(upbeat music) Happy New Year and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm Chris Hutchins and I'm excited you're here for the first episode of 2023. I also hope you're feeling better than I am because somehow everyone in our house has gotten a cold or flu twice in the past two and a half weeks.

But sick or not, I am excited to kick off the new year with another listener question episode. We're gonna cover paying down your mortgage, where to put cash savings, managing credit cards with your partner, booking hotels direct versus the portal, what to do when you're short on points, how to save money on data while traveling, and more.

I'm also gonna share some of the listener hacks that you all sent me. So let's get right into it after this. (upbeat music) Okay, to get started, I just wanna share a few amazing listener wins that you guys have sent in. It makes me so happy to hear these stories, so keep them coming.

First, I wanna talk about Chad's story. He and his wife hadn't opened a card in over 15 years before listening to the show, and they've now amassed almost 400,000 points. And use some of those points for five nights in Ontario, a free Marriott stay, flights for the whole family to Florida.

And Chad's estimate is that they've not only saved $2,000 in travel already, but they still have 300,000 points to use. He also said that as part of this, he and his wife's credit scores have both jumped 20 to 40 points. That is awesome, Chad. I love hearing that story.

Similarly, Prema was able to rack up 100,000 points from a signup bonus and used it to fly her little sister to the States from India for 45,000 miles, which saved her almost $1,200. She said she got this taste of points and miles, and now she wants more. So I hope 2023 brings you even more points.

After talking about unclaimed money, I got a message from a listener who looked and found $93, which was cool, but he got obsessed and started checking out all of his friends and family and ended up finding over $1,000 for everyone. One of his friends actually had $500 owed just to him.

He'd never even heard of it before and is so excited. If you're listening to this and haven't already checked for unclaimed money yourself, search for unclaimed money and the name of your state and go to that site and see what you're owed. I got another email from Amy, who said she emailed a hotel, just like we've talked about on the show a lot, and told them she was excited for her upcoming stay.

And when they arrived, she got upgraded to a corner suite. They had a cool present for her kid and a fancy box of chocolates for the adults. And they comped their parking, which was $70 a day. So if you're listening and you're not booking hotels direct and sending a note, you definitely should, because you never know if you're gonna get hooked up like Amy did.

And finally, Michael heard my story on the London episode about saving money on Airbnbs. And so he messaged the host of a property that was a little out of his price range and was able to get 15% off and booked it immediately. And he said that since this is all the hacks, he went and bought a $500 Airbnb gift card on Amazon with his Chase Amazon card to get 5% cash back before booking the rest on his Sapphire Reserve for three X points.

Awesome job, Michael. I hope everyone that's booking Airbnbs is doing their best to negotiate a better deal. So those are just a few of the wins I've gotten from you all. Please send them in. I love hearing stories like that. But I also wanna share some of the great deals and hacks that you guys have sent in as well.

So first off, Skylar wrote in and listened to a few episodes where I've said that really some of the only great deals for points on hotels is Hyatt. And he wanted to point out that that's not always the case. If you have Citi or Capital One points, he's been able to transfer them to Wyndham and get a really good deal using them with the Vacasa program.

And when I say good deal, he's been getting two to four cents per point, including a nice place he just booked for a winter weekend in Tahoe. He also said there's some good deals transferring from Citi to Choice when you get a one to two ratio, and especially when you're traveling in Scandinavia, or if you're using the points to book their preferred resorts and hotels, though he's never done the latter because as good of a deal as it is, it can kind of be a headache to book.

So if you're thinking about how you could use your points for hotels, definitely consider checking out the Wyndham Vacasa program or some of the Choice hotels and see if you can get as a good deal as Skyler. Thank you so much for sending that in. Also, Manny sent in a great hack for transportation to the airport on your last day in the city.

It turns out that sometimes it's actually cheaper to do a one-way car rental from the city to the airport than it is to pay for a Lyft or Uber to get there. But if you have a late flight and an early checkout, it can actually be even better because you can rent a car in the morning, go and tour the city, go stop off, go see interesting stuff, and then drop it off at the airport and not have to pay to shuttle yourself around, have a place to store your bags, and it makes everything easier and you can save money.

That's an awesome suggestion. I hope some people can get some good value there. Finally, Nirav wanted to recommend that people check out the Cashback Comparison browser extension because it compares the cashback rates from all kinds of sites like Rakuten and Top Cashback. I know in the past I've suggested Cashback Monitor, but just having something on the browser saves you even more time, so Nirav, thanks for that suggestion.

All right, those are some great hacks. I really hope you guys keep sending them in and I'll keep sharing them because I know everyone listening loves hearing new ways to save. So let's jump into questions. First, I wanna tackle two questions that are very similar from Gavin and Matt.

Both of them had a rough question about paying down your mortgage to reduce your monthly payments. One of the questions was about whether it makes sense to pay it down or to invest that money and take the growth and income from those investments to make your mortgage payments. And the other was about whether it makes sense to withdraw money from a retirement account like a Roth IRA or a brokerage account to pay down your mortgage so you can lower your monthly payments.

So I know I've talked about this in the past, but mortgage rates were 2% or 3% back then, so I think it's worth bringing this up again now that mortgage rates are in the high single digits. However, I wanna point out a few things. So one, mortgage interest in the US for a mortgage up to $750,000, if you itemize on your taxes, is tax deductible.

So even if you're paying 7%, if you itemize your taxes, that 7% is probably reduced by anywhere from a third to half, depending on what state you're in and what your tax bracket's in. So if you look at the average long-term return of a portfolio, anywhere from the 5% to 8%, I'm guessing that after your tax deductibility of your mortgage interest, you're at about break-even.

However, there's one important thing to consider, and that's that your mortgage can be refinanced. So just because your mortgage today is at 5% or 8% doesn't mean that interest rates might not drop and you might be able to refinance at 3% or 4% in a few years. So for me, even at high interest rates today, I still don't like the option of paying down your mortgage, especially if it means taking money out of a tax-advantaged account, and even more so if it means paying penalties or fees.

All that said, this is much more of an emotional than a rational decision, and there's no one-size-fits-all answer. There are a lot of people out there that I know are so stressed out every day and week just thinking about the fact that they have debt, and knowing that they could live in their home with no mortgage payment in the future is something that could bring them such satisfaction and emotional comfort that even if it's not the perfect optimal thing to do, it might still be the right thing for them to do.

So like I said, there's no perfect answer, but in general, if you can deduct the interest on your mortgage, I think at rates today, I would still rather put the money in the market for the long-term and make my regular mortgage payments, and if and when rates go down, refinance to lock in a lower rate.

Next, I got a question from Chelsea about where to put money that they're saving for a big trip to Europe in three years. She asked whether it makes sense to put it in savings, in index funds, in the market, or what makes sense, because she doesn't wanna be too risky, but she also doesn't want it to just sit and not grow.

A few years ago, this might have been a harder question because the interest rates were so low on savings accounts that it really made it tough to leave your money in cash earning 0.1 or 0.2%, but my general rule of thumb has been that for anything you need in the next five years, don't put it in the market, and the reason is simple.

The stock market is volatile enough that at any given point in time, you could see your portfolio, depending on how risky your portfolio is, down 10, 20, 30%, and in years past, those things have lasted multiple years. If you look at the market right now, for at least a year, your portfolio's probably been down, and if this is money that you need in a specific period of time that's less than five years, you don't wanna be in a situation where the market's down and you don't have the money you need, and this goes for a down payment in a few years, a trip, any kind of major purchase or investment, or maybe you wanna quit your job to start a company or do something on your own or take a year off, so my advice here is to keep the money in cash, and fortunately, right now, there are a lot of great options for where you can put money in cash and earn high yield.

If you already have all the money you need right now, then a great option might be to use one of the brokered CD options from Schwab, Vanguard, or Fidelity, which currently are up to 4.9% for durations of anywhere from 10 to 24 months. However, you have to actually have the money now, so if this is a trip that you wanna take and you're gonna be saving for it over the next three years, then a CD might not be the best option 'cause you don't have the money now, and instead, I would open up a cash account where you can earn high yield on your cash while everything is FDIC-insured and you're not taking any risk in the market.

For me, I have mine at Wealthfront where I'm getting 3.8%. I know that there are some options out there that are at 4%, 4.05, 4.1, but one of the things I learned at Wealthfront, and we actually wrote a blog post about this, is that if you're always chasing the best rates and moving your money between different accounts, you actually lose out a lot by having your money in transit because you're not earning interest when it's in transit.

So let's pretend that you decide you always wanna get the best rate, and once a quarter, you're gonna transfer your money from one bank to the next bank, and those ACH transfers take a week each time. So you're gonna miss out on four weeks of interest over the course of the year, which is about 7.5% of the year.

So if you're saying that the average rate for a super-optimized account is 4.1% and you miss out on 7.5% of the year, you're effectively gonna earn 3.79% for the year anyways. So for me, I have watched how Wealthfront operates. I've seen the rates they've had. They're always consistently raising when the Fed raises.

So for me, it's just easier to keep it in one place that I'm confident will go up as rates rise. There are other banks and institutions you could check out that might do the same thing, but I'll link to the show notes, the article about rate chasing. But I just don't think it's always the best to go pick a random bank that has a high APY right now, because if you're constantly having to move around, you actually lose out more in the long run.

So in general, for short-term savings less than five years, especially right now with high interest rates, I would go high-yield cash or high-yield savings for anything that I'm contributing to regularly. And if it's money that I've already saved and I just wanna hold onto it, I'd be looking at some of these brokered CDs that are a little bit higher yield, but you have to lock your money up for anywhere from 10 to 24 months.

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Okay, so I wanna move on to some travel and points stuff. And Scott wrote in saying he's getting married next year, so congrats, and he's wondering what he should do to get the most out of points with his partner. He asked if he should add her to his platinum card, or if he should refer her to get her own.

And this becomes an interesting question, so I'll talk a little bit about how we do it. In general, there's two ways to approach this, and you can kind of combine them. One is around sign-up bonuses. And if there's a card with a really big sign-up bonus, then for us, we try to get it twice so we can maximize the points that we can earn.

But when it comes to keeping the card over the long-term, we try not to have two of the same card, unless for some reason, the rare case that there's a card where the perks and credits and benefits of that card far outweigh the annual fee, and it actually makes sense to have two of them.

That's usually not the case. So in general, we try to make sure that we just have each card once. But if there's a huge sign-up bonus, we might both open it to get the bonus. Now, with Chase, Citi, and Capital One, it's really easy to transfer your points between your partner.

So if you both were to open up a Capital One card, and let's take the Venture or the Venture X card and get 75,000 points right now, you could actually transfer those 75 plus whatever points you earn on the card as you meet the minimum spend into one account, and then either keep that card open or downgrade it.

Obviously, I would always recommend waiting till the end of the year to talk about downgrading and canceling. You don't want any of the card issuers to look at you and say, oh, you're the person that opened the card, got the bonus, and shut it down right away. So reminder, you can go back to listen to some old Q&A episodes where I've talked exactly about how I think about when to close cards.

But in general, if you open up the same two cards to get the bonus, there's no point in keeping both of them active unless the rare case that the annual fee is lower than the value you get from the card. I think the big exception to this is if you're in the military and all of your annual fees are waived, then by all means, having both cards for both spouses might make a lot of sense because you're able to take all the perks and all the benefits without paying the annual fees.

I will say that with Amex, there is no way to transfer points to another person. So just know that if you and your partner both open up an Amex, unless you use the points, you're not gonna be able to combine those points in a one account if you keep only one card open.

Next, I wanna address a question from Olivia about opening up airline accounts. So she asked if she should open up a frequent flyer account for every airline that she can transfer points to from her credit card. So before I answer, I wanna draw an important distinction between opening up the accounts and actually moving points into them.

So I definitely don't think you should move any points out of your Amex, Chase, Cap One, Citi, Balances, to other airlines until you're ready to book. But there are a few airlines where you can't transfer points to them unless the account has been active for 24 hours or three days or one week, different rules like that.

So I would say that maybe it doesn't have to be right away, but as soon as you start thinking about planning a trip, at some point I would go and open up a frequent flyer account for at least the airlines you're considering booking through. At a minimum, I think depending on which credit card you have, airlines like Air France, United, British Airways, even maybe Avios are all airlines that I've opened up accounts at even before I needed them just so that I had them ready to go.

It also helps that when you open up those accounts, you're able to search for flights on their websites. Some airlines will let you do without being logged in, but most need you to be logged in. So because it's easy, because it doesn't cost anything, I've gone ahead for myself and opened up accounts at most of the major airlines I think I'd use just to have on hand.

Now Charles asked a similar question, which was whether it makes sense to go open up frequent flyer accounts for all of your children or whether it's not worth it. So every time we're flying on a flight that we bought seats on, because you don't earn points when you're booking your flight with miles through the airline, but if you're using your points to book in the portal, you will.

So if I'm booking in the portal or if I'm paying cash for any seats for a child, not a lap infant, but actual seats, I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna create a frequent flyer account for my kids. And I know that the miles aren't that big and they're obviously not earning extra bonuses from credit cards and that kind of stuff, but I think over the next 15 or 20 years, it'll add up to something.

While it might not be enough right away for a free flight, you can at some point add them as an authorized cardholder to your Chase or Amex account, and that'll let you transfer points into their accounts. So let's say you need 50,000 United Miles for a round trip ticket that you're taking somewhere and your kid has racked up 5,000.

Well, now you're only gonna need to transfer 45,000 of their account instead of the full 50,000. So for me, I've created accounts for our two-year-old. I haven't yet created one for our six-month-old because we haven't bought her a seat on a flight. It's always been a lap infant. But in the future, I will, and hopefully we'll rack up enough points that maybe by the time they get to college, they've got a few free flights they can take.

And I know I mentioned a little bit about booking on the portal versus not. So I'm gonna answer a question that I've probably answered before, but Carl, Tontesh, and Jessica all wrote in questions about booking hotels and whether it makes sense to do it in the portal. And I think the big confusion here is that many of the cards and travel portals offer huge bonuses for booking hotels and sometimes flights in their portal.

So you can get as many as 10 points per dollar booking a hotel in different portals depending on the card you have. So I wanna clarify when it makes sense and when it doesn't because it can be a little bit confusing. So your chances of getting an upgrade if you book in the portal are almost zero.

Hotels and hotel chains really don't love bookings that come through a lot of these portals. And so they're not gonna treat you anywhere nearly as well as they would if you booked directly with the hotel and especially if you created an account in their loyalty program. Also, depending on the hotel chain, you might not actually earn any points or elite night status when you book through the portal.

So if those are important to you, you don't wanna book in the portal. Also, sometimes the rates that you get on a website for a hotel, especially if you're logged in as one of their members might be better. So in general, I would say, I would never try to book on a portal website to get 10x points if I'm gonna pay a rate that's 20% more.

Finally, in the portal, you're subject to dealing with chase or whatever travel portal you book in when it comes to changing and cancellations, which can be more strict. Sometimes dealing directly with the hotel is gonna get you a little bit further if something goes wrong in the last minute or you need to make a change.

And finally, some travel portals do charge a service fee. Amex used to do this a lot. I can't remember if they still do, but obviously keep in mind whether there's a fee to do anything. All that said, if the price is the same and you're booking at a hotel where you don't really earn points or you don't care about status and the rate is the same, and you're pretty confident that you're not gonna need to cancel or change it, and you can earn 10 points per dollar booking in the chase portal or earn nothing on the hotel website, I'm all for it.

So especially if it's boutique hotels or the kinds of hotels where they're not part of Marriott or Hyatt and you're earning points or status, those could be good opportunities. But again, you're not gonna be able to email the hotel and ask for an upgrade like Amy did at the beginning of this episode.

So it really depends what's more important to you. Is it earning a few more points or is it getting upgraded? When I'm traveling for a conference by myself, I don't care if I have a big room. I just need a bed to sleep in. And so that would be a good example of the kind of stay where I don't really need the upgrade.

And if the closest hotel is not part of a chain, I might book in the portal to earn 10X points. It's much more the exception than the norm. On the topic of transfers, Olivia had a follow-up, which was if more than one of her credit card programs transfer to the same airline, for example, Bilt and Capital One, and actually almost everyone is a transfer partner of Flying Blue, can she transfer 50,000 Bilt points and 50,000 Capital One points to the same Flying Blue account and make it 100,000?

And the answer is absolutely, which is actually one of the reasons I love Flying Blue, because they are a transfer partner of almost every credit card. So if you've earned some Capital One points and some Chase points, and you're trying to figure out how you can book, one option, which I always say is, well, you don't have to book the round trip from any specific program.

So if you have points and the best deal is to transfer your Chase points to United, you could transfer to United to book one way and then use your Amex points, which don't transfer to United, to transfer to another airline to book the return. But with Flying Blue, because they're a transfer partner of almost every credit card program, you can transfer points from all the programs into the same account and be able to book from there.

So yes, Olivia, you can do that. It's something I've done in the past. And I think it's a great way to take advantage of having miles across different accounts. And it's especially something to consider even if you have like a small balance somewhere. So if you have a card where maybe you only have 10,000 Amex points from a card and you're booking something, even though you might have all the points you need in your Chase account to transfer to Flying Blue, it might be a good opportunity to transfer out that balance and then top it up with whatever you need from your Chase account so that you can clear out the small balances.

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Now, sometimes you're actually short on miles, and Candy wrote in asking what to do because she wants to plan a trip to Spain in April, and she's 10,000 points shy of the round-trip fare for two. She knows she'll have the points by the time she goes, but she doesn't have them now, and she doesn't wanna necessarily wait.

So what is the workaround? Now, I don't know what airlines we're talking about or how many points she needs in total, but there are a few options depending on those things. So one is you could just buy the points. So let's say her trip is gonna be 150,000 points and she's 10,000 shy.

She could go and buy the extra 10,000 points on whatever airline it is. Now, that's not always gonna be the best deal. On United, for example, buying 10,000 miles would cost you $350 plus tax, but if that entire trip is going to be the kind of trip where you're gonna save two, three, four, five, or maybe it's in business class and you're gonna save 10 or $20,000, well, maybe the $350 to make it happen now without having to wait is worth it.

Another option is if you can find someone that can let you borrow the points. Now, transferring points to people can sometimes cost money, usually never as much as buying the points directly, but can also sometimes be free. So if you need an extra 10,000 Capital One points, you can actually transfer Capital One points from any cardholder to any other cardholder, whether they're related or not.

So if you're shy 10,000 Capital One points and you know someone that has them, you might be able to do that. To keep to the United example, transferring 10,000 miles to another person costs 150 instead of 350 to buy them, so that might be a better deal. So one option that might not work for everyone, but if you had the cashflow to be able to pre-buy things, so let's say you need an extra 10,000 points and you have an Amex Gold card, could you go to the grocery store and buy five $500 gift cards for retailers that you use regularly, whether it's Amazon, gas, groceries, anything that you know you're gonna spend.

I'm not recommending you buy gift cards that you don't need, but if you're able to buy five $500 gift cards, that's $2,500, you're getting four X points at the grocery store so you'd earn 10,000 points. Similarly, for example, if you had a card like the Capital One Venture X card and you were to put a payment to the IRS on, the fee that they often charge is a little under 2%, so for $10,000, you'd be paying a fee of about $200 to be able to put that purchase on your card and you would earn those 10,000 points.

So it really depends on which card and which way you wanna generate points, but those are a few of the options that you have right now. Last one on the points side is, I got an email from Sandra asking if I could review the PNC Points card and she was excited because it said it gives four points per dollar, which seems higher than every card, and wanted to know what I thought.

Well, I'll give the award to the PNC Points card for the most deceptive marketing because they say four points per dollar, which is great. In the average card, four points per dollar is an awesome return. However, when you look at the value of those points, they're anywhere from 0.1 to 0.3 cents per point, which on average, you're getting about 0.25 cents per point.

So you're earning four points per dollar, but those points are worth 25 cents, so you're earning about an average of 1% return. They do have some bonuses, depending on what kind of PNC account you have and how much money's in it, but at a maximum, you're gonna be earning effectively 1.75% back.

So for me, I'd much rather, at a minimum, use a 2% cash back card like the Citi Double Cash, or more realistically, I'd rather earn points, and a card like the Venture or the Venture X card is gonna earn you 2X points on everything, which means that at a minimum, it's effectively a 2% cash back card, so better than the PNC Points card.

But if you look at, for example, the Points guy values Capital One points at 1.85 cents. So if you're getting two points at 1.85 cents, you're effectively getting 3.7% cash back. So I'm a much bigger fan of almost every other card than this card, so don't fall prey to their marketing making you think you're getting four valuable points per dollar, because unfortunately, you are not.

And I've said this before, but I'll say it again, because I really appreciate all the support you guys give. If you're signing up for new cards and wanna support the show and me, go to allthehacks.com/cards and sign up for your card there. It really helps us out. That said, if you find a better bonus or your friend can refer you and you can get a better deal, I want you to have the most points possible, so do that instead, but if all deals are the same, allthehacks.com/cards would be greatly appreciated.

Now, moving on to a couple travel questions before we wrap up. The biggest one was from Diane and Drew, both trying to figure out how they can save money while they're traveling on data. So I'll give you guys a few options that I think are great. So one, there are a few carriers in the US, Google Fi and T-Mobile being the primary two, that actually include free international data.

So I believe Google Fi's data internationally is a little bit faster. I have a T-Mobile plan, and while the data's free internationally, it's a little bit slow, but keep in mind, I don't have a fancy T-Mobile plan. It's like a $20 a month, two gigabyte plan. I think if you have a fancier, unlimited plan, you'll probably get higher speed data while traveling.

So that's one option, but not everyone wants to switch their carrier. One of the things we do is we're on a Verizon family plan, and we're on the 5G Do More plan. And the thing I love about that plan is that every month, you get one free travel pass day on your Verizon account.

You can accrue up to 12. At 12, it caps off, but when we recently went to London, we each had accrued 12, and so fortunately, when we were in Paris and London for exactly 12 days, we just used our 12 travel pass days, so we were able to use our phones, we were able to do high speed data, and we didn't have to pay for anything.

Now, if you're gonna be traveling more than 12 days a year, it's not a great option because you'll run out of travel pass days. So on a trip to Europe last year, we actually searched on Amazon, and there's an orange SIM card you can buy that includes, I think it was 10 gigabytes of data and some texts and some phone calls for $38 and worked all over Europe.

And right now, I'm looking, and it looks like it actually includes 20 gigabytes right now, so you can get 20 gigs for $40. So that's one option that I think was great. The other is to use an eSIM. And I know that Diana actually tried this and had some struggles, so I reached out and asked people where the best eSIM store was.

And shout out to Paul Stamatow, a friend of mine, @stami on Twitter, who shared that the Arilow eSIM store was fantastic. So in his case, he actually got a 10 gig eSIM for Europe for only $16, and it worked great. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes, but the way it works is you used to have to buy a SIM card and actually physically put it in your phone.

And the orange SIMs I mentioned for Europe that you can buy on Amazon are that. It's a physical SIM card you have to put in. But with eSIMs, for a phone that supports it, you can actually add the SIM card to your phone without having to put anything in it.

So at any of these websites, you can actually sign up for a new carrier and get an eSIM and add it to your account and actually run it simultaneously alongside your main carrier. In fact, one thing I did just to give me the most option was I actually transferred my Verizon account from a physical SIM card to an eSIM.

And I did this actually last year because I bought this SIM card for going to Europe on Amazon. I wanted to be able to put it in my phone, but still have my Verizon account active, even though I'd turned data roaming off. So I definitely recommend if you want the most flexibility to transfer your domestic carrier onto your phone as an eSIM so you can free up the SIM card spot just in case you need it while you're traveling.

But now that it's so easy to get eSIMs around the world, especially at a marketplace like AeroLow, that would be my option. And that's probably what we'll do going forward if we're traveling any more than the 12 days we get for free each year with Verizon. Finally, I wanna talk about storing photos because Jordan asked what I do to organize, store, and manage your photos.

And frankly, I'll share what I do, but I would also love anyone who has a better suggestion because there are a few problems with the solution we have. So our current option, and we all have iPhones, is that we just have the two terabyte iCloud plan and we take all our photos, we store them all on our phone, and that's it.

It's super straightforward. Before that, I used Flickr and it was just a lot of hassle to manage because you have to get all your photos up there, you have to upload them. I felt like some of the data was getting lost, whether it was live photos or videos or the location data.

I haven't really tried Google Photos for a long time, so maybe this is the answer. But let me explain the biggest benefits and problems with the iCloud option. So the greatest thing is that everything's just super seamless. I take all my photos, it's great. We actually travel sometimes with a physical camera, I throw the SD card in, I import them to Apple Photos on my Mac, and all the photos show up there as well.

It's super simple. The one thing that's really frustrating, and I don't think I have a great solution, is that Amy, my wife, is always asking for my photos. And I wish there was some way that I could just give her access to the entire library so that I don't have to create a shared album every time and upload all the photos, and I don't think there's any easy way to do that.

So that is my one gripe. If there were a solution that made that easier, I would absolutely switch, because just recently we went to London and Paris, and Amy's asking me, "Where are all the photos?" And it seems so silly to create a shared album and transfer basically hundreds of photos into that shared album, but I don't think it necessarily uses extra space, so maybe that's just the answer.

But it's the best thing we've found so far, and it's what we're doing. Okay, I know there are a few other questions. If you emailed in and I haven't gotten to them, I will try to get to them in the future. If it's been more than a few months, please reach back out.

I might have lost the email, I might have forgot, but I really do try hard to respond to every single one of the questions you guys write in. Finally, before we wrap, if anyone has a Chase Freedom card, don't forget that it's Q1, and you can go activate 5X points.

This quarter, it's grocery stores, fitness clubs, gym memberships, and Target, so just a friendly reminder there. That's all for this week. See you next week. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)