(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. First off, happy holidays to everyone. And if you're new, I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm excited to have you here. Each week, you'll normally hear me talking to an expert about how they became world-class at optimizing an aspect of their life, or doing a deep dive myself on a topic I've been researching, or maybe just answering your questions, which by the way, I will be doing next week, so please send some in.

But given that it's the last episode of the year, I wanted to do something different and a little special. I wanna recap the 10 biggest takeaways and learnings I've had from the past 94 episodes, and the ones that I'm gonna be focusing on in my own life in the year ahead.

After that, I'm gonna share some of my top hacks from the year, as well as my favorite credit cards from 2022, based on my actual spending data. So let's jump in right after this. (upbeat music) Okay, so I wanted to do these takeaways in order, but someone managed to trick Amex Travel into putting $5,000 of flights on my credit card, so I just spent the last few hours trying to get my funds back, which it turns out will be easy, but also to make sure the scammers return flights, which happened to leave tonight, are canceled.

As all this plays out, I'll definitely share more, but given that I can see the full United info, David Weaverling and Ethan Butler, good luck getting back to Pittsburgh tonight, because your return flight was canceled. So while I didn't get to put these in a perfect priority, I did save my top two for last.

But takeaway number one is all about time. I've talked to a handful of people about time management and productivity, but the story that's really stuck in my head the most is from Laura Vanderkam in episode seven, where we talked about time management. To illustrate the point that we should stop saying, "I don't have time," she talked about what would happen if your water heater started flooding, and the three to four hours that would magically free up in your day so you could deal with the issue.

Ever since that episode, I've been trying to catch myself from saying, "I don't have time," and start realizing that if I don't have time, I'm either overcommitting or probably poorly prioritizing my day. I won't say that I've become a true expert here, but I'm getting a lot better, and I'm really excited to focus on this next year.

A few of the things that have been helpful for me are doing a calendar audit, which involved trying to be more diligent about tracking what I'm doing so that I could really review how I spent my time. Even if it's just for a week, it is so helpful to see how you actually spend the 168 hours you have each week.

The other thing I've been working on came from a great reminder from Brandon Turner in episode 82. He discussed how important it is to learn to drop the right balls and establish boundaries. Since then, I've been getting much better about saying no to meetings that I don't wanna prioritize and taking my time to follow up on things that really aren't at the top of the priority list.

One other tactic I've been trying is asking people to send me questions instead of schedule meetings. And I've suggested that they use a tool called Loom to record the conversation. That way, one, I can respond asynchronously on my own time, and two, I can actually speed up the video to 2X.

The third side benefit is that actually this forces some people to just give up and not actually try to schedule a meeting. So that's a tactic I've been using. I know that some of this prioritization means that some of you listening didn't get a reply to me as fast as I used to, but I'm working on finding a good balance and I still plan to reply to everyone.

Also, I just recorded an episode a couple of days ago that'll come out on January 18th with Dan Martell, who has a book coming out called "Buy Back Your Time." And it gave me so many good ideas on how I can be more intentional about spending my money as a trade-off for time in 2023.

So to summarize takeaway one is that I have plenty of time. I just need to get better about prioritizing it and saying no to things that are less important. Also, if you notice me mentioning all of the past episodes by number, like number seven with Laura Vanderkam, that's to make it really easy for you guys to go find them.

Either by scrolling through the feed in the app you're listening to this podcast right now, or if you go to allthehacks.com/seven or any episode number, it'll take you directly to the show notes page for that episode and the links on that page, at least the ones for Apple, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, should open exactly to that episode in the player app.

Okay, my second big takeaway is all about automating and simplifying your finances. It came up in episode 42 with Ben Carlson, 19 with Andy Ratcliffe, but the first thing I'll share is from Ramit Sethi in episode nine. He shared his money rules and I loved it. For him, they're things like never question spending money on books, appetizers, health, or donating to a friend's charity fundraiser, and always have one year of emergency funds in cash.

The idea of coming up with a few rules to simplify some financial decisions is so awesome. He also has one for business class on flights over four hours which I think just takes away the headache of trying to make a decision about when to upgrade. Though for me, four hours or any number of hours is probably not worth spending the dollars on business class, but if I can do it for points, I definitely will.

Amy and I actually had a conversation about this and we started putting a few rules together. One of the ones we have is discuss any purchase over $200 with each other, but I really wanna put together a more complete list next year that's more like the 10 rules Ramit has that I'll also link to in the show notes.

Another big thing for me was trying to simplify my finances. For the past five to six years, I've been building consumer finance apps, which has led me to open different banking and investment accounts at so many different institutions. But I realized that having my money spread out across so many different places made the whole process of money management more stressful than it needed to be.

Fortunately, my investments were easy because I'd already moved pretty much everything to Wealthfront and I have no plans to take it out now that I've left as an employee. I'm really happy to pay their nominal fee for software to manage my investments and my tax loss harvesting and rebalancing far more efficiently than I can.

Not to mention the peace of mind of just not having to think about it. So going into 2023, my goal is to get as simple as I can. Ideally, we have just one checking account, one high-yield cash account, one brokerage account, and then hopefully we can consolidate all our retirement accounts into four.

Two for each 401(k) where we roll over all our past employers' 401(k)s into those and two Roth IRAs. And while that might seem like a lot, I think at one point we had at least two dozen checking, savings, brokerage, and retirement accounts all with a balance in them. Then when it comes to saving each month, I'm really excited for the simplicity to make it even easier to automate.

I spent so much time at Wealthfront building a product called Autopilot because I really think that the easiest way to manage your finances is to just automate things. With Autopilot, you can say leave this much in checking, keep this much in an emergency fund, and move any excess to a series of accounts that you can set caps on, like your IRA, your 529, or just your taxable brokerage account.

If you want to check out Wealthfront, you should use my link at allthehacks.com/wealthfront. It'll be so nice to have everything simplified next year, but even nicer if we can set up those money rules and make our financial decision-making easier too. My next big learning was all about negotiating. Episode 17 with Kwame Christian, who runs the American Negotiation Institute, really was a masterclass in negotiation.

So I won't recap the whole episode, but one big takeaway is that negotiating can really be thought of as all about asking better questions and that those better questions will lead to a better result. So before you enter any negotiation, take the time to ask yourself what you want and why, ask yourself what the other side wants and why, and then write down all the open-ended questions you could possibly ask in the conversation.

Doing those three things is usually the best prep you can do for any negotiation. I also loved hearing Kwame's compassionate curiosity framework that he uses for every negotiation. It starts with acknowledging and validating the other side's feelings and emotions, then getting curious with compassion and asking them questions, which ultimately allows you to productively joint problem-solve to a resolution.

Now that I'm running a business full-time, I imagine I'll be much more involved in negotiations next year, so I'm excited to put some of this knowledge to work. Though I've actually been using the compassionate curiosity framework to negotiate with my two-year-old recently, and I've had some decent success. The other really important negotiation tactic I learned was from Andy Ratcliffe, who co-founded Wealthfront and Benchmark Capital, which, for those who don't know, was probably the most successful venture capital firm of all time.

And in episode 19, he shared the tactic he uses for every negotiation, which is to put the gun in the other person's hand, and if they fire, don't work with them. He explained that most people don't want to be thought of as taking advantage of others, and it works so well, and for the very small percentage of people that always ask for something well in excess of fair, you just walk away from negotiating with them.

So hopefully some of those lessons can help you negotiate next year, though definitely go back to episode 17 if you want to go deeper on this. For number four, I want to talk about regret. It turns out I had at least three episodes that either in part or in whole were about regret.

First, I talked to Ben Nimton in episode 37 about bucket lists, but his whole journey began after he learned that more than 75% of people at the end of their lives regret not living life on their own terms. And while we've all heard people say they have no regrets, I learned in an amazing conversation with best-selling author Dan Pink in episode 40 that regret is one of the most instructive emotions we have.

Naturally, every functioning person has regrets, and they're an essential part of our cognitive machinery. We talked about the four kinds of regret and how to manage them towards your own future happiness. For example, one of the biggest buckets of regret are regrets of boldness, not taking that bold action.

And Dan said the simple hack for preventing that is when you're trying to make a bold decision for yourself, stop framing it as what you're doing and ask yourself what you would advise a friend to do and act according to your advice. Finally, if you want to go deeper about regrets and start thinking about living a more purposeful life, definitely take a listen to my conversation with Jordan Grumman in episode 74, who happens to be a hospice doctor and personal finance writer.

So he brought a fascinating perspective on how purpose, identity, and connection can be so much more important in life than money. So what does all this mean for life and 2023? Well, I think in the same way that I want to be intentional with how I spend the hours of the day, I want to be intentional with big things too.

The way our family spends time together, the trips we take, the friends we hang out with, and a lot more. So Amy and I are really gonna spend some time over the next few weeks talking about what we want in our lives next year. I want to 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. And don't worry, I'm not talking timeshares, I'm talking about Picasso, and I'm excited to partner with them for this episode. So how does it work? Picasso buys amazing luxury homes in over 40 world-class destinations, creates an LLC for each home, and you can buy as little as 1/8th of the property.

But it doesn't stop there. Picasso also professionally manages the home, handling design, cleaning, bills, repairs, taxes, and more. And the scheduling system makes it fair and equitable for everyone to enjoy their home. When we found Picasso, it felt like it was made just for us. That same week, we found the perfect place in Napa, we toured it, and the next week we were closing.

Since then, it's truly become our second home, and it's been so amazing. And it's true real estate ownership. Owners can sell at any time, set their own price, and tap into Picasso's active marketplace of buyers. In fact, on average, Picasso listings resell in 12 days with a 12% annualized gain.

For a modern way to buy and own a second home, go to allthehacks.com/picasso, where our listeners will get a free Picasso Access account, which means you can see new listings before they go on the website and get up to $10,000 in credit towards closing costs. Again, that's allthehacks.com/picasso, P-A-C-A-S-S-O.

I used Daffy to organize all my giving and charitable tax savings in one place, and I'm excited to be partnering with them for this episode. Daffy is a new modern way to give that makes it so much easier to maximize your charitable deductions, especially before the December 31st deadline.

They do that by helping you set up a donor-advised fund, or DAF, which is a tax-advantaged account that lets you contribute cash or assets now, qualify for the tax deduction in 2022, and then gives you time and flexibility in distributing the money to the charities who need it. I love using Daffy because it makes it so easy to put money aside for charity, and my favorite part is that it lets you be more strategic with your giving and your tax planning by having a single source of charitable deductions.

Plus, you don't have to deal with the hassle of tracking receipts from your donations. To make all your tax-deductible donations before year-end in one place, go to allthehacks.com/daffy. Plus, for a limited time, if you visit that link, you can get a free $25 to give to the charity of your choice.

Again, that's allthehacks.com/D-A-F-F-Y. And on the topic of my relationship with Amy, takeaway number five is that we should all strive for an 80/80 marriage, at least those of us who are in a committed relationship. When I spoke with Nate and Kaylee Klemp in episode 43, it was fascinating to talk about how relationships have evolved from a traditional 80/20 relationship decades ago, where one partner, usually the woman, did all the work in the relationship and for the family, because the other was the breadwinner.

As things evolved, we got to a place more like 50/50, which is, I think, where most of us are today. Well, except for maybe those who already listened to episode 43. But the challenge with 50/50 is that so many couples end up keeping score of who's done more dishes or spent more time budgeting or done more kid's bedtimes.

And that kind of competition can be exhausting and certainly doesn't make for a better relationship. So after hundreds of interviews with couples, Nate and Kaylee coined the concept of an 80/80 marriage, where both partners assumed each other are doing the best and tried to pull more than 50% of the weight.

It takes time and practice to get it to work, but I can say that it's certainly been a welcome change for our relationship. In fact, I recently went back and re-listened to episode 43 so I could brush up in advance of 2023, because my relationship with Amy is something I really wanna focus on more now that we have two kids to manage every day as well.

And that episode had some great tactics for putting the concept of an 80/80 marriage into place. My sixth takeaway is short, but it's something I bring up all the time. And it's from an episode I've listened to multiple times. In fact, I've actually re-watched it on YouTube because I think the video adds a lot to the story.

That's episode 46 with Vanessa Van Edwards, and it's all about mastering the secret language of charismatic communication. I knew the first time I heard Vanessa explain her formula for charisma that I had to bring her on the podcast. In the episode, she shared so many great tactics for implementing the right balance of warmth and competence that I use almost every day.

For example, knowing that lots of emojis and exclamation points, both of which I use a lot, can drive a warmth. I either try to tone them down or maybe balance them out in an email where it makes sense to share some data or charts to increase my perceived competence.

Anyways, I won't recap the whole episode, but if your life or work relies on communicating with others, which I'm guessing it does, you should definitely check it out. And as much as I love talking about points and miles, I wasn't actually sure that there would be anything in this episode that made it to my top 10, but as I reflected on the year, I was wrong.

I've spent so much time trying to optimize for getting the most dollar per point value that I've been doing myself a huge disservice. In fact, while I know I'm very fortunate to have millions of points and miles, I'm actually realizing I should probably be more embarrassed that I'm not using them enough.

There've been plenty of times that I opted to pay for flights with cash instead of using points because it wasn't the most optimal redemption, even if it was a good one. Well, in episode 89, Tiffany Funk, who's overseen one of the biggest travel and points sites on the internet for over a decade, really helped me put things in perspective and form this takeaway number seven.

Not only did she remind me that you don't always need to get the perfect deal, but she busted a lot of myths I'd been adhering to about when to use your points. For example, it's long been talked about that the best use of points is on international business class flights, but she pointed out that there have been a lot of great domestic redemptions in the past few years as well.

So needless to say, in 2023, I hope we start burning down our points balance and stop searching for the perfect deal. Though let's be real, that'll be very hard, and I'm sure I'll still be searching for the perfect deal too. I hope I can just get comfortable taking a less perfect deal as well.

So stay tuned. Okay, number eight is a bit of a work in progress. In episode 85, I talked with Tiago Forte about building a second brain, and it was such a great episode that inspired me to change a lot of the ways I save and consume information. For example, I'm now saving so much of the content I find online to a read later app called Matter, which saves me time for three reasons.

First, I can batch together all my information consumption. Second, they do a great job at text to speech, so I can actually listen to those long Atlantic articles instead of needing to read them. But third, and maybe most importantly, at least 50% of the things I save lose their importance by the time I actually come back to them, which means that article that might have interrupted my day for 10 or 15 minutes is something I never end up reading, which is obviously a massive time saver.

But a read later app is just one of the ways I wanna get more serious about how I organize my digital life in 2023. I think with a little bit of intention and organization, especially when it comes to notes and tasks, I can really step things up next year, and I'm fairly certain I'll be re-listening to that episode in a few weeks because it was so good.

Okay, I said I was gonna save my two favorites for last, and while it's really impossible to call any two lessons or takeaways my top two, as I thought about all the learnings from the past year, there are two that really stood out. First was absolutely one of my biggest takeaways, and it's that I need to spend more time focusing on net fulfillment instead of net worth.

If you all listened to episode 91 with Bill Perkins a few weeks ago, you already know what I'm talking about. And if you didn't, I am tempted to say, just stop this episode now and go listen. I've already re-listened to it twice and have lost count of the number of people who said it was their number one episode.

For the past 10 years, I feel like I've gotten caught up in so many of the various aspects of the FIRE movement, which for those unfamiliar is financial independence, retire early, and it's led me to be very frugal and save a lot and focus on building my net worth.

And I'm fortunate for all that savings, but I also worry that there were times, especially before we had kids, now that that chapter is closed, where we opted to save instead of spend money on things that would have had a big increase in our fulfillment in life and where the memories of that experience would pay dividends for years to come.

I'm not saying anyone should be fiscally irresponsible or live at $0 in their bank account, but I just want to reframe the whole perspective on money and saving towards one where we want to find the right way to allocate our money across the entirety of our lives so that we end up at or close to zero when it's all done.

And this new perspective is one that I absolutely wasn't thinking about a few months ago. So what have I started doing differently? One, Amy and I are going to start thinking about what experiences we want to have over the next few years, both from the perspective that it's our last years in our 30s, but also that our kids will never be this young again.

Two, I want to try to ensure we can harvest the dividends of the memories we create. So I'm going to be more intentional about trying to make sure we take photos and videos as we have experiences in life. Third, I'm really going to start making decisions to try to maximize fulfillment.

We just did that with a trip to Europe, and while it wasn't the most perfect use of miles and points and there weren't any hotel deals we could book, we did it because we just knew it was an experience we wanted to have at this point in our life.

I'm sure there are so many more ways this will impact me in my life, and I will probably re-listen to that episode every few months, but it's one of my top learnings this year. And if you missed it, definitely scroll back to episode 91 with Bill Perkins and enjoy.

And finally, my takeaway number 10 is all about happiness, and it stemmed from episode 46 with best-selling author, Arthur Brooks. That episode was so good, I re-listened to it this morning, and I already have it queued up to listen again later this week, except I need to slow it down so I can take some notes.

So the first part of this takeaway is about how to define happiness, but instead of restating Brooks, I'll just play a clip here. Happiness is a combination of three. You might say they're macronutrients. You need enjoyment, you need satisfaction, and you need purpose. When I meet somebody who's not happy, I start looking diagnostically at these three things.

The first practical takeaway that comes from all this theory is that if somebody's like, "Ah, my life isn't complete. "Some things are good, some things aren't, "but I'm not really happy," it means there's a lack of balance in one of these things. Either you don't have enough enjoyment in your life, or you're actually not hitting goals, which means you don't have satisfaction, or you don't have a sense of purpose and direction in your life.

It's one of those three things. And so that's the first place to start looking if you feel like you're not where you wanna be in terms of your happiness. - That was such a great lesson for me, but just learning what happiness is isn't enough. We also talked about how to impact it.

And one of the biggest learnings I had came from understanding our fluid and crystallized intelligence curves. And for some quick context, fluid intelligence is your ability to process new information, learn, and solve problems, while crystallized intelligence is your stored knowledge that you've accumulated over the years. The big takeaway was that in our 20s and 30s, our fluid intelligence curve is at its peak, and we can rely and really thrive with it.

But as we move into our 40s and older, the tides start to shift, and our crystallized intelligence or wisdom starts to form, and realizing that and finding work that can harness it is really the key to happiness with our work for the next few decades. While it may seem obvious to some, it really helped me start to think about what I should be doing professionally and the next chapter of life.

And funny enough, I think transitioning to all the hacks full-time is really a reflection of wanting to shift and make a jump onto that crystallized intelligence curve. Honestly, I could keep going on this episode. We talked about how journaling can be one of the most valuable habits to start doing each day, which is something I'm gonna try to start doing next year.

And beyond journaling, we talked about the four things that you need to focus on each day, and I'll just play another clip instead of trying to say it myself. If you wanna be among the happiest people, they all do these things every day. They practice their faith or life philosophy.

You don't have to be religious. You just have something bigger than you that zooms you out on your own life. Life philosophy or faith or a spiritual practice gives you that uniquely. So it's meditation or prayer or studying the Stoics, whatever it happens to be, you gotta do your thing and you gotta do it seriously.

Second is family, the ties that bind and don't break. It's important that you not choose them, but that you have them for your happiness. And God knows in many cases we wouldn't choose them. The third is friendship. We have a major loneliness crisis in the United States. The average number of close friends that somebody 30 years old has has been cut in half in the past 20 years.

About half of people under 30 say that no one knows them well. It's horrible for every aspect of happiness. And part of the reason for that is that everybody knows how to make deal friends, but we know less and less how to make real friends. And the last is work.

And work doesn't mean working hard all night long. It doesn't mean making tons of money. It doesn't mean having prestige. It means exactly two things. Earning your success, meaning your skills meet your passions, and serving other people, the people who need you. If you earn your success and you're serving other people, I don't care if you're an electrician or a librarian or a podcast host or a Harvard professor, you will be happy from your work.

And if you don't have those things, you won't be happy from your work. Faith, family, friends, and work are the big four. So I could keep going, but instead you should just go back and listen to episode 47 with Arthur Brooks. It is chocked full of great advice and tactics to be happier in 2023.

And I, for one, am going to be putting a lot of that into action next year. All right, it was so hard to try to narrow everything I've learned down to just 10 things. And unfortunately there were so many great things that didn't make the cut. Since I'm not working at a company anymore, I left off a few episodes from this list because they're not big takeaways for me right now.

But if you are working for a company and especially in a leadership role, you should definitely go check out three episodes, number 39 with submarine commander, David Marquet, number 57 with Navy SEAL commander, Mike Hayes, and number 90 with product builder extraordinaire, Lenny Ruchitsky. But if you think that there's an important takeaway or lesson that I missed, I would love to hear from you because I'm always curious what you think.

But that's enough lessons and takeaways for now. Let's also talk about the best hacks from 2022. You all know I love credit card points. So I'm excited to be partnering with Card Pointers today, which is one of my favorite tools for travel hacking. It's a free app that helps you manage all of your credit cards in one place and makes it easy to find the right card to maximize your category bonuses on every purchase.

You can also load it on your partner's phone so they always know the best cards to use. The app automatically tracks every category bonus and recurring credit from over 5,000 cards. And they also track and help you use your Amex, Chase, Bank of America, or Citibank offers to save even more money every day.

And with their browser extension, you can actually activate every single Amex and Chase offer in just one click. And because of that massive credit card database, you can do all of this without having to give up any personal or banking details. The app is free to download and many of the features are free as well.

But if you wanna try out the pro version, there's a free trial. And if you decide you wanna sign up after the trial, which you probably will, you can go to allthehacks.com/cardpointers to get 20% off. Again, that's allthehacks.com/cardpointers. Getting the crew together isn't as easy as it used to be.

I get it, life comes at you fast, but trust me, your friends are probably desperate for a good hang. So, kick 2024 off right by finally hosting that event. Just make sure you do it the easy way and let our sponsor Drizzly, the go-to app for drink delivery, take care of the supplies.

All you need to come up with is the excuse to get together. It doesn't even have to be a good one. It could be your dog's birthday, that the sun finally came out, or maybe you just wanna celebrate that you got through another week. With Drizzly, you can make hosting easy by taking the drink run off your to-do list, which means you can entice your friends to leave their houses without ever leaving yours.

And since I know you like a good deal, Drizzly compares prices on their massive selection of beer, wine, and spirits across multiple stores. So, when I really wanted to make a few cocktails while we were hosting family last week, not only could I get an Italian Amaro delivered in less than an hour, but I found it for $15 less than my local liquor store.

So, whatever the occasion, download the Drizzly app or go to drizzly.com. That's D-R-I-Z-L-Y.com today. Must be 21 plus, not available in all locations. I just wanna thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com/deals.

So, please consider supporting those who support us. Coming in at number one has to be the hack that's resulted in the most emails from you all, which is booking a hotel directly and emailing them to tell them you're excited to stay. Big thanks to Lee Rowan for sharing it in episode one and Julia Menez for sharing it alongside a template for doing it in episode 55.

I've heard from over a hundred listeners about using this hack to get upgrades, bottles of wine, free food, vouchers for drinks at the bar, free parking, and maybe most ridiculously, pillows embroidered with initials on them. So, I hope that this hack continues to bring you upgrades and more in 2023.

And if you're new and want more details about it, definitely go back and listen to episode one or episode 55. Next is probably the second most popular hack I've heard from listeners about, and that's finding free unclaimed money that you're owed on your state's unclaimed money website. I think the biggest winner was a listener who found over $1,000 for her and her family, but I've had dozens of people find over $100 and countless people who found at least $20.

So, if you haven't checked yourself, definitely do that. And if you're with friends or family for the last few days of the year, and you can look them up and surprise them at dinner with free money, then surely that would make a great holiday gift for them. So, two more travel hacks that have been awesome.

One, taking the main photo from a vacation rental on Airbnb or VRBO and doing a reverse image search to find it on other and probably more cheaper sites. This one is great. I did use this tactic in Paris and found an alternative site to book a place we were considering for 20% less.

Big shout out to Lee Rowan for sharing that all the way back in episode one, which is still the all-time most popular episode in this podcast and definitely worth a listen if you like travel hacks. Two, for rental cars, AutoSlash has saved me and countless listeners hundreds of dollars.

I actually interviewed the CEO, Jonathan, in episode 66, and I think it was effectively a masterclass on getting deals on car rentals. So, before you book your next rental car, or even if you already made a reservation, at a minimum, check out AutoSlash, but probably go back and listen to all of episode 66.

Okay, this next hack is one I used earlier today, and it's a trick I learned from Nir Eyal in episode 25, where we talked about distraction and how you can become indistractable. For me, it was a hack for saying no to delicious, unhealthy food in the house. The trick is not to say no, but to give yourself permission to have it in five minutes.

By then, you've almost always moved on to something else and have lost your craving, and this morning, it resulted in me eating at least one or two less molasses cookies, which I will call a win. Continuing on the health side are two hacks from my episode with the host of the Healthier Together podcast, Liz Moody.

First is taping your mouth shut at night. It sounded crazy to me and probably took six months to actually try it, but I am sold. The team at Hostage Tape sent me their mouth tape a few weeks ago, and I've been using it almost every night. I feel like I breathe better and my mouth doesn't get as dry at night.

The second is cold showers. I did it for 30 days straight, but I will be honest, I haven't been as consistent since. However, I wanna get this trend back up again in 2023, because when you start your day with a cold shower or a cold plunge, I just feel like anything else that comes your way is so much more manageable.

Another hack on the health side is that you should never pay the first healthcare bill you get, and that's for so many reasons that I learned when I fractured my foot and got shingles all in a few months. Thanks to reporter Marshall Allen, who actually wrote the book on fighting back against medical bills and winning, who joined me on episode 34, I was armed with the knowledge I needed to save thousands of dollars.

I was amazed at the inaccuracies of some of these medical bills that I took the time to review. It was crazy that just by pushing back, I got my insurance to cover bills that they wouldn't cover at first. And the most wild thing was that some of the bills you get in the mail aren't actually bills.

I'm not kidding. It is perfectly legal for someone to send you a letter that looks like a bill, but it's actually just a request that if you wanna pay them the extra beyond what your insurance company has paid them, you can. That happened for me with a $300 medical boot that my insurance only covered for $75, and the letter I received made it seem like I owed the difference, but the reality was I didn't owe anything at all.

It is all a total racket, and if you wanna learn more or get help fighting back on any of your medical bills, either check out episode 34 or just reach out directly to Marshall Allen. He loves helping people in these situations. So not quite health-related, but definitely a brain hack is for remembering things.

If you already know how to build a memory palace, then you can skip ahead a few seconds, but it was so fascinating to talk to two-time world memory champion Johannes Malo in episode 30 about the tactics he uses to memorize everything from lists to names to numbers, and they're all skills he taught himself later in life, so you can easily pick them up too.

That episode was so fun and a bit interactive, so I hope you enjoy it. And finally, my last hack to share today is a fun one from Nick Gray, and it's to stop inviting people over for dinner and start hosting cocktail parties. It's so much easier. You don't need food.

You can put a two-hour hard stop on the event and kick people out. It lets you spend time with more people in a shorter window, and all around is just more fun. While my All the Hacks event in San Francisco probably bent the rules for an easy cocktail party, it was so fun, and I look forward to doing more events and cocktail parties in 2023, so definitely check out episode 68 with Nick Gray to hear about his formula for the perfect cocktail party.

All right, there were obviously so many more hacks than I included above, so if you want more, there's almost a hundred episodes of the show to go listen to and a few dozen newsletters that you can check out at allthehacks.com/email. But to wrap up this episode, I wanted to run through my top credit cards for 2022.

I looked at my spending summary for the year, and it was really dominated by four cards that have become my main four for non-business expenses. First is the Amex Gold, which is my dining/grocery card, which happens to be a lot of my credit card spending this year, and I'd say it was pretty optimal using it because 98% of the points I earned on that card were in those 4X bonus point categories.

Obviously, I'd love to have it at 100, but 98's pretty good. Next up is the Chase Sapphire Reserve, which is my primary travel card, but also gets used for dining when I forget to bring my Amex or in the rare case Amex isn't accepted. And I did slightly worse here, only getting 92% of my spending in the bonus category, so need to work on that a little.

The reserve annual fee is 550 versus the preferred at 95, but if you deduct 300 for the easy-to-use travel credit, then at 250, you're paying an extra $155 for the reserve. So if you value chase points at one and a half cents, then you probably need to be spending at least $10,000 on travel to make it worth earning three points on travel instead of 2X on the preferred.

For me, the trip to Paris and London at the end of the year put me just over that threshold, but it was close. Third up is the Chase Amazon Prime Visa. I don't even wanna think about how much we spent on Amazon and Amazon Fresh this year, but I can tell you that the 5% back was definitely enough to make it worth having this no annual fee card.

Not to mention that for this one, we hit 100% on keeping spend only to the 5% back categories, but that's easy because it's all on Amazon. Now, I'm not usually a cash back person, but when it's 5% cash back versus 2X points, I'll take the 5% all day as long as the spending is enough, which unfortunately was definitely the case for Amazon this year.

There are a handful of other cards that offer similar cash back on other categories, but they're usually either categories like travel, dining, or groceries, where I can get three to four points, or categories like gas or streaming service, where I just don't spend enough to make it worth the effort.

And finally, what probably should have been the first, but is easier to explain at the end, is the Capital One Venture X, which is the de facto card for everything not in one of the categories I mentioned above. And it happens to be the only card I actually carry everywhere, if you don't include Apple Pay, which lets me carry all the cards.

Building up some Capital One points was certainly beneficial because I was able to use them to transfer to Turkish Air and get an amazing deal back home from London this year. Also, Amy and I actually both opened up a Venture X this year to get the signup bonus, and we were trying to decide whether we keep it open.

While the $395 annual fee is steep, if you just look at the $300 travel credit and the 10,000 point annual bonus, it's kind of a wash, so it's probably worth keeping open, but the travel credit does require booking in the portal, so it's a little bit of work. That said, as I was recording this, I realized that to avoid the annual fee, you either need to downgrade before the fee posts, which is too late for us, or cancel a card without downgrading, which I don't wanna do.

So I actually think we'll probably just keep it open for another year, which is fine, giving the credits. So those are my top four cards this year. I still use the Amex Platinum for booking flights, Bonvoy and Hilton cards if we stay at those hotels, and my Chase Freedom if any of our spend falls in one of their quarterly 5X point categories, but those are all such a tiny fraction of our spend that I didn't include them.

And on the business side, the majority of my spend is either on the Chase Inc Business Preferred for business travel or the Capital One Spark Cash Plus card, which while it's marketed as a 2% cash back card, is actually a 2X points card if you also have a miles earning card with Capital One.

And if you're interested in any of those cards, or really any cards at all, please consider signing up for them at allthehacks.com/cards where every signup helps me and the show out. Assuming it's the same offer you find elsewhere online, it shouldn't cost you a thing. That said, one, please do not sign up for a card just to help me out.

It's only if you're already signing up. And two, if you do find a better bonus somewhere, which while rare, may happen if you have a targeted mailer or referral offer, by all means, optimize for getting the most points you can. (upbeat music) That is it for this final episode of 2022.

I cannot believe how far all the hacks has come this year. And even more, I can't believe that it's now my full-time job. It is such an honor and a privilege to get to do this for you all each week. So thank you so much for listening and supporting me and the show.

I hope your 2022 comes to an incredible end. And I am so excited for everything that lies ahead in 2023. Happy New Year to you and all of your families. I will see you next week. Oh, and if you wanna help push a bad review further down the list, I would love a quick positive review on Apple Podcasts.

Thanks so much. (upbeat music) (birds chirping)