Mindy:
Do you want to know how to get discounts almost anywhere? Travel hacks, spending hacks, medical hacks. If there’s one thing that Chris Hutchins has learned, it’s that everything is negotiable and each year new financial opportunities come. So we are excited to hear the way our dear listeners should be looking out for big savings in 2025. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my not a hack co-host Scott Trench.

Scott:
Thanks Mindy. Always appreciate you bringing strong fundamentals to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. BiggerPockets has a goal of creating 1 million millionaires. You’re in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone no matter when or where you’re starting, but it’s especially attainable for those who are willing to invest the time to learn about all of the hacks that can save you tremendous percentages of your annual expenditure and make you some extra money on the side as well. In case you don’t know, Chris Hutchins is the award-winning host of the podcast, all the hacks. You may remember him from BiggerPockets Money episodes 3 55 and 4 73, and he’s also been on the fire series with Mindy because we all love him that much. Chris, also fun fact moderated the fierce bloody debate that Dave Meyer and I had with the Fool folks about real estate versus stocks back on the BiggerPockets Real Estate podcast. So Chris, welcome back to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. We are so excited to have you and chat with you once again.

Chris:
I am excited to be back here.

Mindy:
Okay, Chris, for those who haven’t heard of your podcast or listened to any of our previous episodes where we’ve had you on, can you give me a quick little overview of who you are and how you came to know about literally every hack on the planet?

Chris:
Yeah, so I’m Chris. I’m kind of one of those crazy optimizers spreadsheet for everything. I kind of just don’t like taking no as an answer, but I also don’t like spending money and so I had this long history of, well, just because I don’t want to spend money doesn’t mean I don’t want to take a nice vacation. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to drive a nice car. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to insert everything in the world that costs money and I’ve spent the last 20 plus years getting creative at finding ways to do all those awesome things without having to spend as much.

Mindy:
That is awesome because I am not that kind of person. I love hearing you are my cheat code. You go out and find all the cheat codes and then you are my cheat code so I don’t have to spend all this time doing it. I feel like I can’t figure out the answers to some of these things. So if you are also like me and you don’t know how to do all of this stuff, you don’t have to because Chris knows it all. Chris, what’s the best hack you found for 2024?

Chris:
This is pretty tough, right? I wrote down a list of 15 of them and then I’m working on an episode that by the time this comes out, maybe it will also be out of my top 20, 24 takeaways. So there is a lot. I think that if I had to peg just one thing, I did an episode with this guy named Kai who runs a podcast called The Daily Churn. It was episode 180 1, all the hacks.com/ 1 8 1, and he does all these little deals every month and ever since talking to him about them, he’s probably making $30,000 a month or some insane amount of money. I would say when he got started it was like a couple thousand, but it’s just everything from how does he just use meal kits and find the right deals to be able to never pay for food? How does he find these different things? And so I’ve been picking up some of them. I’ve been buying and reselling gold at Costco. I’ve been finding discounted gift cards and reselling them. I’ve just been picking up all these side hustles and so I think the biggest financial hack, if I summarized it, would be finding the right little side hustles to get excited about that don’t feel like work but generate a profit.

Scott:
Are we going to dive into some of those? Let’s start with the one that stuck out to me here of buying and reselling gold bullion at Costco. How does this work? What do you do?

Chris:
So for anyone watching on video, this is a little gold bar. It’s way smaller than you’d think and it costs about $2,600. But yesterday I was at Costco with no intention of buying any gold and gold bars were $2,669 and 99 cents, so 26 69, and I just looked on an app called Pure and it’s marketplace. So I look and I’m like, what could I sell this gold for? And it was like, oh, I could sell the gold for like 26 50, so I’d lose $19. But Costco has an executive rewards program where you get 2% back on all your spending for the year. So that alone covered that, but they also let you put on a credit card. So here I am buying this gold bar, losing $19, but also making 2% in Costco executive rewards and 4% or more on a credit card. And now all of a sudden I’m like, well yeah, I’ll take five bars of gold.

Scott:
So lemme just is math here? So 2% of 2,600 is going to be $52 plus a little bit of change and you’re going to get, what was the other part of it?

Chris:
Whatever your credit card gets, right? Maybe you open a new card and you’re going to get a 200,000 point signup bonus. Maybe you’re earning four points per dollar on the new US bank smartly visa. I can’t pretend to tell you which credit card you have, but I would say if you stack things up, maybe you’re earning 6%. What’s 6% on five $2,600 bars of gold, that’s $780. You know what? I spent less than that on Costco, so I just paid for my groceries.

Scott:
So this is sort of scalable, but then you have to have a large amount of gold that you’re storing at hope.

Chris:
Oh, no, no. I’ve got FedEx boxes on the ground. I sold it while I was walking before I picked it up before I got to the door at Costco. You all know where they look at your receipt and you’re always wondering what they’re really doing in that period of time. I’d sold it,

Scott:
But you still have to mechanically,

Chris:
Yeah, I got to put it in a box. They send you a free label?

Scott:
Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Chris:
Take it to the FedEx, drop it off, gone.

Scott:
Awesome.

Mindy:
Okay. Alright. Okay, hold on. Hold on. Chris, you said I’ll take five bars. Does Costco limit you to five bars or did you just

Chris:
Five bars per account

Mindy:
Forever

Chris:
Split up? I don’t know that woman. They also limit you to $62,500 of spend a year before the 2% ends. So you and your partner can have an account, you get a business account, you could take your parents to Costco, use their account. So that’s just one example. But basically there’s stuff all the time that’s on sale in limited quantities. And what I’ve realized is there are a lot of interesting opportunities. Black Friday, there’s a bunch of electronic goods that are on sale for prices that people overseas would love to pay. So there’s these buying groups where they’ll buy these products for a small margin, but you get to keep all the rewards of any purchase you make and we’re not going to do an episode on the taxes that come with credit card points. That could get a little interesting, but I think that anytime you see an amazing deal, you can kind of be the person that maybe I used to be, which is like, oh, this thing’s on sale, I should buy it in case I ever need it.
And now I’m like, oh, this thing’s on sale, I should buy it and sell it immediately because someone out there is probably interested in it. So that’s true about gold. This morning I bought 200 or $750 worth of gift cards at Finish Line. I’m not going to finish line 30 seconds after I bought ’em, I sold the gift cards for a two or 3% spread. And it’s like if you stack these things up and every day you’re finding an opportunity to spend a thousand, 2000, $3,000 and you’re taking a two to 3% margin on that, whether that’s in the form of margin or Costco rewards or credit card rewards, if you could spend a thousand bucks a day taking 2%, it’s like almost 10 grand a year, how much can you scale that up? Can you get it to $10,000 a day? Well now you’re making 73,000. Can you get to 5% margins? Now you’re making go over $150,000 a year.

Scott:
I love it.

Chris:
So I think what takes the cake is going far enough to understand all the things that are happening so that you can diversify because you never know. Costco doesn’t sell gold like it’s out of stock sometimes. Or sometimes you go and the price is like you’re losing 4% just buying it. So it’s not a good day there. But sometimes you go to the grocery store and gift cards are 10% off and you’ve got a Safeway coupon attached to your Safeway account and all of a sudden you could buy a Best Buy gift card for 20% off and you could sell it for 5% off. So I’d say diversification wins and just kind of going down these rabbit holes.

Scott:
The best hack is just always paying attention and always keeping an eye out for these opportunities to make a few points of spread. Sometimes you win 2%, that’s a win. Sometimes you make $1,200 in a day on it and what is that? A 40% spread? Yeah, on a $2,800 purchase for the $4,000 sale. And that’s really the way to maximize what you’re talking about here.

Chris:
Yes. I think the big hack is just realizing that when you find a good deal, it turns out there are marketplaces of people who will buy gold, who will buy gift cards, who will buy products and ship them overseas. So a friend of mine bought a thousand HP laptops on Black Friday and made $15 on each one plus probably made four points per dollar buying them. So you buy a thousand laptops and you make $15, but you also make 4%. It’s probably $20,000 in a day.

Scott:
Alright, we’ll be talking about gold and gift arbitrage and we’ll even be covering saving money on insurance after the break. Stay tuned

Mindy:
And we are back. Let’s jump into some of these hot button topics

Scott:
And one has to have $800,000 in liquidity to take on this opportunity. Is that correct?

Chris:
It depends if you put $800,000, if you had $800,000 of limit across all of your cards, but how quickly can you get paid back? So I sent some gold yesterday, they received it today. They’ll probably get me the money by Thursday and my credit card bill is probably due in 30 days. The statement hasn’t even closed. So you need the limit and you need to be willing to, there’s some risk in anything you’re doing, right? You could buy a bunch of gold bars and drop one in the sidewalk and that’s going to burn, that eats your profit for the year. But I would say yes, I would not encourage anyone to go to Costco with 20 friends and buy that quantity of gold and then be like, I’m going to start huge. But the more you kind of dabble and understand how different things work and realize that any deal you find might be a deal for someone else, that’s where it gets interesting.

Scott:
Well, this is why I love talking to you so much because you can tell my brain just does not work the same way that yours does. These concepts are so foreign to me. It’s not in my wheelhouse to go to Costco and buy $12,500 plus whatever and change worth of gold bullion, arbitrage it for a small loss and then take the points on there. I’m just like, okay, that’s how I don’t even, then I got to ship the gold, I’m going to be thinking about it for the next three. And you’re like, no, I’m going to go take that on. I’m going to go make that spread. I’m going to make 5% on this, 700 bucks and that’s my Tuesday.

Chris:
Okay, so you’ve been to Costco though, right, Scott?

Scott:
Oh, I go all the time. Yeah, I’m going tonight.

Chris:
Okay, those gift cards you got Instacart, 80 bucks for a hundred bucks, Uber, 80 bucks for a hundred bucks, DoorDash, 80 bucks for a hundred bucks. I was talking to a friend the other day and this is a person who spends a lot of money on DoorDash, like five grand a year and never goes to Costco. And I was like, so what if I could just get you $5,000 of DoorDash gift cards at 10% off? And they were like, that’s a great deal. I spend $5,000 on DoorDash all the time if you could save me 10%. And I was like, just to be clear, if you want to drive to Costco for $200 a time, you could buy these for 20% off. But I could probably just reach out to a bunch of people I know and say, Hey everybody, go buy these. I’ll buy them for $5 over every time you go to Costco, just start collecting them. And that’s what other people are doing online. And so everything you see, most people are paying full price for DoorDash and Instacart and Topgolf and cinema cinemas. If you want to get old school, I was at Costco, they had cinema gift cards. Go buy ’em at Costco and stand outside the movie theater and just sell ’em on the street for half the margin. Just every time I see a deal I’m like, there’s got to be a way to build some business around this.

Scott:
How does this translate to your investing approach? Do you think about investing separately from this gold flip? I’m going to term it here. How do you actually think about long-term wealth creation?

Chris:
So all my money’s in VTI.

Scott:
Okay, so we have a boring old school, never touch it VTI passive index fund investment approach coupled with I’m going to take a 10% spread on Costco gift cards and multiply that out as much as possible.

Chris:
And sometimes it’s maybe it’s not to make money. Maybe if I could forget the spread and find a really good friend and save him a thousand dollars, maybe that relationship building practice is worth more than taking a few basis points off that deal because one day maybe I do a business deal with that person. There’s lots of currencies that aren’t all USD or Troy Ounce gold. But yeah, so that’s kind of been the really exciting thing that I’ve been messing around with if you will this year is just finding these little column side hustles, column, whatever you want that have been just kind of getting me really excited. Whether it’s buying groups and reselling things, whether it’s gold, whether it’s gift cards, I don’t know.

Mindy:
So this all sounds awesome. I hear how excited you are about it, it sounds super fun, but I’m going to be honest, I am not going over to my Costco even if they do have gold bars, I’m not going to grab these and sell these because that’s a lot of mental bandwidth that I just don’t have. What are some of your favorite hacks that are a little less, I got to do it right now kind of thing. My whole life is frantic and I’m trying to calm it down so I could hear how excited you are. I would love to be able to be that excited about this kind of thing, but it’s giving me a little bit of anxiety to think about all of this mental bandwidth that I would have to spend in order to make sure that I sold this gold. I don’t want to get stuck with gold.

Chris:
I like to think of saving and making money as kind of two different directions. If you want more money you can spend less or you can make more. Those are really, it’s a simple equation and there are probably two big levers there. One, you could look at all of your spending and find out if there are ways to make that spending less. So I would argue if you’re spending a lot of money on travel and you want to go learn the ins and outs of points and miles and credit card rewards and that kind of stuff, you could cut your travel costs way, way down. You want to cut your food costs down, go try every, there’s like 20 meal kit companies that are all going to offer you a free meal kit every time you try it. Go try all 20 of them in 20 weeks in a row and you’re basically going to have free groceries for a third of the year.
Pick whatever area you’re spending a lot of money on and I think you’ll find some creative solution and I think you’ll probably be more motivated to save money, to cut back on what you’re paying than you would to just make a little extra. So great example, we’ve got two kids we’re saving for their college and I found that if you stack all these different ways that you shop online, so I don’t know when this is coming out, but holidays, people are shopping online and you’re like, well, I’ve got to spend a lot of money for the holidays. Go look at your credit card, your chase, your amex, your Bank of America, what deals are there? Go look at cashback sites like cashback monitors, see what Rakuten’s offering, look at picking the right card and stack it all up. Sometimes you can save 10, 15% on something you’re already buying and there was a case this year, I did this episode on saving on college and turns out that you could buy gift cards for college 5 29 investment for 10% off and it felt easier to save money on a thing I was already going to spend on then to try to go make a little extra money.
So that would be one approach is focus not if it feels like a lot of mental overhead to try and go make a little bit more money, would it feel like less mental overhead if you were cutting back on what you already spend? And I would say focus on the big things. A massive bill that funny enough is due today in my county is property tax. So our property tax is pretty high. We live in the Bay area. I was looking online, it was like, hmm, you can appeal this. Interest rates are high. I went in and just appealed our property tax and we brought the value of our house down by 25% and for anyone who knows Bay Area real estate, I assure you that saving 25% on your property tax bill for the year is a massive win like travel budget for the year kind of level win. And that one took me a couple hours to save four figures. So I would say look at where you’re spending money and focus there. It’ll probably be easier because you’re like, God, I’m going to get money back that I otherwise will spend.

Mindy:
Okay, I love that tip. I have successfully argued against my property tax increase multiple times simply by following the rules of whichever municipality that I happened to be living in at the time. That’s a really great tip though if for everybody, if you have a property tax bill, appeal it and see what happens because you could save a lot of money.

Scott:
I think that’s great. That’s great advice and it’s an awesome win and if you can do it, but how should I think about that, right? I’m the CEO here at BiggerPockets. I have 40 hours that are very busy every week during regular work hours and put it in time on top of that. Do I have to physically go to a courthouse for example in order to appeal my property taxes in person or can I do this? How can I mechanically fit these hacks into my life?

Chris:
So here’s the great thing, and it’s funny because two of the biggest ones for me, if I look at the dollars saved this year appealing, my property tax and travel rewards were the two biggest ones. And on one hand, property tax you can, and by the way, you could do it all online in the Bay area at least, but you go fill out a form and I sent it in and then I emailed the email on there and said, Hey, here’s a quick spreadsheet of how I came to this new value. And I just looked at the comps on January 1st and the fun thing about our home is that it’s almost a hundred years old, it’s been renovated a lot, but it’s from 1920 something, 1930 something. So you got to compare it to other homes that are that old and it’s like how do you value other homes square feet?
It was really nice to have an old home in this process and I was actually surprised in California. I did this last year and I was about to appeal it again this year and they emailed me and they said, well actually we just did it for you and we found that it was even lower this year than last year. Is that cool? Can we just use this new even lower number? I was like, yeah, go ahead. It was like the gift that keeps on giving. But there’s companies out there, there’s people that’ll send you a letter. There’s a company called Own Well or owns well.com, they’ll do all this for you a hundred percent of the work and they’ll just take I think 25% of whatever the savings is. So if they save you five grand on your property tax bill, they’ll take 1250. The same thing goes with points and miles.
You can go and learn the ins and outs of how to use your points and miles to book an incredible vacation. Or there’s these award booking services where you might pay them 150 or 200 bucks a person and they’ll look at all your points and miles and you say, I want to go to Europe this summer. They’ll put together the perfect itinerary that makes points that maybe if you had redeemed them in the travel portal or cashed them out for statement credit, you would’ve gotten a thousand dollars. They make it worth $10,000 of travel and they charged you let’s say 400 bucks. So you need to decide how optimal do you want to be because if time’s the important resource, we’ll give up 25% of the savings on your property tax, give up $400 on booking your dream vacation and let someone else who’s an expert in that area do it. So one, I don’t think it’s as much work as people think, but it’s also not really that hard to find someone else to do it.

Scott:
Alright, we’ll take a quick break and then we’ll be right back with Chris Hutchins from all the hacks.

Mindy:
Welcome back to the show.

Scott:
I’ve been thinking a lot more about the, there’s an incongruity that we’re trying to attack here in BiggerPockets money with respect to the fact that fire, A lot of people build this up as a number, I need 2.5 million so I can withdraw 4% or a hundred grand a year to live on it. But your ability to fire has a lot more to do with how much you spend than how big the pile of money is right now. But let’s take the paradigm of somebody who’s listening to this who’s like, Nope, I’m going to hit the 4% rule plus. How do I make that happen sooner and practically retire? There’s something in your world that can help them do that, right? Because the big expenses are going to be your housing, your transportation and your food expenses. And you’ve already alluded to hacks if you will, that can bring those expenses down dramatically, right? One of the biggest expenses after your mortgage is going to be your tax bill. You just go contest the assessed value at the courthouse or fill out the form, make that a thing that’s 25% savings. That’s actually huge in the context of someone who’s trying to finish the play there. You bring that number down. That’s really important. Do you have one for insurance? I just want to go down the list here.

Chris:
So I put this one quote on if you go to all the hacks.com, the first quote is a review. Someone left me on iTunes that says I saved $15,000 a year listening to episode and now I’m going to forget the episode number, an episode I did on insurance. And basically episode 1 0 4 saved me $15,854 a year. So one hack, go listen to episode 1 0 4 of all the hacks because someone else saved $15,000 a year doing that.

Scott:
Can you save us 1000 of those 15,000 in the next three minutes and then we’ll go listen to 1 0 4?

Chris:
No, no, no. Yeah, I’m not going to gate keep all the information, but the short answer is a lot of people get an insurance at one point in their life, whether it’s car, home, whatever it is, and then they just assume that because it was the cheapest rate in 2014 that it’s the cheapest most competitive rate forever. And I try to, and this is not perfect because there is not a great website to search all the insurance rates. In fact, most of the websites that claim to search all the different insurance companies, don’t search all of them. So three minutes, I’m going to say no, maybe block off 45 minutes and go to the 10 major kind of insurance companies, go to Progressive State Farm, Geico, USAA, if you’re eligible, I’m going to miss some, so I’m not going to try to go through all of them.
Amica or Amica, I can’t remember how to pronounce. There’s a handful of these insurance companies and some might be better rates if you’re an A RP member, AAA member or a Costco member, that kind of thing, and go price them all out. And I found, I was at State Farm for a long time and I had this legacy, you’ve been a customer for 10 year discount. And then I went to USAA and I was like, let’s just price it out. And I was like, I’m going to save 30% and I’d never been a customer of USA. So that legacy discount, these bundling discounts, it feels good to get a discount but know that many of those discounts come at the expense of like, I’m just going to charge you more and give you a discount.

Scott:
Perfect. So just shop it out. Do you think there’s credibility to that bundling discount or do you think you should price out every insurance policy across all of I’ve got home, I’ve got auto, I’ve got an umbrella, I’ve got a landlord policy, I should go and shop every single one of those separately or should I get the bundle discounts or how do I efficiently conduct that shopping process there?

Chris:
Yeah, so when I ran this, I shopped the bundles altogether and they usually give you the price, the separate prices, and yes, depending on the carrier, sometimes they only discount one. So I think at USAA, they don’t discount auto, but if you have auto, they discount your home and so you can, I just made a quick spreadsheet that was the different policies I have and the carriers I shopped at and what are the prices and just kind of ran through that pretty quickly and it was pretty compelling I would say going through that process. And so we ended up at USA, there was a window where I think that if I kept one policy at State Farm three at USAA and one somewhere else, I was going to save 20 more dollars every six months. And I was like, that’s just not worth it. I’d rather have all my policies in one simple place for 20 bucks, but to save 30%, I’ll move around.
I want to read some reviews. I would say go get the consumer reports or go to your local library and get access to consumer reports if you don’t want to pay for it and see which carriers are actually good because you don’t want to have a cheap policy that’s going to be a headache if you have an issue. The other big one with insurance for your car, if you don’t drive 10 to 12,000 miles a year, which I know many of us in this post pandemic world don’t because maybe we’re working from home five to one days a week, you can go and tell your insurance company, I don’t drive 12,000 miles and they will drop the price significantly. And so we don’t drive that much. So our two policies are rated for like 4,000 miles a year and every year, unfortunately, the insurance company needs to have you report your odometer so that they can know that that’s real. So you have to redo it every year. But every year I get a new price for auto insurance and it’s gone up like 30% and then I call in and say, Hey, here’s my new odometer. And they say, great, we’ll re drop it 30%. And so if you’re not driving as many miles as your insurance is, then you’re just giving away money.

Scott:
This is perfect, right? This is what I’m talking about. But this is real tangible stuff. You can reduce that expense. You just gave us 25% savings on your tax bill and 25 to 30% savings on your insurance on there, which is very real dollars. And that is an activity that you can conduct every year easily after financial independence here. Now Chris, how do I cut 25 30% out of my utilities?

Chris:
That’s a tough one. I don’t know about. I would say you could go get a sense monitor and figure out if you’re overusing on a lot of things. And there are a lot of little half a percent gains here and there that I’ve been reading about when it comes to utilities where it’s like, oh, have you washed your stuff on cold water? And if you turn your water heater down like a little notch. And I think if you stacked all of those things, if you want pay your utilities by credit card, a lot of utility companies you can pay through PayPal’s bill pay feature and they won’t charge the fee that a lot of utility companies charge for paying with a credit card. They’re little subtle ways to hack your utilities. You go get solar, you could go make a big investment that might pay off over 20 or 30 years. You could bundle up and not turn on your heat, but I don’t think that that’s going to be an area where you’re going to have a huge impact without sacrificing a lot of quality of life. And so I haven’t found one there, so I don’t, don’t have a good one.

Scott:
Okay, I got two more questions. You already covered transportation to a large degree with the insurance discussion here and then travel rewards that you touched on briefly, and that’s an area that we’ve covered before and folks need to go look into and you’re one of the best resources around for that. The next category is food. You kind of touched on that one. Do you have any more tips besides getting 20 free meals from other meal providers to keep those expenses really low?

Chris:
I mean, look at where you spend money. If you’re cooking and you’re doing groceries, look into meal prep. You could save a lot of money just not on a whim buying, ran a bunch of groceries for one night and you could prep meals out for the week and probably save a little there if you’re going out to eat a lot. I mean, I come back to gift cards in a somewhat ridiculous way, but let’s take Cheesecake Factory, California Pizza Kitchen. If you go to places like that, those gift cards are pretty regularly like 20 to 30% off if you’re going out to eat or you’re ordering from DoorDash, we already talked about that. Go to Costco, $200 DoorDash, $160, you order from Instacart $200, Instacart $160, you order from Uber Eats $200, Uber Eats $160. You could cut 20% off your delivery budget by buying gift cards for whatever place you deliver from.
Going out to eat is tough, right? There aren’t that many restaurants that have such crazy deals, but there are some, there’s this restaurant app called in kind where you can basically pre-buy credits and use them and depending on where you live, there might be restaurants you go to all the time and there might be nothing, but there were some promotions on Costco where it was like $60 for a hundred dollars of credit that you could use at local restaurants that were not necessarily chain restaurants. Some people are like, I love a Cheesecake Factory. Some people are like, I want a little local restaurant. That’s the best I’ve got there. Eating is a place where I’ve just decided to not try to optimize it too much because I enjoy going out to eat. I like good food. And just because I can’t find a way to save at my favorite restaurant doesn’t mean I’m not going to go there.
But I don’t know if you have a built card, if anyone’s renting and you have the built card and you’re earning points on your rent, they do rent day where normally it’s three x points on dining, but on the first of the month it’s six x points on dining. Go to your local restaurant and buy a gift card that at a restaurant you love on the first of the month and now you’re going to get six points even if you dine on the second or the fifth or the 10th. So there are little subtle ways to really knock that out of the park. I dunno, six x points on dining is pretty good

Scott:
And all this adds up. We have the taxes, we have the insurance. Someone else will have to invent the next hack or you’ll have to get them on the show about utilities for that next piece. But the food, all this stuff, I mean you could cut literally 20% out of your current budget if you’re working and busy or having put the mental energy into all of these savings in that post career phase, that makes the number way easier to achieve.

Chris:
If you spend $80,000 a year and you’re looking at the Forex rule and you need $2 million and you can cut that down to $60,000 a year, now you need one and a half million dollars, you just saved yourself the need to save half a million dollars.

Scott:
That’s my point. That’s how powerful what you’re talking about here is. And the issue is I think a lot of people are like, oh, that’s too much. That’s too much work. That’s too much. Well, that’s something you will have easy time for. This is only a few hours a week. That may be overwhelming right now while you’re in the throes of the career or whatever around there. But this is something that in a world future state where you retire is super accessible for you to do. If it’s not accessible right now, even while you’re busy what you’re saying, these are not huge intensive things that are going to disrupt your life. These are easy tactics that you can deploy with a little bit of planning to save big. So the last one I want to ask and then I’m going to shut up is healthcare. Have you solved that one with a hack here? And if you’re not an employee, you’re not getting that through your employer, how can we gain that system, hack that system, whatever it is that you want to?

Chris:
So this is going to be an experiment next year. I came up with what I think is the hack and I’m going to try it. And if you buy your health insurance on the exchange, which is unfortunate because a lot of the exchanges don’t have as great of a plan as you’ll get at an employer, but it’s expensive. I didn’t realize how expensive health insurance is until we both quit our jobs and we’re like, oh, now we’re going to buy it. And in California for a family of four, if you want the top policy like the platinum PPO in California, we’re going to pay about $3,900 a month. A month.

Scott:
Wow.

Chris:
Yeah. So a massive line item.

Scott:
Is that an HSA compatible plan?

Chris:
No, no, no. That’s like no HSA.

Scott:
Okay.

Chris:
So an equivalent plan that I’m still, I have a couple months left on Cobra is like $2,300 a month. And I would actually argue that I would take the $2,300 a month plan over the $3,900 a month exchange plan if they were all the same price, not just from the price, but it’s just a better plan. So the exchange plans are much more expensive for something that unfortunately, at least in my case, is not as good. Now I looked at the other end of the spectrum, the bronze high deductible health plan, which was like 1900 a month or something, like half the price. And I thought, wow, this plan, yes, it’s HSA compatible, that’s cool, but I think it had an out-of-pocket maximum, or sorry, basically no insurance kicked in other than preventative care until you spent $14,000. And I thought, that’s going to be tough, but I’m going to save $2,000 a month picking this plan, which over the course of a year is $24,000.
And once I spend $14,000 on medical care, a hundred percent of everything is covered. So worst case, I have more than $14,000 in medical bills and I save $10,000 on the year. Best case, we have like $3,000 of medical care for the year, and I saved something like, let’s see, 2024, I saved $21,000 plus I get to put money in an HSA, which has benefits I’m sure you’ve covered. So the only thing that I don’t like is now if my daughter is sick, I need to decide, even though I’m going to save $24,000 a year just in premiums going into it, I’m going to save $24,000 a year if my daughter’s sick, I need to decide, do I want to take her to the doctor and pay $300 to see a doctor? And I think it will be psychologically hard for me to say, look, I know I’ve already, in just one month, I’ve set aside an extra $2,000 of savings.
Am I going to be able to take her to the doctor? Which anyone with kids listening or even without kids, 50% of the time I go to the doctor, I’m like, well, that was a complete waste of time. The doctor’s like, you’re sick, get some rest, drinks of water, hot fluids, get sleep. So I think it’s going to make care tough, but there are also tricks for that. There’s an app called Summer Health and Blueberry Pediatrics, which are subscription services that include free consultative care for children. So I think it’s like 10 bucks a month or something, and you can message them anytime and they’ll send a prescription. So if your kid’s coughing, you can do a video call, they can hear ’em coughing, send a prescription to the pharmacy, and you’re paying 20 bucks a month. So I think I’m going to probably pair some of those things with this.
We’re trying out kind of direct primary care where you pay a couple thousand dollars a year, but all of your primary care visits are free that this practice doesn’t take children. So it’s like we’re going to combine these 10, $20 a month pediatric care on demand, direct primary care for more like hundreds of dollars a month for adults. We’ll probably spend $3,000 a year on those, but we’ll save $20,000 a year on getting the expensive plan. So I think the biggest hack is that dollar for dollar psychology aside, the cheapest, worst plan is the financially best plan. Even if you have the means, the only downside is you’re going to pay for the first $14,000. And psychologically that might be really tough.

Mindy:
Yeah. Well, and you said you’re saving $14,000 by, or you’re spending $14,000. No, you would’ve already spent that $14,000 just spread out over the premiums.

Chris:
Yes. Yeah, I know that. I know it here.

Mindy:
That’s the hard part. So I can tell you I have a high deductible plan. I have the concierge service for my husband and I don’t have the on demand for the pediatrics. My kids are much older, they’re almost adults, and the concierge service is awesome. It’s so easy. The hassle factor is what I’m trying to remove from my life. So yes, I’m saving money over traditional insurance premiums anyway, but I’m also getting rid of the hassle of going to the primary care. And they’ve got 86 million patients that you’re trying to all get in there at the same time. So do I want to take my kid and pay $300 because I know she’s sick and I’m not sure what it is. No, but also it’s a lot easier to pay that $300 and then be like, you weren’t sick or you just have a cold. That’s what I told you. And then that goes a really long way with my kids.

Chris:
And by the way, healthcare is negotiable, right? I did this great episode almost two years ago, I think it was episode 34 on healthcare bills, and people were like, oh, I owed $10,000 and I negotiated it and brought it down in half. So you can fight medical bills and when you’re paying out of pocket with these high deductible plans, you say, oh, what’s the cash rate? And they’re like, oh, you’re paying out of cash. It’s no longer $800, it’s only $400. And they have to go through a lot of hassle to get money back from your insurance company. And so I think that you can negotiate a lot of these things. If you have outstanding medical debt, it can be negotiated. Go look into it, listen to that episode. I dunno, I think if you stack all this stuff up, you could probably save 20 to 30% on your life. And the impact that will have is amazing. And like you said, Scott, each category, my goal is to do an episode on every category if I haven’t already and walk you through each one. And so I dunno, go search the archive. I’ve probably done it.

Scott:
The way I think about it, you can tell I’m asking the questions here is, okay, what’s the biggest expense in life? It’s housing. Okay, great. For most the average American, you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where are they spending? Okay, housing’s first, then it’s transportation, then it’s food, then it’s health insurance, then it’s, there’s a bunch of other categories there, but those by far the biggest four and those can comprise about 60% of the household spending right there. So everything else is this minority here around it. And I’m like, okay, how can you reduce all of those expenses as low as possible to live lifestyle you want? And that’s the biggest hack, if you will, to retiring early, right? If you can get those expenses low, it reduces the balance needed to retire at the 4% rule dramatically by hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars as you can get those numbers down and you’ve got ’em them all here.
Healthcare is the big one though. I mean even with what you’re hacked there, you’re out 24,000 a year in premiums on it. That’s what, $700,000 in assets in an asset base needed just to cover that first expense at the 4% rule. I mean, that’s an enormous, enormous, enormous problem that somebody needs to go and figure out in a really comprehensive way. Okay, what is all of the components of what you just said there to game out here? We’ve also heard from someone, ones that I think fewer people will be comfortable with but are valid. One is if you travel internationally for a year, there’s ways to get health insurance really cheaply on an international basis. And the second is these health share ministries where you can sign up and be part of a group that’s not really an insurance, even though they use a lot of similar sounding language for that. But those are not very popular for various reasons.

Chris:
Yes, I’ve heard a lot about the health share and people either have an amazing experience or a horrendous, it’s like a five star, one star kind of thing. It’s like, this is great, I pay a lot less money, I get great care. And then there’s the occasional, I had this catastrophic thing and they said for what some reason it wasn’t covered and now I don’t have insurance and I dunno, it’s just a little bit or my lifestyle, I did this thing but I was drinking and because it’s somewhat religiously affiliated, they’re not going to cover this thing.

Scott:
Yeah, there’s a whole bunch. And then you get the people that are in the health share ministries reaching out to you with nice comments, explaining why you’re wrong on those things whenever you mention. So there’s a whole thing there. It’s not for a lot of folks. It is certainly we’ve covered it in previous BiggerPockets money episodes, but it’s certainly not a popular option among fire folks right now. It’s not very common.

Chris:
We forgot one thing though. For people who haven’t fired yet, I’m going to assume you have a job and I think one of the lowest hanging fruits in terms of increasing your net savings, meaning either money in, minus money out, go to your boss and say, Hey, what would you need to see from me for me to get a raise or a promotion? Don’t say, just give it to me. No one wants someone to come and say, can you just give me more money? I’ve had employees do that to me in the past. They’re like, Hey, I’d like to have more money. And I was like, great, me too. But say, what would you need to see me demonstrate for you to level me up, increase my salary, move me up in my comp band, and then just go do it and then come back and say, Hey, I did that thing you told me I needed to do.
And so it depends on your salary and your spending, but if you’re making a six figure salary and you can increase that by 10, 15% or some meaningful amount by getting a serious promotion, that’s going to have a similarly huge impact on your savings for however much longer you’re working. And so, and can be as simple as, Hey, what do I need to do three months of doing the same thing I’m already doing? Sometimes it’s like companies just aren’t always thinking, how do we reward the people that are doing great? Sometimes you have to put that in your own hands, and so I wouldn’t be afraid to think of that as another option.

Scott:
I love it when folks come with that because then you can say, well, I need this number to move from X to Y, and if that number moves from X to Y, I’m so happy to give out more money on that front. So I wish more people would do that all over the place from both sides. I’m sure you loved it when people came to you with that. You’re like, yeah, well, the way I could make my division look great is with this. Yeah.

Mindy:
Okay. Chris, one last question before we let you go. On the first episode that we recorded with you, episode 355, you gave your history of hacks and hacking concert tickets for free in high school, selling pizza by the slice in college so that you could get free pizza. You’ve always been looking to hack your system, which is awesome for people like me who are not looking to hack their system. Has there ever been anything that you were not able to hack or that you hacked but it wasn’t worth the time?

Chris:
I mean, right now we’re in holiday season and I have not found a great way to make it easy to just be healthy. You just have to put in the time and energy to work out. There’s no hack. Come to my house while I’m sleeping and give me some magical pill and work me out while I, there’s nothing if you want. What is all of this for? We’re trying to save money so we can retire so we can enjoy our lives. If we don’t have our health and we die early or we can’t run and we can’t move, it’s kind of not a good life worth living. And I don’t think there’s a great hack for how do you live longer? It takes eating healthier.

Scott:
How do you get free high yoga classes?

Chris:
I’m sure there’s gift cards for some chain of hot yoga classes, you just got to go find them. But actually speaking of that, Barry’s bootcamp, someone told me they pre-buy all their berries bootcamp for the year on Black Friday or something. So there are ways, but I have not found anything. It just takes discipline and not eating that 13th holiday cookie that you want. There’s not a trick other than some mindset stuff. So I always tell myself, I’ll get another one in five minutes and that way, not saying I’m not depriving myself of cookie number five, I’m going to give it to myself in five minutes and then I get distracted and I don’t necessarily want it. So there’s some subtle mindset shifts, but I think when it comes to health, it’s like even if you hire the nice concierge doctor, it’s not like they’re giving you a magic pill. You still have to work out. You still have to do strength training, you have to do all these things that are not nearly as fun as binge watching Netflix and eating ice cream. But if we’re going to do all this work to try to build up our wealth so that we can have the freedom to live the life we want, we want to be physically capable of living that life for as long as possible. And I don’t know a lot of hacks to make that easy.

Mindy:
Chris, this was a super awesome fun show always because you just have so many great hacks that I am not thinking of, I will never think of. I love the idea that I am going to go out and save a lot of money on certain aspects of the insurance. I actually did save some money on my insurance and in Colorado, our insurance property taxes are being reassessed on the odd year. So next year we get a big reassessment again. And you can bet that I’m going to go and fight that. And thank you so much for the tip there. All of this is just so much fun to talk to you about and I really appreciate your time today.

Scott:
Thanks so much for coming on today, Chris. Always learn a lot every time we talk to you. Really appreciate it. And your energy is unmatched. Your enthusiasm for all these hacks just never ends it seems like. So thank you for bringing the fire every single time to everything you do and every time you come here on BiggerPockets Money. Thanks

Chris:
For having me. I love

Scott:
It. All right. That was Chris Hutchins from all the hacks, and that was just another fantastic bit of fun. Mindy, I learned a lot. And there’s something there if we just go through each of these categories and don’t just think about the basics of fundamentals, but also think how do we layer in some hacks? I think there’s a lot on the table that could be explored here. For a lot of folks in the BiggerPockets money community, there’s lots of ways I bet you to reduce rent, to reduce electricity bills, to reduce your property taxes, to reduce your property insurance. There’s a ton, probably almost in every single category of expense that can save 10 to 25% if you’re creative and actually put the time and energy into it. And that’s a project that I want to undertake with you over the next year or two and learn from Chris on these is there’s a way to do this in a way that can really change up the speed to approaching retirement here.

Mindy:
And I want to make a note to anybody who is in my position and feeling a little bit overwhelmed by all the stuff that Chris threw at you. Chris threw a lot at you. We only have him for a short time and he has, I don’t know, another 700,000 hours worth of ideas in his head. So you don’t have to do all of these. You could focus on one or one aspect of one that he shared and start small. Every dollar you save is a dollar that’s not going out of your pocket. Maybe start with the insurance and just, oh, my insurance is up soon. I’m going to take some time and I’m going to call all of these different companies and find out how much it’s going to cost at each one of these places. Now, I had insurance with a company who shall not be named, and I did that exact same thing.
I got more coverage on my auto, more coverage on my homeowners, and added an umbrella policy for less than what I was paying for the lower coverage on my car, the lower coverage on my house, and no umbrella policy. That’s real giant savings. I mean, it’s only like a hundred dollars less than what I was paying, but I’ve got so much more coverage and the only time you need insurance is when you need it. You can’t predict when you’re going to get into a car accident. I better up my coverage about to get hit. That’s not going to happen. So you have it. You have the peace of mind that you have the insurance, and now I’m paying less and getting way more coverage. So he’s absolutely right. Your insurance company is not going to reward your loyalty, so don’t reward them with yours. Go and find a company that works.
Now, I will recommend that you stay with one of the bigger agencies. Bob’s Insurance Company is probably not going to be there for you should something really catastrophic happen. Or maybe they will, I don’t know. But go with a bigger name that’s just giving you more security than some little noname company that you’ve never heard of. But yeah, all of these ideas might work for you. A couple of them might work for you or you might not like any of those. In which case, go listen to his show. He’s got a hundred million more ideas too. So he’s just a wealth of information and I love having him on the show. But I do do want to caveat that you don’t have to do them all. Maybe they don’t all apply to you, or maybe you’re just not interested. I’m not interested in buying gold. So Scott, if you want to buy gold, come over to Costco with me. I’ll let you buy some gold for me.

Scott:
Yeah, I think I’m out on that. I don’t want to $25,000 worth of gold in my house right now. If you robbed my house, the most valuable thing is probably a suit that’s 20 years old on there. That’s it. There’s nothing there from a robbery perspective, I don’t want to have, that’s one of the fears that I have with approach like that. I get it. You only have it for a few days, but some of those are for other folks to take advantage of and get that spread. I would rather do some things digitally, I think,

Mindy:
Right? But even if that specific item isn’t for you, here’s the idea that you could buy low and sell high or buy and sell at a slight loss, but because you’ve got all these different things going on, you’re actually coming out ahead. So I love the idea. I could look at that and say, oh, I bought it for this and I can sell it for less than, no, I’m out without even thinking about the other things. So that’s what Chris is here for to give us all these different ideas to think about. Absolutely love having him here. He’s always so much fun. So Scott, should we say thank you to Chris and get out of here?

Scott:
Let’s do it.

Mindy:
Alright. That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast. He is the Scott Trench and I am Mindy Jensen saying, got a bolt cult.