The Ultimate Guide to Smarter Living: All the Hacks with Chris Hutchins

[00:00:05] Jay, remind me I've got to send this episode to my kids because I cannot believe what that guy just told us. So Chris Hutchins, he has the All The Hacks podcast and so many interesting things at his website, allthehacks.com. But I don't like the word life hack. I think a lot of that is just BS. But this was legit, like ranging from his stories where he would go buy gold bars at

[00:00:36] Costco and how you can make money by doing that or his stuff with gift cards or he had so many weird, interesting financial or other kinds of life hacks where you can literally like make a living and have a better life. Like it seemed like he was doing great with all this stuff. So again, what you're about to hear is weird, interesting, and potentially financially lucrative, or at least thought provoking.

[00:01:04] So it's Chris Hutchins. He's got the All The Hacks podcast and allthehacks.com and you can find his newsletter there and other stuff. Let's start the episode. This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

[00:01:35] Chris, I'm skeptical of the word life hacks. Like everybody's got their life hacks. Oh, you could, you know, ever since Tim Ferriss wrote the excellent book, The 4-Hour Workweek, the meme of the century has been the word life hacks. And I'm usually sick of it. But when I ran into you at that party, you were telling me these amazing hacks that you did that were like,

[00:01:57] they actually worked and they also were great stories. And so I just, I want to get into your whole like origin story, how you got into these. But first, I just want, what is like one, just so we could demonstrate to the listeners, what's one life hack that works that you've used to successfully change something in your life? Maybe even financially. Well, financially, I was going to go with like a really simple one, which is related to food. I'll go start with this real simple one.

[00:02:27] Tell me that one. It's just, I have a problem eating unhealthy food. My wife loves to bake and I'm always like, I just want more. And so someone told me this trick and they're like, just give yourself the permission to eat the unhealthy thing in five minutes. I was like, this is so silly. So I see a freshly baked set of cookies and I'm like, you know what? I can eat all the cookies I want in five minutes. And in those five minutes, I get distracted. I go start doing something and then I never eat the cookies.

[00:02:51] But it doesn't feel like I'm depriving myself. Like when I think of hacks, I don't think of like cheating the system. I think of just like mindset shifts or arbitrage opportunities that allow you to have an outsized outcome without sacrificing. That's the big one for me. Well, I like this one. I'm definitely going to apply it. What's another simple one like that? And then we'll get into a financial one. So this one is number one I'm going to do.

[00:03:16] Yeah, yeah. It's very easy. I don't know. I think I'm trying to think of like a perfect example of something I love to do. So I love credit card points and miles, but that probably falls into the finance camp. But at the end of the day, I think part of the origin story for me was I wanted to live this great life. I didn't want to work at a job that I thought was terrible.

[00:03:42] And the traditional answer is like financial independence, retire early, which is like deprive yourself, reuse your tinfoil, you know, use twigs in your yard to make a rake. And I was like, I don't want to live that life. Yeah. And there has to be these opportunities to find ways to kind of really dial in and optimize your life without having to sacrifice. And so that became the inspiration for all of this and how I wanted to kind of live my life.

[00:04:08] I think here's one. This is another non-finance, non-money. My wife and I were constantly, you know, having this back and forth. Okay, well, I did the dishes tonight. You do the dishes tomorrow night, right? These are mindset shifts. And so we had this kind of, oh, I did bedtime for the kids. Now you do bedtime. And then I interviewed this couple who wrote this book called The 80-80 Marriage.

[00:04:29] And their premise was if you both just operate under the assumption that each of you is doing 80% of the work, then you can stop keeping score. And as long as you actually like live to that, you know, you can't just not be – you can't not be helpful. But if you live to that, then you stop keeping score. And the overhead of a relationship goes away. There's no more like, hey, you know, it's your turn for dinner. It's just like you're always volunteering to do things. You're always trying to help out. You get rid of keeping score. And it just makes life a lot easier.

[00:04:59] But, you know, I think that's hard to know what is 80%. I think it's just a concept. It's a concept that like you're both doing more than half so you don't have to keep score. And then once you stop keeping score, all the overhead that went into keeping score makes it so much easier to just do a little bit more. And so some weeks I'll do dinner every night. And some weeks my wife will do dinner every night. But we're just not – we're not tracking it. And it makes for a happier relationship, an easier life. All right, I like that. I like that one also. I'm going to read that book.

[00:05:30] Okay, so here's one more that's in the travel but not in the money camp. So if you ever want to rent a house anywhere in the world, right? So a lot of people go to Airbnb and you say, oh, this looks like a really great house. Well, we all know that Airbnb takes a pretty big cut. That's their whole business model. So if you take the image on an Airbnb listing, try to find the one that most represents the property, copy the image, screenshot the image, and then go to Google Image Search and search for the image.

[00:05:57] You can often find that exact same house on some other platform. It might be a website operated directly by the owner. It might be like a lower cost, you know, villa rental service in another country. Yeah. And you can usually save money booking direct or through like a less expensive platform just by taking that image and searching for it. Man, that is an excellent idea. I wish I had known that when I was actually living in Airbnbs.

[00:06:23] So I wanted to see if my, there was a period of about two and a half, three years where I only lived in Airbnbs. Like I didn't rent any place and I didn't own any place because I wanted to see if it would be cheaper ultimately and easier and make my life more easy just by living in Airbnbs. And the point is I don't have to deal with buying furniture. I don't have to deal with maintenance. I could move whenever I want. It's not like dealing with kind of like a lease or whatever.

[00:06:51] Uh, and it really was much more convenient without much more added expense than renting an apartment, particularly when you count in like furniture costs and all that kind of stuff. Oh yeah. Dude. Yeah. So you could have done this. You could have found cheaper places. Yeah. And it would have been great. So that's a good one. All right. Now what's, I know like when we were at that party, we talked a lot about financial stuff. Like, like particularly there was one where you were, you were buying gold and selling it.

[00:07:19] You're buying gold cheap and selling it. So I actually have one on my desk. So the Costco sells these little gold bars. And I, I, when I first told my wife, I was going through this crazy gold system. I told her I was going to Costco and I was going to pick up a bunch of gold. And she's like, okay. And I was like, yeah, I just picked up 10 gold bars today. And she's like, where are you going to put it? And then I came home. I was like, no, no, no. They're literally like the size of a credit card. Yeah. I just put it by pocket. And so how much do you buy them for? Like, how do they set the price? Like, let's say gold is, I don't even know what gold is right now. Gold's a little over 3000 an ounce.

[00:07:49] So let's say gold's 3000 an ounce and you're buying how, how many ounces is that? Like one 10th of an ounce, one 100th of an ounce. This is one ounce. Oh, that's one ounce. This is $3,000 of gold. It's, you know, it's not that different than the size of a credit card. And do you pay $3,000 for it? Yeah. So the, the fun trick and the reason why Costco gold is so interesting is that it's not that Costco sells gold for a good deal. Right. And relative to other places, maybe it is, but if, if gold is $3,000, Costco might be

[00:08:18] selling gold for 3000 and let's call it $60. Right. So 2% over. So you're paying a 2% premium to buy the gold at Costco on a good day. I'm usually paying like one to one and a half percent premium. Okay. But I'm paying a premium. The crazy thing is Costco has two reasons that makes that lucrative. Reason one, Costco has this program called executive rewards and you pay for their membership. I think it's $120 a year.

[00:08:44] And for the first $62,500 you spend a year at Costco, they give you 2% of your purchases back. Okay. I see. So, so worst case is like if you buy the gold and sell it immediately on the open market, uh, you, you, you, you break even on your Costco purchases. That's the worst. And so I think that's the worst case, but, and that's honestly, it's also probably the best case. I mean, the worst case would be, you bought the gold, you forgot to sell it. Gold price drops tremendously.

[00:09:14] And, and, and, you know, that, that would be the worst case or you just lost it. Yeah. You know, that would be even worse. But Costco also lets you buy gold on a credit card. So let's say you went and opened up, let's say you're someone who doesn't spend a ridiculous amount of money. Right. But you got this thing in the mail from Amex and they said, you know, if you open up this Amex platinum card, we're going to give you 200,000 points. Uh, but you've got to spend 10 grand in order to get those 2000, 200,000 points. Now, 200,000 Amex points. Let's just say at the worst case is worth two grand. Right.

[00:09:44] It's like a penny a point. I would say that's the worst case. Um, and we can get to why that's the worst case, but so, so two grand, but if you don't spend $8,000, you know, you don't, you're not that kind of person, then this is not an opportunity for you. Well, actually I should pause. This is not a perfect example because Costco doesn't take Amex. So let's pretend that this is a chase, this is a chase, chase offer. Same thing. You're getting $2,000 for opening up this chase card, um, or, or this capital one card

[00:10:13] and it's a visa and you want to take advantage of this, but you don't spend that much money. Right. Capital one had this great card that was like a 20, $2,500 signup bonus, but you had to spend $20,000. And it was the $2,500 was in points cash back. Okay. Cash back. It was the capital one spark cash plus card. Um, and, but so you, that's a problem because you don't spend $20,000. The average person doesn't have $20,000 of extra expenses, but if you could go to Costco and you could buy gold and the Costco membership would subsidize your loss.

[00:10:43] Then not only are you getting points when you spend money on that credit card to buy the gold, but then you get that $2,500 signup bonus. So if you factor in the points you're getting on your card, you factor in the signup bonus all of a sudden it's actually like you're making money. And it got to the point that I calculated that I could hit, you know, hit sounds like I'm robbing Costco. I'm paying them. You know, there's no, there's no thievery here, but I was like, I could go to like 12 Costco's in the Bay area in like four hours. I could just drive a loop and hit all the Costco's.

[00:11:10] So one day I did it and I picked up like 20 bars of gold. And I think my profit was somewhere, you know, around, I don't know, like two or $3,000 that day from your profit from Costco, from the credit card rewards, from Costco's credit card rewards and Costco's, um, executive rewards. And some days there's great days because Costco, you know, gold is a real time market in the middle of the day. Costco doesn't have these paper printed price tags that auto update.

[00:11:38] So if you're looking and it's like 9am and all of a sudden something happened in the news and gold is up 5%, we'll drive to Costco because they probably didn't jack the rates up 5%. That is actually an amazing idea. There used to be this, it was actually, uh, illegal, but it's similar to what you're saying, but with stocks. So mutual funds, uh, are priced once a day. It's the sum of all their assets added up, all their stocks added up, but the mutual fund

[00:12:06] prices at four 15, even though the market closed at four. So, oh no, sorry. The mutual fund, um, prices at 4 PM when the market closes, but sometimes they allow for, or they did allow for late trading up to like four 15. So if there were, there was news, you could do this thing called mutual fund timing. So you could take advantage of the fact that the stocks might've gone up, but you, you're the mutual funds fixed at price, fix their price at four o'clock. So it's just similar to that.

[00:12:36] So if gold, like you said, if gold is up 5%, but Costco priced early this morning at last, you know, at last night's close or whatever, then you can make a lot of money doing this. Yeah. Yeah. There are people I know that, so you can only spend this $62,000. There are people I know who have many Costco memberships, right? Because they want to, you know, if you're, they want to spend a million dollars on gold, you need a lot of Costco memberships. There are people out there who will basically say, Hey, I will pay you just to use your Costco membership.

[00:13:06] Um, and if you don't have a Costco near you, Costco ships gold. I've gotten dozens of packages this year of gold bars to my house from buying Costco gold online. And the online price is fixed. Once you buy it, it's bought. It's fixed when you buy it. But the fun hack is it's fixed when you buy it. You know, you never know if the order is not going to get fulfilled. I've never had that happen, but you know, you order something online, maybe it doesn't come, maybe there's an issue. So I'd wait to lock in my sales price until the gold.

[00:13:36] I have a tracking number. Like once it's in UPS's hands, I feel good selling it. Um, even though I haven't received it yet, but if for some reason gold crashed after you ordered it, but before it got delivered, you could just return to sender and Costco will refund you. So you have like downside protection on the price drops. If price goes up, then you just make more money. So, so the idea would be basically you have your stock market, your, your, your brokerage account open and you have your Costco account open.

[00:14:05] And when the price of Costco gold is less than the price of gold on the markets, you buy the Costco gold and sell instantly on the market. Yes. With the exception of, you know, because Costco has given you this 2% and you're getting credit card rewards, it might not need to be less. It might just need to be a smaller, you know, but just in an extreme case, like gold spikes up in the middle of the day. Yeah. There was a day where, you know, I remember getting all these alerts on different slacks

[00:14:35] and discords. I'm in where everyone's like, go to Costco right now. Like gold just spiked. Costco hasn't repriced drive, drive, drive. And like all these people are like, I'm going, I'm going. Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at Alcatra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

[00:15:11] And so theoretically, what's the maximum amount of gold you could buy like online right now? So Costco will sell you five bars per membership per SKU. So there's, Costco probably sells like, depending on inventory, like 10 SKUs. And, you know, if you live with someone, you can each have a membership. If you have a business, you can have another membership. So I would say, I know people that, you know, found a few workarounds where if you, you know, you bought a Costco membership on, you know, through some third party platform,

[00:15:40] maybe they let you have a third one. You know, there were people that could buy a lot. I'd say the average person is limited, not by Costco, but limited by the credit card limits they have. Right. If gold is $3,000 a bar, even if you can get your hands on the ability to buy a hundred bars, you need to have 300, you know, a hundred thousand. How much credit limit do you have on cards that Costco accepts? Right. But theoretically though, if you're making like a couple of percent per, per transaction,

[00:16:09] whether it's again, through the rewards or you have, or there's this arbitrage between the real price of gold and the Costco price of gold, like a young person in their twenties who just wants to kind of live the easy life could potentially make like a hundred bucks a day to some doing this. Because I was, I came to like, every time I went to Costco, I was making a hundred dollars a bar. So it was like $500 a trip. So like, okay. So 500 bucks a day potentially. And that was for every stop.

[00:16:38] So if I went to two Costco's, it'd be a thousand. If I went to four Costco's, it'd be 2000. Now Costco doesn't, doesn't restock gold every single day. So it'd be, it'd be tricky. But what about online though? They, they online, they do, but they limit you to five bars every week. But you could open up an account for everybody in your family. You could. And so, so potentially you could buy like 20 bars in a week. Yeah. I think that the game here is finding the credit card that gives you the most rewards because

[00:17:06] the difference between buying gold with a 2% cashback card, a 4% cashback card, like that's a big change. When you say cashback, I'm not familiar with credit card rewards. They give you cash for like, so there are like us bank just launched this credit card, which there are, to be clear, there are rumors that they're, they're changing it, but it would be a four, it's a 4% cashback card. As long as you have, you know, a hundred thousand dollars of brokerage assets with them. So if not, it's a 2% cashback.

[00:17:35] And by cashback, that means like, if I spend $10,000, they'll give me $200 back. Well, no, this is 4%. So I'll give you $400. $400 cash. Cash. They will deposit that cash into your checking account that you have at us bank. And, and do they also have rewards points? Like, no, they just cashback card. And with rewards points, we've determined that they're about a penny, a point. What can you do with rewards points? They have like a catalog where you can spend the points. So I'd say the, the highest leverage thing you can do with your credit card points.

[00:18:04] If it's, if it's Amex, Chase, um, Capital One, Citibank, the highest leverage thing you can do is book travel. If you have some flexibility. So my wife and I decided the next spring break, we're going to go to Japan and we're going to take the kids. We need four tickets to Japan. And I know that Japan airlines opens up the schedule 360 days out. And, you know, so we're going to book a 360 days out.

[00:18:29] We're going to get these round trip business class tickets to Japan for approximately 150,000 points. Now, if I were getting value them at a penny a point, it would be $1,500, you know, you can't get a round trip international business class ticket for $1,500, um, especially to Japan. So in that particular case, it's going to be probably $4,500. So three cents a point, except regularly different, uh, banks have promotions.

[00:18:59] So oftentimes Chase and Amex will say, Hey, if you transfer your points to British airways, which is how we're going to book this flight, we're going to give you 30% more. Well, there's another rewards program called built, which, you know, pays you points for rent when you pay your rent. And they had a promo yesterday that was a hundred percent transfer bonus. So you transfer 50,000, they'll give you a hundred thousand. So effectively we got about six cents per point on these tickets to Japan, which, which makes

[00:19:26] the effective cashback price of our trip to Japan round trip business class tickets, like 700 bucks a person. Now I don't even think I can go and coach to Japan for 700 bucks. Yeah. I was just going to say, but, but okay, what's this cashback or what's this rewards program for paying your rent? I never heard of this. Oh, so there's a credit card called built. Um, it was a venture backed company. The Wells Fargo issues, the card and built rewards. It's a credit card, but you can put your rent on the credit card and it doesn't matter

[00:19:55] who your landlord is. They'll just mail your landlord a check if you have to, and they'll give you a pet, a point for every dollar of rent up to a hundred thousand points a year. And what can you do with their points? Same thing. You could, you could book travel at a penny a point, or you can transfer them to hotels and airlines. And kind of, if you play the system, you could get 10 cents a point. If you are really poor at playing the system, you know, maybe you'll get worse, but no, like you would, you would have to try to not get a penny a point. Now, why does, why does built do this?

[00:20:24] What's their, what's, what's the business model for this? So, I mean, there are a few articles about, you know, the relationship between built and Wells Fargo and whether this deal they have will get renewed. So, you know, there's an open question there. I think everyone is trying to become the primary financial institution for the next generation. And, you know, some people do that by saying, Hey, sign up for this card and we'll give you 200,000 points, which is worth $2,000 built. Doesn't do that.

[00:20:54] When you sign up for the built card, you don't get a signup bonus. So you could argue that, okay, instead of putting money into intro offers, we're putting money into ongoing offers for rent payments. Not only that, like Wells Fargo is going to get, or built is going to get an enormous amount of data that could fuel AI. Like let's say a landlord wants to know who's a good person to rent to. They're not going to, they're going to know all the data from, from built. Yeah. And presumably you'll spend that card on lots of other things throughout the year

[00:21:22] and participate in their programs. And I know they have a program for landlords that landlords can sign up and accept payments that they probably have some, you know, business model behind as well. So I think there are a lot of businesses, a lot of ways they're making money. They're a venture backed company. You know, I don't know if they're profitable or not. They're private. But I think every financial institution dangles something to people to try to get them over, whether that's free money to join, whether that's, you know, 5X points on this thing.

[00:21:52] And built is that they'll give you points on your rent. And honestly, if you're a renter, you should have the bill card. Like you can give free points on your rent. There's no other card that's going to give you points on rent. I feel like this is a good idea to do deals with kind of smaller cryptos to kind of, oh, if you spend $1,000, you're going to get 1,000 tokens of this crypto and do like a whole bunch of crypto. So it's like this, you get these crypto awards every time you spend money. It's a good way for marketing these different cryptos.

[00:22:22] I feel like that would be a, like, it depends on the month, whether that's a good idea. Like there are months where like that would turn a lot of consumers off. There's months where consumers would be stoked and by the time you pencil the deal, you might be in the, on the other side of it. So I don't know. I know I'm not excited about that. So, so the gold one though, legitimately, it seems, and I keep thinking of my daughters when I have conversations like this, like they live in New York city. They want to be actresses, which means most of the time they're waitresses.

[00:22:52] And so it seems like a young person can do stuff like this. So I, there's this whole underground. So I did this episode with this guy, Kai. And you know, I, I met him because he loves finding these deals and these arbitrage opportunities. So it's episode one 81, all the hacks.com slash one 81. And he's making more than $3,000 a month finding deals, whether it's gold or other things and taking advantage of those deals and turning them into profit

[00:23:21] and all kinds of stuff. But like, just on gold alone, you're saying you're making $500 a trip to Costco. Like, why don't you do that every day and make 15,000 a month? Yeah. Well, because Costco usually only restocks gold on Fridays and Saturdays. So there's, there's that limit. There's the limit of like, how do I want to spend my time? Um, but yeah, I mean, there are people I know that go to Costco every day. There's restock. There is actually a guy online who's created a $5 a month service that he will tell you,

[00:23:49] like, he'll send you a DM as soon as your Costco restocks gold. And so, uh, like how much, like your friend who does these, like finds all these different opportunities. How much time does he spend per month doing this? Is it? He says he spends less than 20 hours a week. And I think he does a, he has this podcast called the daily churn. And in the podcast, he sums up at the end of the month, like here's how much I've made. And then at the end of the year, I'd say he's probably making a six figure income just from these things.

[00:24:19] Um, gift cards is another interesting one. And you talked about your daughter. So I did this with my daughters this weekend. So Amex has these offers from time to time on their cards where they're like, Hey, if you spend $200 at Lowe's, we'll give you $50 back. Cash. I was like, well, that's interesting. Cash, cash back. So I was like, Oh, that's interesting. I'm going to go to Lowe's. I took my daughters to Lowe's. We, I had six cards that had this offer on it. Um, and side plug, there's an app called card pointers that will activate these offers on multiple cards.

[00:24:47] So my daughters and I, we went to Lowe's. We bought six, $200 Dick's sporting good gift cards. We immediately in the parking lot sold them at 88 cents on the dollar. But because we were getting 50 backs, 50 bucks back from Costco, we were only paying 75 cents on the dollar. So we made, you know, a 12, uh, 12, 13, 13 point spread on buying these gift cards. Right. Just cash because you sold the gift cards immediately in the parking lot. Sold the gift cards for cash.

[00:25:16] You know, we paid one 50 and we sold them for whatever 88 of 200. So we sold them for 176. So for each gift card, we made 26 bucks times six. We made like 150 bucks. Now, was it worth my time to drive to Lowe's for, you know, an hour to make, uh, 150 bucks? No, but my daughter who's four is like, you know, we, we, we literally deposited 150, but like, you know, this is not a lemonade stand, right? She's making 150 bucks in an hour.

[00:25:43] So, so do people really like, if you go into the parking lot and if some stranger approaches me, he's like, Hey buddy, you want to buy a Dick's gift card? Like, I don't know. No, no. There's, there's marketplaces for this. Like there are, I have, there's three gift card brokers I work with, um, to buy and sell gift cards. And funny enough, when I went to Lowe's, if I had been able to buy Apple gift cards, I would have been able to sell them at 91 cents on the dollar. The entire rack of Apple gift cards was sold out. The entire rack of Amazon gift cards was sold out because all of these people are in the middle of doing this.

[00:26:13] In fact, I got stopped in the parking lot from someone that was like, Hey, I recognize your voice from your podcast. I was here to buy gift cards. That's so funny. So give the gift cards alone is like an arbitrage. So if you, if I could go in the parking lot of Costco and buy, you know, gift cards for 88 cents on the dollar, then I could go to Dick's sporting goods and buy like a tennis racket for 88 cents on the dollar. Could I just sell it on eBay for a hundred cents on the dollar? A hundred percent.

[00:26:38] So I, I did this, uh, experiment in February where I went deep on gift cards, right? There's, I met this guy who runs a gift card brokerage firm. And at any given point in time, he's got like seven, seven million ish dollars of gift cards on inventory. Like he's holding, you know, how does he get them? So there are all kinds of reasons that buying gift cards and selling them for below market value is a good deal.

[00:27:07] Sometimes there's promotions, right? You just, we're giving 10% off if you buy DoorDash gift cards. In fact, if you go to Costco, you can, they sell Uber gift cards regularly for a hundred dollars of Uber for $75. Almost every week you can get 20% off, but probably four or five times a year, you can get 25% off. Same thing is true right now. You want to buy Alaska airlines gift cards, 10% off at Costco. You want to buy DoorDash 20% off. You want to buy Topgolf. It's like 20 or 30% off.

[00:27:34] So Costco is always selling gift cards at a discount and you could go to Costco, buy all these gift cards, immediately sell them. And, and, you know, may usually the profit is in the credit card points. And so these gift card brokers know that. So when you go buy a Uber gift card for 75 bucks, they're going to buy it from you from 75 bucks. But if you had a 4% cashback card, you get to keep that cashback. That's how the market often works. So let's say I'm a young person.

[00:28:01] I typically take an, well, probably young people don't take Ubers to work, but let's say I take an Uber once a week on the weekends. Yeah. On the weekends. So I'm going to save money. I'm going to have, I'm going to save money on that. But then also I'm going to make, well, how much can I sell the Uber, the gift card for if I buy it for 75 cents on the dollar? To a gift card broker right now, probably not much more than 75 cents on the dollar. But here's the interesting thing that I figured out.

[00:28:29] That's like, I realized that why can't the average person just buy these gift cards easily, right? You go online and you, you know, like most people are just paying, you know, a hundred cents on the dollar for Uber, even though at almost virtually unlimited scale, you can buy Uber gift cards on sale. This was the crazy thing I found. I don't think anyone should pay full price at any retailer anywhere because you can buy

[00:28:54] almost every single retailer's gift card for five to 30% off. This might be the most valuable podcast I've ever done. This might be the most valuable episode out of 1500 episodes. So wait, so I can, so, so, okay. So, so two things I could buy all these, let's just stick with Uber, but I understand it's for every product you're saying. So let's transition to Amazon because it's even more relevant to everyone. And I, I, this was what sparked a crazy thing in January was Amazon gift cards.

[00:29:23] I noticed that you could buy Amazon gift cards in unlimited quantity from gift card brokers for somewhere on the order of 15, 15% off. So, so if I'm buying a hundred dollars worth of books that day and I use my gift cards, I'm really going to spend $85 for a hundred dollars worth of books. Yep. Okay. So I can buy them at some gift broker and, and just, just there, I'm getting the 15% discount

[00:29:52] on Amazon, but every dollar I spend, I'm getting points, maybe cashback points on my credit card. Yeah. So, so the double arbitrage is you could buy gift cards at a discount and you can put them on a credit card. You still get the points. And the only downside I would say, and this is a downside that most people that probably don't even know exists is that many credit cards have what's called purchase protection. So if you go buy, and I've used this on my iPhone every time, uh, if you buy an iPhone

[00:30:20] and it breaks in the first year, um, and you need to get a warranty claim, Apple will cover it. Apple's warranty is good for a year, but a lot of credit cards will extend the warranty by one year. Right. Or if you buy something and it gets stolen in the first 90 days, most credit cards will cover that. Some of them will even cover it if it breaks. So one time I bought an iPhone screen broke 40 days in file the claim to the credit card company. They paid to repair the screen. Now, if you buy a gift card, obviously the purchase protection you have on your credit card

[00:30:47] will not apply, but so I would never buy a new laptop on a gift card because if that laptop has a problem year two, I'd love for my credit card company to pay $300 to fix it. I get it. But for everything else, but groceries, a hundred percent of our groceries we buy with Amazon gift cards. Wow. So you basically, so, so if there's 3% inflation this year, but you're getting 15% discount, like inflation just doesn't affect you. You're, you're basically things deflated for you. Once you started using this strategy.

[00:31:18] Yeah. I would say not only that you're getting the cash back for some percentage of all the groceries you buy on top of the discount from the gift card. I'm getting the cash back when I bought the gift cards. Right. So, uh, it's, it, yeah. When I actually model out how much I pay for gift cards, I include the cash back. So it lowers the rate. So, so essentially instead of it being like a 75 cents on the dollar, it's almost like maybe 50 or 60 cents on the dollar you're spending because you're getting the cash back too,

[00:31:47] on top of the discount. I would say the cash back best case is like three to 4%. So it wouldn't go that far, but here's a fun example. This listener of mine wanted to remodel his house and the guy, he's like, Hey, contractor, can I pay you with a credit card? Contractors like, sorry, I like, I don't take credit card. That's just like, I don't, I would have to pay charge you 3%. And he goes, Oh, well, where are you buying all these supplies? The guy's like, Oh, I buy them at Lowe's. He's like, can I go buy them at Lowe's? And the contractor's like, sure. You know, that's fine with me.

[00:32:16] Especially because, you know, this contractor, I think the way he told the story was, uh, like the contractor didn't have the credit limit to do this. So he was probably going to pay cash for all these supplies anyways. So he goes to Lowe's with his brother. They take every credit card they have and they go buy a bunch of Lowe's gift cards. And they put $170,000 of supplies for their home renovation on like 15 to 20 credit cards. And a bunch of Lowe's gift cards that they got on discount.

[00:32:41] And they basically saved, I would guess on average, like five to 6% off the renovation of their home. Because they're getting a discount from the Lowe's gift cards. They bought Lowe's gift cards on a discount and they're earning, they opened up a bunch of credit cards. So they got these signup bonuses because they're like, God, we got $170,000 to spend, you know, open up that Amex card. That's going to give me a, you know, huge $2,000. If I spend, you know, uh, two, $10,000 this month.

[00:33:09] And if I just Google gift brokers, I'll find like all sorts of gift gift card brokers. Yeah. So, um, I think it was episode two, 12. I did, let's see all the hacks to 12. I have some in the show notes there, but I talked to one of them, this guy that runs aligned incentives. So here's the interesting thing. All the brokers that are buying gift cards are not selling to consumers. And so the re the challenge is fraud in gift cards is huge because someone will go and buy this Amazon gift card for 500 bucks. They'll order something for same day delivery.

[00:33:38] They'll ship it to an address, like a shipping location at a UPS store. They'll go pick it up. And then they'll say gift card didn't work. You know, like they'll call their credit card company, the credit card company, I'll charge it back. And it's this whole mess of fraud. Anyone that's listening, that's ever run a business that accepts credit card knows that like if someone wants to fight your charge, it is hard to defend it. Like one time we sold a product to someone and we had evidence that they got the product we sold them and the credit card company still sided with the consumer. Wow.

[00:34:07] Um, so the biggest marketplace for this is called GCX. Um, it's owned by a company called raise. I think it's GCX dot raise.com. They're the biggest consumer facing gift card purchasing site I'm aware of. And they have great deals, but the deals are better from brokers, but brokers don't want to take on this fraud risk. So I'd say, so I set up, I realized this opportunity and in January I was like, well, I have an audience that I think if I talk on the podcast, it's not that written with fraud because it's not,

[00:34:35] you know, you know, we're not, we don't, we don't have this massive website that we're promoting. So I just started selling direct from the brokers. The problem is the brokers want to sell five, $10,000 minimums. So I'd say, if anyone's out there and they're like, I want to spend 20, $30,000, you know, I set up a gift card site. It's like all the hacks.com slash gift cards, but I set the minimum order at $5,000.

[00:35:12] It feels like there's an opportunity here. For instance, you're saying consumer facing gift card brokers aren't happy because there's all this fraud risk when they're dealing with random consumers. What if you did something simple? Like when someone signs up, they have to be a member it's free, but they have to be a member of your gift card site. And one way you have to confirm their employment. So it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily mean anything that they're employed, but it kind of makes them a little bit more hesitant to defraud you if they just gave you their place

[00:35:41] of employment. So I went down this path of, should I just go start? Like, like I have all these relationships. Should I just go start a better gift card site that used like Stripe has ID verification APIs. So I could require you to, you know, we've all opened up some app where you've got to take a picture of your, you know, driver's license. You got to turn your head to the left and the right and do a selfie on your phone. And you kind of do identity verification. At the end of the day, I was like, I don't know if I want to go spend my time right now running a gift card website.

[00:36:08] So I took mine and I kind of wound it down and it's a friends and family thing. If you need to buy five plus thousand dollars of gift cards, I'll get you the best deal I can. But otherwise, you know, raise and GCX have this or once a quarter, I'm going to open up the gift card site to everyone. I'll put it in my newsletter and because then I don't have to deal with these minimum orders. Like I know that if I can get all the orders every three months, then if you want to spend a thousand dollars on gift cards, that's fine because, you know, I know I can meet my $10,000

[00:36:38] minimum because I'm, I'm kind of aggregating demand. So now, okay. I get it that all the gift brokers, let's, let's go back to Uber for a second. I get it that all the gift brokers are not going to pay more than 75 cents a dollar for an Uber gift card. By the way, how do they get the gift cards? I forget. How does Costco get them? Yeah. Or the gift brokers. I'll buy a gift card at Costco. I'll go and I'll literally just like scratch off the thing and I'll like take, type in the

[00:37:07] pin number on the platform that the gift card buyer site has. Oh, so the gift brokers might just get these gift cards at Costco. So the gift brokers get them from a, an army of people who are willing to drive to Costco or any other retailer that has gift cards on sale because they want their profit is almost always in the credit card rewards. The consumer or the gift card broker? The consumer, the broker sits in the middle. There's people who are willing to drive to Costco, buy gift cards so that they can earn credit card rewards.

[00:37:36] They sell to a broker and then the broker sells to, you know, a consumer facing platform like raise where, you know, you could go buy them today. So I see. So, so the consumer might not make any money on the gift cards. He's buys it for 75 cents on the dollar sells to the gift card broker for 75 cents. And, and, and, and his incentive is he doesn't really want the gift card. He just wants the cash back on the credit card. Yeah. And I did this analysis where I looked at all these signup bonuses, right? Every credit card that you open is going to give you some bonus except that built card

[00:38:05] I mentioned, but almost every card is giving you a bonus on average. That bonus results in about 10 to 15% cash back. Now at the low end, there are some cards where it's, you know, $500 on your first purchase. So that's like an, you know, almost infinity cash back, right? You put 10 cents on your card, you get $500. That's a good deal. But on average, if you look at the larger ones where it's, you know, you know, hundreds of dollars or even a thousand dollars, it's like over 10% back. And that 10% lasts forever.

[00:38:36] No, no. It's just a, you know, spend a thousand and spend a thousand and get, you know, a hundred or spend 10,000, get a thousand kind of, that would be an example of a 10% back. Once you've spent that $10,000, you know, you're out. But, you know, we, I was talking, um, with your producer for a moment before, before we started and he was like, well, but how many cards can you open? What does that do to your credit score? And I was like, I've opened dozens of credit cards. I've near perfect credit score. And yeah, it might improve your credit score.

[00:39:05] Cause you're always paying the credit card back and they see you having lots of credit cards. You're probably the best customer for credit card companies. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if someone who just does the bonus and, and kind of doesn't keep using the card as the best customer, but from a credit store standpoint, I have a lot of outstanding credit. I don't carry a balance. I haven't missed a payment. Like I'm definitely not someone who's going to, you know, need to go through bankruptcy and they're going to have to write off my debt. And, and, but again, like how many credit cards can you physically open?

[00:39:34] Like, isn't there a cap? Like at the 50th card in a year, some credit card company might say like, what are you doing with all these credit cards? Yeah, I would say that there is every credit card company has different rules and how they, how they look at this. Um, chase, if you've opened five cards in the last 24 months, they're not going to prove you for another card. But like someone with a big family, for instance, though, or lots of friends who don't want to get into this could, they could open up a lot of credit cards with these friends. I've got a friend who I think has, you know, in the credit card points and miles world, we call them players.

[00:40:04] So it's like, you know, my wife is my player too. I know someone who has at least seven or eight players where he's, he's just doing it. You know, it's basically, it sounds like identity theft. Cause it's like, he's just using their, you know, social security numbers to open up cards and do it, but they're fully engaged. And, you know, he probably does, I think like a 50, 50 rev share with them. So he's like, I found that. And how much does he make per month? I would say at the upper end, there was a fun survey in one of these kind of groups of people I'm in.

[00:40:34] People are making six, seven figures a year. And then, because then also you can take your profits from this and pour it into the gold thing. You could just keep on like recycling the money. The gold thing might not even be the most lucrative. If the gold thing is like a 3% margin on your spend. And, you know, you might find places where you could go for 5% margin, you know, or scale from your home without having to drive to Costco. I'm just curious if anyone buys a 75 cents on your dollar Uber card gift card, and then

[00:41:02] just sells it to their friend's friends for like 90 cents on the dollar. Like, Hey, you're going to take an Uber tonight. I'll show it. I have an, I have an Uber gift card. I'll sell it to it's, it's a hundred dollars worth. They'll sell it to you for 90. I think there is a great business for someone listening to have, which is I'm going to go find all these gift card deals. And then I'm going to make it easier for people to access it. You know, if you're on college campus, you know, and you were selling, I don't know, DoorDash gift cards for 10% off. I don't know.

[00:41:30] It seems like a fraternity fundraiser thing, you know, in the works. Yeah. Or if you just set up like a little booth on campus, like, Hey, DoorDash and Uber gift cards for 80 cents on the dollar. And yeah, you know, 10, 90 cents, 90 cents on the dollar. It's getting a huge discount. So that that's amazing. This was, I mean, it's funny. I, I, when you said that, it reminded me of one of my earliest versions of this was I

[00:41:55] went to boarding school and most kids at boarding schools, parents just give them unlimited amounts of money. Mine did not. And so every night people were ordering food and I was like, I want food, you know, like, but I don't have my parents' credit card, so I can't order it. So I would just order a pizza and I would sell six of the eight slices of pizza and, and take the prop and like that would cover the cost. So if I bought a pizza for 10 bucks, I'd sell the six slices, you know, for $10 divided by six for like a buck 60 or maybe two bucks a slice.

[00:42:24] And I just eat for free. Like, you know, the earliest version of this in my life. Yeah. Like the earliest version of this was I just want to eat the pizza like everybody else. And I don't want to pay for it. I don't want to deprive myself to save money. I want to live that life that these other kids with their parents' credit cards are living. I just would prefer to do it for free. Right. So you basically say to three of your friends, like, Hey, I'm going to order a pie of pizza. Are you in? They all say yes. And you charge them. Sorry. There's this huge bee that's flying around me. So that's why I keep waving.

[00:42:54] You charge them the price of the pizza. And then you have two slices left over for yourself. Yeah. Now in the, in the case that they were close friends, I would be like, you know, that would feel like in advance. It wouldn't feel great. But in the moment it's like all these kids, they didn't have the foresight to think, gosh, I'd really love to order a pizza tonight. You know, they show up at school. We had this 30 minute window after, you know, we'd all have to study for two hours. We could go socialize for 30 minutes. And then we went to bed. And in this 30 minute window, people were like, dang, I really, I really could use a slice of pizza.

[00:43:24] And I'm like, here I am. I got a slice of pizza for you. This is such a great example of how basically adversity inspires creativity. Like they weren't, they didn't start. And you, and creativity is like a muscle that you have to train. So now here you are doing a podcast about all these life hacks and a newsletter about all these life hacks. You have a career around this. And it all because it's all because your parents didn't give you money when you went to boarding school with all the rich kids, they're not starting these businesses. They're sitting at their desk at a law firm with a gun in their mouth, deciding whether or not to shoot it.

[00:43:53] And you're like living the life. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I do think that the inspiration for all of this was a combo of early, just like not having less resources than some of the other kids at the school I went to and getting creative and then not loving my first job out of college. What was your first job out of college? I worked at an investment bank in New York. Which one? It was called Allen and Company. Oh yeah, I know. We talked about this. Yeah. At the party. But I know Allen and Company very well.

[00:44:23] They invested in one of my failed companies, one of my many failed companies. They lost $2 million on investing in me. I don't think it necessarily happened at that job. And then my second job was at a management consulting firm that no longer exists called Monitor Group. But when I was at management consulting, I think it was this moment where, because I had accepted two jobs in college because one of the offers started nine months later and I thought, well, I might as well hedge, right? Like if I accept both offers and I don't like the first job, I could just do the second job.

[00:44:51] So I get to the first job and I'm like, management or investment banking is just not a job for kind of creative entrepreneurial people. It just didn't fit my lifestyle. So I was like, let's try management consulting. And then I was like, gosh, I don't like this either. And I was like, do I like work? Like, do I have a problem? Like, do I just not like working? And if I don't like working, life's going to be really tough, right? If I have to do this for the next 50 years and I don't like it, like, what am I going to do? Yeah. You know? Were you depressed? So I was like, I need to save every dollar I want. I have, but I didn't want to do nothing. Like I wanted to travel.

[00:45:21] I wanted to go see cool stuff. I wanted to go hang out with friends and I didn't want to just live this recluse life. So that was what really inspired the, you know, looking at all of the money I spend, what are ways to take the big ticket items on my budget and keep doing them without paying for them? And that's when the credit card points thing came in. Cause I was like, oh, I want to go to Europe. But I, how could I do it for free? Oh, credit card points can make me travel for free.

[00:45:46] And that unlocked that huge thing that, you know, travel is a very big part of people's budget if you're doing it because, and it's expensive, but if you could do it all for free, that's great. Well, okay. So simplifying this, why can't somebody just go to Amazon and with their credit card by $10,000 worth of stuff and then immediately on eBay sell it for $10,000 or it's not that easy. There's, there's things called buyers groups. I actually went to one of their warehouses in LA once.

[00:46:17] And, um, the, the premise here is a lot of times things go on sale or not even on sale, but they have limited quantities. So like when you, when Apple launches a new product, sometimes they won't let you buy 27 iPhones, right? You could just buy two or something, but overseas, there are a lot of people who want iPhones where Apple's not selling them at the beginning. So, uh, there's this guy I got to know. And I think on Apple release day, he bought like a thousand iPhones with like, he got all

[00:46:44] his friends together, ordered them to different stores, all stuff, and immediately resold them to these buying groups who package them all up, put them on a, you know, cargo pallet, ship it overseas and sell it. And in general, it's the same model. They're usually willing to buy all kinds of consumer electronics at the same price you're going to pay for them. So, so this solves the first problem, which is just breaking even on the transaction so that you, but you start accumulating the points, which is again, like a penny a point and you

[00:47:13] start accumulating points. You can use points for travel or, or sometimes you get cash back or whatever, but then one step further, like with the gold example, you could even make a profit on the transaction or in some of these gift card examples, you can even make a profit on the, on the transaction. Yeah. I find that the more you explore like these arbitrage opportunities, the more you start to think outside the box, get creative and realize, Oh, like, yeah, I could buy this gift card for 75 bucks and resell it to a broker. But what if I resold it to a person?

[00:47:42] Because at the end of the day, I was buying these gift cards for let's call it 75 cents on the dollar. And then I was selling them for 75 cents. And then I was like, well, where's that guy selling them? And then I was like, wow, if I wanted to buy this myself, it's actually 85. On the dollar. So there's a 10% spread that is going to this grant. What if I just sold it? What if I set up an e-commerce website and sold these gift cards for 80 cents, you know, 85 cents. Now all of a sudden I'm keeping the spread. And, and they would go to you because they don't know, they don't have access to the gift

[00:48:11] broker selling them for 75 cents. The gift card broker probably wants to make his three or 4%. And so if I, instead of selling to him, I sold to consumers, there's that. And then the gift card broker doesn't want to deal with individual order fulfillment, setting up an e-commerce site. So when I buy from a gift card broker, it's usually $10,000 at a time. And so you have that relationship with the gift card broker because you're buying in size. Yep. I, I basically once a quarter, I plan to send an email on the newsletter and say, Hey, gift cards are on sale again.

[00:48:40] And I'm basically, my spread is probably only 3%, but at scale, 3% is really interesting. So, okay. What's one more, what's one more kind of financial hack? Okay. I mean, here's a fun, easy one that anyone, at least in the United States can do. Every state has a registry of unclaimed money. So this sounds so crazy because it just seems like in America, somehow this would never happen.

[00:49:07] But if some business owes you money, they can't just keep it after a certain amount of time. So they hand it over to the state after a certain number of years of trying to send it to you. Like, like, well, what's an example where a business might owe me money? I had one example where my wife had a Delta gift card and for whatever reason, it never expired, but, you know, we'd never use it or a flight credit before they expired. Another one, you might cancel your Verizon home internet and, you know, you paid for the month in advance.

[00:49:36] Verizon owes you the $80 and they try to get in touch with you, but newsflash, they couldn't get in touch with you because you've moved, which is why you canceled it in the first place. So Verizon owes you $80. Sometimes it's, you know, you go and pay a ton of money for, you know, medical treatment and they file it to your insurance. Eventually your insurance pays out, but by the time they paid out, you've already paid and you owe that. So you could go search. Every state has a page. You can go search for your, you know, Delaware unclaimed money, New York unclaimed money, California unclaimed money.

[00:50:06] And so you could go search and see how much money you're owed. And I sent, I've told my audience this, I don't know, once a year I remind people. So I put it in the newsletter a couple of weeks ago, a couple hundred people filled out this survey, 47% found none. Okay. So 40, 50, 50, you know, half the time you get nothing. That said, half the time you get nothing, but I've already talked about this a lot. 5% of people found a thousand dollars or more. Wow.

[00:50:34] So they just searched and it's like, oh wow. You know, Aetna owes me $1,300. Or I happen to have this money in an old bank account that I totally forgot about and lost track of and they've handed it over to the state. Now I can get access to it. Um, another 15% found over a hundred dollars, 3% found over $500. So I think when it all stacks up over 20% of people found a hundred or more dollars.

[00:51:00] So, so this is not necessarily a money-making thing, but it's, it's how you can have more money. Yeah. I mean, what's the difference between 20% of the people lost money that you found, right? You know, so 20% of the people listening to this could just trivially get like, you know, a hundred dollars, a thousand dollars or more without doing anything. Just go to the website, search, and then file the claim. And I would encourage everyone, even if it's just a dollar, if you care about privacy at all to go do this, because one of the challenges is the way these databases work is you could

[00:51:29] go search depending on the state by name and address. So, um, this is actually an interesting one. Someone in the neighborhood I live in, um, you know, which is not a very fancy neighborhood, like normal modest size houses, modest size lots. But there was a security car parked out of this house every single day. And we were like, I wonder who's living here. You know, like who has full-time security in our neighborhood? There's other neighborhoods in the Bay area where I would expect this, but ours doesn't seem like that. And, and so I was like, how do I find this person?

[00:51:58] So, you know, you go search your name and your address and you will probably find uh, you know, if you haven't been proactive here, you will probably find your address online. And I would encourage everyone to go, you know, get that removed. And we could talk about that, but this person had hired a security firm. So the security firm had gone and scrubbed their name and address from all these data broker websites. But then I went to the unclaimed money site and I searched the unclaimed money site for that address.

[00:52:26] And sure enough, there were three people who've lived at that address over the last, you know, 20 something years who had unclaimed money. One of them was the founder of like a prominent tech company. And two of them didn't even have LinkedIn pages. So pretty certain that the person living at this house was that person. So I emailed the, a friend of mine who'd invested in his company and said, Hey, could you pass this note along? It was pretty easy for me to figure out his address. And I got an email like an hour later that was like, could you please talk to my head of security and help him figure out what he's doing wrong? That is really funny.

[00:52:54] You know, it's, it reminds me though, I occasionally get emails from people like random people, strangers and saying, Hey James, you don't know this, but you have some unclaimed money at such and such state. So I do get, I get emails from people who are, I guess they're just being nice or whatever. But I would encourage everyone to claim it because especially claim it from the place you live. If you don't want your address out there, right? If you're someone who's like, I don't know, I don't care if anyone can find my address, it's fine.

[00:53:19] But in the, in this day and age with the sophistication of all these fishing attempts and all kinds of stuff, the last thing I want is someone understanding my entire, you know, here's where I live. Here's my address. Here's my siblings. Here's how old they are. Here's their birthdays. Here's their names. And then calling my mom and pretending to be some emergency room doctor and saying, you know, Hey, we, you know, Chris is unconscious in the hospital and we have his ID. It says he lives here. And we looked in his phone and we already called his sister, this, this, this, and we can't get ahold of her. Like we need you.

[00:53:48] Like we can't perform treatment until somebody pays. Do you have a credit card? And then all of a sudden, you know, that seems like something a lot of people would fall for. And so, you know, you've got, if you go to these evil companies, these data brokers, and you can ask each one of them to remove your data and they will do it. Or you can go hire a service for, you know, a few hundred dollars a year and they'll just remove it from all of them and keep an eye on. Yeah, no, my, my, my wife's very concerned about this. Uh, uh, so she just sent me a link to some site, Opry.

[00:54:17] O-P-R-E-Y.com. So there's one called Optry. Yeah. There's one called Incogni. Uh, I use one called Delete Me. Uh, I haven't done this in six months, but maybe 12 months, but a year ago, I tried all of them. And, you know, some of them don't have as wide of a reach. Some of them are a bit more aggressive in what they say they do. So I, I use them and then they didn't actually do it all. It was like, we'll remove your site from all this stuff. And then there were like a bunch of pending requests.

[00:54:45] Uh, I personally, and full disclosure, after I used Delete Me, I reached out to them and asked them to sponsor the podcast. So Delete Me is a sponsor of the podcast. Um, but so no, you know, disclaimer here, but that's the one I use. And, and despite that, I think I get it for free. We still pay for it for my wife and all of our parents, like all four of them, uh, out of our own pocket, because I think it's just, it's totally worth it.

[00:55:25] It seems like all these businesses that you've gotten to know through all these kinds of, uh, hacks, you could be the middleman between consumers who don't really know about this side of things. And, you know, for instance, the gift card brokers or the Costco gold or whatever, like, and you could take some cut in the middle, which is essentially sort of what you do. You're, you're like an information broker to them when you sell a newsletter. Yeah. So I think ultimately the, like the, the most limited resource I now have is time.

[00:55:53] And I'm starting to think I have a new business idea every day, right? Like I feel like you with your list of ideas, I'm like, Oh, I got this one. I'm gonna go start this one. I'm gonna go start this, but I've got two young kids and I'd love to spend more time with them. And so I end up letting a lot of these ideas kind of fall to the wayside because, you know, the time it would take to get them going is something I don't want to invest in today. Because you have a particular passion for this though, you have, you have stories and content.

[00:56:20] So this is how you create a podcast and, and a newsletter. Like, is that how you make your main living is from the podcast and newsletter? Yeah. This has become a, you know, I, I was working at a tech company and I started the podcast on the side and it, the audience grew big enough that, you know, the sponsors we have, which, which are fortunately all brands that I was like, Oh, I wear your clothes. Can you be our sponsor? I use your product. Can you be our sponsor? That ended up being, uh, replacing my day job income.

[00:56:48] And so I left to do it full time and I've been doing it full time for two and a half years. Do you make money on the newsletter? Newsletter? It's interesting. So yes and no, I think we don't, we have a sponsor in every newsletter, but usually the sponsors in the newsletter are things that we give to podcast sponsors as kind of like a bonus. But you know, full disclosure, if I'll put something in the newsletter and if there's a great deal and you know, a credit card is a great example.

[00:57:15] If someone's listening is like, Oh, I should probably go sign up for one of these cards and get this $20,000 bonus. Well, if you go to all the hacks.com slash cards, we have affiliate links for cards. I always tell everyone go get the best bonus, right? If you find a better deal somewhere else, go get that. Don't, don't support me at the expense of your benefit. But if, if all's the same and you go to all the hacks.com slash deals, and there's a deal on that page for delete me or any brand you want, and it's the best deal you find, you know, sometimes that supports me and I appreciate it. And so that's, that's kind of the newsletter is, Oh, here's an awesome thing.

[00:57:45] Here's my referral link. I might have a bunch of credit in some app, you know, that I can use because people use that link. So, so what percentage of, let's say, let's say this is like a content media strategy that you have. What percentage would you say is podcast sponsor revenue as opposed to affiliate revenue? Um, I would say if you, if you look at credit card affiliate revenue, which honestly, I don't know how long this episode will take to come out, but the compliance restrictions that credit

[00:58:14] card companies are putting on me is enough that in the next two or three weeks, we might forego that, which is about, uh, it's probably 20% credit card affiliate revenue, 70% sponsor revenue and 10% other affiliate revenue. Well, I bet you like 20%. You could like do stuff with brokerage accounts. So they pay huge affiliate fees and offer credit cards into brokerage accounts. And they're probably less shy about giving affiliate fees to people. Yeah. I think the challenge is my style.

[00:58:44] If you go listen. So I did an episode on bank accounts. I haven't done one on brokerage accounts yet. So my style is I'm going to go open up every single bank account. Right. And so I went and opened probably 25 bank accounts and I sent some money into each of them. I tried to see what it was like to do things. Do they have Zelle? Do they make it easy to send money to other people? Like, do they support two factor authentication? Like, does their mobile app any good? And at the end of the day, I decided that there are three bank accounts that I think the average consumer would benefit from using, uh, for three specific reasons.

[00:59:12] And one of them was, uh, Fidelity. So Fidelity has a cash management account. And the primary thing I cared about was in a high interest rate environment. I want to earn a percent on all my cash. I don't want to have money sitting in an account earning nothing. And so Fidelity has a cash management account where you earn interest on your balance that you spend out of. So effectively, it's not a checking account legally, but like it functions like a checking account. You have an ATM card, you can write checks, you can pay your bills and you earn interest on it.

[00:59:42] Now, Fidelity's user interface is, leaves a lot to be desired. Um, the wealth front cash account I think is even better than that in that they have a great user interface. Uh, you earn a, earn interest on your balance. You can pay bills, you can do all this stuff. Um, so that was great, but it's a single account. They don't have a joint account or a trust account. Um, and at the time they didn't make it easy to send wires. And so if you need to send wires as part of your life, it was tough. They do now.

[01:00:09] Um, and then Mercury, which has long been a business bank, um, has a personal account and it does everything you could ever want, including a feature that only one bank I ever found did, which was recurring push, you know, ACH transfers. So if you want to say, I want to send money to, you know, my nanny's bank account every Friday, I couldn't find a single bank that would do that via ACH, right? Maybe you could do it via Zelle or something, but I feel like, well, with mortgages, you could do that with any bank.

[01:00:38] I think you could set up auto pay, but usually you set it up from the receiving institution, not from the sending unless it's part of a bill pay system. But you know, a nanny probably isn't set up as like a bill pay vendor with bank of America or something. By the way, you know why I agree with your fidelity one. So remember in 2000, 2009, there was a big risk that even major banks were going to go out of business and then you were screwed. If you had like a lot of money in a bank account, you might end up with zero. Like if they lose your, if a bank goes out of business, you lose, they lose the money

[01:01:07] that, that you stored in the bank. That isn't covered by FDIC insurance. Right. But, but Fidelity though, doesn't invest your money. Oddly. Well, they, Fidelity holds the money in a mutual fund, which is often invested in U S treasuries. So it's like, you know, right. Like so it's invested, but like the entire U S government might have to collapse for you to lose your money. Like, like other banks in that time in particular, we're investing in mortgage backed derivatives.

[01:01:35] So if you're just investing in treasury bills, you're, it's much safer. Like that was my main concern. And I used Fidelity and I actually even became a spokesperson for Fidelity for a while. Like, I really liked Fidelity for that because they were the safest. People don't think of them as a traditional bank, but they are. And, and they, I felt they were the safest place, the safest large place to put money. And I was very concerned about small banks and, and also even the big banks could be crazy. So between. And so here's the problem.

[01:02:02] I found these three banks that I thought were a great option and I reached out to them and, and it turns out that there's a lot of banks out there that I wouldn't recommend. And then there's banks in the middle where I'm like, it's not bad, but another bank is going to pay you more or have lower fees or be easier to use. So I wouldn't want to work with that bank as a sponsor. I'm not going to tell you if you have your money at, you know, another bank, you have to take it out. There are banks where I would say that, right? If you have a bunch of money in a savings account at, you know, the major U S banks,

[01:02:32] you're probably earning 0%. And if you move it, you could probably earn 4% or more. You should move it. Yeah. Um, but the banks that wanted to pay me to promote their bank and give me an affiliate cut were not the three best banks. Those banks were kind of like, well, no, we, we have the best product, so we don't need to pay people to promote us. So that's where I had the problem was, yes, I could make a lot of money promoting banks and brokerages, but it turns out that my challenge is I'm only going to partner with the brand that I support love and use and decide is the one I want to recommend.

[01:03:02] And unfortunately, in the case of Mercury and Wealthfront and Fidelity, I have been unsuccessful at getting them to pay me to talk about their products. So I just talk about them for free. And I sometimes send these funny emails, which is like, Hey, I'm going to talk about your product no matter what, because I think it's the best, but I'm really only going to talk about it one episode. I'd love to keep reinforcing the message that you're awesome over the course of the year and, and work with you on a partnership basis if you're interested. And sometimes it's a yes. Sometimes it's a no.

[01:03:29] I love this because you probably get more podcast revenues, like, like sponsorship revenues than if you had just signed up for some podcast ad network. A hundred percent. And, and, you know, the, the one business I'm running that I haven't talked about is a couple podcasters have come to me and said, wait, the strategy you're doing seems better than all the other ones. Can you just run our ads also? And so we started doing that for like two podcasts just to experiment. What do you mean run their ads? Like you probably sell ads on. So like someone will come to us and say, Hey, could you basically, instead of us joining

[01:03:58] a network where they're just going to sell us just like everybody else. And they're going to tell us, you know, we have to approve 80% of the brands that they send us and all these crazy rules. Could you, you know, you have a bunch of relationships with brands from doing this for your show. Could you kind of help us be our ad agency to sell our ads for our podcast? And so we've done it like for two podcasts thus far. And, you know, again, trying to decide whether I want to turn this into a business or not. Well, okay. But there's two things. One is selling the sponsorships.

[01:04:28] Okay. And that, and that to your, to your sponsors who you have a personal relationship with, because you call them directly, you could say, listen, my inventory is expanding because I'm bringing on this other podcast into my quote unquote network. Are you into it? And they're going to either just say yes or no. So it's like an easy thing for you. And, uh, but the other thing is I'm thinking is you could set up everybody. You could set up everybody's affiliate page and just do it. You could white label their affiliate page with all your affiliate links and just cut,

[01:04:56] cut the affiliate fees, you know, split the affiliate fees with them. I could, this is just like the endless number of opportunities that I try to prioritize. Right. I, we probably would be surprising or not surprising that we currently also run a travel agency. We're taking two groups of people to Iceland this year. So yeah. So tell me about that. Is that because you're able to book it cheaper because you have all these points on all these cards? No, I wish that was it.

[01:05:22] Um, I have always wanted to go to Iceland and about two years ago, I was like, you know what? I really want to go. Actually, it all started with London. I was going to London and Paris with our kids. And I was like, I don't know a lot about London. I haven't been for 20 years. I wonder if I could just do an episode about London because naturally I want to find someone who knows a lot about London and ask them what to do now. And people go to London. So that would probably be an interesting episode. So I recorded an episode with a woman who kind of has a travel company in London and

[01:05:51] creates all these custom itineraries. And people are like, that was so interesting. I'm going to London. I'm going to use all these tips. And I was like, hmm, where else do I want to go? I really want to go to Iceland. So I found this guy who wrote the Lonely Planet book, like seven editions of the Lonely Planet Iceland, has been there 25, 30 times, is practically from Iceland, except he's an American. And he stayed, I think, at every hotel or hostel or lodging or guest house in Iceland. And I said, let's do an episode on Iceland. And we started talking.

[01:06:20] And in the middle of the episode, I was like, the trip you're telling me that I should go on. You know, the idea was, how do you plan the most amazing trip to Iceland? I was like, I want to go on this trip. And at the end, I remember we paused, stopped recording. And I said, would you ever want to take people on this trip? And he's like, yeah. And at the end, I said, hey, if you want to go on a trip to Iceland, go to allthehacks.com slash Iceland, fill out this Google form. And we'll see. Like, we had no idea what happened. We had 300 people that were like, I'm ready to make a deposit to go on the trip you guys described.

[01:06:48] Because the episode, which was purely me trying to learn about Iceland, ended up being marketing for a travel agency that we hadn't even started yet. And so you pay him basically to be the guide. And then you just mark up whatever he charges. And that's how you make your money. So we went on this trip to Iceland last year. The first one, we took 16 people. And it was the best trip I've ever taken. Like, not just because it was Iceland. It was fun to meet people in our audience. And, you know, it was a premium trip, right? It was a luxury trip.

[01:07:15] It was about $7,000 for seven days. And, you know, which was, it was awesome. It was the trip I wanted to go on. I met some friends that I'm, you know, still friends with. In fact, almost everyone in that group were still friends. And so this year we were like, well, I don't want to go to Iceland again. But we already dialed it in. We found the best place to stay. We found the best restaurants. We found that. Let's just take it again, but I'm not going to go. And so we sold two trips. So now we have 32 people going to Iceland this year.

[01:07:42] And the basic premise is, you know, most people mark up travel 15 to 25%, right? You know, when you're going on an organized tour, you're probably paying a 15, maybe even 35% markup. And so we could not, so if we just took the same markup, we would have a competitively piced trip. But as someone listening might imagine, like, I don't want to just have a trip to Iceland. I want to have the best trip to Iceland.

[01:08:10] So like, I want to go find the best tour operator to take us up into the glaciers. I want to find the best hotel. I want to find the best activities. I want to find the best restaurants. And so that level of research and diligence makes it, you know, yes, it's a comparable price, but it's probably the best trip you could take. But you still have to pay someone some of that fee to kind of be the tour guide. Yeah. So Brandon, the guy I interviewed for this episode is going on that trip. He's leading the trip.

[01:08:36] We've got like a local tour guide who's driving the tour bus, who can talk all about the like stories of where we are. And then you've got Brandon, the kind of like tour operator who knows everything about Iceland, has friends there, invites his friends to dinner. So you get a little bit more of a local experience. Are you able to also do the, like, do you mark up the plane tickets because you have points and stuff like that? I tell everyone, I tell everyone to book their own travel. Okay. But that's potentially an opportunity for you as well, because you have all these discounts. Yeah.

[01:09:02] It's an interesting, it's funny because I'm experimenting with this with a couple of friends. It's like, you know, someone wants to buy a trip to Japan. They're willing to pay $7,000 and they just want someone else to book it for them. And I can go out and get that trip for cheaper because, you know, it turns out that even without trying to find special, like one of the challenges is that airlines don't make every ticket available for miles. But, you know, so if you want to go to Japan and you don't book 360 days out, you might

[01:09:31] need to be really flexible with your dates to get the cheap deals that get you three, four, five cents per point. But, you know, Amex and Bank of America both have these programs where you can get more than one cent a point value, even Chase booking in their travel portal. So if you have a Chase credit card and you have the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, you can cash out your points at one cent or you can book travel for one and a half. Man, you got, you got to write a book because there's so many different things.

[01:10:00] And it all, like it all started with this pizza, like that, that the pizza technique is what you're basically doing here. So you're going to Iceland and you know. Yeah. We got to go on a free trip to Iceland. Everybody that went said we undercharged. That was the feedback. So it's like, they got the best experience. They felt like they got a deal. I got a free trip to Iceland and we made a, we didn't make a lot of money on the first trip, but part of that was not hedging on the currency fluctuations. But, uh, second trip, hopefully we won't have that happen.

[01:10:29] What are you going to hedge on the currency? Like, uh, we're, we're paying in advance. It was like this trade-off of right. Like cash earns 4%. So do you want to pay for the hotel six months in advance where you can lock in the interest rate or sorry, you can lock in the exchange rate. Or do you want to wait, earn your 4% spread on, you know, money. It's, it's a trade-off. So yeah, but there's also, there is like hedging techniques. There's all these like currency swaps where you could hedge out this interest rate risk with, with the price fluctuations, but that gets complicated.

[01:10:59] So, so Chris, this is really great. So all the hacks.com and all the hacks is the name of your podcast. Oh, where can I get the newsletter at your website? All the hacks website.com. Yeah. All the hacks.com slash email is the newsletter. Yeah. It'll, it'll be an interesting. So it was funny enough. If you go to all the hacks.com and you think, why is there no word? All the hacks. We, we were told by chase that we can't have the name hacks in anything we do. And so if you go to the website, it redirects to chrishutchins.com.

[01:11:30] I'm pretty sure that in the next three weeks, we might have completely severed ties with a lot of the credit card companies and maybe the site will once again, be all the hacks.com so that, but, but if you're confused, why the website actually, you don't see the word hacks anywhere on a website about a podcast called all the hacks. You could thank chase for that one. I feel like anybody who has a website and just wants to have an affiliates page should basically copy your affiliates page and cut the deal.

[01:11:57] You handle all the back office, like collecting all the affiliate fees and everything. And you just split it with her. It's just like free revenues for people and more revenues for you. Like this is a, that's like an unbelievable, just cash generator. You could turn on anytime. With the exception of the fact that part of the reason that all of this credit card stuff became a problem is that someone did that exact same business. And that was the house of cards that created all the problems. And the problem is for, for a lot of affiliates, it doesn't matter, right?

[01:12:25] Like if eight sleep wants to sell more eight sleeps there, they don't really care that someone says the right thing. Chase Amex. They want to make sure someone's not out there saying, Hey, go sign up for this card and you just get free money. You know, like they want to make sure you, every time you talk about it, you say all the right things. You say all the right details. You don't forget any of the disclosures. And honestly, they are not sophisticated enough to be able to monitor any medium other than a blog. And that's their problem.

[01:12:54] It's like, they can't monitor a podcast because they'd have to listen to it. They can't monitor a YouTube because they'd have to watch it. And then email, they can monitor an email, but you can't change. If they notice something wrong, it's too late. And so if you work with Chase, unless you get things pre-approved, you can't say the word Chase in an email, on a podcast, on a YouTube video. And so, you know, if you go look online, anyone who has a YouTube video that's saying Chase probably isn't making money referring Chase cards.

[01:13:21] So I think for me, I'd rather give up the revenue than be handcuffed in what I can say. And that's been a tough decision. But I think probably by the time this episode comes out, we will have made it. You know, I'm really impressed. Again, you should, I would pay like $100 for this book. Like you should definitely make a book and you'll at least sell to your audience. Self-publish it. Don't go through a publisher so you can make the maximum amount of money.

[01:13:50] And this is... What would you want that book to be about? Because I actually wrote an intro. You could just take a transcript of this podcast and that's the rough draft of your book. And then throw in some more hacks in there. Yeah, I wrote a proposal for a book. And I didn't get, I didn't finish it. And the feedback I got was no one wants another book that's like 100 hacks. They want a book that's more strategic. No, that's bullshit. Whoever, don't, that's why you don't go to a publisher.

[01:14:17] Do not go to a publisher because then it's going to be published two years from now anyway, when all this stuff will be, have changed and be out of date. Self-publish. So again, you could charge and change pricing during different periods and you make 80% or 70% of the revenues of the book. Your audience is who's going to be buying it anyway. You're just giving your audience for free to the publisher. Publishers don't really give good advances anymore anyway. So much, like form your own publishing company, all the hacks publishing and just publish it

[01:14:47] yourself. And don't listen to their advice. They're 100% of the time they're wrong. I've published 20 books, 25 books, maybe half were with traditional publishers, half were self-published. My self-publishers have made so much more money than my mainstream. I know I published with HarperCollins, Random House, all the big guys. My mainstream, I mean, my self-published books have published so much more money.

[01:15:14] I've made so much more money than my mainstream published books. So that's what you should do. All right. Well, Chris. Maybe I got to pull that proposal out of the drawer and just make it a book. Yeah, definitely. And look, will you come on the podcast again? I want you to come on again like in a month or so. And we continue the conversation. Anytime. This has been great. I love it. Excellent. Well, thanks so much, Chris. I really appreciate it. And good luck with whatever you're researching and hacking on this month.

[01:15:43] And I can't wait to hear about it next month. Yeah. Did we change your mind? You came into this saying you were skeptical of hacks. No, you changed my mind. I am going to tell my kids they have to listen to this episode and also subscribe to all the hacks.com newsletter and, and listen to your podcast. Awesome. Well, thank you so much.