2019 Trips & Travel Hacking

Today, I’m beginning to sit down and sketch out my 2019 (feels weird to write that) travel plans, which…are actually going to be pretty extensive.

They include, but are not limited to, and all in the first half of the year…

• A trip to Canada to film a “Selo Oils Experience”, aka a live webinar with a 4-course meal being prepared live
• Combine that with a trip home to California since I’m skipping out on Christmas this year
• Tokyo, Japan, with a few days in Doha, Qatar
• My parents and grandma coming out for a visit to Ukraine, and taking them to visit Croatia to see the Selo farm, in addition to maybe heading up through Slovenia and into Austria with them

Basically, things are busy.

So, here’s a little tip that I touch on once in a while, but that can pay huge dividends if you do it properly.

Let’s yap about credit for a second.

Some people preach that it’s an evil, evil thing, and some people preach that it’s the greatest thing invented since sliced bread. The answer, as always, is somewhere in the middle of those two things. Credit is horrible if you get in over your head and can’t get out. Credit is also great if it gives you leverage. There’s no right or wrong, just opinions.

Many, many years ago, I got into “travel hacking”.

Namely, stashing away hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer points by opening up (literally) dozens of credit cards. The result was that I moved to Europe with about half a million miles stashed away, and boasting a credit score just a shade below 800 at 24 years old, pretty much obtained simply by just making my payments on time. A few years later, despite cancelling many of these cards, my score is now well above 800.

Anyways, back on point.

Some might consider it a “low abundance” mindset to do travel hacking.

Maybe it is.

I just consider it smart business.

I wanted a new laptop recently and spent $2,500 on it. Prior to doing so, I opened a new credit card and used it to buy the laptop. The result was nearly 100,000 Chase reward points. Used correctly, that’s 3 one-way flights between the US and Europe, which usually costs $500+ each. So if I value those points at $1,500, that means I really just paid $1,000 for the laptop.

Again, smart bid’niz.

But man, I love the game of piecing together an award flight with miles, knowing I’m basically fleecing the banks and airlines (evil, big corporations).

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Here’s the thing:

For every person like me who plays the system, there are 99 suckers also lined up to play…and they’re losing, in the name of purchasing massive televisions they can’t pay off, cars they can’t afford to put gas in, etc, etc. Then they get fleeced with their 29.99% interest rate, which goes towards eating the losses of people like me who are ordering copious amounts of the most expensive whiskey for free.

As always:

You want to be the shark.

Not the gup-gup.

Anyways, what’s the point of all this?

I’m not sure that I have one.

Namely, that if you want to get ahead in the game of life, sometimes it’s worth it to hack the system…especially if you enjoy the process.

Another way to hack life?

Build streams of passive income like I teach how to do in my webinar.

The best “life hack” there is.