← All the Hacks: Money, Points & Life
All the Hacks: Money, Points & Life
Navigating Transfer Bonuses, Hyatt Devaluation, New Card Offers and More
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I just made the biggest speculative point
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transfer in my life. A few hundred thousand points moved out in one shot and I'm still not totally sure if it was brilliant or reckless.
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Today I'm going to tell you exactly
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why I did it, what made this particular deal so hard to pass up, and how you should think about transfer bonuses so you can decide for yourself when they're worth it. I've also got a breakdown of the new Hyatt award chart changes, which yes, really suck, but might not be as catastrophic as the headlines suggest. Then I'll walk through the best elevated credit card welcome offers right now, Delta, United, Southwest and more. And I'll share a quick update on how AI is changing the way I actually run this podcast behind the scenes and some of the stuff I'm working on there. Lots of ground to cover, tons of takeaways you can put to use. So let's get into it. I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoy this episode, please leave a comment or share it with a friend. And if you want to keep upgrading your money points and life, click follow or subscribe.
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All right, so let's talk about a lot of things today, but I'm going to start with something I've been spending a tremendous amount of time on, which won't be a surprise for people who listen to my episode a few weeks ago about AI tools, because it's just kind of really captivated me. It feels like I'm living in the future. And back then I was talking about how I built this open claw agent named Ted. Since then I've spun up another seven agents. So there are kind of seven agent employees operating in my slack on text and all kinds of areas of life. And I want to say that I've kind of evolved how I'm using this tool in a way that I think is a little bit different than I first thought. At first it was I have this assistant. I can message him anytime and he can do all these things. And I'm starting to realize that one great use case for a lot of these technologies is repeatable work that requires context and kind of siloing it into different agents. And I realized that you could do this in two ways. One, you could kind of write up the background and context you want for certain tasks and just have any tool do that when you go and open up a new chat in Claude, in ChatGPT and Gemini. You know what I used to do is I would dump in a list of every title of every episode I've ever published and then say, help me come up with a new title for this episode. Here's the transcript. Now, I have one agent who's solely focused on kind of the creative work around episodes. And so their memory and all of their kind of context already has that. I had them go through all of the past thumbnails, titles and takeaway learnings and write up a brief for themselves for every time I ask them to do anything. And so that agent, her name is Spark, gets a transcript and can propose different ideas for YouTube thumbnails. And so what I've tried to do is instead of thinking of it necessarily like a chat interface, I'm taking different actions and trying to, to kind of tie them both to an agent and to a bunch of context, but also to some automation. And so as soon as I'm done recording, and I mark that in a project management tool that fires off an agent to go grab the transcript, come up with thumbnail ideas, and the next thing that I haven't built yet, but I'm excited about is actually working with some image generation stuff to actually just create the thumbnails. Haven't gotten that far. Right now it uses the Gemini API to generate thumbnails with random people that aren't me, to kind of give the idea of what they would look like. But I actually think there's a world where you could start to use your own images and kind of piece things together. So that is one. And if you don't know how to do that, don't worry, that's where I was. And I just always encourage people to just start talking to these tools and say, hey, I want to build something that could generate thumbnails. How could it do this? And you could do that for any aspect of life. That said, the usefulness of openclaw, I would say, hasn't changed, but the ability for other tools to catch up and kind of replace a lot of what made it super valuable has. And so if anyone uses Claude, they have this tool called Claude Cowork, and you can run it on your computer. And it kind of solves some of this because they added scheduled tasks. So you can say, hey, could you put together this briefing of sorts of whatever you want? And then, hey, could you run it every morning at 7am and so you don't need to go buy a Mac Mini and install Open Claw to do that. And I imagine that a lot of these tools are going to start to layer in schedules, scheduled tasks on an ongoing basis. And as they start building out more connections right in Claude you can go in and connect your email, you can connect things, Chat. GPT has some different apps. Once that starts to happen, you'll have very similar experiences to what you can create with openclaw. But you can do it using the tools that you're already using, instead of having to kind of start from scratch in a little bit more of a raw way. And so I think that's kind of the evolution of where this goes over the next probably couple of weeks is that more and more features like that will exist. What's still missing is that when you have a piece of software running on a computer that has the ability to create more software and run it on the computer as well, you can spin up lots and lots of other things. And I think that's where I still really value what's going on with Open Claw over a lot of these other tools. So, for example, I have an OURA ring, and there wasn't a Aura connector built into CLAUDE or chatgpt on. But there are ways that you could say, hey, go spin up a skill that syncs with Aura and pulls down my sleep data, or, hey, go Sync with Tesla's APIs, or go log into my Open Snow account and give me a snow forecast for an upcoming trip, or go build a way to interact with my meal planning app. Those kinds of things are things that you can use GPT codecs on your computer, you can use CLAUDE code to kind of build those skills, but you need something to interact with them and run them on a recurring basis. I don't think we're that far from all of these mainstream AI properties or kind of software companies from building things like this. But right now, I still think that's one of the competitive edges that you get from playing with things like openclaws that you get to create software that does exactly what you want, runs on a schedule, and kind of interfaces with you wherever you want. And that's the other big thing. I love being able to use iMessage or Slack as the medium instead of going to the ChatGPT app or going to the cloud app. One other thing I've been playing with is I have Card Tool, and then I also have all the hacks. And so I've been trying to think about how I can take all the knowledge of those things and tie them into existing tools. And because I have that information and it lives online in different servers, I actually built something called a mcp, which is a model context protocol. And it kind of sits on top of an API, which is how different applications interface with other applications online. I could plug it into Claude, or you could go create a custom GPT and you could plug it in there and it's able to access that information. It was a really fun experiment because I started seeing another aspect of what I keep referring to as like the future of the web and the future of all of this. And that is that when I go on Claude now or ChatGPT and I open that custom GPT, I can reference data that lives in card tools. So I've added 41 credit cards to this app I've been building and it knows all my annual fees, it knows what credits I have outstanding, it knows when the bills are due, it knows what the balances are, it knows everything, because that's what that app's purpose is. And up until now, ish, every piece of software online is something that you interface with using that piece of software. So when I first built Card Tool, and when we're talking two months ago, it never crossed my mind that someone might use Card Tool without ever even going to our website. And I think that's probably true of all kinds of pieces of software. So, for example, how would you interface with United Airlines if you didn't have the app or the website? Right. I guess you could call the phone number, you could fly the planes, but how would you book a flight? Historically, companies have created APIs so that other companies can access them. But it was very much not a consumer thing, right? It was so that other businesses could interoperate with that business. So maybe Built Travel Portal wants to use United's travel booking platform to book a United flight. So they create an API, but it's not really a consumer thing. Now, some of These tools make APIs available to anyone, and some of them don't. And some of them kind of make them available to anyone. But it's definitely not a straightforward, simple process. And what I realized as I added the card tool data to Claude and I was able to just query it, I realized that the core thing I built was not necessarily a website or an app. It was a bunch of information stored in a particular way that makes it more valuable to because of the way it's stored, and that the interface to it might not in the future be a website or an app. And that as I'm both simultaneously building this app and interfacing with the assistant I've built on openclaw, I started to think about the future of the Internet and whether it looks a lot more like it looked 20 something years ago. Than it does today. And what I mean BY that is 20 or maybe 25, 30 years ago, I can't even keep track of time. You know you would just go into aol, right? And you wouldn't go to a bunch of websites. The content you looked at was on one place. Or I remember Yahoo, the Yahoo homepage. Like you would spend a lot of time on Yahoo. You wouldn't just bounce around to lots of websites. I wonder if in the future we will all have our own interface to the web and that interface could be one single app that we've created with some agent that looks in shapes and feels exactly like we want it to. Or maybe we don't even interface with it on an app at all. Maybe it's just a text based interface. Maybe it's kind of like if you've seen the movie her, it's just something you can talk to. And that app, that interface connects to everything else. So do I ever need to go to my bank's website to do anything? If I could interface with it by just asking. And I'll use Siri as an example here. But if every time I wanted I could say, hey Siri, how much money is in my checking account? Hey Siri, can you transfer a hundred dollars to my friend? Imagine that world where you could just talk like that and interface with all the different services you have, right? If you have a meal planning app, you could say, hey, what's for dinner tonight? What's the recipe? Can you add this to my grocery list? Can you order it on Instacart? And all that stuff can happen, but you don't actually have to go into any of those individual apps or go to any of those websites. And so what that requires or what needs to happen for that to work is that everything needs to talk to everything. And right now the kind of way a lot of those things happen is opening a browser window and browsing to it. And if you've ever synced a bank account using a fintech app or some banking app or a net worth tracking tool, most of the time you'll see plaid or Yodlee or something pop up and it says, you know, enter your login and this third party service will, will connect with the bank. Well, four or five years ago, the way that third party service worked is that they had a little browser instance in the cloud on a server somewhere that would open up the bank and log in. Which is why if anyone used these tools, they broke all the time because the bank would change something about the interface of their website and then these kind of third party aggregator tools would have to go re quickly build the tool and over and over again. Then eventually a lot of the mainstream banks added an OAuth service which is you kind of redirect yourself to the bank's website, you log in there and it says, hey, would you like to allow this third party to have access to this limited set of data? And you've probably done that anytime you sign in with Google or you know, back in the day, if you signed into a lot of things with Facebook, use your Facebook login as the way you authenticate and it would share certain piece of information or maybe you do that with Google and now you share your calendar with a tool. And so I think that there's going to be a lot more of that happening and as people have their own interfaces to lots of different things.
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And so that's kind of where I think we're going here, is that there are lots of APIs, MCP servers or maybe command line interface tools that get shipped so that people can use these software tools, these AI coding tools to build whatever they want to engage and control all the existing tools they have. And so in a future I don't see logging into my bank's website ever, I think I'll will interface with something else. Maybe it's a piece of software I own. Maybe know Claude or OpenAI or Google own this kind of layer maybe. And I think this is Apple's chance. But they seem to have dropped the ball every single time on anything in AI. But like they have my phone, they have Siri, this is a chance they have that they are the interface to all the things. And so I think any one of these companies could do it. It's going to require them being very, very flexible with how you operate with third parties, tools and services and websites. And then all those third parties are gonna need to build ways for that communication to happen. And in the interim there might be tools where they just work on the web. And so when I wanted to build this daily Snow report, the OpenClaw agent I have would on my Mac Mini in my house, open up the Open Snow account, would log into my Open Snow account, would look at the website and figure out the report and text it back to me. So that's like the V1 version, it's not great, it's slow, it breaks. But eventually everyone will just have some way that you can communicate with their software and they will still have value, right? Open Snow's value is not the slick ui, it's going to have the best snow forecasts. And so your value is not going to be on the UI because I think there will be a lot more people owning their UI and it'll look whatever they want. You know, I could have my own finance management dashboard that I run for myself that looks and feels and does exactly what I want and it won't ever have any of the features that I don't care about on the Chase website. So I don't know the long term implications of all of this. It's just as I've been building this software, as I've been playing with it, I realize that I feel like the world is going to look very different because you can just make anything. You can sit down and say, I want a tool or a site or a project that works in this way, shape or form and in minutes it works. And if you want to keep iterating on it and making it better and better and more efficient, you can. And it's just not that expensive to do. I mentioned last time that I spent a bunch of money because I wasn't paying a lot of attention to tokens. But now I've signed up for the Claude Max plan and I haven't spent an extra cent in a given month since. And so I think as things get cheaper it'll be more and more approachable. But I would encourage everyone to play because I feel like knowing these tools, understanding them is going to be really valuable. But it's also just this direction we're heading and we got a 3D printer for the family for the holidays this year and now I'm starting to see it evolve to the real world as well. So not just can I sit at my computer and say, make me a dashboard that will show me my biomarker, blood results and my fitness tracker data and my sleep score all in one. So I kind of have a health dashboard. And by the way, let me query that health dashboard. And by the way, go crawl all the transcripts of my top three sources of podcasts about health so that when I ask a question, you're not just going to the open web, you're going to these sources I trust and all that. You can build that like that is a simple thing to build right now in today's day and age. But with 3D printing now, you can start to build things and just have them in the physical world as well. So it's like, oh, I want to think about how to reorganize my drawer now go make all the things to do that. And so if anyone's interested there, gridfinity is this really cool platform to do that. My father in law was in town this past weekend and I was Thinking, what could I do? He likes to go hunting. What would be a fun 3D print, just to kind of showcase what's possible. And so I 3D printed a duck call and it actually printed, you know, in four or five parts with little tiny reads that you could use in the duck call to for different duck sounds. And we printed it all in an hour and put it together in a couple seconds. And now we had this thing that, you know, cost probably less than a dollar to make, but we had it on our own time whenever we wanted, and we could tweak in whatever way we want. And so, I don't know, it just feels like the future's wild. We're going to be able to create lots of stuff and I don't know what it looks like, but I hope you all are as excited as I am. I will continue to share as I'm learning what's going on. So that was one of the things that's really been dominating the last week. I'm going to do an episode with my wife, Amy, in a few weeks and hopefully you'll get to hear the perspective she has on how dominated my life has been and kind of how that looks from the other side. Because I do realize I've been down a rabbit hole and I've been so excited that it's kind of a little bit all consuming in the last couple of days. One thing that's been a little bit all consuming is try to figure out how to take advantage or not take advantage of. Of a real big transfer bonus between BILT and Japan Airlines. But I realize that's in the past. And so talking about it is kind of useful as a case study, but more useful if I think about it more broadly and talk about transfer bonuses in general. And so for anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about, if you have points with a bank like Chase or Amex or Citi or Capital One, they all can be transferred to airlines and hotels. And I often say that the highest value you're going to get from them often is by transferring to airlines and hotels and booking kind of the best deal awards in that fashion. This is not an episode on that. I'm actually putting together an AMA episode all about award travel and all the great questions you guys have. If you have more about award travel, go to all thehacks.com ama submit a few. In fact, if you have questions on any topic, submit them. Because I'm putting together a lot more frequent AMA episodes to dive into all the great questions you guys have. So what happens is somewhere, and if you look across all the different banks and points, it seems like seven to 15 times a year, each individual bank does some type of transfer bonus where they say, hey, normally if you transfer one Chase point, you get one British Airways point, but right now we're going to give you 30% more. Now, the minimum transfers are often a thousand. So you transfer a thousand Chase points, you're going to get 1300 British Airways points. And so those transfer bonuses happen all the time. Probably, I would say at any given point in time, there's two to five of them going on. And for every individual bank, it's kind of on the cadence of every other month.
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Ish.
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But the challenge is I don't often encourage people to take advantage of them unless you're booking a trip right now. And the reason is, is that one of the reasons I love transferable points is that you have lots of flexibility. If you have 100,000AmEx points, you don't just have 100,000AmEx pointsS, you have the ability to have 100,000 points in lots and lots of different programs because they're all transferable. So with Amex in particular, you've got a dozen airlines that you could transfer those points to. And so by taking advantage of the transfer bonus, yes, you end up with more miles by transferring them to an airline with a bonus, but you lose that flexibility. And there are so many times where Air France might have been the best deal to book a trip to Europe, but then I go to book the next one and there's no availability on Air France. And so having an extra 30% of flying blue miles in my Air France or KLM account does me no good if the only availability out there is on United or Alaska. And so I love transfer bonuses if you're in the middle of planning a trip. I don't usually love transfer bonuses unless that's the case, because you don't want to lose that flexibility. And you never know if a program will devalue its currency. So if you have a million AMEX points and every year, you know you spend 100 or 200,000 Air Canada Aeroplan miles, I'm not going to be upset if you transfer a few hundred thousand points to Aeroplan when there's a 30% bonus because you didn't lose the optionality because you still have a bunch of Amex points and you're really familiar with that program. But absent those cases, I rarely, rarely think it makes sense to take advantage of a Transfer bonus. However, sometimes there are really crazy bonuses. And the Japan Airlines one with BILT was just that. It was on March 1st for rent day, which BILT does all the time, right? They do these Rent Day promos. Last year, I think they did nine of them. So almost every month where you got a huge bonus for transferring. And so if you look across Chase and Amex, the average transfer bonus is often, I'm looking right here on this spreadsheet I made, it's like 22 to 25%. So if you look across Chase, Amex, Capital One and Citi, the average transfer bonus is between 21 and 25%. So it's definitely generous. It's definitely better than yet nothing. But it's not crazy. It's not going to change anything. The average transfer bonus on Bilt was 100%. Now, that's looking at the top tier. And Built has a bunch of tiers of status. And if you want to go deep on this, go back and listen to the episode I did on Built, I'll put in the show notes. But at their top tier of status, you can often get a hundred percent transfer bonus. And now with the addition of Built Cash, this other rewards currency, they were offering you the ability to buy up to one tier higher of status. And if you're already at the top, you could buy your way from 100% to 125% transfer bonus. And this was all for Japan Airlines, which meant that Instead of transferring one built point to one Japan Airlines mile, it was 1 to 2.25. Now, like I said, I never like to make speculative transfers, but in this case, it was a currency that I was a little bit familiar with that had a lot of value that it was just very hard to get access to. Right. Only Capital One and BILT were transfer partners. And so I looked at this and thought, I feel like I should go for this. I had a great experience using Japan Airlines to book our trip this spring to Japan. And they have a ton of availability for their members. And that availability at the low end is 55,000 points to go from the US to Japan in business class each way. And at the high end is kind of around 100,000 points each way. And so if you find that saver availability at 55,000 points, that's a great deal compared to anything at 100,000, it's a little high. But great airline, lots of direct flights, good service, so could even make sense at 100,000. But if you divide that by 2.25, you'd be able to book even at the high end, even in the hundred thousand mile cost with Bilt, it would only end up needing you to transfer 45,000 points now, 45,000 points each way for international Business class to Japan with pretty good availability because that's their high end of their award chart that's just impossible to find. And so a part of me was like, dump every built point I have over to Japan Airlines because all the other places that built points might go, they're all partners of other programs, right? Chase can go to Hyatt and Air Canada is a partner of so many different things, so why not dump them all over? And so that was going through my head with the exception of Japan Airlines having a hard 36 month expiration. Unless you have a ton of life status points with Japan Airlines, which are incredibly difficult to earn, then you have a hard 36 month expiration on points. And if you want to go down the rabbit hole, you can search into Japan Life status points and you'll see that if you get the Japan USA card and you spent $450,000 on it, earning just 1x Japan Airlines miles, you'll be able to extend your miles to 60 months instead of 36. Or if you want to spend $900,000 on the card, you can get a bunch of other perks on Japan Airlines. I don't think anyone listening to this, or maybe no more than one or two people listening to this are going to do that. So that means you could do this, you could transfer your points over, but you've got to use them in 36 months. And I believe it's booked by 36 months. You don't have to fly by then. So maybe you have almost four years to use them. But like a lot of other carriers based in Asia, they're not a program that makes it really easy for you to book for anyone. So I think you have to add family members as kind of nominees to your account in order to book for them. And so I kind of went into this thinking, gosh, this is one of the best deals I've ever seen that I'm confident I will get a value out of. And I'm just totally uncertain how much value I'll get out of it before these points expire. And so I looked at our recent trip to Japan and thought if we needed to book four tickets round trip and business class to Japan each way, it would be about 800,000 Japan Airlines points. Now, if we found them at a better deal, oftentimes you can find them in the 70 to 80,000 range or even in the 55,000 point range. Well, then you would need less. And so I thought, what number of points will I need to book Four international round trip tickets with the expectation that we will take another trip to Japan or connecting through Japan sometime in the next three and a half, four years. And I decided to go for it. And I don't know if this was a terrible decision. We probably won't know for a few years, but I moved a little over 300,000 built points to Japan Airlines, which is a big chunk of the built points I've earned over the last couple of years. And we'll see what happens. I am excited because the opportunities are just there. However, that was on March 1st. I transferred in the morning. It's March 2nd today. And I noticed late last night that Rove, which is another shopping portal that has transferable points, announced they have a 50% transfer bonus to Japan Airlines. I don't have any remorse here because I don't really have any Rove points. I probably have a couple thousand Rove points, but I worry now, oh man. What happens if Japan Airlines is kind of flooding their own program with points by offering all these deals to all these partners and they're about to become a whole lot more competitive or less valuable. And so that's again, one of the risks. Points can devalue. Programs can change. This was a little bit of a, you know, wild Hail Mary's the wrong word. But it, it kind of felt a little like that. I couldn't actually bring myself to click Submit when I was filling the transfer form out. Cause I was like, ah, this seems like a bad idea, this. And I was like, I just have to do it. And I just like forced myself to click it as opposed to think through it until I felt confident about it. And so we'll see how it plays out. But I think Japan Airlines is a great program. I'm glad that they're a transfer partner at Built. I'm glad they're a transfer partner of Capital One. I'm glad that they're a transfer partner of Rove, though I think it's going to be really hard to get enough Rove miles to do a lot with them. And I hope their program stays valuable long enough to use a lot of these points I transferred in. Like I said before, they're not the bulk of my points. And so if you look at transfer bonuses with a lot of these criteria, you'll see that they're not always as valuable as this and they often don't warrant any action. And so I just quickly, I ran through the ones the other transfer bonuses active right now. It's March 2nd. Citi has a transfer bonus to Wyndham. It's an extra 25%. I don't love this. Wyndham points are regularly on sale for about 0.7 cents. And so at best, you know, even with a 25% bonus, it's kind of getting 1 cent of value from your points. I think a couple weeks ago or days ago, Chase added Wyndham as a new transfer partner, which, you know, I always get excited when you have more optionality, but not when it's one to one transfers to a program whose points are worth less than $0.01. I think you'd be better off cashing out your Chase points and buying Wyndham points on Wyndham's website, which you could probably put on a credit card and earn some extra points there too, than actually transferring them. So I don't expect anyone to ever use Chase points to transfer to Wyndham unless you've built up 28,000 Wyndham points and you need 2,000 more for an award. Sure, maybe it makes sense to transfer to close the gap. Otherwise I'm not really that excited about Wyndham points at all. At least not as transfer partners, you know, that are 1 to 1. Even with a 25% bonus. Amex has a bonus right now to Avianca for an extra 15%. Avianca, I think, is maybe the most bonus transfer partner I've seen. And, and so I don't get excited at all about this. I transferred some built points to Avianca when they had a hundred percent bonus and I still haven't used them. You know, you can extend the expiration, but they expire regularly, so you have to kind of stay on top of it. There's a Chase bonus to Avios for an extra 20% again if you have trips planned. Amazing. Awesome. Get 20% more value or transfer less points than you were planning. Amazing. But if you don't, the extra 20% isn't worth it. Just like Capital One's 30% bonus to preferred Hotels right now. Also not worth it, but also not worth it. Because, you know, at first glance I thought, oh, Preferred Hotels is a program I've actually wanted to try to use. 30% bonus, maybe I should move some points there, even though it's speculative. And then I forgot that Capital One transfers to preferred hotels at 1 to 2 and city transfers from 1 to 4. So even 30% more is nowhere near as good a deal as using city points to go to preferred hotels. So hopefully that little rundown is why most of the time a transfer bonus is not something worth looking into unless you have a trip to plan. Now if you were thinking about planning a trip and all of a sudden you see two or three transfer bonuses, maybe try to plan that trip before those bonuses expire so you can see if you use those points if they make sense with that deal. But otherwise I wouldn't do it. And like I said earlier, one of the biggest reasons is devaluation, which is a good segue to the next topic today, which is Hyatt's really big Devaluation.
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Customers product growth is supposed to come first, but suddenly you're also the one responsible for making sure payroll runs on time, benefits are set up right, and a lot more. I learned this early, which is why I've used Gusto for almost every company I've started. And this year we moved our health insurance over to Gusto too. It's just one more thing I don't have to think about. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses all in one remote, friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay, hire onboard and support your team from anywhere. And they also do automatic payroll tax filings, simple direct deposits, health benefits, computer benefits, workers comp 401k and so much more. There is a reason it's the number one payroll software on G2, trusted by over 400,000 small businesses. Try Gusto today at gusto.comAllTheHacks and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.comAllThehacks One more time Gusto.comAllTheHacks this episode is brought to you by Mercury Business Banking Redesigned from the ground up for years I've been telling you about Mercury and the reason is simple. It's fast, elegant and easy to use. If you don't accept mediocre tools anywhere else in your work or life, why would you accept them for something as important as your business finances? Mercury makes things that used to be a headache completely effortless. Need to send a wire done in seconds for free. Need to pay someone but don't have their banking info? You can request it through Mercury and
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set the payment to go out as
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soon as they submit it. Need to collect tax info from contractors. Mercury handles that too, and it flexes to fit all kinds of businesses. Whether you need to collaborate across a growing team, pay vendors or create and issue invoices, Mercury can work for you. No more dealing with tools duct taped together. Get everything you need in one place. And that's why over 300,000 entrepreneurs trust Mercury. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an fdic. Insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and column NA Members FDIC this is
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probably the saddest news of last couple of weeks, and I don't think it is as doom and gloom as a lot of people have been saying it is, but it's not great. Hyatt hasn't really changed a lot of their award pricing for a while, and a lot of the other hotels have moved to a much more dynamic pricing model where there's not a fixed award chart. And Hyatt has kind of said, hey, we're not going to do that, but we're going to add five tiers for each level. And so, you know, the range of a category four hotel will now be 12 to 25,000 points. So there's nothing beyond 25,000. So there's still a ceiling in place, but you know, there's a lot of stops along the way. Instead of off peak, standard and peak, it's now lowest, low, moderate, upper and top. Now, Hyatt did say that while this new framework is going to take place in May, they're going to implement the changes thoughtfully with limited hotels moving a limited number of nights into the upper and top categories in 2026 and broader adoption in the years that follow. So I don't actually know what that means. If you look at this at face value and just say, what's the worst possible scenario? Well, the worst possible scenario is Category 8 hotels, which I happen to be staying at in Japan when we're going at 45,000 points, was the previous peak rate, are now going to be up to 75,000 points, which is a 67% increase, which is really, really big. And if that's the only time you were using Hyatt points is to stay peak dates at Category 8 hotels. And Hyatt does end up putting a lot of those dates into the top category. I think Hyatt points are going to be a lot less valuable to you. That said, I think it's possible and I don't know the answer to this, that top is really more reserved for really prime time dates. So Big sporting events, big festivals, that kind of stuff. And if you look at what's the change going to the upper category that's not top, you know, it kind of all averaged out for a lot of things at 30%. Now, 30% increase in number of points required is still a really, really big increase. But I will also point out that most people generally thought Hyatt was the most valuable single points currency kind of out there. And so I know a lot of people that just viewed their Chase points as Hyatt points, because transferring Chase points to any other program was inherently going to be less valuable than transferring them to Hyatt. And I've regularly gotten 2 to 4 cents of value for Hyatt points. And so, yes, you know, having to spend 30% more of them or maybe even 50 or 60% more of them is not great, but it might still be a better option than a lot of other things. I looked at the hotel we're staying at in Japan, which, because of the kind of ability to use Hyatt's suite upgrade awards, we were able to book and confirm into a suite that would have cost close to $2,000. From a point value, it's kind of somewhere around 4 cents a point, which is amazing. Now, I'm not sure if I would have spent the eighteen hundred dollars a night if I didn't have Hyatt points.
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So.
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So I'm not saying that's a fair comparison, but I just want to highlight the difference is even, even if those dates were at the highest end of the new award chart and they took 75,000 points a night, it would still be 2.4 cents per point. So I think there's still going to be value to be had here. If you back off of category eight, the kind of top tier of categories, you know, it gets a little bit better and then at some of the high ends it doesn't even get that much higher. And so if you look at, you know, staying at an all inclusive property like Miraval, the number of points required for double occupancy is going to be somewhere in the 17 to 30% increase if you're going on those top dates. But if you're going on just that upper level, it's only 6 to 11% more points. So obviously I'd rather go zero, I'd rather it go down. But I think that there is a chance that this isn't as bad as it seems. And I saw a lot of the media was just 67% increase on points needed. And I think that is both true in some very small scenarios and hopefully not true broadly. Hyatt also said that in April they're going to announce whether properties are changing categories if they come out in April. And now say not only is a Category 8 price going to go up up to 67%, but we're moving a bunch of Category 7 hotels into eight. And so now it's really a lot more like almost 100% increase. Well, then it's going to be pretty frustrating. I think people are going to be pretty mad. So I hope that Hyatt is going to take the April changes and think about them carefully so it doesn't feel like they're gutting the value of their points twice in one year. That said, I still think the status at the top tier with Hyatt, with globalist status, the ability to earn suite upgrade awards and confirm them at booking or even use your points to confirm suites at booking makes Hyatt a great program. But I do think that it's from a parity value of points, it's getting closer to a lot of other programs in terms of not being able to consistently always get the most outsized value. I still think it's gonna be outsized value. I still think we'll stay a lot at Hyatt and it'll probably be the primary way we use our Chase points. But because of reasons like this, you never wanna put all your eggs in one basket in advance because you never know what's going to happen. And so in this case, I hope it's not as bad as it seems. And I'll kind of give an update as we learn more. Now, with all of these potential devaluations that could happen, the question is, how do you get more points? I've covered this topic a bunch of times, but someone sent an email that said, hey, I've got these big tax payments. What should I do to earn a big bonus on them? And I'll answer the first question, which is how do you think about earning more points? Because there are a handful of outsized increased bonuses right now. On the tax question, you know, it's interesting. There are a lot of cards that don't earn points on taxes and they often are some of the higher earning cashback or points cards. So the Robin Hood Gold card, the US Bank Smartly card, I think the new built Palladium or all the built cards have kind of said taxes is an excluded category. But it turns out that when you look at welcome bonuses, the earn 100,000 points after spending x thousand dollars in four months. Almost every card that has a compelling welcome offer is not on that same list of cards that don't earn points on tax payments. Now that built Palladium card is an exception, though I would say the 50,000 point welcome offer on that card does not put it in the category of really, really compelling welcome offers right now. So when I think about what are the best welcome offers for earning points on taxes, the answer is what are the best welcome offers for earning points? There's not really any differentiation there, other than certain business cards might have higher fees when you're making tax payments than personal cards, but if you were to pay those through PayPal, which some of the tax payment sites offer, sometimes they don't actually code as business cards when you pay through PayPal, so keep that in mind. So again, if you want to find all these bonuses that I'm talking about, you can go to all thehacks.com cards. I try to do my best to keep that as up to date as possible. I feel like I spend some time every day making sure that all the bonuses are there so you can sort and view them by the best offers. If those offers are partner links of ours and they help support us, that's awesome. But if I find a better offer and it happens to not be a partner link, I'm going to put that anyways. Like, I want you guys to get the most points possible and so we're going to put the best offers we can find and if they happen to be ones that help support the show, great. If they aren't great, it doesn't matter. I want to make sure you guys get the most points possible. If you find a better deal somewhere else, let me know. Use that better deal. I'll try to update our site as quickly as I can, but like I mentioned, there are a few kind of categories of cards that are currently sitting on higher than normal welcome offers. And so I just thought I'd run through them just to kind of talk about them, because by the time this comes out, they'll still be hopefully all available at that higher level.
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This episode is brought to you by Bilt. You've heard me talk about Bilt as the loyalty program that lets you earn points on rent wherever you live, and they just leveled up even more. As of 2026, homeowners can also earn up to 1.25x points on their mortgage payments.
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This is thanks to Bilt's three new
- [41:50]
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credit cards, the Palladium Card, Obsidian Card, and Blue Card. All three. Turn your housing payments, rent or mortgage into flexible rewards so you can choose the card that fits your lifestyle or without missing out on points and exclusive benefits. Built points can be redeemed at top airlines and hotels, Amazon.com purchases, future rent payments and more. Built Points have also been ranked by top publications as the industry's most valuable point currency. Your housing payment is already your biggest expense. Make it your most rewarding. Find the card that fits your lifestyle and apply today at joinbuilt.com allthehacks that's J-O-I-N B I-L-T.com allthehacks make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you. Terms and limitations apply subject to approval and eligibility. Built cards are issued by column NA member FDIC pursuant to a license from MasterCard International Incorporated.
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Thank you so much for being here today. You can find all the links, promo
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codes and discounts from our partners@AllTheHacks.com deals. These are brands I love and use, so please consider supporting those who support us.
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So the first is Delta. This happens throughout the year. Delta increases all their offers and then they decrease them and then they increase them and they decrease them. So it's nothing really out of the ordinary here for these offers. They range from 90,000 points all the way up to 125,000 points. And so I'm going to say unless you're really, really interested in Delta miles right now or you're trying to make sure you have enough cards to earn, you know, the medallion qualifying points you need for Delta status, there's nothing really that compelling and exciting to jump on. But if you are in the market for a new Delta card or you want one because you have a big redemption coming up and you know that holding a Delta card gets you 15% off award travel, then now would be a good time to get that card because the bonuses are all pretty elevated. I think when I went through this process which was I wanted to get that 15% off Delta offer because we were about to book a bunch of trips, I went for the Delta Platinum business card and I did that because I think it had the best balance of points. Doesn't show up in count towards 524 because it's a business card. I thought the perks and benefits relative to the annual fee were probably the closest though in hindsight I think maybe the Gold card was probably similar. Though for the extra points on the welcome offer it probably makes sense to go higher and then later downgrade to the Gold card. So I went for the Delta Platinum business later. I probably after one year will downgrade to the Delta Gold business. But the bigger offer on the Platinum card was worth it. The reserve card always has the biggest offer. Right now it's at 125,000 points. The challenge there is the annual fee is really high and I don't use the Sky Club. And so if you're not using a Delta Sky Club, it's pretty hard to get your value out of that annual fee. They do offer other things and perks and credits, but I just think that those credits still make it hard to close the gap. So that's just something that I think makes it hard to justify the reserve card if you're not going to be doing that or you're not interested in trying to earn status. If you're trying to earn status on Delta, the reserve card is the way to spend yourself to status because you get more MQMs per dollar spent. But I'm not trying to earn Delta status, so that's not for me. Next on the list is United. I talked a couple weeks ago about how United made a bunch of changes to their program and it's going to get a lot more rewarding for people with United cards and a lot less rewarding for people without them. So I think a lot of people out there are thinking, well, if I fly United enough, I probably should have a United card. I'll earn an extra 3 points per dollar on my travel, but I'll also get a better deal when I'm booking flights. And so I don't have a United card right now. And so I've kind of been eyeing this. And I think the sweet spot right now for me might be the United Business card. But if you look at all the cards and I'm going to exclude the Gateway card for a second, it's between 70 and 100,000 point welcome offers. The United Business, United Quest and United Club business cards all have some premier qualifying points as part of the welcome offer. And so if going for United status is something you're doing this year, that could be super helpful. And so the way I would look at these is really just to kind of evaluate whether the benefits and perks of the card or the additional points for getting a more expensive version of a United card justify that extra annual fee. And so the United business card, at 100,000 points for $150 annual fee is probably the best balance for me. If you wanted a consumer card, I think, you know, it's kind of a Toss up between the Explorer and the Quest. I think the Quest card gets you 10,000 more points if you're going for status. It's the clear option because you get 3,000 Premier qualifying points if you run through all the benefits and perks, which I won't do right now because I don't know if everyone listening is even interested in United card. You know, you can kind of walk through and think about which cards actually make the most sense relative to whether you're going to get value out of the JSX credit or the rideshare credit or the Travel bank credit. I think if you force me to pick a consumer card, I'd probably go for the United Quest card. And if I was trying to chase United status, I'd absolutely go for the United Quest card. But right now I'm not going for status. And so I think the United Business card is probably the right balance. That said, I need to take a look at a few of the payments we make, things like property tax. And to the extent that any of them allow for fee free debit card payments, you can also get all the benefits, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, of being a United cardholder with United debit card as long as you spend $10,000 on it each year. And so obviously I'd much rather spend $10,000 on a credit card than a debit card if all things are the same. But if there are some expenses or payments I can make that otherwise would earn nothing or would otherwise cost me a 3% fee, then the debit card might actually be the easier play. No big welcome offer, but also no annual fee, no card to manage, no extra inquiry on the credit report, no hit to 524 status and all that kind of stuff. So it's probably going to be United debit card or United Business card for me. But if you're a frequent United flyer, I feel like it is probably going to make sense for you to hold a United card going forward. And the United Gateway card unfortunately is the only no annual fee card, but it also earns so poorly that it's probably not a great option because you've got to spend $10,000 on it to get anything there. So I would take a look at a United card if that's you and if you just are looking for a good welcome offer right now. Some of these offers, a hundred thousand points for spending 5,000 in three months is a pretty great welcome offer anyways. Next is the Hilton cards all have some increased offers. This happens a lot of times during the year, but about once a year, it seems that they add free nights to their welcome offers for most of the cards. And so right now, the regular Hilton card, the surpass, and the business card all have welcome offers. 70, 130, all the way up to 175,000 points. But you also get a free night award. And the great thing about Hilton free night awards is that they're not capped on category. So any standard room, whether it's 40,000 points or 240,000 points, if you find a standard room available, you can use your free night award. And so we've used free night awards for rooms that would have cost 200,000 points a night. So if you look at some of these offers, and this is going to sound crazy, so keep in mind that Hilton points are often only worth about half a cent each, and that's kind of a common valuation. But if you look at a Hilton Honors surpass card, you get 130,000 Hilton points for the bonus. You only have to spend $3,000 in six months to get it, and you get a free night award. And if you were going to stay at a property where that free night would have otherwise cost you 200,000 points, then you could kind of view this offer as 200,000 plus 130,000, which is 330,000 points on $3,000 spent, which is 110 points per dollar. Now, granted, these are Hilton points, I'd say they're worth probably 30, 40% of the value of an airline mile. So, you know, it's not fair to call it 110,000, but it's just still crazy to think about, like 110,000 points per dollar for those first $3,000 is crazy. So if you have plans or could make plans to use Hilton points or, or stay in Hilton properties, I think these are some great options. The business card actually has even More points at 175,000 and a free night. But I like staying in the personal lane with Hilton because you get options to downgrade to the no annual fee card, or you can upgrade to the Aspire card, which has a higher annual fee, but you get an annual free night certificate. So you could have a surpass for a year, then then upgrade to an Aspire, get another free night. And so that's another path. They also give you diamond status and a bunch of other kind of burks and credits to try to make up for that annual fee. And so I think the Aspire card is one of my favorite cards to hold but that surpass card with a free night award and 130,000 point bonus is pretty interesting. And so we already have two of these. And so if we didn't have two and we weren't sitting on probably four Hilton free nights right now, I think we would probably get another one, because my wife is the holder of all Hilton cards, and so I've actually never had any of them. So this year it's not in the cards. But another year in the future when we're traveling a bit more to places where we might use Hilton, I think that's definitely something I'm thinking about. And then last is Southwest. Southwest has some big offers on the personal cards in that they will give you a free companion pass through February 28, 2027 for hitting a welcome bonus, which only requires three to $5,000 spend. And then they're also going to give you 20 to 40,000 points with that on top of it. For those not familiar, the way Companion Pass works on Southwest is you buy one ticket, whether you use points or cash, and one nominated person who you designate can travel free, just paying taxes and fees, and you can change that person three times a year. If you have a lot of travel coming up and you're going to fly a lot of Southwest, if you're going to spend a thousand or two thousand dollars on Southwest flights in a year, this could be a huge welcome offer. Right? It's going to save you all of that cost. So that's amazing. That said, if you're only going to travel in Southwest once or twice, it's really not that interesting. And so I think if you are someone who's thinking you're going to do a lot of Southwest travel, that is a path. The only thing I'll flag is that unlike a lot of the times people use Southwest cards to earn Companion Pass, historically, the way people did that was they would open one or two cards, earn enough Southwest points to hit the 135,000 points you need to hit Companion Pass. And when you do it that way, when you do it through earning points, you get it in the year, you earn it and the following year. And so people would open a card, try to hit that as early as they can in a year. And so let's say you hit that in January or February, you'd now have Companion Pass for that year and the following year. Now it's gotten a lot easier and that you don't need to get two cards, you don't need to hit 135,000 points, you just open one card and you've got Companion Pass, but you only get it through February 28, 2027. So you don't get it as long, but it's a lot easier to get. And so I'd say if you want to play the Southwest companion pass kind of game, now could be an interesting time to do it because you don't have to do as much work. And if you find that you get a ton of value out of it, well, then Maybe in early 2027, whoever of your companion or you, whoever got the card now, the other person could kind of approach it towards that time of year, maybe get one or two cards, get it early 2027, and you'd have another Companion Pass from 2027 all the way to the end of 2028. So pretty interesting offers there. If you're just looking for points, there's some kind of mainstay offers that are always out there. The amex Platinum Business, Platinum Business Gold, the Chase Sapphire Reserve, Sapphire Reserve Business, the Chasing Preferred. They always seem to have 100 to 200,000 point welcome offers. And so if you're just going for a big offer, all of those are always great offers in terms of the ROI of your spend and the size of the offer. You know, you might be scared away by seeing, you know, 8, 900 annual fees, but when the size of the welcome bonus is, you know, worth into the 1500-2500 range, then it kind of often makes up for that annual fee, not to mention all the credits that you get that kind of offset the fee as well. So that's a lot of bonuses. I do try, if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, to share these bonuses anytime they happen. I don't always have a chance to make an episode before the bonuses expire, which is why I don't often do this type of content. But I'm experimenting today and recording a bit closer to publish. And so if you want to check that out allthehacks.com Email Every Saturday we share a ton of deals, news stuff that's going on, interesting stuff that's happening in my life and that I'm reading and finding. And so definitely sign up. It's totally free and you can check it out all the hacks.com/email. One of the things we do is we share deals. And so I'll just share two deals because this is going to come out soon enough that the deals are still alive and they're both for the Chase Sapphire Reserve Card. I think There's a smaller version of them for the sapphire preferred, but I thought they're worth sharing because people should definitely consider them if they have that card. And one is that I think until May, if you buy a whoop, which is a fitness tracker, and you buy it with the pro plan and you spend over $359, and that's a really important thing, you have to spend $359 or more, Chase will give you $359 back. Now, I'm sure WHOOP is subsidizing this and I'm sure WHOOP is hoping that you buy this, get on the $359 a year plan and then renew it the next year. I'm not saying you need to do that. And honestly, I wouldn't waste your time on this. If it's not something you want at all though, maybe you could sell a WHOOP band on the Internet. But if you spend $359 or more, you're going to get the entire purchase back up to $359. And so this does actually stack with referral codes. And so the cool thing there is Chase is looking at the total value and depending on what state you're in and what shipping speed you pick, you know that total price is probably going to go over 359. If you live in a state with, you know, roughly 10% sales tax, it'll go up to like 389. So I'll put my referral code in the shownotes or you just go to allthehacks.com whoops that should take $30 off, which depending on the state you live in and the sales tax might be exactly what you need to get the total purchase price right at a little bit over 359. If it's a little bit under, you could add expedited shipping. I think you can add a different color band and different things. But I would say just make sure if you're using this offer, whether you're using my promo code or not, just make sure the offer goes over 359 or you're not going to get it back. And I have heard some reports online that it's just any purchase at whoop's website. So if you don't want a WHOOP ban, maybe there's other stuff they sell on the website that you might want, as long as that purchase is over 359. And the other one that expires at the end of this month of March is that Function Health, which is kind of a annual subscription for a service that does a bunch of blood tests is 50% off. It's $365 for an annual membership that I at least used to include two different blood draws. I don't know if it's still two or if it's just the one up front, but you get that for 50% off, bringing the price down to about $180. So if that's something that you were looking at doing, now is a perfect time to do it. It does seem like it will probably work for an existing member renewing. I read the terms and it seems to just say you have to spend 365 or more at Function Health. I do have a referral code that would get you, I think $50 off, but I would encourage you not to use it. It's at all the hacks.com function but but I believe the way these promos often work is you have to spend the full 3:65 in order to get the 50% off. And so I would hate for you to use a promo code, end up spending 3:15 and get nothing back. And so if you find out somewhere that it works on purchases under 365, by all means get the extra off. But otherwise I would say do not use a referral code or a promo code or any other discount unless you find some way to add something else to your order. So the purchase price is over 365, so definitely check that out. I think that is it for this week. So thank you for listening. Feedback is always welcome. Podcast@AllTheHacks.com and go to AllTheHacks.com AMA if you want to submit questions either for me or my wife. We're going to do an episode together soon. Questions on Award Travel, which is a topic I'm going to be recording soon, or really any other topic. Money, credit cards, life, work, etc. So I'm excited to get them. I'm excited to answer them. Thank you so much in advance. That is it for this week. I will see you next week.