(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. Now, today I wanted to try something a little different. In the past week, I've had a couple ideas or musings that I thought would be really interesting things to share on the podcast, but none of them really leveled up to an entire episode on their own, and they weren't really questions from you guys or hacks to share, so they didn't quite fit in the mailbag format.

So I thought, why not just record them and put them out there? And originally I thought this might be a 10 or 15 minute episode, and I was gonna release it on Monday and just call it Monday's Musings. But then as I got to going, I realized there was a lot more I wanted to share, and it really filled up an entire episode.

And so I decided I'm gonna release it on a normal day, and I'm just gonna share some of these things on my mind, 'cause there's a lot of lessons and hacks and learnings that I thought would be really valuable for everyone to hear. But I definitely, definitely, definitely want your feedback.

I'd love to know if you think this is a format I should keep doing, or if maybe I should keep doing, but keep it to another day of the week so Wednesdays are different. Whatever your feedback is, please send me a message, podcast@allthehacks.com. I would really love to hear from you.

You can also reach out to me on social or find me anywhere, because if this is interesting, I'd love to keep it going. If not, I can keep the Musings to myself. And if you're new here, first off, this is obviously not a typical episode, so don't judge that.

And second, I normally cover a lot of topics about travel, points, miles, investing, personal finance. And in the last couple episodes, including the next one, which will actually be about France and a complete travel guide to the country, there's a little deviation from the standard. And that's 'cause I just like to make sure this show is not only focused on one thing, because I think we all like to optimize different areas of our lives and learn lots of things and don't wanna go too far down one path.

So if you're coming here for content on travel, points, or miles, and you haven't heard it, or you wanna hear more about money and investing, and it hasn't been in the last few episodes, don't worry, that stuff is coming. Stay subscribed. And if you have any thoughts on other things you wanna hear me cover or talk about, or guests you wanna hear on the podcast, shoot me a note, podcast@allthehacks.com.

Okay, so what are today's musings about? I'll give you a quick overview. First, I wanna talk about a last-minute trip that Amy and I are planning and how some of the rules of maximizing your points for last-minute travel might not be what they used to be. I also wanna come back to the point-optimizing spreadsheet I talked about in the last Q&A episode, because I've made a few tweaks with it and I'm finally ready to share it with you.

I wanna share a story about optimization going a little bit overboard and wrong and just being a complete waste of time that you can all hopefully learn from my mistake. I wanna talk a little bit about these automated bedtime stories that I created for my daughter with ChatGPT, which I thought was a really cool, fun thing.

I'll talk a little bit about the elusive perfect 850 credit score. I wanna share a sticky healthcare situation I found myself in that almost cost me a few thousand dollars and I'm gonna give an update on the first All The Hacks trip we're gonna take, and this is to Iceland next year, and I have a really special, exciting announcement I've been wanting to tell you all that I will end with, so let's jump in right after this.

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Get yours at allthehacks.com/element, that's L-M-N-T. This deal is only available through my link. You must go to allthehacks.com/element, that's L-M-N-T. (upbeat music) First, I wanna talk about a trip that Amy and I are planning. So my parents have really graciously offered to come and watch our girls for five, six, seven days with the help of our au pair under the only stipulation that we find someone else to watch the dog so they don't have two young kids and a dog.

And they're talking about coming in two weeks. Now we've known about this for about six or seven weeks. And because points availability often opens up so much in the last two weeks, we said, you know what? We're not even gonna figure out where we're going until two weeks out because we know that it'll be so much easier.

At least historically, it's been so much easier to find availability. So we talked about high level what we wanted to do and set some requirements. We said, we don't wanna spend a six day trip flying for 27 hours each way. So as much as we've always thought it'd be amazing to go to places like the Maldives, it's just not in the cards for a six day trip.

And so we said, we've gotta go somewhere where we can get there in less than 12 hours. And that includes any plane changes. So we're like 12 hours is our max. And we wanna go somewhere that we can't just go for a weekend because if we can go there for a weekend, we could probably go there another time easily.

So it kind of is like outside North America, but less than 12 hours away, maybe including the Caribbean. And we wanted to relax a bit, right? This is a time to be away from kids and sleep in as long as you want, which is probably impossible because it seems to never happen anytime I'm away for work or my wife's away for work, but we're gonna try.

So that leaves a few of the islands in the Pacific, that leaves the Caribbean, leave Central America, maybe even Korea, Japan, but it's July and it can get hot. And Europe, there are a lot of places in Europe that you can get to in less than 12 hours if you fly nonstop from the West Coast.

So we kind of were holding out, which I think is a little anxiety inducing because they're all different kinds of trips and there's lots of stuff to figure out. And Amy and I, sometimes we love looking forward to a trip. Oh, what are we gonna do? But if you're not sure whether you're gonna be on an island in the South Pacific or on a city in Europe, it's really hard to really kind of viscerally feel that upcoming trip.

But we also had a lot of stuff going on. So we said, you know what, we'll just wait. Well, we're now about two weeks away. I started looking at flights and the good news is it's opened up a little bit more. Two weeks ago, I looked briefly and there was just nothing.

There was almost no availability nonstop out of SFO. And so first off, I'll share how I was doing this searching because I think there are a lot of us that have a lot of points and maybe we come to a time we wanna go somewhere, but we're not sure where and we want an easy way to search, but there just aren't great tools that allow you to do this.

So I'll share two of them because I've only really found two of them. One of them is a site called seats.arrow, which is seats.a-e-r-o. And I'll include my referral link in the show notes or I think it's just allthehacks.com/seatsarrow, S-E-A-T-S-A-E-R-O. And it's not the most user-friendly tool, but it is very, very powerful once you kind of understand how it works.

And so the way it works is that they go and index all of these flights in advance. So when you're doing your search, it's very, very easy to find things because they've already searched all the flights and they've stored all these routes. So because of that, they're only searching specific routes, but it's a lot, a lot of routes.

Downside is you have to search by airline program. So you can search by Air Canada and that's gonna show you a lot of Star Alliance flights. There's only about 10 different airline programs to search for. But the real magic is that when you're searching, you can filter by a destination, you can filter by an origin, and you can filter by an airport, like I wanna go from SFO to Asia.

And it'll filter all the flights there. You can say, show me only business class. And then it's not quite obvious, but if you start typing in a date in the search field, like 2023-07-24, you'll filter for only flights on that day. Now, if you start doing this search, you'll find out, okay, here's where I can go.

And we started looking around and there were a few options that popped up, some that seemed like the weather was just absolutely a non-starter or the distance. For some reason, there seems to be a lot of business and first-class availability to Delhi, but India is just too far and not the weather we were looking for in July.

But one thing did recently pop up, which was we noticed a lot of flights to Papeete, which is the airport in Tahiti in French Polynesia. Before I continue, I forgot, there's another tool called Roam, which I recently met the founders of and I'm really excited about what they're building.

It's Roame.travel, R-O-A-M-E.travel. And they just launched a feature called Skyview. And it's a beta product. It's only available as a paid member. So you're gonna have to pay to check it out. But it does a similar thing where you can say, here, I'm looking for business class. I'm looking on these dates.

I'm looking from here. And you can kind of get very generic on the destination. I'm looking to Europe and it will just show you all the flights there. You can say how many points you're willing to spend and what day you're looking for. You can even add a plus or minus three days if you want.

So those are two tools that you can use. So we found these flights to Papeete. They actually worked on the exact same days we were looking for. And so we felt like we had scored. Now, we've been to Bora Bora before. I actually made an entire podcast episode on it in March last year.

So yes, we've been there, but boy, is it amazing. We've actually been there twice. It's such an incredible place. Eight hour flight to French Polynesia from San Francisco nonstop. So surprisingly much easier to get to than the Caribbean, which for some islands, I couldn't find anything under 12 hours.

Then I looked at hotels and all the points hotels were either completely sold out at the St. Regis, the Meridian, some of the Intercontinentals, or just an egregious number of points. Now, I actually looked two or three weeks ago at the Conrad in Bora Bora, where we stayed four or five years ago.

And two or three weeks ago, it seemed like there was some availability. 100,000 points at night, which is enough to use your free night certificates if you have any of those from the Hilton Aspire card. And now it's 850,000 points. So as much as I often say that waiting till the last minute, you can get some of the best flight deals, which is absolutely true, because we're talking about 46,000 points each way in business class on United, booked through Aeroplan, as long as you have chase points, because there's currently a 20% transfer bonus.

So it's actually 55,000 points each way. If you book it with United, it's over 70,000 points each way. And then with that transfer bonus, it goes down to 46,000 or a little less actually. And so fantastic deal, but no availability with hotels. And you can spend money. And so we thought, oh, let's go back to the Conrad, but at $1,500 a night, it's just not in the cards.

And so we're looking at a few other islands, seeing if there's still a way to make it work. By the time you've heard this, maybe we've just committed, or maybe we've decided let's wait another week and see if a few things open up. I was surprised that in the past at 14 days, seems like stuff starts to open up, but right now there's still only a handful of options.

And honestly, on some carriers, there's not really anything. I think right now on Star Alliance, other than that flight we found, it's like Edmonton, Mexico City, Delhi, and Vancouver. We're like the four nonstop flights from San Francisco we could use points on. So not the availability I was hoping for.

Now, granted, we're talking peak summer travel season from America. So shame on us, but it's the week we have. So that's all we've got. But let's see, I'm gonna keep monitoring this. I'll probably give an update in a few weeks, maybe the next mailbag episode on what happened as we got closer and closer to our destination time, because I genuinely think it usually gets even better.

Some things like Lufthansa First Class really only opened up in the last few days. So we'll see, stay tuned on where we end up. Maybe we'll get miraculously lucky. I think we'll be able to get enough good use out of points in Air Canada in the future that I might just do the transfer now, book the flights so that we have them, see what hotels open up.

Worst case, we can cancel and book something else. Yes, there's a change fee, but to be able to lock something in, at least so we have a backup plan, would feel really good. So the general lesson I wanna share from this kind of musing is just that, yes, last minute, things have opened up a lot more in the last two weeks, but hotels can be a factor.

So if you're looking at a place that feels like it might be a dream destination, but there aren't a lot of hotels there, maybe it's a smaller town, it might actually be worth booking those hotels earlier. Especially when hotels are so easy to cancel. In fact, if I had a destination in mind, I really wish I had just booked the hotels two, three weeks ago.

Worst case, you cancel them, it's not a big deal. Many hotel rates can be refundable up until the last minute and then seeing how it works. So don't forget that if you're going to a major city, if you're going to London, you're going to Paris, you're probably always gonna be able to find a hotel, whether it's points or dollars, but in some smaller places or off the beaten path, even though you might wait last minute for flights, it might not be the best option.

My fitness routine this year had a few rocky starts, but I am back into it now. And honestly, one of the things that helped me get back is that I just added some new workout gear. And if I'm gonna buy more, why not have the best performance apparel out there, which I think is Viorey, and I am excited to be partnering with them for this episode.

Viorey makes performance apparel that's incredibly versatile. Everything's designed to work out in, but it doesn't look or feel like it at all. And it is so freaking comfortable, you will wanna wear it all the time. But it's not just for men. My wife is obsessed with Viorey as much as I am.

While my personal favorite will probably always be the Sunday Performance Joggers, I have at least three pairs. I just got a few pairs of the Core Shorts and three or four Strato Tech Tees, and I'm loving them. Honestly, I can't think of the last time I went on a run, bike ride, or walk in anything else.

Their products are so versatile. You can use them for just about any activity, whether it's running, training, or yoga, but they're also great for lounging, running around town, or they even have a few things you can wear for a night out. Honestly, I think Viorey is an investment in your happiness.

And for All The Hacks listeners, they're offering 20% off your first purchase, as well as free shipping and returns on US orders over $75. So you should definitely check them out at allthehacks.com/viorey. Again, go to allthehacks.com/v-u-o-r-i and get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet.

It is astonishing how much of our personal information is online, and in the last few months, I've been trying to remove as much of Amy and my info as possible. I also did the same for our parents, and in total, after reviewing over 20,000 listings, we found over 1,000 pieces of personally identifiable information.

Thankfully, it's all getting removed, and instead of spending 50 plus hours searching and filing requests to do that, it only took a few minutes, because I used Delete.me from Avine, and I am so excited to be partnering with them for this episode. Delete.me is an amazing service that will not just find and remove your personal information from over 500 data broker websites, but they'll continuously scan for new data that shows up and get that removed as well.

On average, Delete.me finds and removes over 2,000 pieces of data for a customer in their first two years, and to date, they've removed over 35 million pieces of data for their customers. So if you wanna get your personal information removed from all these listings on the internet, go to allthehacks.com/deleteme and get 20% off a plan for you or your entire family.

Again, that's allthehacks.com/deleteme. Now, speaking of points, next I wanna talk about something I brought up in last month's mailbag episode. I shared the spreadsheet tool I built that analyzed a bunch of credit cards to help you find the best credit card combinations that you can use to maximize the points you earn.

It goes in and prices out, here's how many points you earn in all these categories and what those points are worth. And after you put in your annual spending, you can check off one, two, five, 10 different cards and ultimately see the average number of points per dollar you'd earn, assuming you use the right card for each purchase.

And with point valuations that I got from the points guy, you can see the effective dollar value return you get from that spend as well. So if you're averaging two chase points per dollar and the chase point valuation is two cents, you're actually getting an effective value back of four cents per dollar or the equivalent of 4% back.

And another use case for that tool is that if you check off the cards you have, you can see the incremental value you're gonna get from adding any other card to your arsenal of cards. So that tool is precisely how I determine the best two card combo, which I talked about last time, at least for someone with the average spending pattern from the Bureau Labor Statistics data that I used.

And it was the Amex Gold and the Capital One Venture or Venture X. And those two cards with that spending profile earned an average of 2.49 points per dollar or 4.75 cents per dollar, which is amazing because I don't know of a combo of cash back cards that'll get you 4.75% cash back.

Now, obviously, if you spend a lot more in flights, the platinum might add a lot of value because you're getting 5X points on flights, but this spreadsheet will let you figure that out. So I'll pause because I imagine many of you right now are thinking, "Great, great, Chris, "thank you for telling me about this tool.

"Can I actually play with it?" So I've been trying to think about what to do with all these little projects and tools and databases that I'm spending a lot of time on, and I have a bunch of examples. This tool is one. I built an entire Notion site for planning for children.

I have a stroller comparison spreadsheet. I'm starting to think about writing interesting guides based on some other research I've done. And I was thinking what to do with them. So I mentioned in the mailbag episode that I was gonna make this tool available to members, which I did, but what do I do with them broadly?

They take a lot of time. I really should be valuing my time. And so I'm gonna start out with an experiment to try to learn. I'm gonna make this spreadsheet tool available for at least the next two weeks for a pay-as-you-wish download. So the minimum is $1. You can pay $1, you can pay $1,000, whatever you want.

And honestly, if you pay $1,000, that's too much. I'd greatly appreciate it, but seriously, it's a spreadsheet. And we'll see what happens. I really wanna know what value you get from this. And I'm gonna ask you what you thought. So if you wanna check this out, you can go to the link in the show notes or go to allthehacks.com/cardvalue.

That'll redirect you to a page where there's a YouTube video that I put together, which is really just a walkthrough of the entire tool. So you can get a really good sense of what the tool is, how it works. And then I would say, choose whatever you think it's worth and let me know what you think.

Or if you're an All The Hacks member, just log into the membership site and you will be able to get access to the tool for free. I sent it out to all members a couple of weeks ago to get some early feedback. I made a few changes since then.

Know that as a member, you're always gonna get first access to these products and all these tools. And for things like this, they're gonna be free. So if you'd rather do that, you could just go to allthehacks.com/join and sign up today. It'll also give you access to all the member calls we've done, all the past member emails I've sent, all the deals we've set up, which right now is 50% off card pointers, 50% off trust and will, 40% off trustworthy, 20% off any day and a lot more deals to come.

So again, that's allthehacks.com/join. But like I said, this is available for anyone at allthehacks.com/cardvalue. So hopefully that's helpful and you can play around with it with whatever set of cards you have and let me know what you think. If there's any other products or tools you think would be cool to see me build, let me know as well.

You can always email me, podcast@allthehacks.com. I get all of those straight to my inbox and definitely will check them. Okay, so the next thing I wanna talk about is a story of optimization gone wrong. And it all starts back in February, 2021. We moved into a new house and we decided we wanted a new couch.

And so we went to Macy's Furniture and I'm not sure I can recommend it anymore, but we found this couch, it was on sale. We got a great deal, it was $800. And they asked us if we wanted the warranty. So when you buy furniture at Macy's Furniture, they have this warranty service and it's actually called Warranty Service or maybe that's the name of the app and it's called Worry No More.

It's quite confusing. But for $200, we could basically cover the couch for anything that happens, stains, damage, as long as it was not malicious damage. But if it was a pet stain, if your kid's drawn it with a marker, they will come out and clean it for you or replace it if something happens in the next five years.

And if you don't have anything happen at the end of five years and there are no claims, you get that $200 back as a store credit. So at the time we had one young kid, we were planning on another young kid. Now we have two, definitely seemed like a good deal.

So sure enough, about 18 months later in November, we realized that our dog who we no longer let stay on the couch was sitting on the couch. It was a white couch and it just was like, it wasn't hair as much as it was just like a dark spot from the dog being there a lot.

So we call up the warranty service, we fire off a request and say, "Hey, we want to get this cleaned." They come out and they try to clean the couch and they do get the stain off, but it turns out they left a whole stain somewhere else. And a fun hack here that the cleaner told me was there are some couches that, especially a white couch, kind of fabric couch, where water leaves a stain.

And so what you need to do when you're cleaning it is not just clean the stain, but you also need to vacuum out all the moisture, otherwise it will leave another stain. So this person came out, they did that, but they didn't realize that they left some stains on other parts of the couch.

Maybe they didn't vacuum out everything, I don't know. And so we immediately followed up and said, "Hey, you guys cleaned the stain you came for, "but you created other stains, can you come fix it?" No response. We tried two or three times, got nothing. It was very frustrating. We called, they said they'd get back to us, they didn't.

And we kind of forgot about it and just lived with this stain on the couch. Finally, a couple of months ago in April, I had just brought on a new EA or executive assistant, virtual assistant that I hired, which I've talked about in the past through a service called Oceans, oceansxyz.com.

It's actually been so fantastic that I'm gonna do a whole episode on it in a few weeks. But I said, "Maybe she'll have better luck than me." And sure enough, she managed to get them to send someone out who came out and looked at the couch and said, "Hey, to really do a good job here, "we're going to have to clean the whole thing, "not just the stained areas, so it all matches." And we said, "Okay, fine." Person said, "But I can't do that now.

"I've only been authorized to do a spot treat. "I don't wanna get in trouble from my boss "doing more work than I'm supposed to do, "but I can come out next week." Great. Person goes home, two days later we get an email that says, "We will not be covering this damage "because the damage is repeated damage of the same type," or something like that.

And I said, "No, of course not. "That's not even true. "This is in a different place "and it's a different type of stain "and it was caused by your team." So we call up, we state that case, they say there's nothing they can do. We email, they say there's nothing to do.

I asked for a supervisor and finally someone comes back and says, "Okay, well, you can file a dispute "to a third party kind of team in the company "and they'll review it." So I write up this dispute, I create a Google doc, I put in all these images explaining how obviously this is not the same stain.

And 24 hours later, I get a message that's the exact same one we got before that said, "We don't cover repeated damage of the same type." And I was like, I was losing my mind. I called, I talked to a supervisor, I stated the case. They said they'd get back to us in 24 hours, nothing.

A week later, my wife, whose phone number is on the claims and was the original purchaser, gets a voicemail and someone said, "I'm so sorry. "I don't know how our team managed to process this "in this way, but I took a look at everything "and I wanted to take care of you guys.

"You get two options. "We can send you $337 or we can replace the couch "with a brand new one." So now we're like, okay, but we don't want this couch again. This couch stains really easily. Can we just get a different couch, a store credit or something? And they said, "Well, that's in Macy's hands.

"We file the claim, Macy's will tell you what to do. "We have no luck. "We call Macy's, we don't get a good answer. "So we just drive 20 minutes to Macy's Furniture. "We talked to the rep." Yes, this is a long story, but I think there's a moral at the end.

"We talked to the rep at the Macy's Furniture store. "He explains that it's TBD "on whether they'll replace this couch or not. "We won't know till they file the claim "whether they force us to, "but because it was a custom fabric, they probably won't. "But it's also gotten more expensive.

"So we might have to pay the Delta." And we were just like, this is crazy. So we go home that day and all I can think about is how easy it would have been for someone to just clean this stain. And so I say, you know what? Before we decide what we're gonna do, I'm just gonna try to clean the stain and I'm gonna go get our shop vac and I'm gonna vacuum out the moisture, do it just like the guy did the first time.

Well, 30 minutes later using the cleaning kit that came with the couch, all the stains that were there that the guy created are gone. And I think there was a part of us that just was so angry that they would come out and leave a stain and not be willing to clean it that we put all of our time and energy to fighting this situation.

And hours on the phone, writing emails, driving to Macy's, waiting to speak to the guy who worked there because there was only one employee at the time. And all of it was to get the satisfaction of them taking responsibility for this problem. But at the end of the day, for 30 minutes of time, we got rid of the stain and the couch looks like we would have wanted it to look if someone came out and cleaned it.

And it's a little crazy for me to process the fact that we wasted so much time. We immediately took the $337 offer, which I guess we paid $200 for warranty. We got 337 back, so we made $137, but we probably spent five to seven hours of time on this.

So absolutely not worth it. And what we should have done in the first place is just clean the stain. And I did, to be fair, the first time, I didn't know why when I tried to clean the first stain, it didn't come out easily. And the answer was we needed to vacuum out the moisture or we'd have all these residual water stains.

But once I learned that, instead of trying to milk the system, at least once things weren't working, I should have given up and just done it myself, or at least tried. And if it didn't work, sure, I could continue fighting and maybe get a replacement. But I just wanted to share it because I think there are probably some of you out there who have the same instinct of fighting something to save money, to get money back, to make sure you get that deal.

And I think sometimes you want to pause and say, yes, I want to rectify this situation. Yes, I want to get what's right. But if I'm going to spend five hours of my life to save a hundred bucks when I could just spend 30 minutes and get the same outcome, maybe that's not worth it.

And so hopefully that helps you make that decision on your own the next time and save yourself a lot of hassle. Okay, the next interesting thing I want to share is something fun for anyone who has kids, maybe cousins, nephews. My daughter loves random stories at bedtime. Every time she's like, "Tell me a story about animals and food." And she picks a random animal and a random food and she wants to hear a story about it.

And sometimes she adds details about where they're going or what they're doing. And so she'll say, "Whales eating oatmeal at the park." And then I'll just make up a story or a song about that. So that's something we do every night and it's been fun. Separately from that, she got this really cool thing called a Tony.

And it's a box that's about, I don't know, four inches square. And it has these kind of characters on top, probably with some type of RFID in them. So when you set them on top of the box, the box is basically a speaker that's plugged in. It tells that story.

So if you put the Gruffalo on top, it starts telling you out loud the story of the Gruffalo or Peter Rabbit, or some of them are songs. They have all these partnerships with different brands. And I actually think there's a couple other companies because I told this story to someone and they said, "Oh, we don't have a Tony box, but we have," I think it was called a Yoto audio player.

And they're very similar. They're like readers for kids. And they're fantastic 'cause our daughter will just get stories read to her on her own. She's three. And I thought, gosh, I had this idea. I don't know where the idea came from, but I thought, hmm, ChatGPT is pretty good at writing stories.

And the podcast software I use, Descript, actually has this feature where if you read this long text, maybe two, three hours of text, it'll learn your voice and it will let you play your voice without you actually saying anything. It's basically like a virtual voice that can overdub anything because after you read three hours, it's learned the way you say everything and it can replace your voice.

It's kind of scary. And I'm gonna play a clip of it in a second. So I had this process where very quickly, I had ChatGPT write maybe 10 different stories. And I would give it prompts like, "Write me a bedtime story for my three-year-old "about a white bird named Quinn going on a train to Mexico "and in the story, the bird should eat a hamburger." Or, "Write a bedtime story about a pink duck named Mama "who liked to eat grilled cheese sandwiches "and is going to the airplane museum." So like ridiculous things, but they're the kinds of things my daughter would say and some of them she actually wrote.

Then I took all the text from it. Eventually I said, "Make sure the story is less than five minutes or something." So I wrote all of the stories. I copied them into Descript. And then I told Descript, "Now overdub this with my voice." Then I downloaded the MP3 and I uploaded it to the Tony box.

And you can buy these custom Tonys. So I bought one of me, it's not really me, but I bought two custom Tonys. And one was a superhero guy and one was a fairy woman. And then I told our daughter, I said, "This is Daddy Tony and Mommy Tony." And so my wife and I have now each done this and she has a little Tony and whenever she puts it on her box, Daddy tells her a bedtime story or Mommy tells her a story.

It doesn't even have to be bedtime. So I'll play a quick clip. You'll notice that it's not a perfect rendition of my voice, but it's close and to her, it's still my voice. So I'll play it. I just thought it was something fun, just a use case for different software and AI tools to add a little bit of interestingness to our lives, especially if you have kids.

Once upon a time in a magical land, there lived a beautiful white bird named Quinn. Quinn had silky feathers as white as freshly fallen snow and a heart full of curiosity and adventure. One sunny morning while perched on a tall tree branch, Quinn noticed a colorful poster fluttering in the breeze.

It depicted a magnificent train that was embarking on a journey to Mexico. Okay, so I won't play you the whole story, but there you go. As a parent, your child's wellbeing is your top priority. You wanna see them chase their dreams, embrace life's adventures and thrive in this world.

But you also know life can be unpredictable and that's why it's important to plan for the unexpected so they can continue to thrive no matter what, which is why I'm excited to partner with Fabric by Gerber Life for this episode because they make term life insurance so easy. Fabric was designed by parents for parents to help you get a high quality, surprisingly affordable term life insurance policy in less than 10 minutes.

And when I say surprisingly affordable, I actually went online to compare prices and found that Fabric was highly competitive with great policies like a million dollars in coverage for less than a dollar a day. And you can go from start to covered in less than 10 minutes with no health exam required.

So join the thousands of parents who trust Fabric to protect their family. Apply today in just minutes at meetfabric.com/allthehacks. That's meetfabric.com/allthehacks, M-E-E-T fabric.com/allthehacks. Policies issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company, not available in certain states, prices subject to underwriting and health questions. Getting the crew together isn't as easy as it used to be.

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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. Next, I wanna talk about this kind of elusive perfect credit score, because as someone who's tried to play this credit card game and been very attuned to my credit score and tried to optimize it in every way, I've always thought, gosh, how do I get to an 850, which is a perfect credit score?

Now, when you log into Credit Karma, our most credit monitoring tools, they'll tell you the components of your score and how you score on them. I've been fortunate to be anywhere from 790 to 830 in the last few years. But the other day, I was trying to clean up my inbox and disable some alerts I was getting from Experian.

And when I logged into Experian, it said your FICO score on Experian was 850. And I looked at it, I thought, I finally did it. And nothing happened. Like, any amount of joy or satisfaction I thought I was gonna have from getting there, nonexistent. And the only thing I could think about was, I'm not getting any loans anytime soon.

There are some credit cards with really great signup bonuses. Why was I ever even making this a goal? Like, in a way, it felt a little die with zero-esque, where targeting accumulating money and ending up dying with a bunch of extra money is actually a terrible goal because it means you didn't optimize for net fulfillment.

Well, you don't need an 850 credit score. In fact, I think anything over like 760 is gonna probably get you the best tier of rates for whatever loan you're looking for. In some ways, what I realized after hitting it, and I wouldn't say I tried hard, it wasn't like a quest, but I always thought, wow, it'd be cool to hit an 850.

And then I realized, well, this 850 is really just a sign. I could probably get a few more welcome bonuses. Like, there's a little bit of room for play here. What am I doing? And so I think similar to the optimization story, it was just something interesting where I'd always thought it would be a cool goal.

When I hit it, nothing happened. It wasn't cool, it wasn't interesting. And if anything, it made me think that it was a silly goal in the first place because I probably could, instead of that, add a few extra hundreds of thousands of points by not worrying as much about credit score and really focused on keeping it above a point that mattered but not really doing much else.

So if anyone out there has a similar goal, I urge you to give up on it because there was zero satisfaction in hitting. Okay, maybe there's a little satisfaction in hitting it, but it wore off immediately and maybe came with some self-resentment over wasting any time doing that instead of optimizing for more points and ultimately more trips or more interesting adventures.

Next, I wanna briefly share a medical or health insurance situation I dealt with recently. So if you were here last year, in episode 97, I interviewed Dr. Jordan Schlein about all kinds of ways to optimize your health. And in that episode, I shared that I'd recently gotten a positive calcium score on a heart CT scan, which unfortunately for me is evidence of high cholesterol leading to some calcified plaque buildup in one of my arteries, which is unfortunately irreversible.

Now, the score was very low and it was early enough that getting on the right medication will hopefully be able to prevent or at least massively slow down any issues down the road, which by the way, I have gotten on those medications. My cholesterol is down. But recently I managed to chat with a cardiologist about the situation, and he talked about how a more affordable calcium score scan, like the one I did, really only checks for calcified plaque, but it won't actually see any of the soft plaque that may or may not be built up in your arteries that hasn't yet calcified.

And if you find out you have a lot of soft plaque, he said you may wanna be more aggressive with your course of action or treatment. So to get that answer, he said you need to do a CT angiogram, which uses the same CT scan, but they inject you with a contrast dye so you can actually see the blood flowing through your arteries to see if they get constricted further by soft plaque.

So I thought maybe it would be a good idea to also do that, and I started trying to see what it would cost. Now, the interesting thing I've learned recently about heart-related, cholesterol-related things is that so much of our medical system right now is based off of this kind of belief and kind of risk-scoring methodology that really only looks at what your near-term risk of having a cardiac-related event is.

And the calculator, for many people, doesn't even actually work until you're 40. So establishing any kind of medical necessity for anything and getting things run through insurance can actually be quite difficult. And so I've had a lot of, I don't know, fear of getting charged that really reminded me of my episode with Marshall Allen about fighting back with health insurance companies, but fortunately, that first CT scan did get covered by insurance.

And it was really funny because after I'd gotten it done and found out that I already had a positive calcium score, I got a letter from the insurance company that said, "We're not sure if we're gonna be able to cover this "because there's not enough evidence "that you might have a situation worth doing this test." Funny enough, obviously, that wasn't the case, and I did have it.

I don't know if the results ended up justifying it or not, but eventually, it turns out it was covered by my insurance, so I didn't ask questions. This one was much more expensive. Depending on who you talk to, it could be $1,000 to $5,000 or $6,000. So I wanted to make sure before getting it that it would be covered.

And the reason I wanna share this story is because what happened was very interesting. So I called up and said, "I wanna schedule this." I talked to Sutter Health, which is where I got the procedure done, quick in and out procedure, but they said, "Okay, we're gonna run it by insurance "and we'll let you know." And when they followed up, they said, "Hey, your insurance looks like "it's gonna cover it 100%." So I was like, "Okay." I called the insurance company and I'm like, "Hey, this is expensive.

"I wanna make sure it's covered." And the first person I talked to said, "Totally covered, 100%, shouldn't be an issue." And I said, "Great. "Is there anything else I need to know?" And she's like, "Yeah, let me just read this out loud." And it was like, "Blah, blah, blah, blah.

"Covered 100% as long as it's deemed medically necessary." I was like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. "Who deems if it's medically necessary?" And the representative said, "Well, it kinda depends on the doctor and the hospital, "but it's the responsibility of the hospital "to make sure we'll pay for it. "So just make sure that when you go get it done, "you don't sign any documents saying "that you will be liable for the charges "because if you don't sign those documents, "then it's really just gonna be between us and the hospital "and you won't be on the hook." I said, "Okay, great." I go to the procedure and the first thing they do is they hand me a piece of paper that says, "Can you sign this thing that says "you will be on the hook for this procedure "if your insurance doesn't cover it?" Now, the insurance company told me not to sign this and I said, "Is there a way I can do anything "without signing this?" "No, if you don't sign this, "we're just gonna cancel your appointment." And I said, "Well, can you at least tell me "how much it's gonna cost?" And they said, "Well, we can't tell you how much it costs "because your insurance is gonna cover it in full." I said, "Well, why do you need me to sign this document "that says that if my insurance won't cover it, "I'll pay for it if it's gonna cover it in full?" They said, "Well, maybe you should call "the billing department.

"Here's the phone number." So while I'm waiting at the hospital, I call this billing department and they said, "Well, we didn't even run an estimate "'cause your insurance is gonna cover it. "So I don't even think you need to worry about it." And I was like, "That's great. "But if my insurance doesn't cover it, "you're not gonna be stuck with a bill.

"So would be really, really great "if you could tell me how much it's gonna cost." Back and forth while both doing this on the live chat, on the website and on the phone, I got two different estimates. One was 2000, one was $5,000. And I had to really make a call on how much do I trust that this hospital is correct that my insurance will cover it?

How important is this medical necessity? Will the doctor be able to convince the insurance company if they don't believe it? I had the billing representative write down a note that she told me it looks like it will be covered. So at the end of the day, I decided, "I really wanna know what this is gonna tell me.

"My cardiac health seems important enough "to roll the dice here. "If I tried to come up with some weighted probability "of being able to get this done, "and if they didn't cover it, "what would I be able to negotiate with the hospital "from everything I learned from Marshall Allen "in that episode?" I went for it.

Now, I got the bill first, and it was for about $5,700. And I had a flag on the Cigna website that said, "Awaiting approval," which made me a bit nervous. Fortunately, about four or five days later, I got an email that there was an update. I logged in and it was fully covered.

So I didn't have to go fight that bill, but I would be lying if I wasn't sweating a few bullets that week wondering whether I was gonna get a $5,000 bill, what I'd be able to negotiate it with or not. The only step I didn't take, which I wish I did to prevent a little bit of stress, was it turns out I could have asked if they could review the medical necessity, but I would need my doctor to do that.

So I would have needed the doctor that wrote the test order to reach out to the insurance company and spend a ton of time doing that. And in hindsight, I probably wish I did 'cause it would have saved me a little bit of stress. Knowing what I know now, obviously I wouldn't have 'cause it was covered, but I just wanted to share the situation.

One, because had I not done my own research, everyone in that facility, including the first person I talked to at my insurance company, seemed absolutely certain it was going to be covered. But the small caveat that I learned was only if deemed medically necessary. And I've heard way too many horror stories about that not turning out in your favor.

So I just say, be extra cautious when getting any of these treatments done, making sure that there aren't any potential hiccups in medical necessity, and if so, getting them approved in advance so that you're not stressed out about this. Also, shop around a bit. I did ultimately learn later that the difference between the $2,000 rate and the $5,000 rate was self-pay versus insurance pay.

So I would definitely make sure when you're going in, if you know your insurance won't cover it, make sure it doesn't get coated up like it will because it might end up getting priced incorrectly. But definitely also call around and see if there's another facility. I did find a site that I had heard good things about called MedMo.

I can't speak to anything about it, M-E-D-M-O, but they have a site where you can go in and schedule a bunch of different types of procedures. And the rates they have available are significantly, significantly lower than the rates I found anywhere else. For example, and this seems a little crazy, I'm reading this out loud, but I'm looking at it right now, the CT heart coronary angiogram with intravenous contrast, the self-pay rate on the MedMo site is 375.

So I'm not sure how they get that rate, what facilities they're using. I was advised by that same cardiologist to try to find a facility with newer equipment that would have lower radiation doses than older equipment, but seemed like MedMo was a good option if you're having to self-pay to find something cheaper.

Obviously, I hope everyone has all of their medical conditions covered. In fact, I hope everyone doesn't have any medical conditions but I just thought that would be helpful. And for anyone interested, the results of that CT angiogram were not only that I didn't have any soft plaque, but that the calcium score that the first test told me I had, which was actually in the exact same machine as the second test, was not correct.

And that this test found that I had a zero instead of a two. And so now I'm in the process of trying to request that they review both of the scans next to each other and try to come to a determination of which one was correct. So still a little bit of ambiguity there, but I'm optimistic that the more expensive kind of fancier test might be correct, but who knows.

I mentioned I wanna talk a little about this annual All The Hacks trip to Iceland. So at the end of the Iceland episode, I started talking with my guest Brandon Presser about whether we could actually take a trip like this. And so in that episode, we basically outlined a perfect trip to Iceland.

I've never been to Iceland. I thought, why don't we just go on this trip and why go through the effort to plan a perfect trip and go on it just with the two of us? Or if we invite partners, maybe the four of us, why don't we invite the community?

And so that sparked a series of back and forth questions. It sparked a survey. So if you haven't filled that out, you can go to allthehacks.com/iceland and fill out that survey, but it's actually coming together. So Brandon and I have decided that we're gonna plan this Iceland trip. It's gonna happen sometime in the spring of 2024.

I, funny enough, wanted to try to optimize for a date that wasn't everyone's spring break, or maybe it was everyone's spring break. And I started looking up spring breaks in different counties and cities and found that every single week from March 11th till April 30th is a spring break somewhere.

So I'm not sure if it's better that it's your spring break or not, but it most likely will be someone's because it seems impossible to avoid. So that trip is going to happen. Stay tuned on pricing, stay tuned on dates. I think it will likely be somewhere around 12 to 14 people.

Brandon said the ideal group is a group that fits in two vans. That doesn't mean that we're all gonna be traveling and doing everything in groups of 12 to 15 people. It likely means that we'll split some things off so we can do some small group adventures so it's not crazy, but we will definitely have time for dinners together and all kinds of stuff.

So I think it will be an awesome trip. I will be there. Brandon will be there. It'll be a trip to remember for anyone who wants to see Iceland because Brandon really knows everything there is to know about that country, at least as much as anyone I've ever heard talk about it.

But given the limited size, I will just be totally transparent that I will make it available first to members for some period of time to maybe make a deposit, to lock in and hold a spot, and then I'll make it available to everyone else after. Now, we're already talking about also doing the same thing for a Japan trip next fall.

So stay tuned. I think this could be the first of many trips that we take as a community together. And I think it'll be really cool to meet people in person, be able to talk about a lot of the things that we talk about on the show, but with people in real life, which also leads me to another interesting idea, which I actually got from a survey I sent to members of trying to figure out what the right way to engage the broader community is.

And it turns out lots of people were pretty busy. And so having just a forum where people can chat every day might be too much, but the idea of an annual event where people can get together and talk about various aspects of our lives and tactics we have for improving them and discuss and debate ways that we like to live more optimal lives and break off into groups to talk about specific areas, whether it's health or families or personal finances.

And so the idea of putting together an all-the-hacks summit, like a one-day event somewhere, is something that I'm really seriously excited about. And I don't have any further details, but it's something that I'm actively thinking about. Then that leads to how we're gonna take on all this stuff. So the trips, adding new products, I'm working on a course right now that will be all about credit cards, points, and miles.

The goal is I get so many people that reach out and say, "You've done so many episodes. "What if I just want a start-to-finish course "that's like an intense deep dive "on credit card points and miles, "or maybe it's redeeming, "or maybe it's earning more points." And so I'm working on trying to take all the knowledge and all the content from the show, which you'll always be able to go back in the archives and listen to, but put it in a format that might be easier for people to digest who haven't been around for a while or want something in a different format.

It looks like it'll probably be, my best guess, is like 100 hours of work to write it up, record it, build it out. And so it's gonna take a little time, maybe a few months, but it's something else I'm really excited about. So to do all of this, getting more deals for the membership, how do we go secure some of the best partner deals possible?

Really, really big brands. How do we do awesome things? I was trying to figure out what to do, who to hire, how to grow this, and I had a great conversation with my wife, and the answer was so obvious. And you all have heard me talk about my wife, Amy, who's basically the behind-the-scenes person helping with so many aspects of this.

She's listened to almost every episode, given feedback, helped in so many ways. And so after a lot of conversation about the future and how we wanna live our lives and work together, she decided that she's gonna join all the hacks full-time next month, and we are gonna really take this to the next level.

For those of you who don't know anything about her background, she spent a decade at Lyft running Beady and Partnerships. She led the partnerships Lyft did with Chase, Delta, JetBlue, Disney, Hilton, and so many other big, big brands in travel, points, hospitality, and so many other areas. So she has some crazy, amazing ideas of ways that being an All The Hacks member could add so much more value to your life.

She also has some really amazing ideas about how we can take all the interesting content and learnings and access we have and turn them into even more amazing things for everyone here. So I'm really excited for that. In fact, as a way to kick that off, I'm gonna invite her to join me right now just because she actually had her own musing of something amazing she experienced this week.

And I was like, Amy, this is a perfect thing to share on this episode. So Amy, welcome to the show. - Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to be joining All The Hacks full-time. It's been really interesting to see all of the listener emails that come in.

Chris has shared several with me. I'm fascinated by all the information being shared back and forth. And I'm really fascinated at the amount of intensity and passion you all bring around these topics. So thank you so much for continuing to support us at All The Hacks. I'm really pumped to be here and help out however I can.

- Also, if you have any deals that you're interested in seeing from All The Hacks, definitely hit us up. Very curious to get people's thoughts. And obviously we are looking and thinking about membership stuff for you as listeners. So if you have any interesting ideas, please send them our way, podcast@allthehacks.com.

Both Chris and I will be checking that. Or if you work at a company and you're interested in partnering with All The Hacks, please also send us a note. - Or if you run a company, we'd love to hear any ideas you have on things we could do for this community.

But Amy, you had a thing, and we were talking about this episode, about doing some musings about random things. You actually had one this week. - I did. So Chris and I are very interested in all things credit card, points, travel. We both have Venturex cards. And earlier this week, I got a random email from Capital One and in the email it said, "Hey, it looks like you were charged the same transaction twice.

Is this accurate or would you like to dispute it?" And in the email, there was a little button at the bottom. It said, "Dispute." I clicked on that. It took me to another landing page. It said, "File a dispute here." I clicked one other button, and immediately they submitted a disputed claim on my behalf.

They flagged it for me. It took nothing more than maybe three seconds, two clicks, and that was it. Immediately after, I got a message from Capital One and they confirmed that they will credit my account. So shout out to Capital One. I hope that a lot of these other card companies are starting to do more proactive diligence around that.

I think it was a really great experience. It definitely made me excited for what cards are doing and what cards could be doing for all of us. - It's funny 'cause I had a similar experience on Capital One where I wanted to like limit the number of email alerts I was getting.

And I went in to turn off some alerts and they had all these new alerts. So I saw one that said, "This is the one you got." It's like, "We'll notify you if you think you've been charged twice." But they also had higher than usual tips. So like if you tip more, they're gonna notify you.

They had another one that was like, "If we notice a new subscription or a renewal or a free trial or something like that." They always do the refunds and declines. But they also had, "We'll notify you if a recurring in-app purchase is higher than usual." So it just seemed like there's a lot of stuff they're experimenting with.

So keep it up Capital One and maybe everybody else take a note from that playbook. Any other things you wanna share before we wrap this kind of musing episode? - So I have gone deep in figuring out how to preserve our berries for as long as humanly possible. We have two small children and honestly, the berry bill at the end of each month is insane.

They go through crazy amounts of berries. And as part of that, it's been really hard to not have these berries go moldy halfway through the crate. So a big shout out to Kurt. He wrote in and gave us a tip. He's had a lot of success with distilled white vinegar baths.

I actually read about this before Kurt had sent the note in. And honestly, it sounded like a ton of work. But the way that he communicated it in his note actually really got me thinking this could be much easier than I realized. And so I took Kurt's advice. I did a quick distilled white vinegar bath on all of our berries, about no more than 30 seconds to a minute.

I used about a one to four distilled white vinegar to water ratio. That kills the mold spores in the berries. I then gave him a quick rinse, put him out on a drying rack to Kurt's recommendation, let them dry and pack them up. And they're now perfectly stored in our refrigerator.

So far, Kurt, it's been phenomenal. So I definitely encourage anyone to try this. It does seem to work. - The only thing I'll add here is that because we've been starting to do a lot of Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods delivery, the one thing I love about online grocery delivery, and I feel like I just said this a few days ago, but maybe it was on another podcast, is that when things do go moldy quickly, it is so much less hassle and so much easier to return things online than to drive all the way to the grocery store if you have three, four, $5 tin of raspberries and half of them are moldy.

So one hack here is that buy your groceries online because at least with Amazon, it makes it so, so easy to return things if they spoil, go bad, or in some cases, they just show up moldy already, which is unfortunate, but definitely save some time or at least save some money.

- This is actually goes against what Chris had said. Yes, buying fruit online is much easier if you do get bad fruit and you ask for a refund. That said, you don't have the ability when you're purchasing fruit online to be able to actually look at the fruit quality and choose the right berry carton that looks the most fresh.

And so it's kind of a blessing and a curse. - I don't have that skill. That's the problem is I come home sometimes and I'm like, look, I got this in New York. Why did you get those? These are like moldy or soft. So I think it plays better to someone like me who doesn't know how to pick fruit at the grocery store than you.

- That's fair. And quick tip, for those who don't know how to pick fresh berries, call it blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries. If you go to the store, pick up the crate and tip it upside down. If the fruit sticks to the top of the carton when it's upside down, do not purchase it.

- Meaning when you turn it back, does it stay stuck or what are you looking for exactly? - No, when you pick up the fruit, all the fruit sits at the bottom of the carton. Flip the carton upside down. And if the fruit is still stuck now to what is the top of it, which used to be the bottom, do not choose that carton of berries.

- All right. So maybe I can do this now. I've probably been told that like five times and still don't remember. Anything else we're gonna see, give us a feedback. You can always email us, podcast@allthehacks.com. Use the contact form on the website. Hit us up on social. Let us know, what do you think of this episode?

Should we do more like this? Amy, should she come back? Should we keep doing these? I don't think Amy would be offended at all if you were like, have me on or don't. - Yeah, let me know. I won't be offended. - Anything else on your mind, send a note.

That's all we got right now. We'll see you on Wednesday with another travel episode all about going to France. And it's a great one. So that's it. - Bye. (laughing) - See ya. (upbeat music) I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it.

And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just wanna say hi, I'm Chris@allthehacks.com or @hutchins on Twitter. That's it for this week. I'll see you next week. (upbeat music) (electronic beeping) (electronic buzzing)