Lots of things to share today, from some of the best deals I've seen lately, to my first time calling 9-1-1, booking award travel for the summer, some Father's Day gift ideas, a family update from us, and more. Hello, I am Chris Hutchins, and this is All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel.

Today is something new. I'm going to call it Monday Musings because, well, it's Monday, and I have a lot on my mind. In fact, this idea came to me this morning while I was on a run, and I just kept thinking about more and more things to include, which usually doesn't happen on my runs, but it's probably because I'm normally running with my wife, Amy, who is not able to run with me right now for a few months.

More on that later. So, yes, this is a deviation from our normal show. We'll be back to a regular episode on Wednesday. It's actually an incredible episode about redeeming points and miles for the maximum value, so definitely check that out. Also, given the short turnaround, because I'm recording this the same day I'm going to release it, and it happens to be a holiday, I am editing this one myself, so cut me some slack.

Finally, since this covers a wide range of topics, I will remind you that we do put timestamps to everything in the show notes, so you can jump around, and unless you're on Apple Podcasts, I have no idea why they don't support this feature. You can actually just click those timestamps on every other player and jump to that part of the episode.

So, let's get into it right after this. Okay, the first thing is a really short one, but I want to remind you all to smile. Credit to Matt Wilbers on the Peloton app who gave me that reminder during my run this morning, but it is just wild how smiling can sometimes make you feel better.

Just try it right now. It feels good. So, next, I want to talk about the intros to this podcast. So, if you've watched any of our episodes on YouTube recently, you've probably noticed we've been doing a bit of a different style intro, which naturally has made me think about what kind of intros to do with the podcast on audio outside of YouTube.

So, over the next month, I'm going to test a few things out. You might have heard a little bit of a different intro today, and I'd love to know what you think. If you're on Spotify, they have a cool feature where I can do a pop-up poll that I'm going to try.

Otherwise, you can let me know on Twitter, Instagram, email. I'm just podcast@allthehacks.com. Also, for a little context on why this is all happening, it's because there's a little bit of a shift with audio and video in the industry. Spotify is starting to allow podcasters to add video on their platform, and YouTube has moved to a place that if you want to use the YouTube music app to listen to podcasts, you can only get those as a listener if the publisher, meaning the podcast like me, is putting them out on YouTube.

So, a lot of things are changing, and it probably won't affect most of you, but I'm starting to think about how video and audio fit in together in the future. Okay. Let's talk about some of the latest deals. If you subscribe to my newsletter, which I know many of you do, thank you, some of those deals that you get are going to be familiar to what I'm talking about today, but not all of them.

That's because every two weeks, and hopefully soon every week on Saturday morning, I send out an email with all the latest things I'm finding, which includes deals, news, credit card offers, products, movies, TV show recommendations, and a lot more. I thought today what I'd do is I'd give you a preview of what that content looks like and walk through what's in a newsletter so that you guys listening know what you might get if you sign up and pick up a little bit of cool stuff today.

For those who already subscribe, I added a few extra things as well. And if you're not subscribed and you want to, go to allthehacks.com/email to get the latest deals, news, finds, and more in your inbox every two weeks. So first, I'll talk about deals. So there are a bunch of card-linked offers lately, and those are when you log into Amex or Chase or whatever your platform is, and you can add deals to specific cards.

So on the Amex side, Air France, Dell, Hilton, JetBlue, Delta, Hertz, IHG, and Lyft all have deals that range from $15 off $50 all the way up to $200 off $1,000. A lot of them expire in June, some of them even further than that. And then on the Chase side, IHG, Resort Pass, DoorDash, Westin, and Turo all have offers for anywhere from $10 to 20% back.

Some of those are through the end of May, some of those are pushed out till June. Next there's a deal for today only where you can get 5X bonus miles on Apple purchases through the Alaska, American, Delta, and United shopping portals. So if you have anything from Apple on your plans, today might be a good day to do it.

Next I want to talk about built and how you can start earning even more built points. They just added 20,000 restaurants to built dining. And so even if you don't have a built card, you can use a Chase, Amex, anything, and link that to your built account, which you can create for free.

And then when you go to any of the restaurants in their network, you start earning built points. Now built points are some of the most valuable points out there. You can transfer them to almost every hotel group as well as United, Alaska, Aeroplan, Life Miles. There's so many great options.

And this is one way to get them without the built card. I know some of the restaurants near us that we already frequent. I now get 3X points at when I'm using any card I have. However, if you do have the built card, I'm really excited because in four days it's another rent day and on the first of the month you get double your points.

So that means that built is going to offer 6X on dining, 4X on travel, and 2X on everything else. So that's something I always take advantage of. These built dining rewards stack on top of that, which is awesome. And one more hack is that I've been using built rent days to go and buy gift cards at restaurants we frequent a lot because let's face it, we don't always go out on the first of the month.

And one cool way to do that is if the restaurant uses Toast, which is toasttab.com or the Toast app, you can easily buy gift cards for those restaurants in the Toast app, which has been awesome. Finally, on rent day they have a trivia game that you can play and earn more free points.

So if you want to sign up for a free built account, you can do it at allthehacks.com/built. Also on the deal side, we've recently shared deals to get 10% off gift cards at 100 different brands. That deal's expired. And then Southwest gift cards were on sale for 16% off at Costco and Sam's Club.

That deal has expired, though funny enough it looks like they are back on sale at Costco again. I'm not sure how long that'll last. But those are some of the deals we like to share in the newsletter. On the points and miles front, we share things like right now it's Hilton Double Point summer promo.

So if you register, you can earn 2x points for all stays at Hilton between May 2nd and September 2nd. There's no limit on how much you can earn. We also shared a bunch of the transfer bonuses you can get when transferring points from Amex City Chase to different airlines and hotel groups.

Right now through the end of May, there's three. Amex has 20% to Aeromexico and 30% to Virgin Atlantic, and City has 30% bonus points to Qatar Air. And then through June 15th, Chase has a transfer bonus of 30% to Virgin Atlantic and to Marriott for a 40% bonus, and then City has a 50% bonus to Turkish Miles and Smiles through the same date.

I also love to share when there are cards that are launching or have new signup bonuses. So the City Premier was recently relaunched as the almost identical City Strata Premier. It's always gotten and still gets 3x on airfare, hotels, restaurants, supermarkets, and gas stations, but it now also gets 3x on EV charging.

They also added some travel protections, and they increased the welcome bonus to 75,000 thank you points after you spend $4,000 in three months. The only catch is you can't have received the bonus for a City Premier in the last 48 months. So I'm debating whether I jump on this because I don't have a City card yet.

There is a rumor that there might be a City Strata Elite card coming sometime. I'd love to know if that's coming before I decide whether I do this. And then last, the Chase Sapphire Preferred and Reserve cards both have an increased welcome offer right now up to 75,000 points after you spend $4,000 in three months.

That kind of a deal for both cards works out to about 20 points per dollar if you include the points you get from that spend. But on the Chase side, you can't get the bonus if you have either card right now or if you've earned the bonus from either card in the past 48 months.

And obviously for all Chase cards, you have to be under Chase's 5/24 rule, which means you can't have opened five cards across all issuers in the last 24 months, at least cards that show up on your credit report. So sometimes business cards won't count. But a common strategy for people that already have one of these cards and want the bonus again is to downgrade to the Freedom Flex or the Freedom Unlimited, wait a week or so, and then reapply.

Obviously for cards, I'd appreciate you using our links if they have the best deals. We don't have any City links, so you can go anywhere there. And if you can get a better deal with a referral from your Player 2, go there. Otherwise, allthehacks.com/cards. Last thing in travel points and miles is United, without any announcement, rolled out more devaluations to some of their partner awards.

So if you're looking to book ANA First Class to Japan, it's gone from 121 to 242,000 miles, so doubled. It's kind of a trend that United seems to be increasing partner awards without any notice. So I've really focused most of my booking on Star Alliance from Air Canada or Avianca instead of from United.

I also like to share in the newsletter some great finds that I've had. Recently I found a good video from Dr. Peter Attia that talks about why time isn't really the best factor when it comes to exercise and some of the indicators that might make for good exercise like VO2 max and muscle mass.

Nick Gray, who's a past podcast guest, recently went on a publicly arranged blind date where he solicited recommendations for someone to meet him in Tokyo for a few days. He posted daily about everything that was happening. He chronicled all the posts in a wrap-up on his blog. It was so interesting.

I was literally like waiting for him to write his next post so I could see what was happening. So that was a fun one. And then there was a cool article I found from Vox just about why car insurance rates have been going up so much. So I'll link to all of those in the newsletter, allthehacks.com/email.

And then last, in the newsletters I like to share recommendations, kind of similar to Great Finds, but things that I really enjoyed. On the movie front, I recommended the Tetris movie if anyone hasn't seen it. I thought it was really awesome and I'd never seen or heard the story behind that game, which was fascinating.

It's on Apple TV+. Also recommended Superhuman. It's really the fastest email out there. I've saved so much time since I've used it. It works on Gmail or Outlook. It works with keyboard shortcuts. They have an AI to write emails. It's really great. I'm sure I left off a ton of features, but you can actually try it for a month for free at allthehacks.com/superhuman, or you can use the code ALLTHEHACKS.

And last, I shared a show that I kind of just finished binging called Trafficked on YouTube with Mariana Van Zeller. It is wild how deep she as a host goes in this docuseries where she's kind of exploring these really dangerous inner workings of kind of global underworld, I guess, everything from drug cartels to black market organs, online romance scams.

You can watch it on YouTube, Hulu, and the Nat Geo website. Really liked it. So that's what I typically share in a newsletter. You can go to allthehacks.com/email to read some past ones and subscribe, and I'll be sending another one on Saturday with some particularly awesome hotel deals related to cards that have come up recently, as well as some other stuff.

Next topic today, which actually might end up being in that newsletter next week, is around Father's Day. I had a few friends ask me if I had any ideas, and so I wanted to pull together a few in no particular order. One is the Moft snap-on phone stand and wallet for the iPhone.

It uses MagSafe to kind of magnetically connect. It says it holds two cards. I found that it holds three cards and a couple dollar bills. Moft.us is where you can find that. The Ooni Pizza Oven is great. I actually, we just used one at a neighbor's house. I love making pizza at home.

We've given that as a gift in the past. I really love, for someone who likes cocktails, the Cocktail Codex book. It's fantastic. A friend of mine's really into hoodies and has tried like 15 different hoodies in search of the best one. He claims that so far the 10,000 mid-weight tech hoodie is the best one, and he actually sent me one, and it's fantastic.

I'm still a big fan, from talking about that run this morning, two products. One is the Shox Open Run Pro headphones. I mentioned them in my gift guide last year, and I still really enjoy them. They're open ear, so you can kind of hear what's going on around you better.

The other thing on the run is the Nike Vaporfly 3 shoes. It might be any number. They might have a 4 now. I'm not sure. I remember reading about these shoes in 2020 when there was an article about whether shoes can actually make you run fast, and there's been debate about banning these shoes.

Well, just for a test, when I first got them, I finished a normal 30-minute run, checked my distance, and it was a little shy of 10% further than any 30-minute run I'd done the past year, so if you want to help someone run faster, Nike Vaporflys are great. Next, we got an 8Sleep last year.

We absolutely love it. If you haven't seen, they launched the new Pod 4 Ultra, which is even better. There's actually a $200 discount that we got them to give us for listeners. It's allthehacks.com/8sleep, and if you're on the fence, they have a really generous 30-day return policy, and they even cover return shipping.

A gift certificate for an escape room. I'm a huge escape room fan, or if you want to give someone a solo kind of escape room board game vibe at home, Box One from Theory 11 is an amazing game. It's like a solo game/escape room. I loved it. And then my good friends Heather and Jonathan started an outdoor game during the pandemic called Tug-o-Wobble.

Think of it like tug-of-war, but with a little bit of a twist where you're standing on these platforms. It's really fun. They're having a sale right now that goes through tomorrow, 5/28 for Memorial Day, to get 25% off. I'll link to all these things in the show notes. And then finally, I think you all know that most of the brands we work with as sponsors are brands that we reached out to because we love the products.

And so it's no surprise that there are actually four products that I wanted to include on this list, but I just thought it would be fair to say they are sponsors of the show as well. They actually don't know I'm mentioning them and haven't paid to be here, but I think they make fantastic gifts.

StoryWorth, if you want to create amazing books of stories of your father, it's a great gift. You can get $10 off at allthehacks.com/storyworth. Viore, most comfortable clothes out there. I'm wearing Viore pants and I'm wearing a Viore shirt right now as I record. I love Viore. I wore them on the run this morning.

The core shorts are awesome. Sunday performance joggers, you can get those 15% off, allthehacks.com/viore, V-U-O-R-E. Funny enough, I gave StoryWorth to my dad last year and two years ago, I gave him a subscription to Masterclass, which is amazing online content to learn just about anything from really world-renowned experts, 15% off at allthehacks.com/masterclass.

And then the last is a new sponsor, which I've actually used their products for over a decade, which is Indochino. They're the suit I bought for my wedding. I still wear it to this day. And if you want to get someone a new suit for Father's Day, you can get 10% off with the code allthehacks.

Next, I want to share something a little personal before I jump into booking award travel for the summer. So almost a decade ago, my father-in-law did a genetic test and found out he had the BRCA2 gene mutation. For those not familiar, BRCA1 and BRCA2 are genes that help repair DNA damage.

And when you have a mutation in them, the genes can't necessarily repair things effectively and it increases the risk for different types of cancers, particularly breast and ovarian cancer. And the increased risk is pretty meaningful. If you look at a National Cancer Institute article, it compiled a bunch of research and the summary was 13% of women in the general population will develop breast cancer sometime in their lives.

But if they have the BRCA1 mutation, that increase goes to 55% to 72% by the time they're 70 to 80 years old. And on the BRCA2 side, it goes to 45% to 69%. So a very significant increase. On the ovarian cancer side, it goes from 1.2% for the general population to 39% to 44% for BRCA1 and 11% to 17% for BRCA2 by age 70 to 80.

It has a lot of impact on other cancers. For example, 6% of people by age 69 have prostate cancer. On BRCA1 side, it jumps up to 21% by 75 and 29% by 85. And BRCA2 jumps up to 27% by 75 and 60% by 85. Now these mutations can be inherited from parents.

And so if one of your parents has a BRCA mutation, there's a 50% chance you'll inherit it. And so my wife did a genetic test, which I think it was from either Color or Invitae, and she found out she has the BRCA2 mutation. After learning this, Amy reached out to her doctors at UCSF who recommended she speak with their BRCA team.

And a common course of action is actually a preventative mastectomy or oophorectomy, which is the removal of the breasts and the ovaries. Now as you can imagine, that's a very serious set of procedures that someone will have to make a decision about. And Stanford actually has this amazing decision tool for women to play with some of the numbers for people with the BRCA mutations.

And it highlights the benefits of those procedures and actually shows some examples. And I'm just going to read them because I thought it was really impactful. So what it shows is that for 100 women aged 35 to 39 years old with a BRCA1 mutation who are doing regular screenings, by age 70, 15 of them will be alive and have never had either cancer.

73 will have had breast cancer or ovarian cancer, and of them, 28 will have died of it. And then there are 12 other women who would have died from other causes. And having both of those procedures before 40 years old increases the number out of 100 people who will be alive without having cancer by 4X from 15 to 60 and reduces the number who have had either cancer from 73 down to 25 and also reduces the number of people who died from either of those two cancers from 28 to 8.

So those are the numbers for the BRCA1 mutation. For BRCA2, which is what Amy has, it's slightly better, but it's still not what you want to see. So for 100 women 35 to 39 years old with BRCA2 who are doing regular screenings, by age 70, 37 will be alive and have never had breast cancer or ovarian cancer.

50 will be alive having had breast or ovarian cancer, and 11 of them will have died from it. Then 13 other women would have died from other causes. And if you have BRCA2 and you get both of those preventative procedures done before 40, it increases the number out of 100 who will be alive without having either cancer 2X from 37 to 74 and reduces the number of people who have had either cancer from 50 to just 11 and reduces the number who died from either cancer from 11 to 2.

So I know I threw a lot of numbers out there, but I think that data makes a really strong case for both procedures. But given the impact on having children and breastfeeding, Amy and her doctors ultimately decided to hold off on anything other than frequent screening until she finished having children and breastfeeding, which was last year.

So being the incredible and courageous woman she is, last week Amy had her double mastectomy, which seems so far to have gone as well as it could have. She's probably going to do her ovarian removal next year, which because it can likely be done laparoscopically will be much less invasive with a much shorter recovery.

As for now, she is recovering at home and it is so tough to have to explain to the kids why mommy can't pick them up, but they are taking it well and we're just all really excited for her to be fully recovered and to take a family trip, which we're planning on the other side of this at the end of the summer.

So part of the reason I shared that is just because it's something we never knew about before going into this. The testing was something that only really came up because her father tested for it. And I just thought it was interesting and knowledge that some people might want to have, especially if you're in the middle of this situation.

However, there is one more part of the journey that while very difficult in the moment and hard for us, had some valuable takeaways that I wanted to also share. So last Wednesday morning, Amy was discharged and we came home and she was mostly resting. After dinner, she decided to stay downstairs and I helped drain some of the fluid from the tubes that they leave in for a few weeks after surgery.

Now I'm not sure why, but afterwards Amy felt a bit nauseous and we decided to help her get upstairs to lie down and about halfway there, she decided she wanted to sit down and took a break on the bottom of the stairs and she ended up passing out. Now she was completely unresponsive for what was actually only about 20 to 30 seconds, but felt like way longer.

While absolutely terrifying, I immediately called 911. Her mom propped her up and very shortly she came back to it. She said she felt like she had just fallen asleep. Very quickly the paramedics arrived. Thank you so much for all first responders. They checked her vitals. They didn't really find anything wrong at all, but of course they still suggested she go to the ER to get checked out either in the ambulance or we could drive her.

Now it's 9 30 PM when this happens. After having had surgery, the absolute last thing Amy wanted to do was to go sit in an ER for hours. So fortunately I decided to call a good friend and ER physician, a guy named Bill Yount, who happens to also host an amazing podcast called Catching Up to Phi, where he basically covers the financial independence journey for people who are getting a late start.

I've been a guest, so thank you Bill for having me on. Bill didn't want to give me personal medical advice, but he wanted to talk about the situation. He pointed out a few things that would have been warning signs of something much more serious like a pulmonary embolism, and those warning signs made me want to share this story with you.

And the two things were whether it came out of nowhere or not. So Amy was feeling a bit nauseous for a few minutes before she fainted, so that was actually pretty positive. And then the second was whether it was accompanied by shortness of breath, difficulty breathing, lots of sweats, which it was not.

Now Bill's professional advice was to go to the ER, be seen by a doctor, rule out something more serious. However, personally, he said if it were him and his wife, it sounded like a safe situation to stay home, and that it likely could have been a vasovagal syncope, which is a common cause of fainting that happens when your heart rate and blood pressure suddenly drop, reducing your blood flow to your brain, causing you to lose consciousness for a short time.

Some common triggers of that are seeing blood, standing up too quickly, or being in a stressful situation, all of which were present that night, so ultimately we decided to stay home and we haven't had any issues since. Amy has been resting more, not watching when the tubes are drained, and staying very hydrated.

So I wanted to share that because I thought maybe it would be interesting, maybe it would be useful. Honestly, I hope it's not useful to any of you because you never have to deal with any of those situations, but it's something that I thought I would share today. So thank you so much for listening.

I'm going to take a little bit of a turn here and talk about summer travel with points, and it's relevant because we're going to be taking a summer trip with points after Amy's recovery, and it's tough because in the summer, it seems like everyone in the United States wants to take a vacation.

So I first want to tell you a story about summer travel, but related to a friend of mine who, funny enough, is also named Bill. He was looking to take a trip from Seattle to London and come back a few weeks later from Paris back to Seattle. He had very specific dates, he wanted to fly direct, maybe one stop, and he was willing to pay to do it in business class for three people, but he was sitting on a lot of points and wanted to see if he could get a good deal.

Now when he looked, each one way from Seattle to London and from Paris back to Seattle was about $5,000. When we looked at points, we found an option to go from Seattle to London direct on Virgin Atlantic booked through Air France for 105,000 points and $200. Comparing that to $5,000 was about 4.6 cents per point, which is a great, great, great value.

And just for anyone trying to understand the math there, I took $5,000, which was the fare, minus $200 to account for the taxes and fees you have to pay on the award ticket, which comes out to $4,800, and then I divide that by 105,000 points, which gets you 0.0457, or about 4.6 cents per point.

So that was great. But the return was a bit tougher, and the best option we found was one stop on United a day later for 175,000 points and $150, which works out to about 2.8 cents per point. Now if he wanted to go the same day direct, it was over 300,000 or 400,000 points, which was just not a good deal.

So the total for those two flights is 280,000 points and $350 per person. Now relative to two $5,000 tickets, it actually seemed like a really good deal. It would have been an average of 3.4 cents per point. But then I remembered something and asked him if he looked at multi-city flights or two one-ways.

Now he couldn't have booked a round trip because he wasn't actually going into and out of the same airport. He was doing what's called an open job, where you book from Seattle to London and then back from Paris. And funny enough, it really, really changed things. But when you want to do that search, a lot of places can do it as a multi-city, where you can do that on Google Flights, you can do it anywhere.

And sure enough, if Bill bought that flight from Seattle to London and Paris back to Seattle, all in business class as one ticket, where the outbound was on Delta and the return was on Air France, which works well because they're partners, instead of $5,000 each way, it came down to $4,050 total.

So now I went back and said, "Oh, let's look at those options again." But keep in mind, those best options weren't even as ideal as the paid ticket because the return wasn't direct and he had to leave a day later. It would have actually only been 1.32 cents per point, which means he would actually just be better off buying the $4,050 ticket in the Chase portal because with his Chase reserve, he'd get 1.5 cents per point to book in the portal, which he would only need 270,000 points to do.

Meanwhile, booking with points and miles and transferring to partners was going to cost 280,000 points, which is more, plus $350 in taxes. And that doesn't even take into account the fact that on those paid tickets, he'd actually be earning a lot of miles and points because he's buying a business class flight.

If he credited all those flights to Delta, and I know he has status, so he'd be getting nine points per dollar, so almost 36,000 points. So you could actually factor that all into the calculation as well, and it brings the value to 1.17 cents per point. So in this case, for him, the portal was actually a much better deal, that if he's always going to travel like this, meaning he has no flexibility on dates or destinations, only really wants to fly direct, he's probably better off stopping playing the points game and just focusing on cashback and burning all the points he has right now in the portal.

However, if he had another way to get outsized value from his points, he should just book this trip direct, pay out of pocket with dollars, and save his points for another day. And while he agreed that travel isn't usually that flexible, he did point out that he thinks he's going to be able to get a lot of value transferring his points to Hyatt and booking a lot of hotels, and that value can often be in the 1.8 to 2 cents per point.

So for now, he's going to hold off on transferring his points, use them for Hyatt, and this is a trip he's just going to have to pay cash for. Now, before I talk about our trip, I want to come back to the idea that booking international one-way flights, especially between the US and Europe, can be very suboptimal.

However, I want to flag an incredible way to save money if you ever need to do this. For example, I looked at a flight from Seattle to Paris where the one-way business class ticket was $4,383, but if you booked that exact same $4,400 business class flight and added a return in economy a few weeks later, it came down to $2,465.

And if you just made that return go back to New York instead of Seattle, because that leg is even cheaper, the total came down to $2,250. Now, I only checked one date, and I put it in the summer, and it came back to just one airport. It is very possible that if I went and looked at more dates and more airports, it could have gotten any cheaper to come back.

However, that took the price of the exact same $4,400 flight down to $2,250, meaning saving almost 50% of the cost. And it's not just true for business class. I looked on economy and a one-way flight, same dates from Seattle to Paris, that flight was $928 in economy for a one-way ticket, but if I made it a round trip coming back to New York, it brought the round trip price down to $691.

So by adding a round trip leg, even if you're never going to take it, you would have saved on that economy ticket $237 or 26%. Now, if you want to take it even one step further and get more, once you've flown that first leg, you can cancel the return flight.

Now, you're not going to usually get the fare back at all, not even as a credit, because you've started your trip, but most airlines are still required to give you back the taxes and fees if you cancel that leg, which in this case was actually $107. So that adds to the savings as well, and that was true even for economy, bringing that economy flight back after the refund to under $600.

So two big takeaways. If you need to book a paid one-way flight between regions, especially the US to Europe, it can be way cheaper to add a throwaway leg to make it a round trip. And the extra bonus is if you're trying to do it in business class, make the return leg in economy.

Now, you can't do this the other way around, because if you miss your first flight, your second flight will get canceled. And second, it doesn't make sense to compare the miles you need for two one-way award tickets to two one-way paid tickets if you can book those flights as multi-cities or using the trick we just talked about for way, way less.

So hopefully that's helpful for anyone either traveling on one-ways or thinking about booking flights in business. So I first want to tell you a story about summer travel. As for our situation, now that our oldest daughter is going to school, it turns out as any parent knows, except us, because we're just entering this, the travel window just gets really narrow.

It was obvious as we thought about it, but we never really processed the fact that once you have young kids that are in school, now you are forced to travel during summer, Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's, and spring break, maybe a winter break if you have that as well. Otherwise, you're pulling your kids out of school.

So we decided we wanted to take a trip somewhere this summer. And when it comes to weather and young kids, it seems like the best option for late summer is somewhere in Europe. As it turns out, lots of people want to go to Europe in the summer, and we're going to be looking for four to five business class seats, depending on whether we bring our au pair.

And so I thought I'd share about how I approach that search, because it's a little different than other times. For starters, I'm not even thinking about our final destination, whatever that may be, because we don't even know what it is. Instead, I am just looking for a flight directly from San Francisco to Europe over a large travel window that we can go.

And I've been checking for five, 10 minutes every few days, but I actually found the flight we booked on PointsYaz Daydream Explorer tool, which if you aren't familiar, go back and listen to my episode a few weeks ago with Greg from The Frequent Miler. But I put in US/Europe with a window, I put four seats, and sure enough, I found a flight on one particular day that was cheaper than every single other day, and that was from San Francisco to Paris, and it was only 45,000 points, plus $200 per person.

Now, since we don't have a destination in mind, it's really hard to compare that to what the cash price would be, but given what I just learned from helping Bill, it seemed like about $2,000 might be fair. Compared to $2,000, 45,000 points. Now, keep in mind, we probably aren't actually going to end up in Paris.

We went there a few years ago, but because it's a direct flight to Europe, during dates that work for us, that lands early enough that we could easily hop on another cheap intra-Europe flight or train, we decided to book it. And a few considerations when you're doing one of these bookings, which is, I'll say, a little speculative.

One, I was concerned that had I known where we wanted to go, I could have added that connecting leg on without paying any more miles, but just to set aside that concern, I ended up searching for those same flights with flights to all over Europe. Search Scandinavia, Rome, Portugal, Spain, everything, and every time it almost doubled the price, so I wasn't too worried, and when I was looking at all those intra-Europe flights, they were all less than 10,000 points in economy, availability was pretty good, and even if we had to pay cash, they were a couple hundred dollars, so I wasn't really worried about that aspect of it.

Also, I did consider that we might find something better later, which brings up questions about the cost to cancel if you do something kind of speculative, and that's where the airline you book with actually matters. So in the case of Air France, I had to transfer those miles from Amex, which is irreversible.

So if I want to change plans, and those plans aren't on Air France, I'm stuck with a balance of Air France points. So I have consistently found great Air France deals in the past, and it's pretty easy to prevent your miles from expiring, and so I'm okay leaving those points and miles in Air France if we decide to change things, but another important thing is that I also have enough points in Amex and Chase that I can use somewhere else, so it's not going to be too restrictive.

However, also important is the cancellation cost. Many U.S. airlines will let you cancel and redeposit your miles for free, which is awesome, but a lot of the international airlines don't. So for Air France, you pay 70 euro per person to cancel, so in this case, if we found something better or decided not to take this trip, we'd be out 350 euro, which would suck, but it's nowhere near as bad as some others, which can be $200 per person.

I'll link to a frequent miler article in the show notes that covers all the award cancel and change policies for every airline. As for coming home, we actually don't have a return trip, and that's something that in Wednesday's episode this week, I'm going to talk a lot about with Nick from The Frequent Miler also, and it's just such a great conversation.

You are going to love it. We are going to talk about how to focus on getting the most value from your points and miles and ways to think about planning an entire trip, so stay tuned for that in two days. But coming back to it, we actually did find a return trip that could work, and it was a pretty good deal, 63,000 points, but it was on Swiss Air from Vienna to Zurich to San Francisco.

Now, knowing we have no plans to end up in Vienna and that we have to book through Avianca, which was a $200 per person cancellation fee, I felt like it wasn't as likely to work as the other one, and we passed on it. Now, funny enough, if we could have just booked that direct Zurich flight instead of have to start in Vienna, I probably would have done it, but for some reason, that flight just didn't show up.

If you wanted to book directly Zurich to San Francisco, it was like three times the price as booking Vienna to Zurich to San Francisco on the same flight, so that's just one of the nuances of miles and points and why having to use a lot of these new tools to do searching can be super valuable.

Once we get everything booked, I will make sure to share all my learnings, and when we get back from the trip, I will definitely share my takeaways. Two more things that I quickly want to talk about. First is about teaching our three-year-old daughter how to read. Now, this wasn't something really on our minds at all until I saw this tweet go viral a few months ago about an app called Mentava that helps teach kids to read at really young ages, as early as two or three.

Our daughter has been interested in letters and numbers, but we never really thought about trying to teach her to read yet, but I love technology, so it seemed like a great time to give it a consideration, so I signed up for the wait list and soon got an invitation.

Without much context, the initial price of this app gave me a bit of sticker shock. It was $500 a month. Initially, that seemed really high, but in comparison to a private tutor, which would be $1,000 a month, or even private school at $2,000 to $3,000 a month, you could probably make an argument that this is a much better deal.

Either way, it had a 30-day money-back guarantee, so I thought, "Why not give it a try?" About two weeks in, I was absolutely blown away. My daughter was actually reading four-letter words on her own, and all I could think about was what did I get myself into? The CEO of Mentava, Niels, has been posting a lot of interesting stuff online.

He shared that the 30-day refund rate was way lower than expected, and they've seen a much higher renewal rate, which probably tracks with the experience that we're seeing of how well this works. Also, any time someone criticized the price online, he just offered up the advice of this incredible book for less than $20 that can help kids have a similar outcome.

It's called "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons." Naturally, I bought that book as well, and am trying to at least do my best comparison before the 30-day window is up. But having done a couple of lessons from the book, it really feels like Mentava wins on at least convenience and engagement, especially if my daughter had a vote, but that obviously comes at a cost.

Quick aside, that also made me wonder, are there other apps or companies that could be built to take other types of learning and make them more convenient? So if you have that same idea and you're curious, definitely check out Greg Eisenberg's "The Startup Ideas" pod, because I joined him a couple weeks ago to talk about that exact topic.

Now, just to clarify and be extra transparent, Mentava is not a sponsor of this show. At all. There was zero consideration given from Mentava, as much as I would absolutely love to get a free subscription. That was not offered to me, at least not yet. Niels, if you're listening, you have my email.

But they did offer a $50 discount with the code ALLTHEHACKS to anyone who wants to give it a try for a month. I will just give you the same warning I gave my sister and wish I got myself. Don't try it unless you're actually willing to continue, because there is something so magical about seeing your child starting to learn to read.

Next thing I probably need to do is some research on whether early reading actually has any impact on educational success or anything like that, so stay tuned. Finally, I want to give an update on the charity water fundraiser we did last year. We hit our goal of raising $20,000, which was $15,000 from all of you, and we ended up matching the first $5,000, which means we will be able to fully fund two water projects.

Thank you so much to everyone who contributed. A special thank you to the five people who contributed $1,000 or more, Christian, Richard, the Greger family, Court, and a huge thank you to Kylie for the final $2,421 that got us to our $20,000 goal, which was on top of another contribution she had already made.

I will keep everyone posted if we get updates from Charity Water about the progress of the water projects we're building. Thank you so much for listening. If you have any thoughts or feedback about this Monday Musings episode, please let me know. You can tag me on Twitter or Instagram, you can send a DM or email, podcast@allthehacks.com, or if you really want to speak my love language right now, it would be through a five-star review on Apple Podcasts.

Thank you so much. I will see everyone on Wednesday.