← All the Hacks: Money, Points & Life
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- [00:02]
Chris Hutchins
If you're planning on doing any shopping for the holidays, then I hope this episode will both give you a ton of inspiration and ideas for gifts, as well as walk you through the three to four major ways. I get anywhere from 5 to 25% off almost all my shopping. I'm Chris Hutchins and today's gift guide will include over 80 different ideas for the holiday season across a bunch of categories from tack to kitchen clothes, health, games, kids and learning. And in addition to sharing how I make sure I'm always saving, including discounted gift cards, cash back card linked offers, and more, I'm going to close this out by sharing a few of our family traditions for the holidays. And if you want to jump around, you'll find timestamps in the show notes to make it easier to do it. Also, please know that none of the items in this gift guide have paid me to be a part of this list. However, some of them are sponsors of the show. But that makes sense because as I've said before, most of my sponsors are here because I reached out to them after loving their products and while I often read out the URL for things on the show, there's just too many products. So I'm going to put all the links to everything, including all the discounts I find@AllTheHacks.com gifts and since a few of these links are from sponsors or are my affiliate links to sites like Amazon, I would obviously greatly appreciate it if you want to use them to support me in the show. Of course, if you find a better deal somewhere else, absolutely go there instead. Again, all the links are@allthehacks.com gifts and if you enjoy this episode, please share it with a friend. Leave a comment or review. And if you want to keep upgrading your life, money and travel, click follow or subscribe.
- [01:37]
Unknown Co-host
Now. Let's get into it right after this.
- [01:41]
Chris Hutchins
This episode is brought to you by Element. Now, I love Element and use it all the time because it helps anyone stay hydrated without the sugar and other dodgy ingredients in popular electrolyte and sports drinks. In fact, Element is a zero sugar electrolyte electrolyte drink mix and sparkling electrolyte water born from the growing body of research showing that optimal health outcomes occur at sodium levels two to three times government recommendations. And you don't just have to drink it cold. This holiday season, you can get the Element Chocolate Medley and enjoy it hot or even with your coffee, tea or cocoa. Element is formulated for anyone on a mission to restore health through hydration and is perfectly suited for everyone from athletes to regular people just like me and works if you're fasting on a keto, low carb or Paleo diet. And if you're not sure if it's for you, don't worry because Element offers no questions asked refunds so you can try it totally risk free. Get your free sample pack with any element purchase@AllTheHacks.com LMNT this deal is only available through my link, so support the show and go to allthehacks.com element LMNT and get hydrated.
- [02:52]
Unknown Co-host
So I'm going to.
- [02:53]
Chris Hutchins
Start with some tech and personal gift ideas.
- [02:55]
Unknown Co-host
First, a product I use literally every.
- [02:58]
Chris Hutchins
Single day and that's the Moft iPhone wallet.
- [03:00]
Unknown Co-host
It's a magnetic wallet that sticks on your iPhone. I carry it almost everywhere I go.
- [03:05]
Chris Hutchins
It holds about three cards, maybe it's two.
- [03:07]
Unknown Co-host
When you start with it, it stretches a little bit. You could put a $20 bill in there also just in case you need cash. I really think this is the best wallet. It also flips out so it can become a stand so you can balance your phone if you're watching something or you want to keep it upright on your desk. Definitely an amazing product. Pretty small, could be a stocking stuffer as well. Other product for your phone is the Anker charging stand. There are so many different charging stands that you can buy on Amazon, in the Apple Store, anywhere really, and so I'm not saying this is the best one. I really like Anker's products though, and what's great about this one is with the new iOS they kind of have that clock display which I really like, but it also has a charging case below built into the stand for AirPods.
- [03:51]
Chris Hutchins
Or an Apple Watch or anything else.
- [03:53]
Unknown Co-host
So really love these charging stands.
- [03:55]
Chris Hutchins
We have one on my desk, we.
- [03:57]
Unknown Co-host
Have one on the sides of our bed and we even put one in the kitchen just so that we could charge our phone easily and quickly when we're cooking or doing stuff around the house. Side bonus is if you put one in your kitchen it forces you to keep your phone charging and away so you can go be a little bit more present with others, which I also like. I mentioned that it charges your AirPods. I've been using older gen AirPods for a long time, but recently I'd been getting to such little battery life that I upgraded to the AirPod 44 and I really really like the noise canceling that they added. It's just so noticeable on an airplane or in a noisy space. So I'm really happy with that. And the MagSafe case and the addition of USB C means I now no longer need a lightning cable to charge any of the devices we have, which is also great. I've mentioned multiple times, probably in last year's Gift Guide that airtags make a great gift. Also, we throw them in all of our bags whenever we're traveling just to get that little extra peace of mind that we know where our bags are and if for some reason they got lost, we could kind of help find them, which can sometimes just be helpful at an airport or something like that. In fact, I actually had a dream last night that I had two flights and I checked my bag on the flight I didn't take and for some reason in that dream, maybe it was preparing for this episode, I didn't have airtags and I was kind of stressed out about it. Okay, don't worry, this is not just a giant Apple ad that might be the last Apple product. So next I want to talk about the Anker Gan Prime Power Bank. It looks just like a power brick that you could plug in a USB or a USB C charger, but it also has a 10,000 milliamp hour battery built into it and a high power 30 watt charging port. This has kind of replaced my need to bring any of the plugs that I use so I can charge my phone and my computer. But it also has enough battery, it gets a handful of charges and can even do a pretty decent job charging a laptop. Next few are a bit nerdy, but I mentioned this on my Stuff I Use episode. I kind of got really excited about backing things up locally, mostly because I started amassing so much content from this podcast, from photos I take with a nicer camera, from videos we're making that I just wanted a place to have a backup that wasn't in the cloud that was a little bit larger than needing to pay for more than 2 terabytes of storage. So I got this Synology Disk Station DS923 plus. It's basically a network attached storage drive that you could throw three to four hard drives into and it will operate as a backup that's on the network, but if you want you can sync different folders to the cloud. If anyone needs something for local backup and storage, this is a great idea. It's really easy to connect to the network, attach to any computer and use as kind of an external hard drive. Do regular backups, especially if you have slower Internet or someone in your family does and they can't easily back things up online. Two other fun nerdy gifts are a Raspberry PI, which for anyone not familiar is basically a really tiny sub 100 computer that you can load all kinds of things onto, from home automation to little servers. Next is probably one that a lot of people listening have, which is a set of Sonos speakers. Or especially if it's not a set, the Sonos Move speaker is waterproof portable. The Sonos system, even though the latest app update for Sonos is so bad and I wish they would go back, I just think they're the best speakers that you can have for connecting everything in your house, doing everything remotely so that you can play music without having to rely on your phone in case you need to take a phone call. I'm just such a big fan in the bedroom. I love the eight Sleep Pod Cover four that we have. It's a fantastic product. It basically cools and heats your mattress on both sides to whatever temperature you want. Kind of adjusts that throughout the night. It has an autopilot feature. Amy and I both have very different perspectives on what temperature we want the bed, and it's just magical, right? On winter nights you can go in and dial it up and you can have a warm cozy bed, but once you're asleep it'll drop the temperature so that you actually get a better night's sleep. Because I guess this science often shows that slightly cooler temperatures at night help better sleep. There's a great deal for that in the show. Notes for everyone then. I love my Oura ring. I had this both in fitness and here, but I figured since we're talking about sleep, I'll mention it. I got one of the newer ones that tracks heart rate for workouts, so it does a little bit more. My original first gen that I bought I looked back in the history I bought on PayPal before they even had an e commerce website. It still worked, but the battery wasn't what it used to be. Earlier this year, or maybe late last year, I did an episode with Molly from Sleep is a Skill and she has a whole store set up. So if you want to dial in your sleep, I'll put a link in the show notes and a gift guide to her store which has a ton of different products to help promote better sleep, from different lights to different glasses and eye masks and all kinds of stuff. So I'll link to that. There's some really cool stuff in there. The next three I didn't know where to put them, so everything I just mentioned was technology related. But these are three gifts, one of which I've given multiple times, which is a subscription to Delete Me. It is not the sexiest gift you can give anyone, but I've given it to all of our parents. Surprise. If you're listening, it might be a gift for siblings. I just think with the amount of scamming and phishing and what AI can do to compound that it's more important now than ever to scrub your data off the Internet, so you're just a little bit harder to find and less of a target. So Delete Me will go in and regularly and continuously pull all of your name, email address, phone number, relative names, et cetera, off of the hundreds and hundreds of data broker websites out there that are just constantly sharing that information. So they've been a longtime partner of the show. I reached out to them. We were actually their first podcast sponsor ever. And so we've got a great 20% off discount on the gift guide site. Next is one that I've never actually given but have received and my wife has received a few, which is just a fun video from Cameo. You basically can hire a celebrity, usually not a list, but B through F list celebrity, to go record a one minute video to send to someone. And depending on the relationship that you have with someone, it can be a fun gift to send someone. You just really don't know what to send. But you know there's a mutual show or sports team that you guys love. Last, there's this company, Funko, that makes these kind of plastic action figure style characters and they actually have a thing called Pop Yourself where you can go in and design your own character. And so, you know, you pick skin tone and whether you want eyelashes and different hairstyles and what color they are, you can pick the clothes and then you can basically create a character and give it to someone. And so it's not 3D printed perfect image of you, but it's just kind of a fun thing that I was thinking this year about whether there was someone that would make a good gift for no affiliation to these guys. I just thought it was kind of a cool idea. So that's mostly kind of the personal tech stuff. A lot of the next category is also technology, and that's food and kitchen. For some reason I feel like maybe it's just that we love to eat, we love to cook. There are so many ideas of things that we've asked for, things that we've gifted in the past few years that all fall into this bucket. Recently a gift we received was an Air fryer. We got a Cosori 9 in one countertop air fryer. It is absolutely awesome. I am actually really surprised at how often we use this to cook almost everything from fish to chicken. We've cooked pizzas in it. We've cooked French fries. Great for making quick things like chicken nuggets for the kids reheating food. We use it all the time. I might be late to this game. I know a lot of people have an air fryer already, but definitely a cool gift idea. And thank you, mom and dad, because we didn't have one and we didn't ask for one and there's nothing I love more than getting gifts that I didn't ask for. Another one that I've now gifted a handful of times is a Ninja Creamy, which is a kind of frozen ice cream sorbet milkshake maker. But the thing that I love about it most is you can make just an incredible protein ice cream. So I'll link to both the product and the recipe for that protein ice cream. But the ice cream it makes is just so good and you can make it with no sugar added and it just tastes like ice cream even though there's no sugar. It's mind blowing. So really big fan of the Ninja Creami. Also for the kids, it makes amazing sorbet so you can mash up a bunch of bananas, freeze it, and it'll just blend it into this ice cream where the only ingredient is bananas and it's delicious. We've done it with strawberries and other fruit as well. So love the Ninja Creamy. Shout out to Sahil Bloom, who's been on the podcast for first turning me onto this next is almost anything that Breville makes. I can't speak to every product they have because we haven't used all of them, but we do have the tea maker and the immersion blender. I think we have another blender and I just think if you're trying to buy a kitchen product, we've just been really happy with the Breville products. Big fans there. I also think that something that we use all the time, and I mentioned this in stuff I use and I got some feedback. So I'll clarify here is a Belgian waffle maker and one of those, like double Belgian waffle makers that you spin over and back. Someone emailed me and said, hey, the one you recommended is $400. Is it really that good? And my answer is no, no, it's really not that good. I went back and looked and it was only 75 when we bought It. So I absolutely wouldn't get the one I got. But I'm surprised at how often we use a double Belgian waffle maker in our house. A lot of time we use Kodiak cake, add eggs and milk to make kind of high protein Belgian waffles. And they're just a staple and kind of a weekend morning thing for us almost every week. One other thing we've been making a lot of is smash burgers. In fact, we were at a burger place the other day and my wife didn't get a burger, even though she loves them. And I was like, why not? And she's like, honestly, I just want smash burgers. I don't want these gourmet burgers. And so this year we had kind of a burger party for 4th of July, and I bought this Cuisinart kit. There are a lot of different ones, but it basically comes with like a cast iron press, a bunch of sheets of parchment paper that you can use so nothing gets stuck to it, and a shaker. You know, buy whatever your favorite seasoning is for a smash burger and a big strong spatula and wow, we make smash burgers all the time. Get a little brioche bun, toast it. Really, really big fan. Another thing we make a lot is homemade pizza. The ooni pizza oven is something that we actually gave to a family member during the holidays a few years back, and they've gotten so much use out of it. So if you like a fresh homemade pizza, there's just nothing as good as a homemade pizza in a pizza oven. And the ooni pizza oven is such a great way to do it. Fun. One that I've mentioned in the past is the dash rapid egg cooker. Just a really silly gag gift almost in that it's so cheap you can get it sometimes for as low as like 10, $15. But it's just a great way to cook hard boiled eggs. My wife loves them, and so I've got this easy way to make basically perfect hard boiled eggs and never have to worry about it. And the kids love the music it makes when it's done. So highly recommend that if that's a staple in your house. A long time ago, we had chef David Chang on and he was talking about any day cookware. And it's a set of microwave cookware that if you haven't listened to that episode, go back because I think you won't believe me. And this is something funny where I gifted it to my mom and she also didn't really believe me. And then I Told her to give it a chance and now she's like, I make all the vegetables. I make all of our mashed potatoes in half the time. I never thought I would cook as much in the microwave as I do and so got a link for that. I think they gave us a discount that still works. So you'll find that on the gift guide. Really love their cookware. Comes in a couple different colors. One other thing that I think will shock you is we've used it a lot for making fish. There's this David Chang salmon recipe that we've made a bunch and I was surprised that frozen fish can be so good, especially in the microwave, for storing all these recipes for a long, long time. I've talked about the Paprika app. It costs money and I suggested it in the past as a gift because I think it's so good. But the founder of an app called Umami is another recipe app, emailed me and was like, I really think we made an awesome app and you'd be worth checking it out. And so I did and it's pretty good. We were able to import all of our recipes, sort them, plan out meals, groceries, and on top of that, way less expensive. I think the Paprika app across all your devices can cost you 50, 60, $70. And the umami app, best I can tell, is actually free. So big fan of that. Not really a gift. But here's my advice. If you could curate a bunch of family recipes, if you could take all those old recipes that maybe your mother or your grandmother or your grandfather have in some sort of probably index cards or book, and you could turn them all into a digital recipe library and send all of those recipes to different family members. I think it'd be a really cool gift. That would be something that really doesn't cost anything. But you could just export the file and say, hey, I've got the entire book of family recipes in a format that you can use forever and save digitally. So that's an idea for everyone. Device we use a lot is the Coravin wine preserver. And we use it because we just don't always want to drink an entire bottle of wine. It just lets you pour by the glass out of a bottle without ruining the rest of the wine, without needing to finish the bottle of wine that week. And it does it by replacing all of the wine with argon gas. It's really curbed our feeling like we need to just finish an entire bottle at night and we almost never open the entire bottle unless we have people.
- [17:29]
Chris Hutchins
Over this episode is brought to you by Gelt. When it comes to building wealth, taxes are such a big part of the strategy and as the year comes to an end, being proactive now to lower your future liability is so important. And now that I'm working with Gelt, I finally feel like I have a partner I can trust to handle everything for my personal and business taxes. Think of Gelt as the ultimate modern cpa. Of course they have an in house team of expert CPAs to work with who help you determine the most effective tax strategies to minimize risk and grow your wealth. But they also have an amazing tech platform that gives you personalized guidance to maximize deductions, tax credits and savings. It also has an amazing document vault where you can upload all your tax related files, tag them with the relevant years, and even see when your tax team has reviewed each file. Beyond that, the tax library you get access to as a client has dozens of in depth guides on things like choosing retirement plans, taxes for new parents, qualified business income, or qbi and so much more. So if you're ready for a more premium proactive tax strategy to optimize and file your taxes, you have to check out Gilt. And as an all the Hacks listener, you can skip the waitlist, just head to allthehacks.com/g e l t again, that's all the hacks.com/ge Ltd to stop overpaying on taxes this episode is brought to you by Notion. Just today I was Both planning out 2025 for this podcast and organizing all of our holiday plans all in the same tool, Notion, which is one of my favorite products. It's so simple and beautifully designed and it combines your notes, docs and projects into one space. But it gets better. The new Notion AI is a single AI tool that does it all. Search across Notion and other apps, generate docs in your own style, analyze PDFs and images, and chat with you about anything. That makes Notion the perfect place to organize your tasks, track your habits, write beautiful docs, and collaborate with your team. And the more content you add to Notion, the more Notion AI can personalize its responses for you. I use Notion all the time, but it's not just me. Notion is used by over half of Fortune 500 companies and teams that use Notion. Send less email, cancel more meetings, save time searching, and spend less on tools. Try Notion for free when you go to notion.com allthehacks that's all lowercase letters notion.com allthehacks to try the powerful, easy to use notion AI today and when you use our link, you're supporting our show. Notion.comAllTheHacks on drinks we've been gifted a.
- [20:11]
Unknown Co-host
Bunch of different insulated mugs for various reasons and my wife the other day was just saying none of them keep coffee warm like an ember mug. And my mom loves her ember mug even though it's broke a few times, the customer service has always replaced it. So while I wish it never had issues, I'm at least happy that they have good support. But an ember mug makes a great gift. They have travel ones and countertop ones. I actually think sometimes during the year they're on sale at Costco, which also makes me remember that the Ninja Creami Deluxe is available at Costco and that's where you're going to get the best deal there. I can't promise this is still there, but if you're not a Costco member right now, there's a deal to get a discounted Costco membership or at least a full price Costco membership with a $45 Costco shop card from Groupon. So definitely something to look into for anyone who is looking at Costco stuff but doesn't have a membership. On the topic of things to put in that coffee cup, there is a product that I have never bought but I've heard great things about and is very expensive. But if you need a gift like this, the Ratio coffee machine is something I've heard about which is basically a machine to do pour over coffee at home. It's anywhere from $250 all the way up to $700. It looks really beautiful and if pour over coffee and automation and beautiful kitchen appliances are something that kind of meet the criteria of what you're looking for. Highly recommend if you need a subscription to Coffee Trade Coffee and Atlas Coffee Club are two companies that I've heard good things about. Last thing that I'll share on the drinks because I found this product and I never knew where to share. It is a spirit called the Pathfinder and the interesting thing about it is there is no alcohol in it but it's one of the best non alcoholic spirits I've found and I'd say it's somewhat similar to an Amaro. It's just really good. So if that sounds good to you, take a look. You might be able to find it locally at a handful of stores and is a great option for anyone not drinking this holiday season. One more idea for food is gifting or doing a hot sauce challenge is something I Love. I actually went to a party that our previous guest, Steph Smith hosted, and she had the Hot Ones kit and did a tasting test. You can buy ones from Hot Ones. There are all kinds of products like this online. I think we did the Tame to Insane challenge box goes all the way up to 11. I remember this very distinctly because number 10 is called paint apple and it is a hot sauce. And one time, because it doesn't have one of those lids that makes it come out in smaller quantities, Amy miscalculated and poured a lot of it on her taco. And boy, it was both comical and I felt bad for her. But I still to this day think it's a delicious hot sauce. So really loved doing one of these challenge boxes. This was another gift for my parents that I never would have expected or asked for. And it was a lot of fun, but it also creates a fun activity that you can do during the holidays with your family. Okay, let's talk clothing and gear. It would be hard for me not to start with Vuori gear. Right now I'm wearing three pieces of it. And that was not intentional. It just happens to be what I wear all the time. I've got a pair of Sunday performance joggers. Highly recommend. I've got a Strato tech tee, also highly recommend. And a Ponto performance half zip hoodie. Really, anything with their dream knit fabric is amazing. I was actually at a conference recently. After giving someone a hug, they said, wow, this is so soft. What is it? I was like, oh, it's Vori. I felt like I was a walking billboard for this company. And I don't even get all of my Vuori clothes for free. I actually pay for them. I just love them that much. And so they've been a long time. Maybe our longest partner of the show. Big 20% off discount for anyone that's listening in the gift guide. Really love them. Amy is as big of a fan as I am. So many great products. Leggings, sports bras, shirts, jackets, everything. If you need to dress up. While I do often wear the Vuori Meta pants as my kind of nice dress pants, and they're super comfortable. If you do need kind of a fun design dress shirt for someone. Almost all of my dress shirts are from bonobos. They've got all kinds of cool, interesting designs. Some have tigers, some have bunnies, some have foxes. My kids love kind of picking out something creative, so love their shirts and then also love gooder sunglasses. They make a great stocking stuffer. They're affordable but they're also really well made. I've used them for years and almost all environments because they're not that expensive. You don't mind wearing them in the ocean or in the pool. And I just really love that. About sunglasses. I hate owning a really expensive pair of sunglasses that you're worried you're going to scratch or forget or anything like that. And then a new clothing brand to me that my wife asked me to put on this list because she loves it is Quints. All their clothes are really classic. The exact shirt I think I probably own 5 to 10 of is the Riviera short sleeve shirt. So many different designs. They don't go after any extreme trends, but they're really high quality, they have good manufacturing practices and they're just not as expensive as a lot of other brands. And she just got me a really nice cashmere sweater that I'm enjoying a lot. This is a great example because there is an Amex offer right now for $40 off $175. They also make great home products. I think we use the Quint duvet on our bed and it's wonderful. So I'll come back to those Amex offers later. But I just wanted to flag that when I noticed one of the things in this guide has a special deal it's worth including waterproof Birkenstocks. I don't own a pair, but I think my wife and our daughter are wearing them all around all the time. Our kids also really like Crocs. I had to look up what these things are called, but they have these little jibbitz that you can kind of add to your Crocs for fun designs. Kids love them. Great stocking stuffer. You can of course buy them from Crocs and they have thousands of ones on Amazon as well. Next is Arcade AI, which is a really cool custom jewelry website that my wife sent me. And unfortunately because she sent it to me, I can't probably find something to surprise her with. But for all of you out there, if you're looking for a gift for someone and it's in the jewelry area, there's some really cool unique stuff on here. And then last stance socks always make a great stocking suffer. Big fan of their socks. Of course if you just need regular running socks, I like what they sell at Costco. The Puma socks there, they're super cheap, but when it comes to fun, unique socks Stance does a really great job of making socks that last. On the gear side, I'm going to start with the Tortuga backpack and daypack. The daypack is a new product of theirs and it is amazing. Big shout out to the founder of Tortuga who's a listener of the show and helped us design some custom day packs for our trip to Iceland. For everyone that came, we've got logos on them. Really, really amazing. But their core backpack is also fantastic. It's a big travel bag that still is a carry on and it's basically my main bag when I'm going anywhere. If I do need a roller board, I have an away rollerboard and a monos rollerboard that's a little bigger. And if you need a diaper bag, there is none better that I've found than what 5050 gear makes. Another all the hacks listener who started this company, really big fan of their diaper bag and we use it all the time. Just designed both for performance and esthetic, but as well as function. And then Kuyana makes a travel case that my wife has gifted to a lot of people over the years. You can get custom monogrammed their little leather bags, they make a great makeup bag. Next, let's talk health and fitness. Something I've been using for years now when I'm running is the Shokz OpenRun Pro headphones. I mentioned the AirPods earlier. I love them for everything except running. I love that these Shokz headphones are open ear so you can hear things around you, cars coming, anything like that. Also when I'm running, I really like the Nike Slim waist pack. I used to use a shoulder band and then my wife got this waist pack and I was like, oh, that seems silly. And then I tried it, I was like, oh, this is much better. And so you can't see your phone while you're running. But let's be real, using your phone while it's on one of those shoulder bands while you're running is not really possible either. So I've really enjoyed switching to this. Along the lines of running. The Nike Vaporfly 3 shoes are fantastic race day shoes. My speed actually improved pretty noticeably using them, but they're not everyday shoes. And so when it came to running, I switched to the Nike Pegasus 41 shoes which I could totally customize online and I think would make a great holiday gift for anyone who needs a pair of running shoes. Another activity we like to do out, which was actually a gift for us, was stand up paddleboard. So if you live near water anywhere, they're great with kids. And there are a handful of inflatable ones you can get on Amazon or at Costco that I'm surprised at how often we use them just to kind of go out for an hour, paddle around in the sun. Winter's probably not the ideal time to use them, but maybe it's the ideal time to buy them because they're probably not that popular yet. And so, I don't know, it makes a great gift. We have two of them and we go out with the kids probably once a month when it's warm. Amy added the Jade Yoga Harmony yoga mat, which, if you want a really high quality yoga mat, this is a great one. It's actually funny because I have this old crappy yoga mat and I always was like, do you really need a nice yoga mat? And every now and then we'll both do a yoga class together at home and I'll be like, gosh, your yoga mats are really nice. Mine is like chipping apart. So really like that yoga mat when she's not using it. Sometimes I borrow it if you're lifting. I've long been a fan of the Bowflex Selecttech adjustable dumbbells. It just saves the need to have a whole rack of dumbbells and you can adjust in really tight increments. Love those for water bottles. I feel like we've been gifted every water bottle under the sun from conferences and companies, but we've ended up slowly removing all the non hydro flask water bottles and keeping the hydro flask ones. So that is definitely our house pick for water bottles. And then last, this is kind of another weird one. But within the health and fitness world, I think there are a handful of diagnostics that might make sense to give someone. So, for example, high cholesterol runs in our family, so I gave a lot of people in our family a LP little a blood test. I just ordered it up at LabCorp Quest. Whichever was closer to a lot of people, so they knew. That kind of reminds me of how lots of people were giving out 23andMe kits back in the day. I'm going to dive into an episode about a lot of different diagnostic scans in the future. But some of the interesting things to consider as gifts are getting someone a DEXA scan. I did mine at DEXA Fit and they have locations all around the country and that was a really cool experience. So that would be a cool one. Not that expensive. Instalab has a longevity Panel that's about $300. There's Function Health, there's Inside Tracker. I'll include links to all of these, but that's something super interesting. I know that some insurances might cover a few of these tests, not all of them. It's kind of a weird gift to give someone, but it was really, really insightful for me to look at all this data. Scheduling a calcium score test was something that I know a lot of people in my family have done because of the history of cardiovascular disease. So that's another one. There's the true diagnostic true age score. There's a true diagnostic biological age test. There's just a lot of interesting things that could make for good gifts for someone you know well enough to sign up for a medical treatment or test or diagnostic. Okay, onto the fun stuff. I'm a big fan of all kinds of games. In the past I've talked about Box one, which is best I could describe kind of like an adventure game meets an escape room for a single player served up in a box like a board game. And I loved it. And the only thing that I didn't love about it was once you play it, there's no replay value. So it's built and sold by a company called Theory 11. And I happen to meet the guy Jonathan who started this company and runs it. And I asked him this year, I said, hey, is there anything cool coming out? And I had no idea what he was going to say, but he told me Box 2 is coming out now. I can't look at the website right now because it's not even been announced, but by the time this episode comes out, box two will be out. I 100% will be buying box two immediately, as soon as it's there, or at least giving it to someone as a Christmas gift idea. It was so much Fun playing box 1. Highly, highly recommend. Theory 11 also sells Magic tricks, but they also sell the most beautiful playing cards out there in almost every possible design you could imagine, from Broadway shows to movies to Harry Potter. One of the best stocking stuffers you can give someone everything from box sets down to a single deck. Love what Theory 11 makes. And if anyone in the family or your kids are aspiring to learn magic tricks, they have so many high quality magic products as well. Couple small games that are easy to travel with. Monopoly. Deal. We play all the time. Coup. We play all the time. And a new one that someone brought on our Iceland trip that I didn't get a chance to play but was told is amazing is Illimat. It's a card game. I'm excited to test it out. I bought it, but I have not played it yet. For anyone that loves games, I've really enjoyed having a subscription to Games magazine. Each month I get kind of a magazine with a bunch of everything from word puzzles to other riddles and games. Another puzzle that I think is fun as a stocking suffer is called Hinomaru. It's a Japanese flag puzzle. And I'm telling you, it's so simple in its design and it is so difficult. I've been trying to solve it for the better part of a few months. I haven't sat down for hours and hours, but every time I have 15 minutes I take it out and try to figure it out. And it's both difficult and simple and easy and inexpensive. I'll link to that. It's really great. And then I've recently gotten excited watching these different puzzle boxes get played. So there's a guy named Chris Ramsey that has a YouTube channel where he tries to solve all of them and records himself doing it. And most of them are pretty expensive. And so I haven't really wanted to throw down hundreds of dollars for a puzzle as much as watching him do them makes me want more and more of them. If anything, I want to start kind of a puzzle renting service because once you solve it, there's not a lot of use for it. This company, Puzzle Potato, had an item on Kickstarter which was called the Tesla puzzle. And I thought, wow, this one's less expensive than most. Let's support them. I bought it, it came, it was amazing. Awesome gift idea, under a hundred dollars. Highly, highly recommend for anyone who likes puzzles and challenges and escape room style things that can be done at home. And the only unfortunate thing is now that I've done it, I can't solve it again because I already know the answers. So that's going to become a gift for someone else this year. And then finally, this isn't really a game, but I've really enjoyed trying to learn the art or skill of lock picking. Not for any nefarious reasons, but just because mechanically it's very difficult, even though you know how it works. And so one cool thing that you could give to anyone who might be interested is a little lock picking kit. You can actually see how locks work. A lot of them come with kind of clear locks that you can look into so that you can see how the process works. And it's super interesting. Obviously I wouldn't give this gift to anyone with criminal tendencies, but just a skill to pick up and practice. It's really interesting.
- [35:31]
Chris Hutchins
This episode is brought to you by 1Password, which I've used for over a decade and absolutely love. So how do you make a password that is strong enough and no one will guess it and impossible to forget and do it for a hundred different sites and make sure everyone in your company and family can do the same without ever needing to reset them? Sounds impossible unless you have 1Password 1Password combines industry leading security with award winning design to bring private, secure and user friendly password management to everyone. And that's important because countless hours are lost every day from people forgetting and resetting passwords and a single data breach can cost millions of dollars. Best of all, 1Password works on any device, anytime and lets you securely switch between iPhone, Android, Mac and PC. All you have to remember is the one strong account password that protects everything else, your logins, credit cards, even secure notes. So protect yourself, your global workforce or just your family with the award winning 1Password which is Wirecutter's number one pick and trusted by millions of users and over 100,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. Right now my listeners get a free two week trial at AllTheHacks.com 1Password for your growing business. That's two free weeks at AllTheHacks.com1Password. Don't let security slow your business down. Go to AllTheHacks.com 1Crypt when it comes to managing my money, there is one app I check almost every day and it's Copilot, our sponsor. Today it's one of my all time favorite apps. It's on my home screen and it makes it so seamless and easy to track your spending and manage your entire financial picture. And just this week they launched an importer for all your old mint data, which is amazing because I just imported 9,917 transactions dating back to 2012, which means I now have over a decade of all of my financial data in one place. Now I've tried so many apps for tracking spending, last year I evaluated over a dozen of them, but Copilot is the only one I've kept using. You can link your accounts at over 10,000 institutions and their expense categorization is the best I've used. With custom Amazon and Venmo integrations that make it even better, you can completely design your spending categories and subcategories and even easily set up rules to assign transactions to them automatically. Thanks to Copilot, I've never had a better grasp on our spending and cash flow, which I'm pretty sure has resulted in thousands of dollars of savings every year. So for the best app to track your spending, subscriptions and investments, go to allthehacks.com copilot on an iPhone or Mac to download copilot and enter code hacks2 during onboarding for a two month free trial. Again, that's allthehacks.com copilot and the code hacks2 for a free two month trial of my favorite personal finance app. I just want to thank you Kwik for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com deals so please consider supporting those who support us.
- [38:46]
Unknown Co-host
Okay, two more categories on kids. I want to share one of my favorites which every time I'm using it, another parent sees it and says what is that? Where do I get that? And that's the UKI Kids Learner Skateboard. It's basically a skateboard that can help someone progress from probably the age of 18 months, two years old all the way up to five or six or seven. And it's just been really awesome to watch our girls learn how to balance and learn how to lean. They've really enjoyed it. These kids gifts are going to go all over the place. But another one is the Melissa and Doug pizza playset. We've gotten a lot of these little like play sets around the house, but for some reason the pizza one just seems to be the most popular. So really like it. You can get it at Target. Another thing that's been hugely popular in our house is a Tony box. I talked about it a while ago because not only can you buy characters that sit on top of this box, that's basically a speaker that's connected to the Internet and plays songs and stories, but you can record your own custom stories. In a past episode I talked about how I used AI to create stories in my own voice that I generated with Chad GPT. I've heard some good feedback also about the yoto, which is a alternative to the Tony. It's nice to have a thing that's kind of like watching shows for kids that isn't screen time. Another one that we actually had to wait for a while on was a nugget, which is basically a set of, I don't know, like cushions that you can use to build forts that you can use to create kind of sitting area you could use as a makeshift bed for a sleepover. It's really great. Another really cool thing we saw at Costco for kids that could be a fun holiday gift is this really cool Lego table that kind Of Pops Open stores. All these Legos closes has a whole Lego surface on top. So that was one that I was like, gosh, we have something similar, but I really want this one. So that's a good one for kind of fun stocking stuffers. Jelly cat stuffed animals are a big hit in our house, as well as coloring books. And there's actually a cool coloring book kit that I'll link to. There's nothing unique about it other than the markers are all kind of built into it. So when we travel, it's a little bit easier for anyone who has really young kids or needs a gift. For someone with young kids, a love every subscription or just a gift. They make these Montessori toys and kits. So for every kind of three months or four months of age, they have a different kit that they send with everything from books to an instruction guide to a bunch of different toys and learning activities that we've really loved. Another thing that we don't yet own, but I really want, and I don't have a particular brand to recommend, is a Swedish Ladder, which is kind of like a indoor gym for kids that you can mount on the wall. Some of them are freestanding, and if you just search for it on Amazon, there are a bunch of different ones. But this is something that if we had the right space in the house, we would probably definitely have it right now we do not. But it's something that I think our kids would love and would be a really awesome thing to get them. And then I probably should have mentioned this in the game section. I'm not going to go through all the kids games. There's so many. But I'm going to flag one. And it's not a particularly fun game for adults. But the only reason I'll share it is because there are not a lot of games that are easy to play with a very young kid, 18 to 36 months. But there's this game called Monkey around, which basically is a beanbag banana, and each card just tells you something to do with it. And our kids really loved it at that age when we were trying to, you know, play a board game with them and they were just weren't ready for it. I would recommend the game First Orchard, which was a good board game to kind of start to teach kids about games. But, man, this Monkey around game, they just loved for, I guess, all the obvious reasons. But all they do is, here's a banana, balance it on your head, hop around with the banana, toss it, hold it under your legs. That kind of Stuff Last is the books and learning section. A few things here. So if you want to learn about diving down rabbit holes on the Internet, Steph Smith's course that we talked about in my episode with her, there's still a $200 discount for her course called Internet Pipes. If you want to learn really anything. Huge fan of Masterclass. We've partnered with them for a long time. I've given it as multiple gifts. There's going to be a holiday promo on the gift guide. So I just think it's a really excellent gift, especially if you need a last minute idea because you can buy it online, but even if you don't, there's so many different things that really anyone can learn from. Someone wants to dial in their credit card game, you could obviously get them a copy of my credit card tool. And then last one that we've given to I think every family member is Storyworth, which is basically a book that gets built over the year. So you send all these prompts to someone in your family, a parent, a grandparent, they answer these emails and then at the end of the year all of the email replies get packaged up into a book. So it might be something like, tell me about your first date, tell me about your first job. What was your childhood like? Where did you live? And you start to build these amazing stories from your family that you can pass down from generation to generation. Last on books. There are so many books that different guests we've interviewed this year have talked about. I'm just going to put the full list of all the book recommendations in the gift guide again, all the hacks.com/gifts instead of just reading the name of all the books right now. Okay, so I hope that gift guide was helpful, but what I think is even more helpful is saving money on all the gifts you're buying, whether they're on the list or not. And so I want to talk about a handful of the ways I make sure I'm always getting the best deal. So first off, there are a few sale periods like Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Always a good time to consider what you're buying but do make sure that those sales are real. And so I always like to install the browser extension keepa, which when you're browsing anything on Amazon, you can look down and see if that price has changed over time. So right now I'm trying to find a product that has a good history. I'm looking at the UKI skateboard and I'm seeing that right now it's $139. But prior to October 5th, it was always $120, and it's dropped a handful of days since then. So that tells me that 139 maybe is the new price and 119 is maybe the previous price. But if on Black Friday they end up saying, oh, it's on sale, and they drop it to 135, you know, it might not really be a sale. I have seen a ton of times where people increase the base price, discount it, and it looks like a big sale, but it's not actually that much cheaper than it normally is. So the Keepa browser extension is really helpful to be able to track those prices. Now, once you've decided that you want to buy something and it's a good price, I want to make sure that I can get cash back if possible. And so I like to go to Cash Back Monitor. And that gives you a dashboard of all of the different places you can get cash back. So, for example, let's take Nike. Let's say you want to buy those Pegasus 41 shoes that I mentioned, which is actually a process that I went through when I bought them. And you can see that you can get anywhere from one to two miles per dollar. With airlines, you can get two credit card points. Sometimes there's bonuses. So one of the credit card portals right now is at 15 points per dollar, but you can also just get cash back. So Rakuten's at 8% back, top cashback's at 10%. And this stuff changes all the time. So I think going on to Cashback Monitor, seeing what kind of deals are there, is interesting. But also some of these cashback portals have their own promotions. And so as of recording this, I'm not sure if these will still be around when this episode comes out, but for anyone who is subscribed to the all the Hacks newsletter, I will have sent them all around to everyone before they expire. If you're not all the hacks.com/email to get on for the next time. But all the airline shopping portals, American, Delta, Southwest, Alaska and United all have promos going on right now where if you spend a certain amount through the portal, they'll give you a lot of bonus miles and those bonuses end up being somewhere in the 3 to 7% back range. And that's primarily my calculations looking@giftcards.com which I'll come back to. But I'm always looking at ways to get cash back when I'm shopping online. If there's a bonus at an airline portal that could make sense? If not. I'm almost just focusing on Rakuten because you not only get cash back, but you can convert that cash back to Amex points if you want. And with a referral, which I'll put in the gift guide, you can usually get a free 30 to $40 with your first purchase. So 99% of all my shopping online I'm doing Rakuten. But every now and then I'll go to Cashback Monitor and I'll see, oh, rakuten might be 3% and there's some promo going on that's 20% back from some other portal. Now, there are always some terms, sometimes they're pretty straightforward and it's just this is the deal. And sometimes it says, well, it only applies in this certain area or a maximum purchase amount of this. So definitely look at those terms. But I've earned probably hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars in cash back from optimizing these cash back portals. A new one that I'm exploring is called Kudos, and the way it works is a little bit more confusing. You load your credit cards into it and they multiply your credit card rewards so it looks like according to them, you can get up to 25% back. This must be a startup that's funded by some kind of venture capital because I don't see how you could get 25% back sustainably. So I'll put my referral link in there if you want to get a head start to some of that cash back and play around with it. But those are kind of a couple of the ways I'm getting cash back when I'm buying, but that's not it. So I want the best price, I want to get the most cash back, but when it comes time to pay for it, yes, ideally you're using the right card, but even better than using the right credit card is oftentimes using a gift card. And so what I'll do is I'll go online and see if I can find a gift card for that merchant that might actually be cheaper than actually using a credit card when you factor in all the points and everything like that. So a few options here. So one, obviously you could go buy the gift cards at a grocery store or if there's a sale a lot of times on the weekends for whatever reason. Kroger Safeway have been having deals where you earn a lot of extra points or discounts for buying gift cards. So that's one option. Costco is known to have a bunch of gift cards on sale, but they usually have limits. So I know recently you could get Uber gift cards for $75 for $100 in value or DoorDash and Instacart for $80 for $100 of value. They also regularly have $500 of Southwest credit for $430. So a lot of ways to buy them yourself, but in limited quantities and only when they happen to be on sale and in stock, though Costco's are available on their website. There are also a few apps that I use regularly to find gift cards. And so one of them is the Pepper app. So you can go to go pepper.com or you could just search for Pepper in the App Store. The way it works is you can buy gift cards at whatever value you want and earn Pepper points. I mentioned this in my episode with Kevin Rose. And the points you earn could be anywhere from like the equivalent of 4x points, which is about 4% cash back, but sometimes they boost it. And I've gotten Amazon gift cards for 14x points, which is effectively 14% cash back, which is way better than using my Amazon card to go and buy anything on Amazon because that's maximum getting me 5, maybe 6% if you delay your shipping and have the right card to do that. So these gift cards go on sale all the time, so it's hard to know when you're going to get the best deal on what. But right now I'm looking and if you wanted to buy Lowe's gift cards, you can get 15% off or 15x points. Nike's at 15, Kohl's is at 16. And so every day the deals change. But there's a lot of great opportunity. If you're going to spend $200, make sure you use someone's referral code because you get an extra $20. Mine is 612342. It's not the normal thing where you use a name or a link, it's just a six digit number. So that's one option. Another option is an app called Flooz. You can find it in the App Store and they basically also let you just buy gift cards. They're usually not at that big of a discount as I've seen when Pepper app puts things on sale. An example right now we're making a purchase on Hannah Anderson to buy some Christmas pajamas and you could earn up to 5% back. So you go and purchase a gift card, you put in the exact amount you want, even to the scent, and you basically pay for the gift card and then you just get some cash back that I think you could just use for another gift card. So if you can't find as good of a deal in Pepper, you might be able to find it in the flu's app. And even if there's not a bonus, sometimes it's still a great deal. So I'll mention in a few minutes why we were shopping on Hannah Anderson to buy holiday pajamas and they had a 5x points, which is basically 5% off. And there was no other deal for Hannah Anderson. So that was way better than me using a card that would probably just get 2% back or 2 points per dollar. Another interesting option is giftcards.com and the reason it's interesting is because it's in a lot of the shopping portals. So I know on rakuten you get 2 1/2% back on purchases up to $2,000, but if you stack it with a lot of those airline deals that are happening in the airline shopping portals, then you can get three and a half to 7% back. So there can be some really good deals. They also have their own rewards program. So when you end up buying something on giftcards.com you can stack the cash back with whatever cashback portal or rakuten you're using. You can stack the gift card.com rewards and on top of that you can also layer on your credit card rewards. Depending on those factors and what you see on an app like Pepper, it may or may not be a good deal, but it's at least an option, especially with some of these holiday shopping portal bonuses. There are some going on now and there will inevitably be more going on in the future. Now, one interesting thing I've learned as I dug into all of this gift card buying and selling marketplace is that a lot of people who buy these gift cards are turning around and reselling them. So there's a pretty active marketplace for buying and selling gift cards. I might actually do an entire episode on that and bring on someone I've gotten to know who runs one of them. But if you are interested, and this is kind of a long shot, might be relevant to two or three of you. But if anyone's making very, very large purchases, let's call it in the probably 10,000 plus a year range at a major merchant, whether that's Amazon, Best buy, Apple, Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, there is an opportunity to actually buy those gift cards wholesale in bulk, and I'm happy to try to help make that happen for anyone that's interested. But most of these wholesalers are really not interested unless you're in the kind of five figure plus range. Otherwise it's just easier for you to go buy them from an app like pepper or giftcards.com or at Costco, which is really the source of them all in the first place. But the short answer is almost every online retailer it is a better deal to pay with a gift card that you buy at a discount than it is to pay with your credit card. The last big one is card linked offers. And so almost every credit card platform from every major issuer has a set of offers where from time to time there are things like get $40 off $100, get 10% off up to $200 at so many different retailers. I mentioned this when I talked about quints earlier because there was an amex offer for $40 off $175 purchase. I actually went through Amex and Chase and looked at the lifetime dollars that I've earned from all of these card linked offers. And for me personally across my and Amy's cards it's $2270.52 which is actually pretty astonishing because that makes up for a lot of the annual fees that I've paid on a lot of these cards and it's been on things like Delta Dropbox, Love Every Hydro Flask Quince. So absolutely worth, especially right before the holiday season or any time you're doing a lot of shopping to just go online and look at your cards website and see what deals are there. Sometimes there's nothing relevant, sometimes there's a ton of relevant stuff that wraps up most of the ways I save money when I shop. If you go back and listen episode 195 it was 50 ways I earned More Points without spending more. There are a few more tactics that were in that episode that I'm not going to necessarily cover right here, but hopefully I just gave you a bunch of gift ideas and ways to save money on those gifts. Now since I know you're all thinking that was so valuable, what gift should I give Chris for the holidays? Don't worry, I'm not asking you to spend money and send me anything. But I do have one gift that won't cost you anything and is so easy that I'll ask for. And it's just if you could pick your favorite episode of the podcast or maybe it's a few different ones and share them or the podcast in general with anyone and everyone you think might enjoy it or get value from it, it would really mean the world to me. If you want to go above and beyond. Of course, you could share the newsletter, leave a rating and review. But my main ask this year if you've gotten any value out of the show is to just share it with someone. Thank you so much in advance for that. Finally, as I mentioned, I want to wrap up and just share some of the holiday traditions that we have. And I'd invite anyone with a fun holiday tradition that they'd like to share. Send an email podcast at all the hacks.com I'd love to collect them all and maybe find a place or a time to share them back with people. So the first one I'll talk about is that on one side of our family, we started doing a kind of everyone picks one person and gets one really nice gift. And we actually evolved it to just be each couple. So we might draw, you know, a sibling or a parent, and everyone goes and tries to find something really nice and meaningful instead of trying to find a bunch of small gifts. So, for example, one of them one year was an ooni pizza oven. And so we were able to go a little bit above and beyond and get something really interesting for one member of the family. And then that person had another person, kind of like a white elephant, except serious gifts instead of fun gifts. So that was one thing we did each year. Everyone gets an ornament in our family, and so our tree is covered with all these different unique ornaments. Sometimes it's related to something we did that year. For example, one year I was really into fantasy football, and so Amy got me a fantasy football ornament, or it might be from a trip we took. So we have a very personalized set of ornaments on the tree. As I mentioned earlier, we buy matching pajamas, usually from Hannah Anderson, both for Christmas morning and to take photos, which has been a fun tradition. We actually try not just to buy gifts for our family, but for other people who don't have them. And we've tried to incorporate the girls in this process. And sometimes local businesses or our employers have driven this. Other times we drive it ourselves. And we'll go and say, take a list of 10 people and we'll go to Target and we'll have the girls help us pick out gifts for a bunch of kids or adults. And on that day, it's not about anything for us, it's about for someone else. So we like to try to incorporate some form of giving, some, especially with the kids, so that they understand that there are a lot of people that don't have what they have and they get to experience what it's like to try to provide for others. Last year we actually did a big charity fundraiser on the podcast. As you all know, we ended up funding two entire water projects in Cambodia. And based on the update I just recently got, they finished all the permits, partners, supplies, and over the next six months they're actually going to be doing construction. So stay tuned. There another one is anytime a toy is introduced to our house, we try to rotate another toy out and either give that toy away or put it in storage so there just aren't toys everywhere. It turns out that if you take a toy and put it in a closet for six months and give it to your kids again, it almost feels like a new toy. So that's another great hack. And then each year we tried to make a tradition out of doing a cookie decorating party. So we'll bake a lot of holiday cookies and invite friends and family over using the Nick Gray Cocktail Party formula, which if you didn't listen of that episode, go back and check it out and invite people over and you can decorate cookies and leave with a little bag of cookies. So I secretly want to evolve that to a gingerbread house making party, but the sheer quantity of gingerbread that needs to be made is just not something that we're ready to do right now. So I think those are most of the traditions I'm always open to more. Again, share them podcast at all the hacks.com finally, reminder that links to all the products and gifts and ideas I mentioned, including dozens of them with really great discounts or referral codes, are all in the show notes and@allthehacks.com gifts. That is it for this week. I will see you next week.