← All the Hacks: Money, Points & Life
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There are a handful of decisions you can make before December 31st that can be worth thousands of dollars in tax savings. So today I want to walk through a checklist of things you can do grouped into 10 tax topics, all in plain English so you can decide what moves are worth doing in your situation. I'm also going to run through an end of the year checklist for your credit cards, points and miles so you can make sure you aren't leaving any money on the table there. Also going to turn this entire episode into a PDF checklist so you can download that@allthehacks.com checklist or find the link in the Show Notes. So if you enjoy this episode, you enjoy the checklist and you want to share it with your friends, by all means, please do that. It means so much to me. And if you want to keep upgrading your money points in life, click follow or subscribe before we get into everything, it should go without saying that I am not a tax advisor. This is not personalized tax advice for you. That said, if you are looking for someone to help this and you want to check out the tax team I use, they're called GELT and you can learn more at allthehacks.com guilt so much of what we're going to talk about today starts with the question of whether you are taking the standard deduction or itemizing. So for those not familiar with the US Tax code, you can either choose to say, I'm going to subtract this amount of money, the standard deduction from my income, and not pay taxes on that amount, or I will itemize. And by itemizing, I mean including all the things that you can deduct from your income. That's state, local taxes, mortgage interest, charitable giving, medical expenses, and a bunch of other things. And if those things are greater than the standard deduction, then you would itemize on your taxes. And so that's a really important question because it dictates whether some of these strategies, whether some of these things make sense for you. So for context, in 2025, the standard deduction for a single tax filer is $15,750. And for people married filing jointly, it's $31,500. And then 23,625 if you are the head of household. So that's the standard deduction. So you can either take that automatically or add up all your itemized deductions and use them if they're actually higher. However, the goal here is not to wait till the end of the year and find out what happened. The goal is to try to benchmark where you're going to end up and then take advantage of some strategies that might be bunching more itemized deductions one year so, so that you're way over that amount and then the next year doing a lot less of them so that you're way under and you can take the standard deduction. So I mentioned what counts as itemized deductions high level above. We're going to go through in a lot more detail. But for example, with that SALT limit, which is the state and local property taxes that has increased this year from $10,000 limit to 40,000. Now, we'll talk about the income limitations there, but you could in one year prepay some property taxes, you could prepay a mortgage payment, you could do a lot of charitable giving so that you use up a lot of deductions, and maybe that puts you past the standard deduction line where it makes sense to itemize, and then the next year you'd take the standard deduction. So let's dig in a little bit deeper and first talk about that SALT limit. So the one big beautiful bill this year raised the SALT cap from 10,000 to 40,000 for many taxpayers who are under $500,000 of income, which is huge for people who live in high state taxes or who have big property tax bills. Because all your state taxes, that's if you live in the state of California, the dollars you pay towards the California Department of Revenue in your state taxes or your property taxes, you can actually deduct that from your income for federal purposes up to $40,000. So if you make more than $500,000, this starts to phase out, and that's where you need to start figuring out whether this applies to you based on your income. But if you used to be stuck at 10,000, this means you might be able to deduct a lot more. And if in scenarios past, you were stuck at never being able to itemize and it never made sense, now that might actually make sense, especially when you add in your mortgage interest, any charitable contributions, and those kinds of things. So some tactical moves to be thinking about here. If it's looking like you are going to itemize this year and you're not going to be over that $40,000 limit for your SALT deduction, you could prepay property taxes or, or make mortgage payments that aren't due until early next year. So I think where I live, you make one property tax payment in the November December range and then another one in I think it's like March, April. Well, you can pay both of them in 2025 if you want and create more state and local taxes that you will have to deduct off of your income. Now, that wouldn't make sense if you're already at that $40,000 limit, but if you're not, it could make a lot of sense to pull those things in. On the topic of property taxes, I'm just going to throw out a remind. You can go through a process to appeal the valuation of your property and lower your property taxes. Depending on the state, there are deadlines throughout the end of the year. Sometimes they're November, sometimes they're December. So this isn't a December 31st checklist item, but I just wanted to flag it because our property taxes this year are lower than they were supposed to be because we went through that process of appealing the value of our home. Now we're gonna put a section at the end of this episode about some quick hits for people who own businesses. But one specifically related to this to keep in mind is that if you are an partnership or an S Corp and you're a business owner, there is a world in some states where your entity can pay your taxes. This is called a pass through entity tax, and it's a workaround for the state and local tax limitations. So the limits are up to 40,000. If you make too much, then you can't even deduct the full 40,000. But let's say you owed your state $80,000 of taxes for state taxes. Your company could potentially make those payments for you on your behalf, sometimes at a different tax rate, and then deduct them as business expenses. And then you wouldn't have your state taxes showing up as part of your SALT limit. So just something to keep in mind, if you're doing that, it will affect your total SALT taxes and that might change the calculus of whether you make a property tax payment earlier or later. Definitely something that if you are doing, you're probably working with a cpa, but just something to keep in the back of your mind. So next, let's talk about charitable giving. And it's one of the most flexible levers you have, especially at the end of the year, and especially if you think about how it applies to this new SALT limit, bunching your deductions, and especially with a change that's going to happen next year. So there are a few different ways that you can donate to charities and deduct them from your taxes. But the most important thing to know is that in 2025, deducting charitable donations and contributions is only going to help you if you're itemizing on your taxes. I'll get to how that's changing next year and how that might change your strategy. But let's talk about the high level types of donations. There's cash and non cash donations that could be giving directly to a charity or an organization, or donating clothes, electronics or anything to a Goodwill, Salvation army, something like that. You can generally deduct up to $5,000 a year without needing any formal appraisals. But I would write down what you're donating or maybe take pictures of it and not just put 5,000 on the form with no backup documentation if you ever need it. Another option, which is my favorite, is donating appreciated assets. So let's say you have some stock that you bought for $100 and it's now worth $1,000. If you decided to sell that stock and donate the proceeds to charity, you would have to pay taxes on the $900 gain you have. But if you donate the thousand dollar stack stock to charity, then you don't have to pay any capital gains taxes. And so the charity gets the full thousand dollars and you get a deduction of $1,000 assuming you're itemizing in 2025. Whereas in the former scenario you'd sell $1,000, you'd pay taxes on the $900 gain and you'd probably end up with something like 6 or $700 that you could donate to charity and get a smaller deduction. So if you have any types of securities or assets that have appreciated in value, donating those assets to charity is always going to be a more effective strategy than just donating cash. Now this only works if you've held the asset for more than one year and you donate it to a qualifying charity. Now one really important thing, we'll talk about this later when we talk about investments, but that the wash sale rule doesn't apply here. So normally if you sell an asset, you can't get any tax benefit from selling that asset if you rebuy it within 30 days. But if you donate Apple stock to a charitable organization and then rebuy that Apple stock, there is no wash sale rule that gets triggered and you can do that. So it's a great way to effectively step up the cost basis of any security you hold while concurrently giving a donation and kind of avoiding the capital gains tax. So let's say every year at the end of the year you want to donate $1,000. Find any stock you have, preferably the one with the lowest cost basis, meaning you bought it for the largest spread between what it's worth today, donate that thousand dollars and then immediately rebuy it. And that's going to be way more effective than donating $1,000 cash and holding onto that security. Now one of the challenges with this strategy is that it's not always easy to donate stocks to a charity. Especially if you want to make 10, 20 donations throughout the year. It can be really complicated to try to send one share of one stock. And that's where one of my favorite charitable donation strategies comes in, which is donor advised funds. And so the way this works is you set up an account called a donor advised fund. It itself is a charitable organization and you can donate money, you can donate securities, you can donate crypto to your donor advised fund. And so you effectively have this little mini charitable organization that you manage. And you donate the money now you get the deduction, now the money is gone. Effectively. Like you can't claw that money back, you can't get the money back. Once you donate it to your donor advised fund, you have donated it to a charity. However, you get the ability to decide when to disperse that money anytime in the future. And until you do, you can actually invest that money. So for example, let's say you have $1,000 you want to donate to charity every year and you have some stock that's highly appreciated. You could transfer $3,000 of stock into a donor advised fund. Now invest that money in some different types of investments depending on the donor advised fund. And then anytime you want to make those hundred $200 donations, you can log into your donor advised fund and send $100 somewhere, $200 somewhere else. And it really takes away the headache of trying to donate appreciated stock, crypto or other assets to individual charities. Now there are a lot of donor advice funds out there you can go search. The one I personally use is a sponsor of this podcast is Daffy. They're amazing. You could do everything from your pocket in your phone. You can also do it on the web. They have a great user interface. You can set up fundraising campaigns. And even better than that, the fees are really, really competitive. I found them when I did my research to be lower than all the other options. It's a great product. You can find it at allthehacks.com Daffy that's my link. And that's where you'll get a free $25 to give to the charity of your and so I'm just a big fan of donor advised funds and how they work and how they especially apply to giving appreciated stock and crypto to charities. Now if you apply that to the philosophy earlier about bunching, you might say, oh, we're going to itemize this year so let's donate and then next year we won't. So you could make all your charitable contributions for this year and next year now, but put them in a donor advised fund so you can actually give them each year. So if you have a church or a school that you need to give to or want to give to every single year and not in advance, you could do it like that. But let's talk for a second about why 2025 and 2026 are going to be a little bit different. This episode is brought to you by Vuori. If you've been listening for a while, you know I am a huge fan of Vuori. They make performance apparel that somehow works for every part of your day. Whether I'm lounging at home, running errands, jumping on a quick workout or heading out to dinner, I'm usually wearing something from Viori. And this time of year, as the weather cools down, I have been living in their Sunday Performance Joggers or Ponto Performance Joggers. Both are made with their signature Dream Knit fabric that is insanely soft but still holds up when you're moving around. And their Strato Tech tee is basically replaced all of my other T shirts. Vuori makes the perfect mix of comfort and performance, the kind of clothes you never want to take off and that are truly an investment in your happiness. And for our listeners, they are offering 20% off your first purchase plus free shipping on US orders over $75 and free returns. So get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet@AllTheHacks.com Vuori that's V U O R I again, that's AllTheHacks.com Vuori V U O R I Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. 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2026, for those who do itemize, there is this 0.5% floor relative to your adjusted gross income that you won't be able to deduct from your taxes if you're itemizing, which means that if your AGI is for round number purposes $100,000, then the first $500 of your charitable deductions are not eligible to be itemized expenses. What that means is that going forward starting in 2026, if you take the standard deduction and let's say you're single, the maximum you'll be able to deduct is $1,000. And if you are itemizing that first half a percent of your adjusted gross income will not be eligible for deductions. So 2025 is a fantastic year if you're already itemizing to contribute to a donor advised fund so that you can contribute all of that money now and not have to worry about whether you can take a deduction next year for your charitable contrib the next five or 10 years. I know a lot of people that in years where they have larger windfalls, maybe they worked at a company and that company went public or they got a big inheritance that year when they're at a really high tax bracket. They just decided we're going to make our charitable contributions for the next 10 years, 20 years now, and we're not going to have to do it in the future because we're going to have a pool of that money. And the other crazy thing is they don't anticipate always how much the market grows. And so they put in enough money for let's say 10, 15 years of charitable contributions. And then all of a sudden they realize five years in that it's grown so much that it might end up being 20, 25 years or it might be 10 to 15 years, but you get to be even more generous with those years. So, big fan of this strategy. We do all of our charitable giving from a donor advised fund and we do take advantage of trying to figure out which years make sense to itemize and bulking in as many deductions as we can that year. And if we're taking the standard deduction, then we try not to do too many things and we try to push them to the other years. So that's a change for 2026. Let's go back to a couple 2025 changes that came out of the one big beautiful bill that are relevant to your taxes this year. So one is around car loan interest. So this is an interesting one that I actually didn't know about until I started doing research for this episode. If you purchased a vehicle, a new vehicle, and you got a car loan for that vehicle, and the loan originated after December 31, 2024, effectively means if you got a car loan in 2025 and the car did its final assembly in the US and I'm not going to list which vehicles that is, you'll have to look that up. And it's under a certain weight limit that most normal cars and SUVs are generally fine. So if those things are true and you meet income requirements, you can deduct up to $10,000 of auto interest per year on that loan. Now, that doesn't mean you can deduct 10,000 of auto payments. It's just the interest component of those payments. However, there are some income limitations here. So if you're single, it starts at $100,000. Income is when this deduction starts to phase out. And if you're married at $200,000, this deduction gets to phase out and it actually phases out pretty quickly. So on the single side, by the time you have $150,000 of modified adjusted gross income, you will not be eligible for the car loan interest deduction. On married filers, that's at 250,000 of your modified adjusted gross income. So if you're under that 150 to $200,000 range, single and married, then if you got a loan this year, and that includes people who get a loan before the end of the year, the interest on that loan will be deductible. And I can't remember how many years, this is definitely going to be happening. But if you meet those income requirements and you're getting a new car loan, this is awesome. We happen to get a car loan in 2024, so we don't have a car loan that's eligible and we're not looking for a new car. I don't think that this deduction is lucrative enough that you should buy a car if you didn't want it. But if you are already going to buy a car this year, or if you already did and you got a loan for it and you meet the income requirements, absolutely make sure you're going to take advantage of this when you file your taxes. Another one is for people who have qualified tips and overtime. If you're in a service job or you earn a lot of overtime, make sure your W2 is coded correctly. And this is one where your CPA or your payroll department can help just to make sure you get that deduction for qualified tips and overtime. And then there is a new deduction for seniors. If you're over 65, you get $6,000. And if both spouses are, then it's $12,000 above the line deduction. It does start to phase out at $75,000 of income for single and $150,000 of income for married couples. But if you're in the right income threshold, this is really interesting, and this is a good example of where deferring some income, maybe what you're doing with required minimum distributions or Roth conversions or consulting income could be really valuable, is just trying to make sure that, that you fall into the right thresholds for these income caps. And so another strategy relevant to all of this is shifting income. And so this doesn't necessarily only apply to seniors, but if you're someone who is on the cusp of certain points for taxes, where maybe a credit or a deduction is phased out or maybe a new tax rate kicks in. And keep in mind, one thing that I think is a common myth about taxes is that you can get pushed into a higher tax bracket. That is true. But by getting pushed into that tax bracket, it really costs you a lot of money. So if you could just stay right below that, you know, it's great. That is actually not the way the tax system works. For the most part. When you get pushed from, let's say, you know, the 35 to the 37% bracket, all the income above that threshold gets taxed at the new level, but it doesn't change the way the income below that threshold gets taxed. There are cases like these tax deductions, like some of these itemization limits, sometimes like the net investment income tax, where those things kick in after a certain threshold that is often these round numbers, 1500-002000-00500,000. And so if you're close to that level and these situations actually apply to you, you are a senior or you have car loan interest, or you have a lot of state and local taxes, then it could be worth trying to find a way. If you could either defer some of your income, maybe you could do a few things like contribute More to your 401k to have more pre tax deductions or contribute to an HSA or something like that, just to kind of keep your income over that threshold and still be eligible for those different credits or, you know, exemptions. So next, let's talk about capital gains and investing. So the biggest thing that I think I always try to make sure I'm doing before the end of the year is looking at any opportunities to tax loss harvest. And the general premise here is that when you have a capital loss on something, you bought a stock and it went down in price, you can capture that loss. And in the future or in that tax year, you can offset gains. So if your losses exceed your gains and you have extra losses in a year, you can do two things. One, you can actually offset $3,000 of ordinary income. So that means let's say you have a stock that is down $3,000 from when you bought it, you could sell it. If you had no other capital gains or losses that year and you were in a really high tax bracket, you could offset $3,000 of income and save yourself paying, depending on your state, maybe 30 to 50% taxes on that money. So that's really interesting. Any losses over $3,000 actually carry forward indefinitely. So you could just hold on to those losses. Now short term losses, if you bought something it's at a loss and you've held it for less than a year, are even more valuable because they also can offset short term gains which are taxed at much higher rates than long term capital gains. Now the really important thing, I hinted at this earlier is the wash sale rule. If you sell something for a loss, you can't buy the same or a substantially identical security within 30 days. Otherwise, not only does it negate the ability to take the loss, but it just makes your taxes complicated. So I'd say don't do that. And this is true across accounts. So you want to be careful not to be selling something in your brokerage account and then buying something in your IRA or your spouse's ira. And it can get really messy. If those things you're buying and selling are exactly the same, however, you can swap similar non identical things so what I often look at is if I'm looking at the end of the year and I've been invested in a total stock market fund for a long time, and for whatever reason, most of the time this actually isn't going to be true. Because in the long run the stock market goes up. But let's say from a timing perspective, you just made a big investment and it's down. You could sell that ETF or that index fund or the mutual fund you have, and then you could buy something very similar. Maybe it is A S&P 500 fund, maybe it's a similar all US investing strategy offered by another provider. So it could be a Vanguard Total Stock Market. Maybe Schwab or ishares has something kind of similar that's not identical and you could buy that instead. And if you search tax loss harvesting pairs, you'll find a lot of options for similar ETFs. Now, you don't have to do this before the end of the year. Any point in time throughout the year that there's a large market decline you could evaluate. Oh, now could be a good time to harvest my losses. That said, for individual securities, if you were an investor in a company and that Stock is down 30%, there's not an easy way to harvest the losses of that stock without just not holding it for 30 days and then rebuying it 30 days later. So this is a much better strategy if you can invest in something similar and have a very correlated outcome without having to buy the same thing. Do note that it does not currently apply to crypto. So if you're looking at your bitcoin strategy, and as of recording this, bitcoin has not been on a tear the last few weeks, maybe even months, and you're down 20%, you can sell that bitcoin and then rebuy it and capture that loss. Now, I don't know what the future holds for crypto and wash sale rules. So that is my understanding of it right now is that the wash sale rule does not apply to crypto. So there's another way to capture your losses. Now on the flip side, if you're in a very low income year, so let's say you took a sabbatical and you don't just don't have a lot of income, maybe you're Even in that 0% capital gains rate because you have no income, well, forget tax loss harvesting, this might be a good year to harvest your gains. Because if you have long term capital gains and you have just small enough income that you're paying 0% taxes on capital gains, and I think the limit for that is around 50,000 and 100,000, depending on whether you're single or married. But if you can realize some gains without pushing yourself into a higher capital gains bracket, this might be a year to harvest gains. So that's definitely something to think about if you had no income this year. But you do have some securities, a handful of other things in the kind of like advanced. Ask your CPA if you have worthless securities or bankruptcy positions. Those might be things you can take advantage of. If you have concentrated stock and you want to look into exchange funds, if you want to look into qualified opportunity zones as a way to defer your capital gains, or if you want to look into solar projects as a way to offset gains. Those are all things that I'll put in the do your research, talk to a tax pro. But they're just some ideas to keep in the back of your mind as it comes to investing and tax optimization. All right, next let's talk about retirement accounts and so some key limits and deadlines to know. On the 401k side, the employee contribution limit for 2025 is $23,500. There's a $7,500 additional catch up amount for anyone over 50. And those employee deferrals must happen by the end of the year, December 31st through your payroll. So that's really your only option to take advantage of that 401k limit. And you can do that depending on your employer and your plan, either pre tax or after tax. But if it is pre tax then it will help lower your income because the money you put into that account will not count as income because you put it in Pre tax or 401. Now if your plan allows it at work there is something called the mega backdoor Roth. You can go down all the rabbit holes googling about it, but the essential idea here is you can make a non deductible contribution, which means after tax money with no tax benefit. And so this isn't something you'd want to do unless your plan both allows those after tax contributions but also allows in plan Roth conversions. So what happens is you're allowed to actually take advantage of the total 401k limit for the year, which happens to be $69,000 in 2025, and put everything above your employee limit, but also your employer limit. If your employer has a match and and anything left over between $69,000 and your employee and your employer amounts, you can put it on an after tax basis and then convert it within your plan to a Roth account. So it's kind of an effective way to get more money into a Roth style account, which means that that money went in after tax and as long as you hold it until retirement age, you can take it out without paying taxes on it. So for example, if you work at a company that has a 401k that supports this, when I worked at Google, their plan did. If you maxed out your employee contribution of 23,500 and let's say your employer doesn't offer any matching, you could put another $45,500 into your 401k on an after tax basis and then roll it into a Roth, which is how a lot of people I know that work at companies that allow this feature and have the income to do it have been able to build up pretty substantial Roth IRA positions because they could potentially be putting in tens of thousands of dollars a year into a Roth, which is way higher than the Roth IRA limits, which I will talk about next. This episode is brought to you by Aura.
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This episode is brought to you by Deleteme. Did you know that it is legal for data brokers to collect all types of information about you, including tons of personally identifiable information like your name, address, phone, even your relatives names and then sell it to just about anyone with a credit card or or even just list it online for free. This can expose you to serious risks like identity theft, scams, phishing, doxing, harassment, and I'm sure you know that privacy is now increasingly a serious concern, which is why I have been trusting Deleteme to protect my privacy online for years. Delete Me is a hands free subscription service that removes your personal information from hundreds of data broker and people search sites, reducing the risk of your valuable data getting into the wrong hands. I picked Deleteme because they've been doing this for over 15 years and they use their own tech to continuously monitor and remove instead of outsourcing it to third parties. 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I'm not entirely sure there, but there's not really a reason to wait till April. In fact, if I remember correctly, when I was filing my taxes myself, waiting till April just meant that it was slightly more complicated in terms of the tax filing. So if you have the money to do an IRA contribution and you want to, I would encourage you to do that before December 31st. To make things more simple, if you're not eligible because you have a plan at work or because you exceed the income limitations for the Roth ira, you can do a similar thing to the mega backdoor Roth I just explained, which is you can make a contribution to a traditional Iraq on an after tax basis. So a non deductible contribution to a traditional IRA and then roll your traditional IRA into a Roth ira. And the only thing to keep in mind there is that if you have any gains in that account between the time you contribute and roll it over, you might owe taxes on those gains. And then two, there is this pro rata rule which basically says you can't cherry pick which contributions to a traditional IRA roll over to a Roth ira. So if you have a large traditional IRA balance, then the backdoor Roth strategy can make things really, really messy. And so one way to avoid that is if you have a lot of traditional IRA assets and in one year you're able to move those into a 401k which by the way, you can move assets from traditional IRAs and even old 401ks from other employers and into your current company for a 1k if your plan allows it. So one strategy is in one year get all of those traditional pre tax assets across all your accounts into your 401k so you have no traditional IRA assets. And then the next year you can kind of resume the process of now when I contribute to my traditional ira, it's the only money there, it's all after tax. And then I can roll that over into a Roth and have more after tax Roth dollars, which can grow for the rest of my life up until I have to withdraw the money in retirement and at which point I will not have to pay taxes on any of those gains. I have been doing a backdoor Roth almost every year, I think actually every year since I learned about it. And I've been trying to do the mega backdoor Roth as much as the places I worked supported it. And it's just been a really great strategy to add to a Roth IRA. And Roth IRAs have a ton of flexibility in terms of what you can invest in. I love having dollars in a Roth ira, not just for all those reasons, but also just because you're not going to pay taxes if you keep that money in there until retirement age. The last thing, I'll talk about this a bit more in the business owner section. But if you have a business or you have your own income, that is self employed income separate from your W2, you can also open up self employed retirement accounts and I'll talk about how those work in tandem, but that's another option. Just make sure you set those accounts up by the end of the year. So I mentioned earlier that if you're in a low income year that you might want to do some capital gain harvesting. Another thing to consider, if you're in a low income year is a Roth conversion. And so that's taking your traditional assets from your traditional IRA or possibly from your traditional 401k and rolling them into a Roth IRA or a Roth 401k to be after tax assets. And so the general rule of thumb is if you're in a really high tax bracket one year, this is not a great year to do a Roth conversion. But if you are in a low tax bracket year, it can make sense. And there are some advantages that we will not get to in this episode. But if you go back and listen to episode 144 with my friend Katie, we talked all about tax advantaged accounts and this Roth conversion strategy. And there could be a lot of reasons that it can be super advantageous, but only really if you're in a low income year or you're trying to really structure some kind of laddered Roth contributions to be able to pull money out of your retirement accounts. But it can get more complicated. I also did an episode with Michael Kitces on this topic a little bit. And then the last investment related topic I'll mention is that if you work at a company or if you have some type of stock options, specifically ISOs, incentive stock options, there is an amount you can exercise each year that won't push you into this thing called alternative minimum tax. This is not going to be an episode about alternative minimum tax or amt, but once you cross into amt, it's kind of a different way to calculate all of your taxes. And just something to keep in mind is the fear of exercising a lot of your stock options is it might push you into this AMT level and change your taxes scenario. But if you work with a cpa, you can find out how many of your incentive stock options you can exercise in a given year without pushing yourself into AMT and triggering taxes on that exercise. And so that's something you might want to consider if you have stock options. But absolutely work with a CPA or a tax planner to try to figure this out. It can be pretty complicated and I think it would be messy to do it solo. All right. A few other tax advantaged accounts that are not related to investing as much as they are your health are FSAs and HSAs. And so with your FSA, it's different than an HSA in that you make contributions in the year from your employer account, from your paycheck, and it's use it or lose it. Some plans do have a little bit of a rollover or grace period until the next year. But generally, if you've maxed out your FSA and you haven't used it all by 1231, you are not going to get to keep that money and it's gone. So something you should make sure you're doing is using all those FSA dollars. And some of the ways you can think about doing this are booking any last minute appointments towards the end of the year, refilling your prescriptions, buying any other kind of over the counter medical things. There are a lot of other medical eligible products, like an Oura ring or a nanit camera, which is like a baby camera that you can put over a crib. There's a lot of stuff online if you start searching around for FSA eligible products. So just make sure you use up all your FSA dollars before the end of the year. If you genuinely can't find anything you need, but you don't want the money to go to waste, I would strongly encourage you to go find anything you can and donate it to a local shelter. Whether they're items for babies, whether items for adults, surely there is something that you could buy and donate that would be valued somewhere else other than letting that money go to waste. And while we're on the topic of FSAs, one strategy for anyone who's considering leaving their job in 2026, if you contribute to an FSA, usually you get the full amount of money upfront. And if you leave your job, you don't get to spend the rest of it once you've left, but you don't have to pay back your employer if you overspent that amount when you leave, which is kind of the trade off of if you don't spend the money, you don't get it back. And so if you're planning to leave your job in 2026, early in the year you could max out your FSA, max out using it before you leave your job, even if you haven't contributed to the full amount that's in there. So it's a little bit of an advanced strategy and you have to make sure you have a plan for how to use that money. But one thing that I've seen people kind of really try to time is either something related to orthodontia, maybe getting Invisalign or a similar process, or getting Lasik done, which are really expensive things that are medical related and usually not covered by all insurances. And so you can kind of time that together. You can also sometimes time it to span two years. And so I actually think we did this when My wife Amy got her lasik. We did it at the very end of December and we asked them if we could pay part of it in December and part of it in January so we could pull it from two balances of FSA contributions. So that's FSAs. Similar but quite different are HSAs. So both for medical expenses, but the HSA money, once you put it in, it's yours and you don't have to take it out by the end of the year. But the contributions, just like an fsa, are tax deductible. But two other things that are interesting is that you get pre tax deduction putting it in. You don't pay taxes when you take it out. And the money can be invested and grow tax free. So this is like the triple tax free account. I think it's the only one out there. It's awesome. It's great. It's only for medical expenses and it is only for HSA eligible health plans. So if you're not on a high deductible health plan that is HSA eligible, then you can't contribute to your HSA this year. But if you are, then you can contribute 4300 if it's just you for coverage and 8550 if it's for your whole family. And I think if you're over 55, you can contribute another thousand dollars. So a lot of opportunities to contribute health expenses to your HSA if you're on the right plan. I actually think that if you factor in the benefits of being able to contribute to an HSA that the high deductible health plans are often a better deal. Now that might only be true if you're paying for the whole plan out of pocket like I am. It might not be true if you work for an employer where all the plans cost the same for you. I also think similar to an IRA, you can contribute to your HSA up until April 15th the following year. But I find it easier to try to knock all these things out before the end of the year. So I'm not going into 2026 with a list of things I want to get done. I do think you might have to establish the HSA before the end of the year, but you might not need to contribute before the end of the year. One other important thing to keep in mind is that while you can use your HSA to pay your medical expenses now, you don't have to use it to reimburse your medical expenses in this year. So for me personally, if every dollar in my HSA will grow tax free and I can take the money out tax free. Then I would much rather let that money grow tax free as long as possible and pay my medical expenses out of pocket with after tax cash from my paycheck or from other sources and not use my money in my HSA for anything else. Now obviously this assumes you have enough cash flow to be able to do that. But if that's the case, I would also consider saving all your receipts. So save all the receipts you would normally use for your HSA and you can reimburse yourself at any time. There's no kind of statute of limitations on those expenses. So if you need the money three years from now, you have a Dropbox or Google Drive folder with all these receipts, you can submit them and you can get the money out of your HSA without having to pay taxes on it. But if you don't need that money, you can let it grow all the way into retirement. And just like a retirement account, it'll grow tax free, except you put money in pre tax and you don't pay taxes when you take it out. So every year that we have a high deductible health plan, we max out the hsa. We've never tapped it for anything and we're just letting that invest into the future. We're keeping all of our medical expenses saved in case we need those receipts. But I'm also quite unfortunately confident that we will have high medical expenses when we are older unless we figure out some way to make medical expenses go away. I'm just expecting that. So that's a lot of the tax advantaged accounts. Let's switch to our home because this is the last year that you're able to make some of these energy efficient home upgrades. And so there's kind of two categories here that I want to focus on. So one is around efficiency improvements that certain types of windows and doors or insulation, ac water heaters, furnaces, heat pumps, there used to be a $500 lifetime limit and now you get up to, I think it's around $3,200 a year in many cases. But it does need to be put into service by December 31st. So this is something you want to get done sooner rather than later. And then similarly on solar, there's not a cap on the number of dollars, it's just about 30% of the install cost. So if you're already planning on doing solar soon, now could be a really good year to try to get it done. I believe that this has to be put into service. So I don't know if solar companies are going to be able to do things in time by the time this episode comes out, but if they are, this would be a good strategy if it's something you're already considering. I don't think saving 30% makes up for something that you wouldn't do otherwise. Okay, let's talk briefly about kids because there are a few things here to think about. The biggest kids related account is a529 and it allows you to save for education and you get tax free growth from a federal level. There are no tax benefits for putting money in, but many states do give a state tax deduction for contributions, usually with a 1231 end of year deadline. There are a few changes that happened to the 529 plans recently. So you can use some of that money for private school K12 education. And now there are some rules to it. But if there are unused 529 funds up to $35,000 across someone's life, you can, after a 15 year holding period, roll them into a Roth IRA. So if you're considering investing in your children's future, and let's say you weren't even thinking about paying for their college, but you did want to invest into their retirement account, but you aren't eligible to put money into a Roth IRA because your children don't have any income right now, there is a roundabout way that you could fund a 529 even if you're not planning to use it for college so that it will grow into the ability to transfer into a Roth ira. So that is a benefit. I think it's a hedge case for kids won't need the 529 for college, but there's some way to get that money out without having to pay taxes and fees. And so that's something to keep in mind. If you live in a state with tax deductions, 529s can be even more interesting. In California, where we live, there are no tax benefits for a 529. But that doesn't mean it's not something that you might want to use because the tax benefit is that your money will grow tax free, but there's just no tax deduction for the contributions. So the way this works is each person can give each recipient $19,000 a year, which is the annual gift tax exclusion. So in the US there's a gift tax which kicks in and you have a lifetime limit and then you also have an annual limit by which you don't dip into your lifetime limit. And so that's 19,000 per recipient per gifter, which actually means if you had one child, each parent could gift $19,000 to that child's 529. So for $38,000 each, also there is the ability to super fund a 529. And so you can put up to five years of contributions. So that could be up to $95,000 in one year for one child from one parent. Or if you had two parents, you could put $190,000 in with no tax benefits. In California. The only real advantage to putting that money in all upfront is that you let it grow tax free for longer. But I don't know if there are caps on some of the tax deductions in other states, but maybe that's a reason to do it. Similarly, separate from 529s, you can use that annual gifting limit to gift anyone $19,000 a year without touching your lifetime estate and gift exemptions. And if you're a couple, that goes up to $38,000. So this isn't a deduction. It's just a way to avoid future estate taxes and gift taxes. But it can be an effective wealth transfer tool. And so where this might come into play is if someone is trying to transfer assets to someone else and they want to be able to do that without eating into their lifetime gift tax or estate exemption, they could start to transfer $19,000 a year to each person. So if you had a child and you wanted to transfer money to them, but you were married and that child was married, then each one of you could transfer $19,000 to each one of them. So you could transfer $76,000 a year. And if you had two married children, then you could double that, you know, and that would be another $152,000 a year. And so this lets you start to transfer assets between people, get them out of your estate sooner, but not eat into your lifetime exclusions. Now, those lifetime exclusions are really, really high. So I believe right now, as of recording, they just got locked back in for longer, and they're somewhere on the order of $13 million a person. And so if you're nowhere near that amount, then this isn't really a strategy at all. That said, there is always the possibility that in the future they get removed and they could come way, way, way down. So if you're worried about that, that would be a time to think about this. Otherwise probably doesn't come into play that often. But if you want a gift. You can gift up to that $19,000 per recipient, per giver a year without touching that exemption or triggering any taxes. And I didn't mention the when it came to tax accounts for kids, there is a new investment account, the Trump accounts that got introduced in 2025. I'm actually really excited about them as a vehicle for helping invest in your kid's future. However, you can't open them or contribute them until July 4, 2026. So this was introduced. It is something I'm interested in. You'll be able to put $5,000 a year after tax in per kid. I believe children born in 2025 and 2026 are going to get, I think, an additional thousand dollars from the government. I'll talk more about this once the details are finalized, once we know more, but so far we just know we can't do much with this until 2026. And then last I mentioned earlier, you can't contribute to your kid's Roth IRA for them, but if they have income, you can. So if you own a business and there's a reason that makes sense to hire your children, whether that's for administrative work, whether that's to be models for photos or videos you're making, you can pay them a reasonable wage. That's a deduction for your business. Your children pay taxes on that income, but they might be at a very low tax bracket and then that way they can take money that's taxed at a very low tax rate. If anything, start funding their Roth IRA for the long term with many years to compound. Keep in mind this does need payroll, W2s actual work, real documentation. It's not just like a quick, easy thing to do, but does allow you to start funding your children's IRA indirectly if you're able to actually have a reasonable way to hire them. This episode is brought to you by Fabric by Gerber Life.
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Let'S do a quick lightning round about some business things before I jump into the miles points and credit card stuff. And also keep in mind that having a business doesn't necessarily mean you have this big operation and you have employees. If you have consulting revenue, if you sell art, all kinds of things that could count as business income. And so here's some things to think about before the end of the year. If you have any contractors, you need to issue your 1099s. You need to come up with your own reasonable compensation if you have an S corp to make sure it's in line and pay yourself. If you have an S corp, there are some ways that you can deduct your owner's health insurance as long as that shows up on your payroll. We talked about hiring your kids. You're going to need to send them W2s, so that's some of the compliance stuff on the retirement stuff. You can set up a self employed retirement plan. And so there are a few. They're simple IRAs, SEP IRAs. My personal favorite is the Solo 401K. I mentioned that. I talked a lot about this in episode 144. You'll want to put that plan in place by the end of the year. You can open it with self employed income for yourself, but it doesn't work if you have employees. The only other employee of your business can be your spouse. Otherwise you're not eligible to contribute to your solo 401k, but you are eligible to have a solo 401k even if you also have a W2 job that has a 401k. Your employee limits don't stack. So that 23,500 you can put in, you can't put that in twice. But the amount your employers can contribute and that mega backdoor limits those Things might be things that you could kind of stack on, especially if your employer doesn't offer after tax contributions. I did a bunch of research when we opened our solo 401k. I chose to work with one company and I can't remember the name of it and the interface was so bad. And then like three weeks later this company carry launched a solo 401k and I immediately switched before I even funded the other one. I haven't looked back. We do all our solo 401ks through Carrie. I'm a huge fan of them. I think they have a deal which I'll put at all the hacks.com carrie or a link in the show notes for anyone. But they're the solo 401k provider that I use and really enjoy. And then if you're a startup I believe there's some type of tax credit that I haven't done a lot of research into for up to $5,000 a year for the next three years to help cover some of the administrative costs of a 401k. And I also think there's a either a tax credit or a deduction if you set your company's 401k plan to auto enroll. I can't remember exactly how it works, but again, something to look into other things to do before the end of the year. If you're a business owner, just make sure you get all your expenses in your accounting system. Now I try to do it in real time. I use a software called Kik that I'm a big fan of. Full disclosure, I loved it and I invested in the company. Also, I believe they're still offering a huge discount@AllTheHacks.com Kik K I C K but it works like a lot of other fintech apps where you sync all of your credit cards and MEG accounts. But the nice thing I like personally about Kik is that I can link personal cards, label them personal, but if there's a business transaction I can kind of toggle it to slide it over to the business books so that I have all these expenses done. I do it as it goes and I don't have to think about it later in the year or next year. Also, just make sure you figure out a plan for your home, office, phone, Internet, travel expenses. If you're deducting anything like that, it's just helpful to figure that out before the end of the year and then depending on your tax circumstances. Sometimes with companies it's a lot easier to kind of defer or pull up certain Types of expenses. If you have a large purchase, you could make that in December or you can make it in January, or you could reach out to vendors and ask if you can prepay for next year in advance so that you could bring that on your books in 2025. Assuming you do a kind of cash basis of your accounting, you could ask contractors, would you rather be paid before the end of the year or paid in January? I would only ask that question if you're agnostic to the decision. Otherwise I would make the decision for for your own business. One more thing for businesses is bonus depreciation. So it disappeared, it came back. So for any qualified property placed in service after January 19, 2025, which could include large vehicles equipment, if you're going to use it for the majority of time as business, you can front load the depreciation of that equipment when you purchase it. I know there are people who strategically buy vehicles only certain classes of vehicles that are large enough from a weight standpoint that they qualify for bonus depreciation. But you can buy them right towards the end of the year. And then in 2025, you know, you can make sure that equipment is 100% used for business. Just keep in mind that that equipment also has to be used more than 50% for business in the future. Otherwise there can be clawbacks and it can get really messy. So this isn't something you know that you might have seen on TikTok where it's like just buy a G wagon and call it a business expense. This is not as simple as those videos might make it seem, but it is something that could be really valuable. If there is actually a business vehicle or a piece of business equipment that is large enough, you could depreciate it all upfront. And then finally I mentioned earlier the pass the re entity taxes. If your state offers it and you're eligible, it can be a great way to optimize how you are able to deduct all of your state taxes from your business instead of your personal situation where you might be over that salt limit. So that is what I have for optimizing your taxes and money moves to make before the end of the year. Like I said, all thehacks.com checklist is where you'll find it. But let's go into the stuff that's kind of unique to this show, which is about what to do with points, miles, status, credit cards, and how your end of the year checklist plays in here. So first off, if you're chasing status for the year, whether that's an airline status or a hotel status. Usually you have to complete all that activity before the end of the year. And so if you're trying to get to a certain level and you're not quite there, you have a couple options. So you can go on what's called a mileage or a mattress run, which means you basically take a flight or book a hotel room that serves only as a purpose to earn you extra elite qualifying miles, points, nights, et cetera. There are some cases where this makes sense. You know, if you are one night away from hitting Hyatt Globalist and you don't have any stay, I would absolutely encourage you to find the cheapest possible night before the end of the year and go book a night to be able to hit that level. And there is this cool site, hotelmattressrun.com and it lets you search all the major chains except Hyatt right now for what is the cheapest stay within a certain radius of a zip code in that hotel chain during these date windows. So that could be a good option if you need to close the gap of a couple nights. A lot of chains, if you book a three night stay and you check in, you don't necessarily need to be there all three nights. I have heard though, if people book longer stays, 5, 10, 20 night stays, you might need to check in with the hotel more than the one time you check in though you might be able to have a conversation at the manager or the front desk and figure something out. On the airline side, there's no real hack there. You have to actually get on the plane and fly. But I do know people that have gone on mileage runs and sometimes doing it in a way that's adding segments for certain qualification where you'll fly from San Francisco to Vegas to San Diego to la just to add on a few extra segments. You might need to take a trip to LA for work, but maybe you make the trip a little more out of the way to add on just enough to get you over that edge. A couple other options are with credit cards. So almost every program, airline and hotel has some way depending on the card, you have to earn some type of qualifying point for their status. Sometimes it even comes as a bonus for having the card or opening the card. And so I know United often has premier qualifying point bonuses. With Delta, for every card you have of the platinum and reserve type, you get 2,500 medallion qualifying dollars. And then I know for Alaska, the Bank of America card, you don't get anything the first year you open it, but you do the second year. But as you spend on those cards, you earn status in the form of elite qualifying points, the Hyatt card, some certain Marriott cards. The more you spend, the more nights you get. So that is an option even when your statement closes, let's say, January 15th. As far as I'm aware, every single one of those cards will award you the elite qualifying points or nights based on when your spend happens. And so if you have an American Airlines card and you're trying to earn loyalty points and Your statement closes January 15th, for all the transactions that post by December 31st, you should get all of those points for the 2025 year. Now, on American's case, the qualifying year actually ends in February, so it doesn't matter. But for other programs, it usually ends 1231. I'd prefer not to push it till 1231, maybe by 1229, so you're sure the transactions post by 1231. The only caveat there is for a program like Hyatt, where if you have the Hyatt business card, you get five Elite nights for every $10,000 spent. That resets, I believe, on 1231. So you'll need to make sure you cross that $10,000 of spend for each five Elite nights before the end of the year. If you spend 9,000 of the way towards 10,000, I believe that resets. And then if you spend a thousand in January, you're not going to then get an extra elite night. You're just going to be one of 10,000 of the way towards your next set of elite nights. So that's chasing status again. Either last week or next week, you will have heard me talk about chasing status being one of my top five mistakes. And so I'm not saying you should do this, but that's how to think about it as we think about earning status for a lot of programs. Alaska, Hyatt, American, Delta, Marriott. As you earn certain tiers of status or cross certain thresholds, you have the ability to pick certain benefits. And some of those are set at a timeframe of three months or six months from when you earned them. But some of them have deadlines. And I believe the Marriott and Delta ones are maybe at the end of the year or just after. So just make sure that if you're earning those milestone benefits for hitting different statuses, make sure you select the milestones or the choice benefits before they expire. Sometimes they will default to giving you one of them, and sometimes you'll just forfeit the right to get them. So definitely make sure you're doing that. Now let's move on to credit card perks and credits real quick. One thing, there are a few cards out there, I won't cover all of them that have caps on the year as to how much you can spend before you no longer get those elevated bonuses. So the amex Blue Business plus and Blue Business Cash cards, you earn 2x or 2% back up to $50,000 spend. So before 1231, if you want to max that out, you have time. A lot of the rotating category cards, some of them have monthly, some quarterly, and some annually elevated bonuses. And so I know like the customized cash business card on bank of America, you earn your elevated bonus on up to $50,000 spend in the year. So you want to make sure if you're trying to max that out, you do that by the end of the year. And then for example, the Amex Gold card, you can get forex on grocery up to 25,000 a year or restaurants up to 50,000 a year if you're trying to maximize those things that limit resets at the end of the year. Another spending related thing is there are some cards that have perks that you get from spending. So for example, the Hilton Aspire and Surpass cards, you get free nights after hitting 15, 30 or $60,000 of spend. Those reset at the end of the year. So if you're trying to hit those free nights, make sure you do that spend and you hit it before the end of the year. Similarly, I think there's a 15,000 threshold on the Hyatt personal card to get a free night certificate. So that's something. There are probably other ones that I'm not listing on Marriott cards or other cards. Just keep that in mind. Then on the Amex Platinum Business Platinum Venture X and the Venture X Business cards, you can earn the ability to bring guests into the lounges by spending $75,000 in a calendar year that resets every year. So if you're at 70,000, make sure you get to that $75,000 of spend before the end of the year so that you're able to earn that guest access. Keep in mind that it might not actually make financial Sense to spend 75,000 to earn that guest access. So I'm not saying you should do it, but if you're trying to do it, do it before the end of the year. And then at a similar threshold of 75,000. The Chase Sapphire Reserve has a bunch of perks that unlock at 75,000 dol I believe this Chase sapphire reserve business has similar perks that unlock at $120,000 of spend. Notably, you get some credit for the Chase shops, you get a Southwest gift card and you get Southwest A list status. And I think you get top tier IHG status. So if you're trying to hit that, make sure you do that before the end of the year as well. Now the big thing to make sure you do is use up a lot of your credits on your credit cards. I'm going to skip over all the monthly credits out there because that'd just be way too many. And that's not something you need to think about end of year. That's something you need to think about every month. And the way I keep track of this personally is I use the Card Pointers app and so I add all of my cards to card pointers and they do not require you to link your bank account. So you're not sharing financial details with card pointers. You're just telling them, I have this card and you tell them, I opened it up on this day. And each month they show you all of the standard offers linked with that card and then you can mark whether you've used them or not. And then they show you they reset every month, quarter year. And so I just go through that list and I favorited some that I actually care about using, which will make sense in a moment. And then I filter to my favorites and that is my end of month, end of quarter, end of year checklist to go through and make sure I'm taking advantage of all the credits I have. So I won't talk about the monthly ones, I will talk about the annual ones. Something to keep in mind when it comes to these really big calendar year credits is the concept of either a double or a triple dip, which is if you think about signing up for a new card and you sign up for it across two years, but it has calendar year benefits, you can get those calendar year benefits for two calendar years, even though you might only hold the card for one year. So you'd pay one annual fee, but get 2, 200 airline credits on the AMEX Platinum. And there is a strategy which is to open the card up at the end of the year, take advantage of the 2025 credits, take advantage of the 2026 credits. Once the annual fee posts, you usually have 30 days to cancel the card and get a refund from the statement close date of the annual fee. So if you open a card in December, you might be able to delay canceling it until January 2027 and use some of those calendar year perks across three calendar years for just one annual fee. So obviously if you're going to open up any of these cards, I always appreciate it. If you go to all thehacks.com cards, those are the links that help support this show. Obviously if you find a better deal anywhere else, use that better deal. We've tried to use member links and referral links to make sure that we're always showing the best deals. But of course if you find a better deal, if you have a referral link from your partner, use that. But if not, thank you in advance for going to that page and using our links. So here are the credits that are calendar year credits that are important to think about making sure you're using. So I'll start with Amex. First is the Gold card. And the Gold card has a semi annual $50 resi credit for restaurants. Now obviously you could go out to dinner and that's an easy way to use it. Maybe you've already used it, but if not and you don't have plans to go to a resi restaurant, you can usually use a gift card from the restaurant. And if they are a restaurant that uses the toast platform, that gift card can be bought online. And personally I've had all of those for getting the resi credits. And so if you go to this website, use your credits.com they have a great tool that you can find that helps you use a lot of the credits we're talking about, but specifically shows you resi restaurants on toast that you can buy gift cards online. On the Amex Platinum side and the personal platinum, there's a $200 airline credit to make sure you're finding all the best ways to use that credit. Search flyer, talk Amex Platinum Delta or Alaska and go read about all the things that can qualify for that. Because sometimes there are some really EAS ways to cash out that credit that is easier than paying for an extra seat fee. There's also a hundred dollar resi credit. Same thing applies as the Gold card. There's a $300 fine hotels and resorts credit. This one, if you have a Platinum card and you're going to hold it for a while, you're going to get used to using this because you get $300 every six months. But that's to book a hotel, either a one or more night stay from fine hotels and resorts or a two or more night stay from the hotel collection. So if you book a one night stay you can knock $300 off the price. Now, a lot of the fine hotels and resorts are expensive, so finding one under or around $300 can be tricky. Though Las Vegas is a great place to find hotels in that price range that are in that collection. Keep in mind you don't have to actually book this just for yourself. You can use this to book a hotel for someone else. The only caveat is that other person needs to have an AMEX card. It doesn't have to be a Platinum card, but they need to have an amex. You can also book back to back stays. So if you had a Platinum card and your partner had one, you could both book one night fine hotels and resorts reservations and extend the usage to get $600 off that two night stay. Or if you find a hotel that's in the hotel collection, you could book two two night stays and get $600 off those four nights. Now, the properties are not supposed to provide a lot of the dollar based credits that you get from booking these properties for back to back stays. So if you're getting $100 spa credit and you book two nights back to back, you shouldn't get a second $100 credit, but you should continue to get your free breakfast, your late checkout and all that. The Amex Platinum also has a $50 credit for Saks. This is one that I've more and more increasingly just started valuing at zero because like it's just gotten harder and harder to use. Unless you're near a sax in person. $75 Lululemon credit each quarter you can go to the store. You can usually buy a gift card online as long as it's a physical gift card they mail to you. Or you can go to a local store and buy a gift card. If you don't have something you need, there's a $200 oura ring credit. Now that Oura Ring credit is not something that you can buy a gift card for, but during the holidays they've already announced their Black Friday sale as I'm recording this. But there are some sales bringing the price of the Gen 4 ring close to $200. So that's something to consider. There's your Clear credit. If you haven't enrolled in Clear that expires at the end of the year. There's an Equinox credit that expires at the end of the year. There's a Soul Cycle credit that expires at the end of the year. The Equinox and Soul Cycle ones are a bit harder to use, so I'll kind of brush over them quickly. On the business platinum side, your $200 airline credit, just like the personal Platinum needs to be used. The same 300 hotel credit. The new ones for a business card are you get $150 Dell credit so you can use that. Buy some headphones, buy a video game, buy some lights, speakers, microphone. You also get a thousand dollars credit if you spend $5,000 on Dell. So I think that one's a little bit harder to use. But the 150 off 150 should be easier. And then there's a $50 Hilton credit, which is not the easiest to use. But there are. If you search around online, there are some Hiltons that have restaurants in them where you can get that credit. Some of the Hiltons I've been in have like a little store in the front where you can go buy food and drinks. Some of them have Starbucks. So those have coded for a lot of people as long as they're inside of Hilton. Same Clear credit. And then there's an Adobe Indeed credit that I've never heard of anyone using, so I can't speak to it. If you have an Amex Hilton Aspire card, you've got a $200 resort credit to use before the end of the year. You also have a $50 quarterly flight credit. For me personally, I just add $50 to my United Travel bank and make it easy. And then you've also got the clear credit again. We've got a lot of clear credits in our house, so we've offered a lot of our immediate family, hey, can we sign you up for clear? And so we've signed them up for clear and offered to pay for it because otherwise we're not going to use the credit. Amex Green Card also has a clear credit. If you have any Delta Amex cards, you get between 100 and $250 for a hotel stay booked through Delta Stays. So that's something you can do. If you do a prepaid stay, it doesn't have to be for this year, which is similar with the fine hotels and resorts. $300 credit, you have to book the stay. It has to be a prepaid stay. But the stay doesn't have to be this year. You just have to book it before the end of this year. So that's amex bank of America is a little easier. There are two cards to call out, the Premium Rewards Elite card and the Premium Rewards card. The Elite card has a $300 airline credit that's pretty easy to use. I think a lot of the travel bank gift card stuff might work. And then there's $150 lifestyle credit that you can use on streaming. You could use it on food delivery, and so those two need to be used before the end of the year. The regular premium rewards Card just has $100 airline credit. It's similarly pretty easy to use when it comes to Capital One. I believe all of the Capital One credits are card member year based, so if you opened your card January 1st, then you need to use them before the end of the year. But otherwise they're not credits that you need to think about using before the end of the year. Chase Some of the credits on Chase cards are card member year and some are calendar year, so it's a little confusing. On the Chase Reserve and the Chase reserve business, the $300 travel credits are card member year based, so you can kind of ignore those for the sake of this episode. But the $250 edit credits, which are Chase's version of the kind of hotel collection, they require a two night stay. Those need to be used by the end of the calendar year. I'm going to assume you can do a prepaid stay and book it online and use it now for a stay next year. But I haven't used mine, so something I need to figure out before the end of the year. There's a $150 restaurant credit on the Personal Chase Sapphire Reserve for Sapphire tables. I have heard that similarly, if you can find a Sapphire Reserve Tables restaurant that also takes toast, you can use a gift card. It's a much more limited set of restaurants, so that might be necessary. And then There is a $150 StubHub credit that I have not found something to go to yet. But end of the year there's lots of holiday things. I know the San Francisco Symphony does some really cool holiday movies with live orchestra, so maybe we'll be using our StubHub credit for something like that. On the business side, you've got a $200 Google Workspace credit to use before the end of the year, a $50 giftcards.com credit to use, which has a little bit of nuance on how you use it, and then a semi annually $200 zip recruiter credit that I'm not going to even try to use. Two other Chase cards that have calendar year credits, the ritz card, that $300 airline credit is a calendar year credit. And on the Hyatt business card you have two $50 Hyatt credits that Expire or I guess reset at the end of the calendar year. Next is Citi. So Citi has a few of these, but not nearly as many as Amex. On the Strata Elite you've got your $300 hotel credit, which is becoming a kind of recurring theme of all these hotel credits on all these premium credit cards. The $200 splurge credit on the Strata Elite expires at the end of the year and the semiannually Black Lane a hundred dollar credit exp expires at the end of the year. But from everything I've read, that Black Lane credit basically brings Black Lane, which is a private car service, down to the cost of an Uber. So it's not that great of a credit. If you have a City Strata Premier, there's a $100 hotel credit that expires at the end of the year on a hotel booking over $500. I have that card. I haven't used that credit. I probably won't use that credit. A lot of these hotel credits are hard to use and I try to not assume that they're part of the value I'm getting from the card and my calculus on keeping them because I just can't manage to use them all. If you have the old Legacy City prestige, there's a 250 travel credit that you have to use before the end of the year. And then on the American cards, the Platinum has a Turo credit of 18030 a trip that you can use by the end of the year. The American executive card has 120 AVIs or budget credit. I'm surprised that on one card they're doing Turo, the other card they're doing Avis. That's a little bit confusing to me. And then the new AA Globe card, all the Admirals Club passes need to be used by the end of the year. And then they also have a Turo credit. This one's $240, but it's only $30 each trip. And then they also have a hundred dollar in flight credit and a hundred dollar splurge credit that reset on the calendar year. So if you happen to get this brand new card, a few things to use there. And then the last card that I'll mention is the US Bank Altitude Reserve. It does have a $325 travel and dining credit, but it is on the card member year basis, not the calendar year basis, so you don't have to worry about that. However, as someone who has this card whose card member year resets in November I'm going to be using my second year card member credit as quickly as possible and likely canceling within 30 days of that annual fee hitting. Unless they want to give me a retention offer because they've kind of diminished the value of this card starting in December. I don't see a huge future for that card in my wallet. I think that's it for most of the credits. The only other thing that I like to do at the end of the year I is just run through all my airlines, my hotels and my credit cards and look for a few things. So on the airlines and hotels just double check the expiration dates if you have any miles expiring or any points expiring. It's pretty easy to extend most of them by make a small purchase with a shopping portal, buy a small number of points, redeem some points for a donation to charity or magazine, transfer points to someone. A lot of options there and then you can reset the counter on when those points expire if you don't have activity and then on credit cards I have a few cards that I've just had for so long that are helping my credit score and credit report but I don't use regularly. At the end of the year I just like to go through each credit card and just one make sure it's still open and it didn't get shut down for some reason and put a transaction on it to help keep it open. My longest running credit card was an old United card that I did not do this on and Chase thought, well you haven't used it in three years, we're going to close it for you. And my credit score is fine. But there was a window of time where I was bummed to have my longest history card missing from my credit report and credit score because I forgot to use it. So my tradition is end of the year make sure every card has at least one purchase from that year. So I really hope this has been helpful. Like I mentioned in the intro, I'm going to try to turn this into a checklist you can download@allthehacks.com checklist or we'll put the link in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening. Reminder that we are going to be off for the holidays so there will not be a December 24th episode but we will be back on the 31st for our last episode of the year. Thank you so much for listening. Podcast@AllTheHacks.com if you want to get in touch I will see you next time.