🛫 Travel, Points & Miles
🔍 Best Tools for Booking Flights/Hotels with Points
In this video, Greg from Frequent Miler and I share the best flight and hotel award search tools you can use to save $$$ when booking with points and miles. Make sure to check out the show notes for flight tools and hotel tools for exclusive discounts.
And if you want to go deeper on points and miles, check out the Frequent Miler On The Air podcast and newsletter.
🏨 Hilton + Small Luxury Hotels of the World (SLH)
The Frequent Miler shared some insights about how Hilton is planning to integrate SLH properties into their loyalty program. So far the news is positive and will open up some great options for free night certificates.
🚁 Bilt Rewards & BLADE Partnership
Bilt Rewards announced a partnership with BLADE, which provides Helicopter transfers between NYC and EWR/JFK. The most exciting piece of the partnership is that Bilt Platinum members get a free BLADE flight every year, but everyone with Bilt Elite Status will also get 10% of Blade. More info here.
🏨 Free Luxury Hotel Perks + Upgrade
We built a luxury hotel booking site that gives you access to exclusive benefits at over 4,000 luxury hotels around the world (including Aman, Four Seasons, Park/Grand Hyatt, Andaz, St. Regis, Ritz Carlton, Rosewood, etc). Here are some of the perks that are often included:
- Daily breakfast for two
- $100 property credit
- Complimentary wifi
- Room upgrade upon arrival (when available)
- Early check-in / late check out (when available)
Here’s a quick tutorial on using the site and finding perks included.
🤑 Latest Deals
💼 Daily Getaways 2024 Travel Deals
The US Travel Association is running Daily Getaways through 5/1. The most interesting deals from my perspective are 20% off Marriott Gift Cards (4/23), ~0.5¢ Choice Points (4/29) and 1.2¢ Hyatt Points (4/30).
💳 Card-Linked Offers
Here are a few interesting card-linked offers I found this week:
- Four Seasons: $150 off $750+
- Sheraton: 10% off (max $57 back)
- Marriott: 10% off $100-$750 of spend
- TopGolf: $20 off $100
- Turo: $30 off $150
- Starbucks: 15% off (max $4.50 back)
Note: not all cardmembers will have all offers in their account.
🔁 Current Transfer Bonuses
- Capital One ➡️ Virgin Atlantic: 30% (through 4/30)
- Citi ➡️ Accor: 50% (through 5/11)
Note: I don't recommend speculative transfers, but if you're planning a trip and can use one of the bonuses, it'd be an even better deal!
🕵️ Great Finds
📊 How to Build and Optimize an Investment Portfolio
I had a great conversation with my former co-founder Chris Doyle about how to build and manage an investment portfolio. The episode dives deep into diversification, tax-award allocation, capacity and tolerance for risk, tax-loss harvesting, rebalancing and so much more to help you grow and protect your wealth.
⏰ The 67-Hour Workweek
I enjoyed an this article on The Atlantic about how married couples in America have continued to work a 67-hour workweek since the late 19th century, despite so many significant economic, technological and societal changes. While I support paying for content, if you'd rather not, check out the free 12ft.io version of the article.
📱 Cell Phone Trick to Enable 4K Video Streaming
Here's a great explanation of how some cell phone plans limit your video streaming speeds and how a VPN can circumvent those carrier speed limits. If you need a VPN recommendation, I use NordVPN.
🤩 Recommendations
🏦 Mercury = My New Personal Bank
It seems like every personal bank I've tried either offers free ACH/wire transfers and reimbursed ATMs or a high interest rates on savings, but never both. For a few years, I've used the Wealthfront Cash account, which is now at 5% and has same day ACH transfers to your own accounts, but no easy way to send money to others (e.g. paying our Au Pair) and no ATM fee reimbursements. Then I got an invite last month to Mercury's Personal Banking.
They also offer 5% APY, free ACH/wires, ATM fee reimbursements and the ability to spin up additional debit cards for others (with custom limits). At first glance I hated the 5% fee, but I leave at least $5k in a checking account outside of Wealthfront earning 0% interest, which at 5% would earn $250. They're not a partner (yet) and I don't have any invites (yet), but you can join their waitlist here.
I'm also going to do a whole episode soon about the top banks and my setup to put finances on autopilot, so if you have any recommendations for other banks to check out, please reply to this email and let me know!
📝 Sam's List - Find CPAs
With 2023 taxes behind us (or extensions filed), some of you might be looking for a CPA. Good news! My friend Sam Parr recently launched Sam's List to help find CPAs. I haven't personally used it to find a CPA, because I'm working with Gelt for all my taxes and have been very happy since they saved me over $10k after finding a mistake my prior CPA made. That said finding a CPA is tough, so I wanted to share!
🎧 BG2Pod on Tech, Markets and Investing
For the past few months, I've really been enjoying the BG2Pod, which is co-hosted by two incredible tech investors, Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley. They cover everything from AI to self-driving cars to the macro-economy, all through a lens of their background in Silicon Valley.
Editor’s Note: The content on this page is accurate as of the posting date; however, some of our partner offers may have expired. Opinions expressed here are the author's alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, hotel, airline, or other entity. This content has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included within the post.
