(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks. I'm Chris Hutchins, I'm excited you're here. Two weeks ago, I did an episode that was a bit of a combination of questions you've sent in, hacks you've shared, some takeaways from some recent trips I've taken, some of the latest deals on points and miles, and honestly, there was so much good content to cover that I didn't even get to the questions about money and a lot of the other categories in life, and we focused mostly on travel.

So today, I wanna do another similar episode, but dive into a lot of money and life questions. Things like where to put cash, whether it's T-bills, high-yield savings, CD ladders, even things like Wealthfront's new bond portfolio, for anyone who had iBonds, what to do about them, when to sell them.

I'll talk a little bit about some bank bonuses, which actually could be a compelling alternative to earning interest, share some hacks from listeners, and then on the life side, I've got a few fun things on food, especially on how to save money on meat. I've also done a really big deep dive on cell phone plans.

I've gotten a lot of questions from you all that I wanna dive into, and then a few other hacks on personal data, photo storage, and a lot more, but to kick us off, I wanna share a few wins that listeners have sent in. So the first came in as a review on Apple Podcasts from Timit687.

Thanks for writing that review. I really appreciate these reviews. I'm gonna start highlighting them, so if you wanna write them in with something interesting in the topic, I'd love to share them on the show. I just wanna give him a shout out. He started listening to this show about three months ago, and he's already earned over half a million points.

He's already taken two free trips and more to come. I wish I had your contact info, because I would ask you how you earned those points so I could share more to everyone here, but great work there. So glad you've been able to take so many trips. Really excited for you.

Next was from Brian, who was staying at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. He did what I've always recommended, book directly with the hotel, email them in advance, let them know he's coming and how excited he is for the trip, and while he didn't actually get an upgrade this time, he ended up getting champagne, nuts, chocolates, and free desserts at all his meals at the hotel, which was amazing.

And finally, Drew was on a hybrid personal work trip where the work part got canceled and he needed to book a flight home himself. The cheapest flight out there was about $400, but he found the same flights on American Airlines' website for only 7,500 points, which ended up being over five cents of value per point, which is an amazing option.

For those who don't know, American Airlines miles are some of the hardest to come by. The main ways to get them are flying American, signing up for an American Airlines credit card, or getting a Bilt card, because Bilt is the only transferable point that transfers to American. It's one of the reasons I'm so happy to have Bilt points because American has such great value in so many cases and they're just so hard to come by.

If you're interested in the Bilt card, which, by the way, also lets you earn points on rent, three points per dollar on dining, and two per dollar on travel, you can go to allthehacks.com/bilt and check out that card. Those are a couple quick wins I wanted to share, so let's jump into the topic of money right after this.

(upbeat music) So first off, as much as this is a topic that's come up quite a few times, I feel like changes in the market affect the answer enough that it's worth addressing again. And it's the question of what to do with cash. And I'll define what to do with cash as what to do with money that you think you need in less than five years, because for me, long-term savings, things I don't need to touch for five years, I put in my Wealthfront Investment account, invest it in the market.

But for short-term money that I wanna earn a return on, I feel like there are a few options. The traditional option that I think many people have done in the past is high-yield savings accounts, but there's also CDs and treasury bills, which have been really popular lately. The way I think about it is, ultimately, I'm looking for a combination of return, but actually after-tax return, because there are some tax benefits of some of these options, but I'm also looking for liquidity and ease of use.

So I'll start with high-yield savings. It's typically the easiest option because it's transferring money into an account. There's no buying, there's no trading, there's no locking up. Obvious downside is that you're not locking in any rates. So if rates were to change, your interest rate would change immediately. For high-yield savings, there are so many options.

I'll link to a post from Doctor of Credit, which has a list of every high-yield savings option compared. Personally, I keep all of my high-yield savings cash in my Wealthfront cash account. If you have an individual cash account at Wealthfront, there's a big advantage that you can also do a lot of things you can't do in most high-yield savings accounts, which is you can do bill pay, you can take money out from an ATM.

It functions very much like a checking account and has all the typical checking features. And so you can use that account to direct deposit your paycheck, to pay your bills and do everything normally, and still earn high yield. So from a simplicity standpoint, I think the individual cash account at Wealthfront is great.

If you sign up with a link at allthehacks.com/wfcash, for the first three months, you'll get an additional 50 basis points, meaning the 4.8% rate they are marketing will get bumped up to 5.3. That's not my referral link. Actually, it's the referral link from All The Hacks members. It's a unique link that any member who sent in their referral link, it cycles through them randomly.

So you'll be supporting other All The Hacks listeners by using that link. But if you wanna add your links and you're an All The Hacks member, send it to me. If you're not, check out allthehacks.com/join. Now, I think high yield savings accounts might be the easiest, but if you want a little bit higher return, CDs and treasuries are an option that I think a lot of people have been talking about lately.

Depending on the day you look at it, CDs and treasuries might have the same rate, one might be slightly better, one might be slightly worse. The durations are not exactly the same, but I think they're very similar. I think CDs have an advantage of being a little simpler because you just put the money in your bank, it's very clear how it all works, and treasuries feel a little bit more complicated.

If you buy them directly from an auction, that process can feel overwhelming. You can buy them on the secondary market through your brokerage firm, which makes it a little easier, or you can even just buy an ETF that holds them, something like SGOV, or you can even buy a mutual fund, a money market fund that holds treasuries as well, like VUSXX.

So I think those are the options out there. I have a slight edge for treasuries because I live in California, we have high state taxes, and treasuries are state tax exempt. So that gives a return boost because I'm not paying an extra 10% of taxes on the return from those treasuries.

As for whether you want to buy the ETF or buy the treasuries directly at auction or buy them in the secondary, I'm gonna leave that up to you. But if you have a specific term in mind and you wanna lock that interest rate in, you can directly buy those specific duration treasuries.

So you could buy a one-year treasury and lock in that rate for one year. So if you have a specific duration in mind, that can make sense. But if you just wanna park money, you don't have a duration in mind, you live in a high tax state, so you appreciate that state tax exemption for treasury bills, putting it in an ETF or a money market fund that invests in treasuries is not gonna be that different of an outcome, certainly correlated the same, and might be a lot easier for you.

The one that I've used is SGOV, but there are a lot of other ones out there, so feel free to take a look. Similarly, I got a question from Dan about CD laddering, and he's looking at some options there. The way a CD typically works is you can invest an amount of money, get a return, but you agree to lock it up for a certain period of time.

But if you do need to take that money out early, you'll probably forfeit some number of months of interest as a penalty. But if you're someone who likes to lock up that interest rate for a long period of time, you could buy a five-year CD and know that you're gonna get that return for five years, which is a pretty compelling thing for people who don't wanna take any interest rate risk, but it means you don't have access to that cash without some form of penalty earlier.

And when interest rates change in the future, you have a little bit of risk that at that point in time when you're reinvesting, rates have gone down. And so you're concentrating the entire reinvestment risk, if it were a five-year CD, at that five-year mark. So one option is called CD laddering, which the end outcome would be, and I'm gonna use one example of doing it over five years, the end goal would be to end up with five-year CDs, but that start every five years so that every year you're reinvesting 20% of your money and you're spreading out that reinvestment risk, and then also every year, you get the chance to take out 20% of your money without having a penalty.

And so the way you would implement that is you would buy a one, two, three, four, and five-year CD now, and in the end of one year, buy another five-year CD with that money, and then the end of two years do the same thing until you've got rolling five-year CDs every single year.

I think if you're someone who likes taking less interest rate risk, someone who likes to lock in that interest rate for five years, maybe wants a little more liquidity, and wants to spread out that reinvestment risk over five years, instead of knowing that every five years you're gonna lock that up, that could make sense.

For me, as much as I would love to lock in a great rate for five years, I don't like locking my money up for that long, so it's not a product I've played with. I don't have a strong opinion for or against it, but I think you need to be someone who really wants to lock interest rates in for a long time, not need access to capital for a long time, and want to spread out your reinvestment risk for it to make sense.

But speaking of locking your rate in for a while, if you are someone who has a very, very defined need for money, let's say I need $100,000 in 12 months, and you know you don't need access to that money, that's where I think it could make sense to use a product like a one-year treasury bill or a one-year CD, because you can lock that interest rate in and not have to worry, because let's say the market corrects and rates go down lower and lower, you will be in a place to continue to get that interest no matter what, so you can plan on it.

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And while I haven't used it yet, I will take a little bit of time to explain my quick thoughts. So first off, the idea of the product was, what exists between a stock investing account and cash? What if I don't wanna take all the risk of investing in the stock market, but I wanna take a little bit more risk for a little bit more return than just investing in cash or treasury bills or cash-like alternatives?

So Wealthfront created an automated bond portfolio that has some of the same features, tax loss harvesting, automated rebalancing, as the investment account, but it targets a higher yield than cash and a much lower volatility. So right now they say that they target a 3% volatility. It's an interesting product that I haven't quite figured out how it fits in my world.

One advantage is that some of those bonds being held are in treasuries and U.S. government securities. So you do get a tax benefit there if you live in a state with high state taxes. But I had a conversation with my old co-founder about how to think about this. And the point he made was that high-yield bonds are very similar to regular bonds, except for the fact that you're also taking a little bit of risk in the company, which is essentially similar to equity risk.

His perspective was he would be more interested in just taking a smaller percentage of equity risk instead of having a entire portfolio of bonds with some corporate bonds and high-yield bonds. What if you just made a portfolio that was 90% treasuries and 10% stocks? And we were trying to figure out why that wasn't an obvious thing that people did.

And we came to the conclusion that high-yield bonds actually have a marketed yield. So because there is a yield, like a 30-day SEC yield for corporate bonds and high-yield bonds, you're actually able to create a number that you can use to market the return of the portfolio, which Wealthfront does and shows a 5.75% blended 30-day yield on the website.

You can't do that with stocks. Stocks don't have an advertised yield. So I actually think one of the reasons that this product is a little easier is you can just explain what that risk reward looks like in an easier way than you could with a 90% government bond, 10% equity portfolio.

Functionally, they're probably a little bit similar, but the argument was if you want risk, go for equities. If you want stable income, go for government securities, and maybe don't do something in the middle. I don't have much more that I could add on the automated bond portfolio right now, but by no means do I think it would be a bad investment decision to use a product like this.

Certainly lots of smart investors out there are investing in corporate bonds, high-yield bonds, so it's not a product that I think someone would be crazy to use, but I just have to ask myself if I do want more risk than cash, and by cash, I mean treasuries and CDs and high-yield savings, I could just put some of the money in equities and not try to create something in between, but for some people, I think it's just much easier to have an automated thing that fits that kind of middle ground and not need to go buy some equities and combine them with another portfolio, potentially in another account or another brokerage firm.

So hopefully that helps to make sense of everything I talked about, but I did actually wanna go to a completely different idea, which is a little bit more work, but might actually result in a higher return for cash, and that's bank bonuses. So Tyler wrote in saying he got a $750 bonus for parking $15,000 in a U.S.

bank account for 60 days. Now, if you look at that return, $750 on $15,000 is a 5% return, but getting that in about two months instead of 12 months means that the effective annual rate is 30%. So if you want to earn the highest amount of yield on your cash, and you're willing to go through the hoops of opening up a new account, transferring your money there, and earning interest in the form of leaving that money there and getting a bonus and closing the account, I think it seems like that actually might be one of the best options.

And I looked through a few other options. There are a ton of banks that offer cash bonuses for opening up checking and savings accounts. I actually worked with a company called Bank Bonus to set up a site to find them all and sort them. So if you go to allthehacks.com/bankbonus, you can see all the different bonuses.

And the way I would think about it is take the bonus, divide it by the balance you need to maintain to get the interest rate you're gonna get, but then divide that interest rate by the number of days you need to have it in the account and multiply it by 365 to get an effective annual interest rate.

So on one hand, I look at this and I think, wow, it's a great way to get a 30% return on cash, but you're only getting it for 60 days. And a lot of these bonuses are for accounts where you can put 10 or $20,000 in, but it's not an unlimited amount.

If you had $20,000 and you wanted to earn the most interest you could in a year, you'd probably have to open up five or six accounts across the year and you'd be okay. But if you had $200,000, you need to open up somewhere between 30 to 60 accounts throughout the year, which is just too much work for me and I imagine most people to earn that extra return.

Now, because I mentioned how much I love American Miles, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about one other bank bonus, which comes from Basque Bank, who I have an account at. And the difference between Basque Bank and other banks is that they pay their interest in American Airlines Miles, which as I mentioned earlier, are very hard to get.

And the offer that they have is if you deposit $50,000 and they have lower tiers as well, you earn 20,000 American Airlines Miles after you've kept that money in there for 180 days. But on top of that, you also earn 2.5 miles per dollar per year. So if you put $50,000 in for 180 days, you're gonna earn a little over 81,000 American Airlines Miles.

So what's 81,000 American Airlines Miles worth? Depending on who you ask, well, if you're able to get the value that Drew was, it's worth about $4,000. But if you look at the PointsGuys valuations, which is about 1.6 cents per point, it's about $1,300. Now, if you put that same $50,000 just in the Wealthfront Cash account, earning 4.8%, you'd get about $1,200.

So in this case, you're not actually getting that much more value. Now, if you factor in taxes, it probably goes up a little higher because they actually value the miles for tax purposes at 0.42 cents per mile, which is much lower than the 1.6 cents per point we talked about earlier.

So your tax bill on that will be a little smaller than your tax bill would be if you had earned cash. But at the end of the day, this is not really gonna be an option to earning a much higher return as much as it is an option to earn a type of point that is much harder to get.

Okay, I think that covers a lot of the options related to cash. The one follow-on to that that I'll include is about I-bonds. In the past, we've talked on the show about buying I-bonds because when inflation was high, you could earn a yield as high as 9.62%, and that was locked in for six months.

But inflation has dropped, and Nathan wrote in asking, "When do we actually sell these I-bonds?" He sent a good article, and so I thought I'd just help anyone who bought I-bonds think about how to do this, and I'll explain it with the example of how I'm thinking about it.

So I bought my first batch of I-bonds in December 2021, and the way that works is that the interest rate on those I-bonds adjusts every December and June. So for the first six months, I was earning a little over 7%. The next six months, I was earning 9.6%, then 6.4%.

And finally, starting in June 2023, that interest rate dropped to 3.38%, which is much lower than I can get elsewhere, and I would normally like to take that money out. However, the way I-bonds work is that if you take your money out before five years are up, you lose the last three months of interest.

So what I wanna do is make sure that I lose three months of the 3.38% interest, not three months of the 6.48% interest. So for me, that means I'm gonna let June, July, and August, those first three months of earning 3.38%, be those months that I don't wanna earn interest on, and on September 1st, in a few days, I'm gonna withdraw all of the funds from that first I-bond investment.

I bought another tranche of I-bonds in April 2022. Those adjust every April and October. October this year is when that rate will drop to 3.38, or whatever the rate is at the time, and I'll leave it in there for October, November, December, and take it out in January 2024.

There's a great blog post that I'm gonna link to in the show notes that will show you exactly if you bought them this month, this is probably the month you'd wanna sell them, if you wanna follow a similar strategy to what I'm doing, so that's really helpful. So hopefully for anyone who has I-bonds that's trying to figure that out, this will make it a lot easier.

On the topic of money, I've got a couple quick things. First, thank you, Russ, for writing in. Russ shared that most people don't realize they can negotiate a mortgage rate directly with their broker. So his hack is to get a rate quote from three to four lenders, then pick the broker he likes best, and ask them to beat the lowest rate with the lowest fees to get your business.

It got him a 2.75 rate for 30 years, obviously much earlier when rates were a lot lower, and he also got some lender credits towards closing, so definitely can't hurt to ask, and probably a good strategy in today's market. Next, I wanna talk a little bit about auto insurance.

I've done a whole episode on it, it was episode number 104, but interestingly enough, our USAA auto policy just came up for renewal, and it went from about $1,700 every six months, and it went up over $750 over six months. When I first saw this, I was so frustrated, because we spent all this time trying to get the best rate, and here it is going up almost 40% by $750 every six months, by what would ultimately be over $1,500 a year.

And so I called USAA, big credit to them for picking up my phone call at 7.30 in the evening, and helping me understand that when their policies renew, if you specify lower than the average mileage amount, sometimes you need to re-specify your mileage amount. So the default is 12,000 miles a year, but we had had our policies set up for our two cars at 3,500 and 5,000 miles per year each, so when I regave them those numbers, all of a sudden the rate went back down almost $670, so the rate had ultimately only really gone up $100 for the six-month policy, which was such a relief.

So two important things. One, if you drive less than 12,000 miles a year on any of your vehicles, you really should be telling your insurance company, and if you've already told your insurance company, make sure you keep it updated every single year. Finally, if you do have a Tesla, I highly recommend you sign up for Teslify.

I'll get a free month if you use my link, which is allthehacks.com/teslafi. It's $5 a month, and it's basically an entire web dashboard for your car. Yes, you have to authorize your car data to Teslify. There is a complicated way that you could build this all yourself with the Tesla API, but ultimately you get access to all your car's information online, and that means all the drives, all the history, how energy-efficient it was, odometer readings.

So when I wanted to make sure that I was giving USAA an accurate reading of how many miles we used for the car, I was actually able to go into this dashboard and say how many miles did we use in the last 12 months and see the exact odometer readings, which, kind of crazy, were within three or 4% of the estimates I gave USAA.

So you can also do a bunch of other interesting stuff like tag your rides business and personal, get access to your charging, and even if you give them the right authorization, you can control your car in certain ways from the web and set up rules to do different things.

It's really cool. Definitely recommend checking it out if you're a Tesla owner and like to nerd out on data, and especially because you get an easy way to track your odometer readings. While we're on the topic of cars, I definitely wanna let everyone know that two episodes ago when I talked about a hack by renting an electric car and not having to pay to refuel the car because they didn't charge for it, it turns out that my experience does not match reality.

So thanks to Zach, Tyler, and Robert for reminding me that was not the case. Hertz does have a fee if you bring your car in below 70%. They charge $35. A lot of other companies do something similar. So I was completely mistaken. I very much apologize for it. I did look back at my Hertz receipt and when I picked up the car, it said it was at eight of eight charge when I dropped it off, even though it was at about 40%, it said it was at eight of eight charge.

So I had assumed that was not the case. I'd had another friend have a similar experience, but it turns out that you actually need to with Hertz return it above 10%, but anything below 70 and you're gonna have to pay that $35 fee. So not a hack for anyone.

Definitely don't recommend trying to return your car with less unless you're willing to pay the fee, which honestly, when you're renting a car, having to go find a charger and then sit and wait to charge probably just isn't worth it. And you still do have to pay for that charge as well.

When it comes to building wealth, taxes are such a big part of the strategy. And even if you've already filed, being proactive about this year to lower your future liability is so important. And now that I'm working with Gelt, I finally feel like I have a partner I can trust to handle everything for my business and personal taxes.

And I'm excited to partner with them for this episode. Think of Gelt as the ultimate modern CPA. They not only offer an amazing tech platform that gives you personalized guidance to maximize deductions, tax credits and savings, but also everything is backed by an in-house team of expert CPAs who can recommend the most effective tax strategies to minimize risk and grow your wealth.

And best of all, you can have this transparent, open communication with your team in whatever way works best for you, whether that's on their platform, over email, in Slack or scheduling a call. Finally, my favorite story is that when we first onboarded with Gelt, they reviewed our past returns and found a huge mistake our prior CPA had made.

So they refiled and got us back all that money. So if you're ready for a more premium, proactive tax strategy to optimize and file your taxes, you have to check out Gelt. And as an All The Hacks listener, you can skip the wait list and get started today. Just head to allthehacks.com/Gelt, G-E-L-T.

Again, that's allthehacks.com/G-E-L-T. Now that we have three people working full-time on All The Hacks, it's more important than ever to have a central place for everything we're doing, whether that's planning episodes, tracking projects, recording listener questions, or really anything else. And for us, that place is Notion, who I'm so grateful to have as our sponsor today because I truly love the product.

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Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com/allthehacks. That's all lowercase letters, notion.com/allthehacks to try out the incredible power of Notion AI today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. Try Notion AI for free right now at notion.com/allthehacks. I just wanna thank you, Kwik, 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. So now I wanna jump through a bunch of awesome hacks people have shared with me and a few things that I've been noticing that are really across the board.

The first one's a little bit personal. So about a year ago, I went through a pretty crazy period of time where I went deep on everything security, identity protection. I published episode 78 and it was my action list of everything you can do to protect your identity, your accounts, credit, and family.

If you haven't listened, it was the culmination of a lot of research and I think a really helpful episode from a lot of people. And one of those things was that there are data brokers out there selling your personal information every single day. So to get that data removed, I used Delete.me and had such a good experience that I partnered with them for the show.

So one of the things Delete.me does is over the course of the year, they're constantly checking to see if there's more information of yours getting exposed and removing that as well. I'll be honest, I was a little skeptical at the beginning of how much data would really pop up.

So I thought it's been about a year, let's go look into it. And so interestingly enough, every single time Delete.me has checked, that was in December, March, and June, there were 14, 15, and 16 different listings of mine that have popped up. So on average, there've been 45 listings of mine pop up over the last nine months with my phone number or email or address or other personal information.

Thank you Delete.me for actually proactively going out and removing all of them. I haven't had to think about it at all and I'm keeping my information off the internet. My wife, Amy, who may be because she is just less out there on the internet than me, has only had 28 pop up over the last nine months, but it's still not zero.

So first off, data brokers, I despise you. Please stop selling my information to the internet. Please stop saying you're gonna take it down and then putting it back up. I wish that you didn't exist and I honestly wish those companies went out of business because it's so infuriating. But also thank you Delete.me for helping continue to remove it.

I'm so excited to continue to partner with them. I love the service. If you want 20% off, you can go to allthehacks.com/deleteme and get your data removed from the web as well. So next I wanna share a hack related to food that comes from Maxine, which really was something I never expected to think about.

And she cooks 90% of her meals at home and she's a big believer that the quality of the ingredients matter. And the hack she's been using for almost a decade to save time, save money and maximize feeling good about her choices is buying meat by the animal from local farmers.

I know it sounds a little crazy, but every year she fills a nine cubic foot freezer with a whole lamb, half a pig and an eighth of a cow that she gets from local farms, which still leaves leftover room for fish, chicken, anything else she buys throughout the year.

She said it saves a ton of time 'cause she only buys the meat once a year. And while it might not be cheaper than discount grocery store meat, buying in bulk is much cheaper than comparable quality meat at a farmer's market or a store like Whole Foods. It's super convenient because it's all divided up like you would want at a grocery store, putting two pork chops or a pound package of ground beef.

So she effectively every week just shops her freezer instead of shopping the grocery store. And she loves that she gets to actually work directly with local farmers, local businesses and get meat that just tastes better and feels like the right way that we should be buying meat. So I haven't tried this yet though.

She wrote to me that there are so many options in the Bay Area, but she's also written an entire book about it. It's called "There's a Cow in My Freezer, The Complete Guide to Buying, Storing and Enjoying Pasture Raised Meat in Bulk." She's got a website. I'll link to both in the show notes if you wanna check it out.

Really interesting hack that we're thinking about trying. Another couple of cooking hacks from Len were one, buy a bench scraper. I totally agree. We have one that just makes it so easy to clean the counters and move things you chop up around. I'll link to the one he suggested in the show notes.

He also said buy three to four cheaper paring knives that work really well, but you can also just throw in the dishwasher and you don't have to worry about hand washing them, which I know a lot of fancy knives suggest you do. And then next, when it comes to herbs, if you treat them like flowers, you can keep them fresh a lot longer.

So wash them, put them stem side down into a glass of water, maybe even put some in the fridge. He said parsley and cilantro do better there, whereas things like basil and mint stay better on the counter. So Len, thanks for those cooking hacks. Super helpful, really appreciate it.

Next comes from Brad, and he's built a really interesting productivity tool for Gmail that actually is the first thing I've seen that's made me consider switching off of Superhuman. I gave him my candid feedback that I'm not sure it would actually bring me to switch. I'm such a big fan of Superhuman, but if you're not using Superhuman and you want a tool that will basically use AI to auto-generate replies as drafts to emails in your inbox, which is kind of like having your own personal assistant, you should definitely check it out.

It's called Ready to Send. Let me know what you think. I'm still using Superhuman for a bunch of other reasons, so I haven't gotten to check it out yet, but it's called Ready to Send. I'll link to it in the show notes. Next, Yelena sent in a service I'd never heard of called Return Queen, which just automates and makes super easy the process of monthly returns.

They even sync with Amazon to make sure you're on top of returns, notifying you before a return window ends. They charge $99 a year, 19 a month, or $9 a pickup, and they just pick up all your returns from your house. You don't have to drive to UPS or FedEx or any of that.

It's called Return Queen. I'll link to it in the show notes. And then next, I got an email from Jamie about a service called Evidation. I'm probably mispronouncing that, but you link your health apps like Aura, Apple Health, and Runkeeper, and they track your progress and give you points.

And every time you get to 10,000 points, you can redeem another $10 gift card. He says he ends up getting a gift card every few months, not having to do anything, and they just stack up in the background. He shared his referral link, which I'll put in the show notes.

You could support Jamie and check it out and earn some money as well. Now, I know the last episode like this was all about travel, and I was intending to not cover travel at all here, but a few things popped up in the last few weeks that I wanted to cover.

First, a huge negative change to the Amex Platinum card. I am so disappointed by this. It really sucks, especially because starting this year, the Platinum card stopped giving guest access to the Centurion Lounge for cardholders, which basically means that if you're traveling with your partner or your kids, unless they have their own Platinum cards or your kids are under two, you can't bring them into the lounge unless you pay $50 for adults and $30 for kids two to, I think, 12.

So the best fix for that has always just been to add them as authorized users, which Amex actually charged $175 for three authorized users. Now, caveat, it's not the best option for young kids because you need to be 13 to be an authorized user, but for a spouse or for older kids, it's worked well.

However, Amex has changed that price, and now instead of $175 per year for three authorized users, it's $195 per authorized user. So huge knock to the card, I think, takes away a lot of the value of being able to let your spouse, friends, or family into the lounge with you.

If you do spend $75,000 a year on your Platinum card, you can get that guest access turned back on for your card. I believe it's up to two guests. But at the end of the day, the number of points you're gonna give up spending $75,000 on your Platinum card is not worth that cost.

I'd rather just pay the $30 to $50 for a guest or use your priority pass to go to a lounge where guests are free. When the VentureX card gives you four free authorized users and the Chase Reserve gives you $75 per authorized user, it seems like this pricing from Amex is a little crazy, but at the end of the day, it's changed, it's what happens.

If you already have multiple authorized users on your card, like I do, when that next renewal comes around, you'll probably get a notice that the price is going up and I will very subsequently cancel those authorized user cards. And in fact, Amy right now has an Amex Platinum card as well and we were thinking of canceling it because I had those three authorized user slots and a really good friend of mine and my sister were on there.

And when you have to divide that cost by two or three if my wife came over, it was pretty reasonable. But now that it's gonna be so expensive, given all the benefits and perks of the Platinum card, I think we're just gonna keep both of them, get access and we'll have to figure out what we do when we're traveling with kids 'cause $60 is just probably not worth it.

So maybe we won't keep both, who knows what we'll end up doing, so stay tuned. Then the last two things I wanna talk about on travel. One, I went on a trip to Denver for podcast movement, really awesome to get to meet a lot of interesting podcasters, come up with ideas for where the show could go and things we could do.

But when I went to go check in on the United app, I saw a pop-up for a United game where it said turn this United play game on, book two flights and get 4,500 miles. And the only caveat was you have to book the flights after you click the activation.

And I had just booked the flights three or four days before. So just quick reminder, if you're booking flights for any airline, open their app, go to their website, see if there are any promotions. Normally I'm pretty good at this, but definitely will lose out on 4,500 points that I could have gotten by opening an app and clicking a button, which is a huge bummer.

Last, the Marriott Bonvoy boundless card has come back with a five night free bonus after you spend $5,000. Those five nights come in the form of certificates that are good at properties up to 50,000 points a night. Though if you have Marriott points, you can bump that up with your own points to 65,000 a night.

That offer is not on our allthehacks.com/cards page. So I'm just gonna link to it in the show notes. It's a unique offer, but I wanna make sure that you guys get the best offers. So like I always say, if you're signing up for a card and you wanna use our card links, I would greatly appreciate it.

It helps support me and the show, but I wanna make sure you get the best deal. So if I find better deals, I'll always share them with you. So that deal's in the show notes, but anytime you're looking at cards, allthehacks.com/cards are all of our links for cards. And usually they have the best deals, but in this rare case, they don't.

So I know I mentioned that we were gonna cover cell phone plans. So I'm gonna record that as a bonus episode. Expect that coming out soon. One other thing, if you're going back and listening to old episodes, Spotify has this program where you can turn on programmatic ads for old episodes.

So I've long said that all the ads that I read, where I talk about brands, I talk about services, those are all products and services that I use. I've tested, I've talked to people, I've liked, so that's how I think about advertisers. But for the first 50, 60 episodes of the podcast, I didn't have advertisers.

And so I've gone back and just put ads that I've recorded for brands I work with in there just to help give them a little extra boost. It's a free thing that I do for those advertisers, but Spotify has this feature that I talked to someone working at Spotify about this week where you can turn on programmatic ads, you can choose the categories they're in and have them run any place you don't already have ads in your catalog.

So I'm gonna go ahead and experiment with turning that on. I don't know how it'll affect the listener experience. I don't know what kinds of ads you'll hear, though I've explicitly excluded many of the categories. And so if you hear any ads, listening to episodes in the back catalog, let me know what you think.

It is a way to add a little bit of extra revenue to the show, which now that Amy is working here full-time is a great addition. I have no idea how much it is. At the end of the day, I really care about the show being very high quality and feeling like a show that everyone enjoys and wants to listen to.

So let me know your feedback about those ads so I can decide whether it makes sense to keep them on long-term. I think that's all I have this week. There was a ton of stuff people wrote in, hacks, ideas, questions that didn't make it in. Expect that the next time.

Continue sending in questions, hacks, deals, anything you want, podcast@allthathacks.com. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next week. (upbeat music) (whooshing)