(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of "All The Hacks," a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and every year as we get closer to December 31st, I start to make sure I've done all the right moves for my money, taxes, points, miles, and more.

So I thought I'd put together an episode to share with all of you what that actually means. There is a lot of good content that I hope can help you all be more optimized this year. And when it comes to all the tax topics, I wanna give a big shout out to Tal Binder, the founder and CEO of Gelt, a tax planning company, that I was so impressed with when I met Tal and heard all of his tax knowledge that I knew I had to invest a small amount in the company.

And since then, I've become a paying customer of their services for my personal and business taxes. And Tal spent 90 minutes giving me feedback and advice for all the content in this episode, which was so helpful. However, full disclosure, I am not an accountant or a CPA, so you shouldn't take anything I'm about to share as tax advice.

And if you do want tax advice, talk to your own accountant, or if you wanna check out Gelt, you can schedule a call with their team to learn more at allthehacks.com/G-E-L-T. Note that they are not a sponsor, that is not an affiliate link, but Tal did say that he'd let anyone that comes from All The Hacks skip their wait list.

Okay, let's get into the episode right after this. All right, since so much of year-end financial planning is tax-related, I'm gonna start there, but I figured it would be good to set a tone for some of the principles of how I think about this. So my goal is not to break the rules or even bend the rules.

I'm really trying to play as squarely in the rules as possible. But within those rules, I would love to avoid taxes if I could, and if not, I'd love to at least minimize the taxes I do owe, and finally, no matter what, I'd love to defer those taxes out as far as I can in the future.

So that's kind of the overarching theme, but let's get into the tactics. Now, I realize some of you might have a small business or a side hustle, and there are so many great optimizations for business owners, but I'm gonna focus first on all the things that apply to everyone, including W-2 employees.

So first, I think it makes sense to talk about one of the biggest decisions that you make on your tax return, which is whether you're gonna take the standard deduction or you're gonna itemize. So the way it kind of works is that the IRS gives you the ability to just say, I want to take this one deduction and reduce my income by it and not do any extra homework.

If you're single, it's 12,950. If you're a joint filer, it's 25,900, and it's super straightforward. Now, if you wanna itemize, you're basically saying I'm going to take all of my individual deductions, add them up, and do that instead. Obviously, you wouldn't do those if they didn't exceed the amount of the standard deduction, but if they do, then obviously it'd be a better deal.

And so you can itemize things like charitable contributions, state and local taxes up to a $10,000 limit, home mortgage interest, and then sometimes things like medical expenses, investment interests, gambling losses, casualty losses, and things like that. So if you're kind of on the line where you could go either way, one tactic you could do is bunch all of your itemized deductions by combining multiple years into one so that you can switch between the itemizing one year and the standard deduction the next year.

So the way you could do that is you could donate all of the money you might wanna donate for two years to charity into one year, and you could either do that by donating to charities or using a donor-advised fund, which we'll talk about later. You could prepay your property tax a little early if you're not gonna be at that state and local tax limit.

You could prepay your January mortgage payment to try to get a little extra mortgage interest contribution in the year. Or if you have any other qualifying expenses, you could do those in one year. And then the next year, you really try to limit all of those expenses so that you take the standard deduction, and then the following year in January, you could play catch up and do it again and try to itemize more that year.

So that's one thing you can do if you're on the fence. So effectively, what you're doing is you're taking those expenses that you can itemize, and you're either deferring them out or accelerating them in. But you could do something similar with income. It's not always as easy if you don't own a business where you could just say, oh, I'm going to ask someone to pay me in January instead of now, or ask someone to prepay me.

But I do have one example recently, which was someone I know was laid off from their job, and their employer told them, well, we would like to give you a severance as soon as you return this document to us. And it happened in December, and he asked how long he had to sign the document.

And they actually told him he could sign it any time before the end of the year, and they would process that severance payment a week later. So he actually waited so that next year, he would get that severance payment and have it come in the following tax year, since he assumed he would likely be at a lower income 'cause he didn't have a job right now.

So when you think about whether you're going to be making more or less income next year compared to this year, you can decide, does it make sense to try to defer some of that income or bring it in? So I mentioned charitable donations, but I want to cover a few components of it.

So you probably know that if you donate money to a nonprofit, you can deduct that on your taxes. Great, but did you also know that any of the non-cash property you donate, whether it's clothes or electronics or anything you drop off at Goodwill, is also a deduction. And if you save the receipt they give you, which is usually blank, and you fill it out, you can actually get a tax donation up to $5,000.

You just need to make sure you write down what you donated and you fill out a receipt so that you have something to have on hand in case you ever have questions down the road. And if you're not sure of the amount, definitely don't just put $5,000 unless you want someone to ask questions.

I would try to put a number that's more accurate. But one of the most effective things to donate is appreciated assets, because you can save even more when you give. So let's take a stock you bought a long time ago for $100, and let's say it's now worth $1,000.

When you sell that stock, you're gonna have to pay taxes on the $900 of gains. Now, it's gonna be long-term cap gains, but you're also gonna need to pay state taxes depending on where you live. And in California, that could add up to like 33%. So you've got $900 gain, you have to pay taxes on a third of it, you're gonna end up owing about $300.

Now, that means that at the end of the day, you're actually gonna take home $700. Now, you could go donate that $700 to a charity and get a $700 deduction. What you can also do is you can actually donate that $1,000 of stock. You'll give the charity $1,000, you'll get $1,000 deduction, they'll get $1,000, but you don't actually have to pay any capital gains tax.

So you never pay capital gains tax on the appreciated assets you donate, and you get the full tax deduction. So that's a great option for giving to charity. And we'll talk about the wash sale rule later. But it turns out the best I understand it, you're not actually impacted by the wash sale rule when you donate to charity.

So you could just buy that stock right away the next day and replace it if you really wanna hold it. So if you own any appreciated assets, you should probably not ever be donating to charity in any format other than those appreciated assets. Because if you wanted to donate $1,000, you're going to save money on taxes by donating $1,000 of appreciated securities versus donating $1,000 outright.

And if you were gonna donate the $1,000 anyways, you could always just rebuy those securities. Now, one of the things that makes this whole thing a little tricky is that donating appreciated securities is not as simple and quick and straightforward as just putting a credit card number on the donation widget on some charities website.

However, one thing I love doing, and I know you've heard me talk about it a lot, is setting up a donor advised fund. So it's a charitable giving vehicle, basically a fund that you create. And when you donate to that fund, you're donating to a nonprofit and you're getting the tax deduction right away.

However, you're in control of where those funds go. And so you can choose to divvy them out at a later date to any number of different organizations. So you could donate $1,000 in 2022, and you could donate that from appreciated securities that would have actually only resulted in you having $700.

And then later in the future, you could donate $100 to one organization, $500 to another. You can kind of decide whenever you want. And until you're ready to donate, you can actually invest the funds in your donor advised fund so that the money still grows with market appreciation. I think you've all heard me talk about Daffy before.

Daffy's how I manage my donor advised fund. They're a partner of the show. You can get $25 for free when you use them at allthehacks.com/daffy. I was using it before they partnered with us and I'll be using it long after if they ever stop partnering with the show. So definitely check that out.

It's a great product. Speaking of capital gains, let's talk a little bit about tax loss harvesting. You might have some stocks or index funds or other securities that you bought, maybe even crypto at a price higher than what they're at today, which means you have a loss. Now, when you sell that stock, you can actually capture that loss and use it to offset other gains or offset your income up to $3,000 a year.

So if you're sitting on losses right now before the end of the year and you have any capital gains, it might be a really good opportunity to sell those securities so that you can use that loss to lower your tax liability for the year. Now, if you don't have any capital gains to use, you can still carry over that loss to future years and use it to offset future capital gains or even offset your income $3,000 a year at a time.

However, the wash sale rule is a really important factor here. What it basically says is you can't sell a security, take a loss, and then rebuy that security for 30 days. So that means if you have a loss on something, but you actually wanna hold it as part of your portfolio, you can't just sell it and buy it back right away.

Otherwise, the loss gets offset and you actually don't get any of the benefit. However, you can buy something that's very similar, but not substantially identical. So in the case of some common index fund pairing examples, you've got VTI, which is a total stock market index fund from Vanguard, but you also have ITOT, which is an iShares total stock market index fund, or you have Schwab's SCHB, which is another US broad market index fund.

So obviously you could just sell something and not hold it for 30 days, and you'd be exposed to whatever price changes happen over those 30 days, but you also can buy something different. Now, products like Wealthfront and other robo-advisors will do this automatically for you, but if you're managing your investments in your own brokerage firm, you can do this yourself.

You just have to sell things at a loss and not rebuy them for 30 days. Because all my long-term investments are at Wealthfront, I don't think about it, it happens automatically, so I don't have to worry about it. In fact, this year, it looks like I've harvested over 10% of the value of my portfolio as losses I can use to offset gains, both in the portfolio and outside of it.

Now, I'm no longer a Wealthfront employee. Amy, my wife, still does work at Wealthfront, but if you wanna get $5,000 managed free, you can use my personal referral link. It's allthehacks.com/wealthfront. Now, when it comes to crypto, there's actually no wash sale rule because they're not securities. So if you're holding any crypto tokens and they're down, you can sell them and then buy them right back and book that loss and be able to use that to offset any gains you have or $3,000 of income.

When it comes to crypto, if you're in a situation like me, where you have crypto that you have no ability to access because it was at Coinbase or FTX or any other projects that are kind of in the middle of either bankruptcy proceedings or you're trying to figure out what happens or withdrawals are paused, that's a different story.

I think right now the best option and what I'm doing is just waiting. You do have the ability, if you're certain you're never getting anything back, to take an abandonment loss. That's something that I'm not familiar enough with to give you a lot of explanation. But fortunately, the team at Gelt has written an entire little tax guide all about tax tips for a recession that includes things like abandonment or even small business stock losses.

So I'll include a link to the show notes to that guide where there's a lot more detail there, but that's just something to consider as well. I wanna tell you all about the most amazing way to buy a second home. And I know because we actually bought one for 1/8th the cost.

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All you have to do is visit allthehacks.com/athleticgreens. Again, that's allthehacks.com/athleticgreens to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Another opportunity, if you have some gains this year, but you don't have any losses to offset them, is to look into Opportunity Zone Investing. If you make an investment into a Qualified Opportunity Zone, and these are certain types of real estate investments, and I'm certainly not the expert here, I'm just sharing what I've learned, you actually can defer capital gains by reinvesting those gains into a Qualified Opportunity Zone, which is usually areas of a city that are lower income, and you're investing in real estate projects there.

Obviously, that comes with significantly more risk than just harvesting losses from your securities, but it is one way to defer capital gains into the future. And then on the topic of investment, let's talk a little bit about a few other things you could do before the end of the year.

One that I love is iBonds. They're Series I savings bonds issued by the US government, and they peg the interest rate to inflation. And so how it works is they lock an interest rate in for six months, and then it changes every six months. Currently, the interest rate is 6.89%.

You do have to keep your money in there for at least one year, and if you take your money out in less than five years, you lose the last three months of your interest. But there are very few places you can go to earn 6% or more that I'm aware of, and so one option before the end of the year is to invest in iBonds.

You can only invest $10,000 per person or entity, so you could put in 10,000 for you, your spouse, you could put it in for your kids, or you could even put it in for a trust. So that's something that, as long as you do it before April, you lock in the 6.89% for the first six months.

I don't know what inflation will look like when it comes to reevaluating that interest rate in April, but whatever the new rate that comes out then will be, you'll be subject to that rate for the next six months, and then you can kind of wait and see what the rate is in the future and decide whether it makes sense to take anything out.

To do that, you have to go to treasurydirect.gov. Unfortunately, it is a really terrible website built by the US government. It's messy and not great, but it works, it's functional, and I was able to use it pretty easily. It just looks like I was using something from 10 years ago.

While we're still talking about investments, if you work at a company and you've been issued any stock options that are ISOs or incentive stock options, usually the problem with exercising them is it generates a certain amount of income, but not income the way your taxes are normally calculated, income that's only subject to what's called the alternative minimum tax, and I won't go into too much detail here, but basically the IRS says there's two ways to calculate your taxes, and if you owe more one way than you do the other way, we use that one.

You can, if you're not already subject to AMT, with the help of an accountant, I wouldn't necessarily try to do this yourself, you could figure out the amount of ISOs you can exercise that won't put you into that limit, and it might allow you to exercise some of your stock without any tax implications a little earlier.

Obviously, you have to pay to do the exercising, but you wouldn't have to pay the extra taxes that year. Finally, retirement accounts, you don't necessarily have to do all of the retirement contributions before the end of the year. Things like IRAs and solo 401ks, you actually have until April, or in some cases October if you file an extension, but if you haven't contributed to your 401k and you can use your last paycheck before the end of the year, by the time this comes out, that's an option.

I always try to just do all of my contributing in the calendar tax year, not that it's necessary. So that's contributing to any retirement accounts outside of your 401k, or contributing to a backdoor Roth contribution, which is most people that have a W-2 job aren't eligible for contributing to a traditional or a Roth IRA, if you are, great.

But if not, and I'll encourage you to Google around for backdoor Roth IRAs, but you can contribute to a traditional IRA, even if you're not eligible for the tax deductibility of it, you can make a non-deductible contribution, and then you can roll that non-deductible contribution over into a Roth IRA.

Why the IRS has come out and said that this is okay, but not just made it easy to do directly is beyond me, so are many things in the tax code. One thing I will say is, if you already have traditional IRA investments, it can get really complicated because you can't just choose which funds you roll over.

So definitely, if you're in that situation, talk to an accountant before thinking about doing any backdoor Roth IRAs. And depending on your tax situation this year relative to next year, you could consider doing a Roth conversion, which is taking any of your pre-tax retirement accounts and converting them to Roth accounts.

Whether they're traditional 401ks or IRAs, you can roll them over into a Roth account, which then means you don't have to pay any taxes on the gains in those accounts as long as you take them out in retirement. So that's an option. It will result in you owing taxes for that conversion.

So it wouldn't be a great idea if 2022 was a really high tax year for you. But if you weren't in that situation, it could be something worth considering before the end of the year. If you have kids and you wanna contribute to a 529 for their educational expenses or say for their college, that's something you can do up to $16,000 a year per child.

Technically, it's actually from each individual to another individual. So if a couple wanted to gift it to two kids, it would be each person giving to each kid. So you could actually gift 32,000 per person. So that's something you could do. If you wanted to super fund the 529, if you haven't done that, you can bulk give up to five years at once.

So depending on your state, you may or may not get a little bit of tax break for putting money in, but the IRS doesn't give you any breaks. And I know in California, you don't. But that money does get to grow tax-free as long as you are using it for a qualified educational expense, which is college.

And now it's actually expanded to even include things like private school and a few other things. And it's not tied to one person. So if you don't use it all up, you can pass it down to other children or grandchildren. And there's even some stipulations that if your child gets a scholarship, the fees to withdraw from it get waived.

When it comes to some of your employer benefits, definitely make sure that you've used up any of the money in your FSA accounts or transit accounts before the end of the year. There's a few different types of accounts. The most common I've seen is FSAs for medical expenses. And while you can usually roll over a small amount of hundreds of dollars, depending on your employer's plan rules, you usually have to spend all of the money in those accounts before the end of the year.

So if you have leftover funds, a few options, there are always things you could go buy before the end of the year. There are products and services like blood tests, genetic tests, new baby monitor, thermometers. Those kinds of things are all eligible expenses. So that's something I've done in the past.

Or if there's really nothing you need, you can always reach out to a local shelter or charity, see if there's anything that they need and you could go buy it for them. If you have a dependent care FSA, just make sure you submit those expenses. And then with HSAs, it's actually not something that you have to use it or lose it.

So I wouldn't feel any stress. In fact, HSAs are really cool because you put money in tax-free, the money grows tax-free and you take it out tax-free. So there's a pretty strong argument to not take your money out from your HSA now. But if you haven't maxed out the contributions and you want to, you can put up to $3,650 in if you have individual coverage or $7,300 if you have family coverage.

When I say coverage, that means covered by a high-deductible health plan. If you weren't covered by a high-deductible health plan in 2022, then you can't contribute to an HSA. But if you haven't maxed that out, that is something you could do before the end of the year. Okay, this one's not that big, but there are some tax benefits for energy efficiency upgrades that you can make before the end of the year.

So any home improvements you've made might be eligible for a tax credit. The tax credit in 2022 is equal to 10% of the cost of those improvements. That means windows, doors, insulation, roofs, heat pumps, water heaters, furnaces. The only catch is that the total credit is up to $500 in your lifetime.

And it's like 300 for building property, 200 for window components. So it's not a massive credit, but if you this year invested in any of those things, central air units, I know we put in a new hot water heater that broke and we put in air conditioning. So I think that might actually get us to that $500 maximum.

Also, if you did invest in solar, you can usually get up to about 30% back in those investments. The only catch there is that that must be in service by the end of the year. So if you haven't done this, it's probably really unlikely that it's going to be something that you're able to do in the next couple of days.

And then finally, if you purchased or if you somehow are able to purchase and take possession of an electric vehicle that was assembled in the US before the end of the year, you might be able to save up to $7,500 of the cost in taxes for the EV tax credit in 2022.

So one tax optimization I've heard a few people talk about is that businesses have so many more opportunities to be more tax efficient because of the rules and regulations we have in this country, that you could try to get your employer to hire you as a business instead of as a W2 employee.

Actually talked a bit about this with Tal. And while it is possible, there are a few really important things to consider. One, you can't just take your job and convert it right away and expect the IRS to let that be okay, unless you really change something about the way you operate.

If you're a designer and you convert from an employee to a contractor and you take on three or four other clients as a design agency, that might make sense. But if you just have one client and you're getting paid about the same amount and you just switch the type, it's unlikely that's gonna hold up.

So if you are actually changing the style of business you operate, great. However, one really important thing to consider is that it is so much harder to get approved for loans, especially mortgages, when you're not a W2 employee. When I was talking to Tal, he's seen clients who even have over a million dollars of income a year struggle to get approved for a mortgage.

I think I'd always heard that that was such an awesome opportunity, but kind of understanding that you really fundamentally need to change how you operate and some of the stresses it might put on you if you're trying to buy a home. I don't think it's really worth it for anyone who's not actually running a business.

However, if you are running a business, there are a handful of tax optimizations to think about. One is doing an S-corp election, which makes it a little bit more efficient for some types of businesses. Obviously, for all of these, you should be talking to an accountant and not just taking anything I say as advice, but it will help you avoid some of the Social Security and Medicare taxes that you would pay on your individual income if you weren't an S-corp.

There's the home office deduction. And one cool thing I learned recently is that you don't necessarily have to allocate your home by a percentage of square feet. You might be able to allocate it by a percentage of rooms. So if you have seven rooms in your house and your office is one of them, maybe you could use one seventh instead of square foot.

The meal deduction, which actually for this year, you can deduct 100% of meals. And what is a business meeting in a pandemic world? If you're doing a virtual meeting over Zoom and having lunch over that meeting, I think there's an argument to be made that that's also a business meal.

There's qualified business income, which is something you should talk to an accountant about. If you have kids and there's really any argument that those kids are doing work for the business, whether they're old enough to actually do work or whether they're young enough to maybe just be models in photos that you put on your company's website, you can hire your children.

And one of the coolest things about doing this is that if your children have income, which also means, by the way, they have to file their taxes, but they can contribute to a Roth IRA. And so if you think about being able to put money into an account for your kids when they're very young and letting that compound for 60 plus years, it could be really, really impactful on their future.

There's also bonus depreciation, which is if you buy something like a car that weighs over 6,000 pounds, then you can actually accelerate the depreciation all in one year. Obviously that car has to be for business purposes. There's a bunch of interesting optimizations when it comes to self-employed retirement plans, SEP IRAs, solo 401ks, where you can actually contribute more than the amount you could contribute to your 401k as an employee at a company.

There's also countless different expenses that qualify as business expenses. So if you're taking a course, if you're paying an annual fee on your business credit card, if you're buying anything that you use for work. So there's really a lot of stuff here. I just use it to highlight some of the things you should use to go start a conversation with your accountant, not anything that you should take as advice.

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So please consider supporting those who support us. Okay, that covers most of the year-end stuff related to taxes, but there are a few other year-end things that I wanna talk about that are mostly about points and miles. But before I get to them, I do also wanna make sure I cover a few of the interesting things that I learned that I'm actually gonna put into place next year because I think they're relevant.

And just because you can't use them this year doesn't mean you might not wanna start thinking about them. So first off, when it comes to the HSA and FSA stuff, I'm actively thinking about things that I might wanna do next year so I can make those elections and decide how much to contribute.

I'm definitely gonna wanna do some blood work that probably won't get covered. I'm considering whether I wanna do the GRAIL test, which is a early pre-screening test for cancer with blood work that's in the hundreds of dollars range. And because of the cancer in my family history, I just wanna start thinking about those kinds of things.

The other one is the Augusta rule, which funny enough is actually created to protect the residents of Augusta, Georgia who rented out their homes to attendees of the Masters Golf Tournament. But it basically says that you can rent out your home for up to 14 nights a year without needing to report any of that rental income on your tax return.

So if you've been considering renting out your place on Airbnb while you're traveling, while you're out of town, but really only for a couple weeks, this is a really great opportunity to bring in some extra income with no tax consequences. Obviously, it's maybe possible for you to do this before the end of the year, but it's probably unlikely given the time of year.

But it is something that I might start thinking about for next year if we have one or two trips planned. One cool hack that I've been shared by a few people is if you have a business, you can actually have your business rent your home to use it for things.

So if I were gonna do a film shoot in the house, the business could rent the home from me, and I would, in effect, be able to pay with company funds to my personal without having to pay taxes. So it makes it really efficient for transferring money from the business to yourself without any tax consequences.

Obviously, this only works if you're actually using it for those purposes. So if you're actually making videos, there's a lot of good evidence that you're doing so because you have video evidence of that. But I don't think this is the kind of thing that I would test out if it wasn't actually true.

Finally, the last thing I've been thinking about is whether I add more California muni bonds to my investment portfolio. Obviously, there are muni bonds in every state, but muni bonds happen to be triple-tax-free from federal, state, and local income. And with taxes in California where they are and interest rates where they are, it seems like something that I might increase the allocation to in my investment portfolio next year.

That's a lot about taxes. I just wanna talk about some of the end-of-the-year things you should be thinking about when it comes to your points and your miles. So first off, I always try to make sure that at least once every year, I'm looking at all my accounts to figure out whether any of them have balances that are gonna expire.

If you have points related to a credit card, then I wouldn't really need to worry about this because you're probably accumulating at least some number of points each month, and almost all mileage accounts, not all, but almost all, will not expire as long as there's some activity in the account.

Hotel points seem to expire more frequently than airlines. There are a lot of airlines that have shifted to no expiration dates, but it's really easy to keep things from expiring, especially with hotels. Sometimes my wife and I just transfer points between each other because a lot of hotel chains allow that for free, and that extends the life of the points.

On airlines, there are a lot of airlines that no longer have expiration dates, but if they do, there are some simple things you can do, whether it's using their shopping portal to make a small purchase, whether it's buying a nominal amount of points, or you could donate a nominal amount of points, or you can redeem a small number of points for a magazine subscription.

Really, any activity in your account will keep those balances active. Okay, when it comes to status at the end of the year, yes, if you're chasing status, whether it's on an airline, or whether it's on a hotel chain, you can always consider whether you wanna make a mileage run or a mattress run.

This is where, let's say, you just need an extra four flight segments before the end of the year to hit a certain level of status. You could actually just buy a ticket wherever the cheapest place to go is with one layover. It might be San Francisco to Los Angeles to Las Vegas, back to Los Angeles, back to San Francisco.

I haven't really ever been too heavy on the mileage runs, but there was one year where I remember flying to San Diego, getting off and getting right back on the same plane to come back to San Francisco because I was just like 800 miles short of hitting that next level of United status.

On hotels, you can do the same thing. You could book a night at a really cheap hotel, go stay there. You do need to show up, but you don't necessarily need to stay there the whole time. So if you're three nights away from status, you could book a really cheap Marriott property, go check in, ruffle up the bed sheets, put on the do not disturb, and then head back home.

I haven't really in the most recent years found status to be that valuable that I really wanna go to those extents, but I totally 10 years ago was doing this. So another big thing to do before the end of the year is if you have Delta or Marriott status, you might have some choice benefits, which with Delta, I think if you hit platinum or diamond, and with Marriott, if you hit platinum or titanium, you basically get some benefits that you have to select before the end of the year.

Things like suite upgrades or premier upgrades or free lounge access passes and things like that. So I would definitely go and make sure you do that before the end of the year. Also, there are some hotel chains that give you free night certificates. Not all of them are tied to the calendar year, but definitely go and make sure that if you have any free night certificates, you book them or even maybe use them before the end of the year if you need to.

Then a lot of credit cards have a bunch of different types of credits. Some of them are tied to the calendar year and some of them are tied to the card member year. I'll run through all of them for the sake of comprehension, but the most important ones, 'cause it's December, are the annual ones.

So on a bunch of Amex cards, platinum, gold, and the Hilton Aspire, you have an airline credit. Whether that's $100 or $200 or $250, basically the credit card is gonna reimburse you for purchases on airlines and you need to use that before the end of the year. You actually need to select your airline first and you can actually only have one airline selected.

I have had some success in the past live chatting with Amex on their app or on the website and asking them to make a switch. They're unlikely to do it multiple times throughout the year but if you don't ask every year, they're usually willing to do it. And there are some really great threads on Flyer Talk if you want to learn about some of the creative ways to take advantage of those airline credits because they're intentionally not supposed to be for buying flights, but for certain airlines, there are ways for those credits to be used to maybe buy a travel bank credit or a small cheap ticket or you could pay for part of your ticket with a gift card and the incremental amount gets coded as an upsell instead of as a ticket.

So that's something to go look at. There's also another few cards, the City Prestige, the Chase Ritz-Carlton, the Bank of America Premium Rewards that have annual credits that I think are a little easier to use but that expire at the end of the year. There are a few other credits.

The Platinum Card has a $200 prepaid hotel credit. There's a $200 Dell credit that expires for a Platinum Card depending on whether you've used that before. The Platinum Card has a bunch of other credits that are worth making sure you've used. There's the $200 prepaid hotel credit that you use booking an Amex travel.

There's a $200 Dell credit that I actually used to buy the original microphone to kick off this podcast. I've used it a long time ago but that's one that is on a calendar year schedule. There's your $50 every six month Saks credit if you haven't used. Two suggestions of how I've used it in the past.

We don't really like to buy fancy soap but we've used our Saks credit to buy Aesop soap and it's just really great soap. I also just bought a couple pairs of Mack Weldon underwear which are maybe a little expensive but very comfortable and free if you use your Saks credit.

There's also the Uber credit of $15 every month but it's actually $35 in December so definitely make sure you use that. We almost always use it for Uber Eats but you can use it for Uber as well. And then finally each month there's the digital entertainment credit on the platinum card which you can use for things like Sirius XM or New York Times and other streaming services.

The Amex Gold has smaller credits. They've got $10 a month dining and $10 a month Uber. Those aren't really annual because they're monthly but just reminder if you're not using them. Similarly Chase has the DoorDash credit on the Chase Reserve and a GoPuff credit on literally every Chase card.

Those are credits that are tied to the month that just reminders to use. On the card member year credits, those are things like on the Venture X you get a $300 a year travel credit. On the Chase Reserve you get a $300 a year travel credit. Those credits are on the cycle of cardholder year.

So whenever you open the card you have a year to use them. The Chase credit's really easy to use. You just have to spend on travel and it automatically gets used. On the Venture X one you have to go into the portal and book something. The Chase Sapphire Preferred card also has a $50 hotel credit when you book in their portal.

And then finally the Hilton Aspire card has a $250 resort credit at Hilton Properties. If you notice I mentioned the Hilton Aspire card a few times. It's only because I recently looked into this card and we actually signed up for it. The reason we looked at it was, is actually I think a pretty good deal for someone who's staying at Hilton's or traveling a lot.

It does have a high annual fee of $450 but you get complimentary diamond status which is their top tier status with free breakfast. You get a $250 airline credit that if you're able to use reduces that annual fee to $200. You get an annual free night at a Hilton property every single year.

And there are a few hotels you can't use it at but it is very liberally used. I've seen multiple reports of people using it at the Conrad and Bora Bora at really nice Waldorf Astorias. And then you get another $250 Hilton resort statement credit. So if you're staying at any Hilton resort you can charge $250 to your room.

So if you add those up, it's like 250 airline credit, 250 resort credit, a free night anywhere and diamond status. It actually seemed like a pretty good deal for $450 a year, assuming you're gonna do that. Not to mention after you spend $4,000 you get 150,000 Hilton points. So I don't have a link for that card.

There's no way that signing up for it will help all the hacks but it's definitely a card that I thought was actually pretty interesting that I'd overlooked in the past. - Quick, small correction. Amy listened to this episode and reminded me that she has a personal referral link for the Hilton Aspire since we opened it in her name.

So if you wanna sign up for that card and help her earn some Hilton points go to allthehacks.com/hilton. I know a lot of this is top of mind for all of you. So I really hope this episode was helpful. I'll put a link to the guide that Tal wrote up as well as a link to check out Gelt and the show notes.

And as always, if you have any feedback, questions or just wanna say hi, I'm Chris at allthehacks.com. Finally, I just wanna say thanks to the 60 or so people that came out to the event in San Francisco. It was so great to meet some of the All The Hacks community.

Special shout out to Scott, Ali, and Akechi for flying out to the event. That means the world to me. And I look forward to doing more events like that in the future. All right, see you next week. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)