visa Infinite or Visa Signature or MasterCard World Elite. Not only look at the benefits that come with your card, but go to the MasterCard World Elite website, go to the Visa Infinite site and look at those benefits.

there are all kinds of things you might not know existed. Unfortunately, the one I'll share right now is gone. But for a while, having a Visa signature or Infinite card included wine tasting two-for-ones in Sonoma County. So just all kinds of crazy benefits that you won't know until you look. And then the last point to Miles One is that if you are active duty military or a spouse of someone who is active duty military, and depending on the issuer, that may include resettlement,

reserves, you can get most of your credit card fees completely waived. And I know this firsthand because a listener emailed me a copy of both their earning summary from their active duty in the reserves, as well as a spreadsheet of all the credit card annual fees that were getting waived because of it. And both numbers were somewhere around $7,000 or $9,000. But the funny part was that they were actually getting more fees waived than they were getting paid for

to be a reservist. So it basically more than doubled their income from that perspective. Now, they probably wouldn't have had all these credit cards if the fees weren't getting waived. But there are some cards that have free nights, free hotel credits, priority pass, global entry, clear, all

all kinds of benefits and perks. And so if those fees are getting waived, it can be a huge benefit for anyone who serves or is married to someone who does. Okay, moving on from credit cards, let's talk general travel. This is more of a mindset shift from episode 187 with my good friend Lee Rowan. We talked in that episode about a bunch of travel planning tips and hacks. But one that keeps sticking with me is asking the question, are you planning the trip or is the trip planning you? And

There are lots of times in this world where we see a deal or we find this awesome thing, and it's not necessarily a bad thing if you find an amazing flight deal or a hotel deal and want to build your entire trip around it. But just make sure you're conscious about what you're doing because sometimes we get down in this rabbit hole where we start finding a deal and the next deal and all of a sudden we're building a trip, but we never pause to step back and say, is this actually the trip we want to take? And I've found myself in that situation a few times. And so my new mindset is,

Think in advance whether this is a trip where we want to be very intentional about the kind of trip or we just want to get out and we're okay letting the deal or the opportunity plan the trip for us.

Here's a small quick one, but it's really fun. And there's actually a company that built an entire business around it, which is that you can reverse image search places on Airbnb or VRBO and find other places that property is being rented. So you could just go take the image, go to Google image search and put the image from the Airbnb site or the Vrbo site and search for it. But there's a website, Hichee, H-I-C-H-E-E.com.

that does this for you. You can paste in the link from Airbnb and they'll go and see if they can find that property somewhere else for you to book. I've never used that site. I have no affiliation with them, but I just want to share because they've kind of productized this functionality. And when we were going to Paris, we found a vacation rental and then we were able to find another place to get the exact same property for about 20% less that wasn't going through Airbnb and I presume had less fees for the person who owned it. Now, another one is that

Once you book something online, you can monitor for price drops. And so you could do this for rental cars, hotel prices, airline fares. And there's a lot of different sites that do this. You can go to Google Flights and set a price alert. And so if the fare drops, you'll get an alert. You can do that whether you've bought the flight or not.

There's a great car rental site I love to use called Auto Slash. I had the founder on talking about ways to get rental car deals. But even if you don't use them to book a rental car, you can go tell them, here's my rental car summary. Here's how much I'm paying. And if they find a better deal, they'll message you and you can basically go and rebook it. And since lots of rental cars are cancelable, it's pretty easy. They launched something called Hotel Slash, which does the same thing for hotels.

There's a service called Autopilot that will monitor, I think, United, Delta, and American flights. And so if the fare drops on any of those flights that you've booked, not only will they let you know that it dropped, but they're actually going to go out and rebook the flight for you so that you don't even have to think about it. Now, they do take, I think, 25% of the savings, so keep that in mind. But they will go out and just say, we'll monitor your flight.

And if the fare changes, we'll just rebook it for you. And you won't even, you'll get a flight credit for the difference or a refund if you booked a refundable fare. TripIt also does something very similar. They don't charge you a fee or do it for you, but they will send you an email and say, hey, we noticed this fare dropped. You could rebook it and save. And that's something that depending on the airline can be really easy to really difficult to do. Some of them like Southwest, it's often as easy as just changing your flight to that same flight and then rebooking.

getting a credit right away. Now, those credits do expire now. They used to not. So keep that in mind. But I always say if you book a flight for $200 and you can change it to a $150 version of the same flight and get a $50 credit, even if you don't use the credit, it didn't cost you anything. So you

Now, similar to not just getting a better deal on the price, one of my favorite tactics that I've heard hundreds of people listening to this podcast use is just sending an email to the hotel. And I won't say you're not asking for an upgrade. Essentially, you're sending an email that says, hey, I'm really excited to stay at your hotel. Here's who we are. If you're traveling with your family, if you're celebrating something, and just let them know who you are. Always book directly with the hotel when you're doing this because

If you just book from some of the third-party booking sites that are powered by Expedia or Travelocity, that reservation might not even be associated with your name in the system until a lot closer to check-in. And hotels are in the hospitality game. So they want to treat customers with a ton of hospitality and try to build a long-term relationship. And if you book directly with them, you're giving them a lot more opportunity to do that. So book directly, send an email. If you can't find an email, call up the hotel and ask for an email for someone at the front desk.

a manager, a sales manager, and just shoot them a note. And then maybe three days before, if you haven't heard from them, send a follow-up. I have heard stories of room upgrades, better views, free champagne, free chocolate, decorating a room for a child's birthday, embroidering initials on pillows, like you name it. Someone has emailed me about a perk they've gotten for doing this, and it's so easy.

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Next, if you're traveling internationally, getting data from eSIMs has gotten so easy. If you're on a plan that includes unlimited international roaming, then obviously you're all set. But if you're still on an AT&T or a Verizon plan that charges $10, $20 a day or even more, I'd highly encourage you to go look at eSIMs.

They are like those SIM cards you just put in your phone, except you can do it all electronically. So there are marketplaces. One I've used in the past is called AirAlo, A-I-R-A-L-O. And you could just go say, oh, I'm going to Japan.

and they'll say oh 20 gigabytes for 10 for seven days or whatever the different plans are and you can get them and activate them without even having to go into a store locally in the country and it's such a cheap way to get usually very inexpensive high speed data and then also when traveling international if you're looking to save money and actually just get a great experience free walking tours are incredible obviously i love free i love say a deal they're not really free because

Almost every time, if you had a great experience, I would strongly encourage you to tip the tour guide. That's how they make their money. But it turns out that people who make their money off tips really try hard to do a good job to earn those tips. And I've had amazing experiences with our family going on these free walking tours in other cities. And we love doing it right when we get somewhere in a city we've never been to. And it kind of helps to orient yourself in the city. And you get to ask questions about what should I do while I'm here.

get some inspiration. So I love that. And then the last one when traveling is something we talked about way, way back in episode five with Scott Kyes, who started a newsletter way back in the day called Scott's Cheap Flights that turned into a whole company now called Going. And we talked about the peak end rule. And it's just something I try to think about when traveling. And it's this idea that the thing that you remember after a trip is the peak, the highlight, and the last thing. So I

So I always try to make sure that we do something really memorable towards the end of a trip, because that's just how our brains work. We're going to remember this really big highlight moment of the trip, which of course we are, but we're also going to usually remember the end of the trip more than the other parts. So save something special for the end, try to make a magical thing happen somewhere in the middle, and maybe make magic happen every day, of course, but I try to remember the peak end rule when I'm trying to lay out an itinerary for a trip. So that's travel.

I wasn't counting off numbers, but we're at 14 right now. And next, I want to jump into money. And it's a topic that I love talking about. And I've broken down the money section into two buckets. One is on expenses. So how do you save money and spend less money? And then one is on investments and income. So how do you generate more money or investor money and grow better? So on the expenses side, the first one is to audit and reduce your bills regularly.

So one great example in episode 104, I talked at length about specifically just insurance policies, making sure you're going through and repricing both with your current carrier or potentially with other carriers. I have found that almost every time I have gone and done that, I

I've found some way to get something comparable or better for less money. And I think the current total is $14,000 that I've heard of. One listener wrote in and said, I went through the process you outlined in that episode and I saved $14,500. It's one of the quotes on the website that just listening to one episode saved them that much money because they found that they were wildly overpaying for insurance. Probably had a very nice home or car to save that much on insurance. But nonetheless...

awesome thing. But I do this with all bills. We all have probably talked or had a conversation about doing this with Comcast or your cable bill, but just something to keep in mind all the time. And one of the bills that I'd really encourage you to push back is a medical bill. So if you want to go back and listen to episode 34, Marshall Allen and I went deep on the process of negotiating your medical bills. And from his experience talking to hundreds of people,

I would say it's almost certain that if you have a high medical bill that you don't think is correct, you can push back and fight it on a number of different ways. We walked through some of them. He also wrote a book about this process. And I would be surprised if you weren't able to get almost any medical bill reduced or

Or if you're paying out of pocket, make sure you tell the health provider that and they often have cash prices. Just a great opportunity to cut a bill significantly down. I know I had one bill where I was trying to be charged for an out-of-network doctor that was working at an in-network hospital and I pushed back and sure enough, I was able to get that covered.

Now, one of the biggest expenses most of us have is on housing. Whether we're renters or owners, there are so many different ways to hack our houses. And if you go back to episode 14, we talked all about house hacking.

I have done this at various stages of my life. For example, our first home purchase was actually a three-bedroom condo, but we bought a specific unit that had a separate entrance in one of the bedrooms that had its own en suite bathroom. And we changed the doorknob that connected that room to the house to turn it into a studio, rented it out, and were able to significantly subsidize the cost of owning that condo so much so that we could buy something that was bigger than we needed at the time.

And then as we grew the family, had a child, we were able to take back that room and we went from a two to a three bedroom condo without actually having to change homes because it had basically gone from a two bedroom with a rental to a three bedroom that we had. We changed the doorknob so that we couldn't lock ourselves in and everything worked really well. That is not the only way to house hack. We went deep on that episode, but if you're looking to offset that expense in your life, there are so many ways to do it. And I definitely encourage you to listen if that's something that's interesting.

Also in the home, many, many different states, counties, and utility companies give you ways to save by changing your energy plan. And so this might not be valid everywhere in the country. Some places there's just a fixed price for energy and that's it. But I know here in the Bay Area with PG&E, there's like five, six different plans. And depending on which one you pick and when you use your energy, especially if you have an electric vehicle, you can get

wildly different bills. And so in episode 135, Matt Farrell and I talked deeply about all the different ways to make your home more energy efficient. But not only do you want to make your home energy efficient, you want to look at changing your energy plan to see if you can pay less. Next is probably one of the biggest mindset shifts, and it's going to be very hard to do it justice in a short period of time in this episode, but it's adopting a die with zero mindset.

So back in episode 91, which I think might have been the most popular episode of all time, I sat down with Bill Perkins, who wrote a book called Die With Zero. And the general principle of the book is that you should focus on net fulfillment over net worth, meaning you

How do you get the most out of life, not how do you accumulate the most amount of money? And one of the most important things to think about is if you live your life in various seasons, there are seasons where it might make more sense to spend and do things than it does to save. And if you look at the data, many people in retirement don't spend nearly as much as they thought.

often because they saved all these adventures and travels and ideas for retirement. But it turns out that some of those things we just can't physically do when we're older. So if you have a dream to go hike Mount Kilimanjaro, waiting till you're 75 and retired might be the worst time to do it. And so before that episode, I

I probably had this mindset of the only goal in life is to increase net worth. And I don't mean the only goal, but it was definitely a topic of conversation with my wife, Amy. After that interview, almost on a dime, I thought, maybe that's not the goal this year. Maybe this year is not the increased net worth year. Maybe this year is the have experiences with our young kids year and next year can be the increased net worth. It was wildly impactful conversation. I highly encourage you to listen or read his book and think about

spending money on what matters and when it matters to you. And that's going to be different for everyone. Along the lines of spending, something that we've adopted in our relationship that's made things really easy and really helped streamline decision making is just creating money rules. So this idea came to me, at least from Ramit Sethi, who wrote a book called I Will Teach You To Be Rich. He came on way, way back in episode nine to talk about this.

Then we talked again a couple years ago about money and relationships. And we're actually going to be talking in a few months about a recap on all of this and thinking about how my perspective on money rules and living your rich life has evolved. But to give you a couple concrete examples, he creates rules that make decisions really easy with money. So for example, never question spending money on books, appetizers, and donating to a friend's charity fundraiser.

And it might seem so obvious, but I think we've all been in a situation where there's some kind of purchase where we're like, oh, this book I heard was really good. Should I buy it? Well, it's $19. His idea was, let's take a category of things that I have a strong opinion on and create a rule so that I never have to think about it. For him, business class on flights over four hours.

For us, we don't have that rule. I've taken plenty of longer than four hour flights in economy. But if we're crossing an ocean overnight, we use points to fly business. And we've never been in a situation yet where we couldn't find the ability to use points. So we haven't had to figure out what we do if that were to mean buying business class flights at face value. But we have a similar-ish rule. And so he's got a ton of them. I'll put a link in the show notes to a blog post he wrote about some of those money rules. We'll talk about them a bit in a few months.

But setting money rules and creating them with your partner or yourself have been super impactful for us. The next one is to just negotiate almost everything. And I don't want to sound like someone who's, I'm not at a restaurant asking if I can get a discount on the dinner I'm having. But there are so many things in life, your salary, your income,

Airbnb. I didn't realize until talking with a few Airbnb owners that people negotiate Airbnbs all the time. I felt like I was a sucker having never done it. And so one time we were looking to book this Airbnb and I actually found a property that had only the number of nights we needed available in their calendar. So I knew if you have five nights open, someone could book three or four or two, but we wanted to book the whole five. And I reached out and said, look, we found a lot of properties. There are a few others that are a little bit

it similar but cheaper. We really liked yours. We want to book the exact five nights that fill your calendar. Could you do it for X price? There was definitely less than the list price.

instant, like within hours. Yes, totally. And we booked it. So that's one. If you haven't started negotiating your salary, we've talked about that in a bunch of different episodes. You should definitely consider that. We've gotten so many emails from people who've managed to negotiate their salary, negotiate their co-worker salaries and all kinds of stuff. If you're on a website buying something, go to the live chat. You might not be negotiating the price, but you could ask, hey, are there any deals right now? Are there any promotions?

In the county we live in, you actually have the ability to negotiate or appeal the valuation of your home for property tax purposes. And we were actually able to lower our home's valuation on the record by about 25%, which in turn lowered our property tax by 25%.

So that's definitely something that I encourage everyone to do. Just if there's a major expense in your life or if there's something, just ask yourself, is it possible that this is flexible? I don't negotiate at the grocery store, but anytime I see that it might be a possibility, I'm absolutely doing that. So for example, one thing that we probably all spend a lot of money on is Amazon. I'm not necessarily negotiating prices on Amazon, but what I am doing, and this is my next tip, is I installed a Keepa extension and there's probably...

a dozen extensions that do this. I like this one, but I don't have any affiliation with them. And they just show you a trending price graph of all the different prices this has been over the last, I want to say 90 or even 365 days. So you can see, I'm not going to negotiate with Amazon. But if I see that this thing I'm buying is always $30. And today it's 35. And it goes on sale nine out of 10 days. Well, I'm going to wait a day or a week and see when the price comes down and buy it then. And

And whenever I'm buying anything, my next favorite tip here is to always stack deals. So you might not negotiate to get the price lower, but there's a series of things that I would encourage you all to look at anytime you're making a major purchase. So I'm

I don't think that I'm going out and doing this for a $5, $10, $20 purchase. But if we're buying a new dresser, if we're buying a new appliance, I'm absolutely going to see how many things I can stack to get a better price. And so those things could be coupons, whether you find them or whether you find a website, like, I don't know if it's still live, but there is this website, savendeals.com. If it's alive, I'll put a link in the show notes. And they were selling Home Depot and Lowe's coupons for a few dollars.

So one, you can put a coupon in. You can also go through a shopping portal to earn points or cash back. You can look at your credit cards, whether it's Amex, Chase, Citi, Bank of America. There are a lot of different card-linked offers, like spend $49 at Chewy and get $15 back, which is one we just used. And gift cards is another one. So you can buy gift cards at a discount. And then finally, whatever you're putting the payment on, if it's your own credit card, you can earn credit card points.

And one of the best examples of doing this was we bought this Japanese Toto toilet seat, built-in bidet, seat warmer, everything. It was awesome. And we bought a coupon online. We went through a shopping portal and got one or 2%. There was a card-linked offer for Lowe's. We bought Lowe's gift cards on sale. Usually you buy gift cards in like

$100, $250 denominations. And we put the remainder on a credit card that had purchase protection and earned cash back or points. I don't actually remember which credit card it was this time. So we stacked all of that. We saved like 35% on the purchase. Another site I really like is SaveWise, which will kind of let you set up alerts for when some of these shopping portal deals come up. So you could say, hey, if Lowe's is ever more than 5% off, let me know. I'll put a link to SaveWise and any of these things in the show notes.

Yeah.

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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. The next one is...

Maybe you could argue a sub-bullet of stacking deals, but it's enough worth calling out that you want to install at least one or two browser extensions for shopping online just to make sure you're not missing on obvious deals. So for me, that's the Rakuten extension and the Card Pointers extension. And what the Rakuten extension does is it's one of the shopping portals. Obviously, if you go to Cashback Monitor, you might find that there's 20 or 30 different shopping portals, and Rakuten's not always the best one. But

I hate having pop-ups on the browser all the time. So if I'm making a big purchase, I'm definitely going to go to Cashback Monitor and see if there's a better place to get cash back or points.

But for general purchases, even if it's just $5, there's no reason not to have one shopping portal extension and just load it. And even if all you're getting back is 50 cents, it takes not even a second to click a button and let the page reload. So I use the Rakuten extension primarily because they typically have good deals and you can convert your Rakuten cash back to Amex points. But I also use the Card Pointers extension and I use that because...

Card pointers, anytime I'm logged into any of my credit card websites, whether that's Chase, Amex, Bank of America, card pointers will go and activate all those card-linked offers. They'll remember which ones you had on which card. And then if you're on a website, they'll pop up and say, hey, definitely use your Citi Premier card because on this website, right now, you have a spend 50, get $15 back offer.

And I can't keep in my head the thousands of card linked offers that have been activated. And I can guarantee I've saved hundreds of dollars just from this extension. And a lifetime membership is way less than that. And you can get 30% off at allthehacks.com slash card pointers. Big fan of the card pointers app. There's

There's a lot more to unpack there, but I will save that for another episode. And next is another one that maybe you could argue was in the stacking deals because it's gift cards, but I want to think about gift cards differently. In episode 212, we went really deep on gift cards and...

I try to do some math. I think the average person could save thousands of dollars a year, at least with the gift card deals that were happening when that episode was recorded. Right now, we're in a little bit of a lull for gift cards, but I think as we get towards the end of the year around the holidays, we'll probably get into another gift card boom. But if you think about the fact that gift cards go on sale all the time with all kinds of promotions, and there are

Is a whole market of people buying those gift cards and reselling them at a loss because they got a good deal on them? Well, if you're ever looking to buy something, you could pay for it with a gift card that you bought on sale. And there are websites that make this easy to go buy those gift cards, like Ray's and Flu's. We built our own gift card site that about every two to three months, I launch for a few days in the newsletter, allthehacks.com slash email, and we announce that gift card site's going live.

But even if they're not on sale, you might earn a lot more points on your spending at office supply stores or grocery stores. And so it might make sense to pick up a gift card at the grocery store, earn the bonus points so that you can use that gift card to buy something somewhere else. One more thing to keep in mind for purchases that

might have issues where you really want to take advantage of your extended warranty or your purchase protection, which are common credit card benefits that you get, those are ones where I try to avoid buying them with gift cards. So for example, if I're buying a computer or a cell phone where I want to be able to get an extra one or two year warranty because I put it on a credit card that offers that benefit, I'm not going to make that purchase with gift cards. But if I'm buying groceries from Amazon Fresh or

Absolutely don't need the purchase protection or return protection, and I'm happy to use gift cards to buy those groceries. All right, a couple quick last ones before I talk about income and investments. So first, I love Library Extension. There's also an app called Libby. You can connect both of them to your local libraries, and anytime you're browsing Amazon for a book, Library Extension will pop up and say, hey, you can just check this book out right now, the e-book version of it from your local library and read it immediately.

Libby is like an app that has an e-bookstore that you can just search your local library's books and read them right away on your iPad or your iPhone or they might even have a Kindle version. I'm not sure. This next one's one of my favorites. Shout out to my friend Mike who pointed out that a lot of hotels don't give you free bottles of water in your room, but they do give you free bottles of water in the gym. And so any

anytime you're at a hotel with a gym, just check out what they've got going on in there. Some of them even have some fresh fruit. And so if it's an amenity for those working out, that doesn't mean it's only if you work out. If the hotel is going to offer it to anyone in the gym, go check out what's in there, grab yourself a free bottle of water, grab yourself a banana, and be excited that you found it for free. Lacks one if you have an expense category.

If you have complicated taxes, your tax bill can be one of your biggest expenses. And I want to encourage people who maybe have the mindset I did a handful of years ago, which was I kind of loved getting in the weeds on my own taxes, using TurboTax to do it all myself. And then I got to the point where I said, okay, I know I'm saving money by doing this over the cost of hiring an actual CPA that's very,

very proactive and really looking at things holistically. I'm saving money on the tax prep, but I might not actually be saving money on the taxes. And so if you have complicated taxes, at a minimum, take a look at a CPA and see if there's one that makes sense. We've done a handful of episodes on saving money on taxes. Episode 147 comes to mind, which is all about saving taxes. And then at the end of the year, for the last few years, we've done episodes on kind of an end of the year tax checklist. If you

If you need a recommendation, personally, I use Gelt. They are a sponsor and partner of the show, but I've been using them since before they were a partner and sponsor. I'll put a link in the show notes if you want to check them out. I've been really happy working with them. Okay, on the investments and income side. First off, automate everything. I really like to not think a lot about

I use a robo-advisor because I like to have my investments rebalanced automatically. I like tax loss harvesting to happen automatically. I just don't really want to think about my finances. In fact, when I was working at Wealthfront, we built this product called Autopilot. And I think now it has a different name, but it's called Autopilot.

But the entire idea was, can I just tell you to automatically keep three months of spending in my emergency fund and then max out my Roth IRA every year and then put the rest of my taxable investment account? It was like everything that I wanted in a product was why I was excited to work on it. And I just love automating all these rules. If you have an account where your paycheck comes

find a financial institution or a FinTech service that will let you say, "Hey, as soon as my paycheck comes in, move 20% of it to savings." Or whatever rules you wanna create, if you can find ways to automate them so you don't have to spend time on your money, I think that's amazing. When it comes to investing, personally, I like to passively invest in low cost index funds. In episode 168, I sat down with the co-founder of the financial planning firm I started, gosh, probably a decade ago at this point,

And we just talked about how to build an investment portfolio to grow and protect your wealth. But for me, the core fundamental piece of that is I'm not trying to time the market. I'm not trying to pick stocks. I want to create a diversified portfolio that invests in low-cost index funds. And I want my money to grow at what has historically been a consistent rate that can set me up for success in the future. So very excited to not be spending time trying to pick stocks and win in the market.

That's not my game. Love the low-cost index fund strategy. It's exactly how I think I want to be investing and encourage lots of people to consider. That said, where I do like to optimize is not necessarily what's in the investment portfolio, but what kind of account I'm investing from. And so there are a lot of different types of tax-advantaged accounts. In episode 144, I sat down with my friend Katie and we went through every different type of tax-advantaged account. Some of my favorites are...

401ks at work. If you have them, especially if your company matches, take advantage. If you don't have access to them, you can open a Roth IRA. You can, even if you aren't eligible from your income, there is a backdoor method to contribute to your Roth IRA that we talked about.

If you contribute any money each year to charitable causes or charities, then I would encourage you to take a look at a donor advised fund. We talked deeply about that in episode 50. And if you do have a donor advised fund, or even if you don't, if you're donating to charity, I'd strongly encourage you to donate the most appreciated...

stocks or other assets you have in your portfolio instead of cash. Because let's say you have $100 and then you have a stock worth $100 that you bought for $50. When you donate the $100 to charity, you get the $100 write-off and you lose $100. That's it. That makes sense. You donated the $100. When you donate the $100 of stock, you get the same $100 deduction. You don't have the $100. But if you held onto it instead of donated it, when you

When you sold it, you would pay taxes on the gains you have. When you donate it, that's not true. So you could donate that $100 position of some stock to a charity. They get the full $100. You get the full write-off. And then if you want, you can take the $100 you didn't donate and buy that stock right back at the same price because the wash sale rule doesn't apply to charitable donations like it would if you were buying and selling. And for those not familiar, I won't

take you down that rabbit hole right now. But now that stock will be at the price you bought as the cost basis. So it'll be at $100. So if you bought it at 50 and it goes to 150, you're going to owe taxes on that $100 gain. But now that you've bought it at 100, you're not going to owe taxes on anything until it goes above that $100 price.

And then last, one of my favorite investment accounts is an HSA because you can put money in pre-tax. That money can grow without having to pay taxes on it each year. And then you can take that money out without paying taxes. And so contrary to how I would use an FSA, which is a flexible spending account, specifically an FSA for health, is I would try to make sure you maximize it because you lose it at the end of the year. For my HSA, I max it out as much as I can because I have an eligible health plan and then

I leave that money there. I don't touch it because what other account do I have that's pre-tax money that can grow tax-free that I can take out tax-free later? So I'm letting my HSA grow as much as possible. I plan to use that money when I'm very old and have probably plenty of medical expenses. While not tax-advantaged, one account that I think is often overlooked as a source of income is your main account, your checking account.

Even your savings account at many financial institutions earns almost, if not nothing. The average savings account rate in America right now is something like 0.03%. And so I would encourage you to try your best to earn interest on all

all of your cash. And if you go back and listen to episode 177, gosh, I probably opened 25 bank accounts to try to find what I think was the optimal bank account setup to earn interest on all your cash. It is possible to have an account that earns interest. And from that account, you

You can receive your paycheck. You can pay off your credit cards. You can write checks. You do everything that you could do from a traditional checking account. Some cases, they even are checking accounts, but there are multiple different options for accounts like this where you can earn interest on all your cash. So I really just want to make sure every dollar I have is being put to work in some way, shape, or form, especially right now when the average yield on Treasury's high-yield savings money markets is kind of

up in the 4% range. Now, when it comes to cash that you don't need direct access to day in and day out to pay bills, maybe that's your emergency fund. Maybe that's your savings for a down payment. Maybe it's just cash savings that you don't want to put in the market right now. If you are in a high tax bracket and you live in a high tax state,

There are some advantages to putting that money into treasuries or short-term U.S. treasury ETFs instead of a high-yield savings account because the income from those treasuries will not be subject to state taxes.

Some states also have their own muni, which meaning municipal. California, for example, has their own ETFs for California treasuries. Those would actually be state and federal tax free, but the yields on them are often a lot less. And so depending on your tax bracket and your state, there are a few different options. But I'd encourage you to look at places like U.S. treasuries that you can get a

over something like a savings account where you're not going to get that tax advantage.

Now, the most popular episode from the last year by YouTube standards, not necessarily audio, but definitely took off on YouTube like no other episode we've done was episode 181, where I sat down with my now good friend Kai, who runs a podcast talking all about deals. And we talked about how easy it can be to make as much as $3,000 a month just from online deals.

And I know this sounds crazy to anyone who hasn't heard that episode, but it is possible to take deals that you're finding online and turn them into your own side hustle. We talked about everything from bank bonuses, brokerage bonuses, meal kits, cell phone offers, buying groups, gift cards. There was a ton in that episode, but Kai himself,

is someone who's kind of done the fire thing, retired early, and then uses this as a way to make that possible even earlier. And in 2023, I think he earned over $36,000 finding all these deals, spending small, like 10, 20 hours a week on it. And then on top of that, he earned over 2 million points taking advantage of credit card offers. So really, really interesting episode to kind of inspire you to the fact that

A side hustle doesn't always have to be a business. If you have an extra 10 hours a week, you could still generate thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands of dollars a year without doing what would traditionally be a side hustle, like starting consulting or starting to sell thing on Etsy or some kind of business.

But if you want the easiest way to find some money that is not surefire, but certainly works for lots of people, go look in the unclaimed money database for your state. Now, if a company owes you money because maybe you got a refund or you canceled your cable bill, but you'd already prepaid for the month and they can't, for whatever reason, find a way to get you that money, they turn it over to the state and the state maintains a database. Each different state has one of all of the unclaimed money out there and they

For some people listening, you've already heard this tip. You've already searched. There's nothing left. I can promise that someone who's listening has not yet done this search. And maybe they haven't done it for themselves, but maybe they also haven't done it for their partner, their children, their parents, their brothers, their sisters, their friends.

And I did a survey in my newsletter a few months ago, and I was blown away that about 10% of the people who searched for unclaimed money found over $500. I think that was the number. Don't quote me on it, but it was a significant amount of money. So if you live in Delaware, go to Delaware Unclaimed Money on Google, find that site, put in your name, search. I'd actually be surprised if someone listening hasn't found at least $10,000. Maybe not for them, maybe collectively across everyone in their family, but it

It is wild how much money is out there just sitting around waiting for someone to claim it. And by someone to claim it, I mean waiting for the right person to claim it. You cannot claim other people's money. That would be fraud. Not encouraging that.

Okay, two more. One is that there's probably a way to pay every single bill you have with a credit card. It might not be obvious. Sometimes you might find, oh, I can pay my taxes with a credit card, but they're going to charge me 1.75% fee. Oh, I can pay my rent, but they might charge me a fee. Well, in that case, you should get the built card because they won't charge you a fee and you can earn points on rent. I'll put my built referral link in the show notes if you want to do that. Big fan of built and earning points on rent.

But there's also a site called Plastique. There's another one called Melio and Zill Money that allow you to pay bills. So Plastique in particular will let you pay your mortgage, your HOA, your tuition, lots of different places that don't all accept credit cards. They will make it possible for you to pay that bill with a credit card. Now they do charge a fee and that fee is around 2.9%, which may not make sense if you have a credit card that earns $2.

2x points or 2% cash back. But it might make sense if you are able now to open up a new card that has 100,000 point signup bonus, but you need to spend, let's call it five or $10,000 in 90 days. Well, if you don't have enough spend to meet that bonus, then you probably wouldn't open it in the first place. But maybe this is something that makes that possible. Maybe you do have the bills, you just didn't realize you could pay some of them with a card. And like I mentioned, the

the average return on welcome bonuses is something like 17%. And so would I pay a 2.9% fee if I'm earning 17%? Absolutely. Now, if I had another way to meet that welcome bonus spend, then maybe I wouldn't. But it is an option that I think sometimes people don't realize. And for the right card, earning the right amount and the right welcome bonus, it might make sense to pay a fee to put something on a credit card.

Where I don't think it ever makes sense is to pay interest. So if you're not able to pay your bill in full each month, I would strongly discourage you from playing the points game unless you're optimizing 0% intro APR cards. Finally, last one in the money category. If you're spending all this time and energy to save money, invest your money, and grow your wealth, and you want to be intentional about what happens to that money if you were to pass away, I would strongly encourage you to look at setting up a will

And in many states, especially at the probably around $100,000 level of assets when you pass away, your money might go through a probate process that can be public record. It can slow things down. And so if you cross that threshold in a lot of states, it also might make sense to set up a basic revocable living trust. This is not something super complicated where it takes years and lawyers and attorneys and requires you to put money in places you can never access it.

There are trusts that allow you to mitigate taxes further that are complicated, but a basic will or a basic estate plan, something that you can set up in hours and maybe just need a signature or a notary, which you might even be able to do online, is something I'd encourage every parent for sure to do and allows you not just with your money, but to set the intentions for who's going to look after your kids, who's going to be their guardian if something happens to you. So that's one last thing that I think everyone should

should look at. Episode 62, we kind of went deep on it and talked to a bunch of people about estate planning. So if that's interesting, you can go deep there. Okay, the last category here, we did travel, we did money, is about life. And I broke this into a few categories. I didn't necessarily want you to think of these categories as I tried to find something for all of them. They're just more of a grouping that kind of helped me organize the content in this episode. So a handful of them are related to time.

And the one that I've been using the most in the past year is just leveraging AI for everything. Whether you like ChatGPT or Gemini or Clot or Perplexity, I'm impartial to what tool you use. But for travel planning, for research, I feel like I have an army of interns at my disposal to go do all kinds of stuff. Can you draft this? Can you review this legal doc? Can you help me come up with an itinerary? Can you go research something for personal life, for work?

Can you help me summarize this? It's just such an amazing tool. I can't imagine how much longer it would take me to do all kinds of work in my life than it does now. And if you're not using any of these tools regularly, I would strongly encourage you to give them a try. I would encourage you to find someone in your circle of friends that probably uses them more than you.

and ask them how they're using them because I'm constantly getting new ideas of ways to do things. This morning, my daughter asked, how many sprinkles are on my pancakes? And there were more than enough on her plate that I wanted to count. And we were like, oh, I wonder if ChatGPT could answer.

It's at a number about 4,000, so I will say that's not the best example of something you can do, but I'm always experimenting for ways that some AI tool could save me time or get me to a better answer sooner. Now, the next tip is not one that I've actually used one of these AI tools for. Maybe I could, but it's to go do a calendar time audit.

So in episode 99, I sat down with Sahil Bloom and we talked about how to plan your year ahead and to do an annual review. And we might be halfway through the year, but I would say better late than never. But one of the things he loves doing is a calendar audit where you go back and you look how you actually spent your time. And then you color code things for like, did it give me energy? Did it take energy away? And look,

With our work, there are things that might not give you energy, but you have to do and that's okay. But there's usually some of these things that we're doing in our own lives and we might realize that we're allocating time differently than how we would want to. And so just going through that audit process is really helpful for me to think about how I want to spend my time going forward. One of the things I like to do is a tip for

from two guys I worked with, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. They wrote this book called Make Time and we talked together in episode 185 and they were like, you should highlight one thing each day. And

It's a simple thing, but in the morning I say, okay, what's the thing I want to accomplish today? What's going to be the highlight of my day today? Write it down. And it's so helpful for making sure you have an awesome day and you get done the one thing that's most important. Arguably one of my favorite filters for whether something should be on the docket for today is applying the hell yes or no filter. And back in episode 109, I talked to Derek Sivers who wrote a book called Hell Yeah or No. And

We had this amazing conversation. It's one of the more interesting episodes because I didn't have an agenda going into the episode. We didn't have a specific topic we wanted to focus on. So often I'm like, oh, I want to learn about gut health or I want to learn how to rethink elite status. In this one, I was just like, Derek Siver is such a great modern philosopher. Let's just talk. And this perspective of if you don't really want to do something, don't do it. It's a little bit like the Marie Kondo. If you don't love this thing, get rid of it.

But applying the hell yes filter to anything in life has been such a powerful way for me and Amy to decide how we want to spend our time. Oh, we got invited to this thing. Is it a hell yeah? Because if it's not, let's just pass. I love that filter. I'd encourage you all to adopt it. He wrote a whole book on this if you want to read it. It's excellent. I'll put a link in the show notes. Now,

One thing that I think many of us forget that we can apply that filter to is our email. And so I was having a conversation with a friend of mine the other day who was like, oh, this guy emailed me and I'm trying to figure out how do I reply. And I was like, do you have to reply? And he's like, well, he emailed me. And I was like, just because someone sends you an email doesn't mean you owe them a response. Now, you might have people with whom you have a relationship or you're a boss where, yes, you do owe them a response. But I sometimes feel like

When someone invites us to dinner, we have the ability to say no, but when someone sends us an email, even if we don't know that person, we sometimes, and I catch myself doing this, feel like we are obliged to reply. And I encouraged him to realize that he is in charge of his own inbox. He doesn't have to reply to every single email. And in this particular case, this was one where he didn't need to reply and he just archived it.

So I would encourage you to think about, do I really feel like I have to give a response to every single person? We've all sent emails and not gotten replies back. Usually those are to people who maybe are better at managing their time than we are, maybe not. But don't forget, you don't owe a reply to every email you get. And finally, on the notion of time,

You can outsource things you don't enjoy to buy back your time. So in episode 98, I sat down with Dan Martell. We talked about buying back your time. And he is excellent at finding things that are not a good use of his time because he has a lot of business opportunities or finding things he just doesn't enjoy and outsourcing them. And so one experiment that we tried

probably around the time of this episode was we realized with two young kids and a lot going on with work, this is before the podcast was our full-time thing. And my wife and I had two full-time jobs and a podcast and young kids. We thought, what is something that we just feel like we never have time for? And we didn't enjoy in the moment.

it. And at that time, it was having to stop work early to prep dinner for the family. And we cared about eating good food. So we didn't just want to do carry out every single night. We wanted whole foods that we could make. So I put an ad on Craigslist and said, I'm looking for someone to prepare meals a few times a week. Now, I was not looking for a chef to come over and create Michelin star meals. I was looking for someone

someone who enjoyed cooking, could be someone who's retired, could be someone who doesn't work anymore. And I just wanted them to find some fun recipes, pick up some groceries and make them for this period of time where work was crazy. And for way less than the cost of ordering out food, we actually got home cooked meals. And this person would drop them off at

two meals at a time. I think Monday they drop off two dinners at a quantity that there was enough leftovers that we would also have some food for lunch the next day. And so we had really healthy food that we could control what it was and what was going into it, but we didn't have to take the time to cook it. And then when things freed up time a little bit more at work, we actually felt like cooking was something we wanted to do again. And we had the time to do it and it wasn't stressful. And we decided to start doing more of the cooking ourselves.

And so you can find windows of your time where outsourcing things make sense. If you don't love cleaning the house, is that something you can outsource? If you don't love mowing the lawn, is that something you can outsource? Buying back your time is something that we can't always do, but there are areas where you can. And so hopefully that's a little bit of inspiration to think about anything that you could buy back time for in your life.

Okay, the next couple are in relationships. And the first one is to just stop talking. This is not only a negotiation tactic, but I think it's a really valuable relationship building tactic. In episode 190, I was talking with Sahil Bloom, and he talked about these three levels of listening. Level one is kind of me listening. Level two is you listening. And level three is us listening. And he pointed out that very charismatic people are very good at level two and three listening. And so

I've just learned that for my personality, I always try to jump in and help. And I've learned to just help myself stop talking. And that's sometimes one of the best tactics. With my wife, one of the most valuable episodes I've ever done was number 43, which interestingly enough is this is tip number 43 of the 50 for this episode. And that was unintentional. But it was an episode with Nate and Kaylee Klemp, who together wrote this book about what they called the 80-80 marriage. And

The premise is simple, but the execution, there's some nuance. But the idea is instead of keeping track of everything, we have this 50-50 marriage where I'll do the bedtime, you do the bedtime. I'll do the bedtime, you do the bedtime. Or I did bedtime last night, so you do the dishes. And you're keeping track of all this stuff. If you can evolve to a place where everyone's trying to do 80%, they won't always get there, never going to happen perfectly, but you can stop keeping track. And it was a totally new model for a happier relationship. And we adopted it.

and we stopped keeping track and it made things so much better so i strongly encourage anyone who feels like that is a problem you sympathize with to consider whether you can stop keeping count of what's going on and really just try to focus on everyone's trying to do as much as they can now the last one's a fun one and i did this episode number 68 with nick gray who's become a good friend of mine and he wrote this book called the two-hour cocktail party and nick if

if he were here right now would make a very strong case for down with dinner parties, down with long backyard parties. It's all about the two hour cocktail party and not only just doing one, but making it so dead simple that you can have it on the calendar, have a recurring event every one, two months. So anytime you meet someone, you say, Oh, I've got this cocktail party next month. Do you want to come on over? And he has a formula for,

creating and running these cocktail parties. And when I say cocktail parties, it doesn't have to be something fancy. I think that's the term he came up with it, but it could be just a happy hour. But the idea is you make it so dead simple and easy to do. You have a formula for how it goes well, and it's such a valuable tool to build relationships.

especially when you're in a new environment. You moved into a new city, you joined a new school, you joined a new church, just different ways that you might want to build and foster community and relationships. It was so awesome. We've been trying to use that anytime we have people over. And instead of necessarily doing dinner parties, which can be tough with young kids and bedtimes, can we do an afternoon cocktail party before dinner on a Sunday afternoon? Could we invite kids to come and play in the backyard? So those three tips I love for relationships.

Now, health is so particular and specific that I decided not to go deep down the health path on this episode. But there are two tips that I want to share that I picked up that are very simple and have been really impactful for me. So one is before I go out to dinner, if I'm trying to be healthy, I'll look at the menu for the restaurant and I will pre-order in my head what I'm going to order. And I find that

maybe right after lunch when I'm not that hungry, it's way easier to commit to, I'm gonna get this salad tonight, it looks great. Then when I get there and I'm hungry, I'm like, that burger actually sounds a lot better. Now, do I always make the decision I pre-ordered? Not always, but it definitely helps to have that commitment ahead of time and I make healthier decisions. The next simple tip to make healthier decisions, you can see that I might have a challenge personally making healthy decisions, both at a restaurant and at home,

is I give myself permission to do the unhealthy thing, but I make myself do it in five minutes. And so my wife, Amy, loves to bake. Sometimes there's banana bread, sometimes there's cookies and all kinds of stuff. And I don't have a lot of self-control. And so instead of saying no, which just doesn't work for me that well, I say yes in five minutes. I find that if there's three dozen cookies sitting on the counter and I say, hey, I can have one of these. I just have to wait five minutes. In that five minute period, I

I've moved on, I've gone to do something, and I've completely forgotten about the cookie. Now, maybe I come back, maybe I repeat the thing, maybe I reward myself with a cookie, but it's such a benefit to me and has prevented me from binge eating a lot of cookies, which is something that I often have found myself doing in the past.

Okay, I think we got four more in two little categories, one on security and one on decision making. And so when it comes to security, I've got two things. It's freeze and delete. And they both fall under the theme of locking down your financial information, your personal data. So first one is freeze everything. So freeze your credit. There's this crazy report called the work number. If you go read up on it, you can find it. It's wild. It has all this information about

every one of your pay stubs and your salary and your bonus, you can freeze all of those things. So I would encourage you to go freeze your credit, freeze your work number report and anything else like that.

And then second, I'd encourage you to make sure that your personal data is not on the internet. Now, I like to do this not just for me, but for my family. And then the second is to delete all of your personal data. And I think this is important because especially in a world we are in right now with AI tools and AI agents and the ability to listen to someone's voice and clone it, I want to make myself as

little of a target as possible. And if you just go online and search for your name and maybe the city you live in, you'd be surprised that there's probably multiple websites with your address, your phone number, your personal information on there. That information is being shared by lots of data brokers.

But also if you go to the MLS or Redfin or Zillow, you'll see that maybe the house you purchased has 45 pictures of every single angle of inside the house. You can request that be removed. Most of those data brokers, you can request they take your personal information down. Or there are a ton of services you can use that for a really nominal amount of money, they will go make all those removal requests for you and update it on an ongoing basis.

After I used DeleteMe, I decided to partner with them on the show. You might have heard an ad for them earlier. They're a tool that I actually pay for my family. And so I've been really happy working with them in the past two or three years we've been working together. It's been great to be able to search my name and not find my address on the internet. So I really care about security. I did an episode back number 78.

which was basically a list of all the things you could do to protect your identity, your accounts, your credit, your family. Everybody should be using password managers. Come up with a safe word amongst your family so that if your parents get a call and they're not sure if it's really you, they can ask about it. I might do an updated version of an episode like that in the future just because I care so much about it. Finally, last two things are around decision making. And one of the most

exciting conversations I had in the past handful of years was episode 105 with a guy named Matt Higgins who wrote a book called Burn the Boats. And

it really just pushed me to overcome the fear of jumping into something. And the idea being that there are battles that were won because soldiers decided to burn the boats so they had no choice but to stay and fight. And how having a plan B sometimes holds you back, even if it's just in your mind. And so that was really impactful to have this burn the boats mentality. Anytime I'm thinking here's something I really, really want to do,

How do I help myself do it? Well, you don't have to actually burn any boats to make this happen, but there are tactics that you can employ to say, I'm not going to spend time thinking about plan B. I'm going to focus on plan A, and that might make it more successful in the future. And then last, when it comes to decision-making, a perspective I like to have every time I think about what I should do is I ask myself what advice I would give my friend in this circumstance.

And for whatever reason, it always comes to me more clearly when I think through that lens than when I think, what should I do? When I think, what should I do? I make a spreadsheet. I try to optimize. I think all these ideas. And when I think, what should I tell my friend to do? Well, maybe I'm not going to go build my own spreadsheet for my friend. So I give him kind of my off-the-cuff gut reaction to what I think they should do. And very often, that's probably what I should do also. And so my last takeaway from the last 200 plus episodes that I'm going to share today is that

When you're not sure what to do, when you're trying to figure it out, ask yourself what advice you would give to a friend.

And so along that lines, I'm going to ask everyone listening, if there's anything you think I left off, if there's anything you think maybe I don't even know that you want to share, podcast at allthehacks.com is an email that I check all the time. I read everything that comes in. I'd love to hear if there are things you think I forgot or there are things you want to share. I'll try to bring them up maybe in a future episode and recap some of the fun ones that you all shared with me and share those with everyone else. Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening. That's it for this week. I will see you next week.