meaning you're saving about 14 which is 70 on a 500 hotel stay among my friends we sometimes joke
that I'm a cash back Queen um because I literally save or make like thousands of dollars in cash
back every year I'm kind of an Optimizer well okay depending on who you are if you're watching this
video you might think that I'm like a hardcore Optimizer and a little bit psycho about it or
you're like you're not optimizing enough for the value but this is just the system that really
works for me and the way that I like to spend money and the way that I like to get cash back but
yeah if you want to learn how to optimize cashback across all the tools that you can use this is
how I do it okay so there's four categories of cashback I'm going to talk about which include
credit cards Chrome extensions travel rewards um and then finally like a fun random one that can
save you a ton of money again this is my system so if you have a way to optimize it further you
should actually let me know there's like a whole side of YouTube that's really into this I'm not
on that side of YouTube but I like I think my system works pretty well okay so starting with
credit card rewards I have three credit cards which is the Bank of America rewards category
rewards credit card I have the AmEx uh rose gold and I have the Chase Sapphire Reserve um and so
in terms of the Bank of America card there's like again a whole set of video like YouTube
that talks about credit cards but essentially the reason why I got it was because I didn't have any
credit I've made a whole video about how people can get credit um I didn't have any credit and
so this was the only card I was qualified for but I kept it for a variety of reasons one is because
it improves your credit score because your average age of credit is really long then but also because
how it works is that you can get three percent cash back on any category of your choice and I
chose online shopping what's kind of interesting about online shop as a category is that a lot of
other credit cards actually don't offer pretty good rewards for online shopping they offer it
for like travel or dining but online shopping is kind of a hard category to get cash back for
which is why I put all my online shopping on this Bank of America rewards card in terms of
Chase and Amex they're fairly similar cards in some ways and so in terms of cashback I compare
them across a variety of categories the first thing I compare is across bonus categories so
this is where you don't just get one point per dollar spent but like like multiples on that so
for example for Chase for travel and dining you get three extra points for AMEX you get 4X the
points on groceries as well as restaurants you can go look up these bonus categories online but you
can't take points at face value because points are worth different amounts between different
programs meaning like one MX points is not the same as like one chase points okay so then in
terms of how much those points are actually worth this really depends on what you want to spend it
on so in the majority of cases I think if you spend it on travel Partners as in you send those
points to like a Marriott travel program to a Hilton travel program or to United's you know
miles program or whatever you actually get the best um money per point so like money per point
is like is a point worth one cent is it worth one and a half cents is it worth two is it worth 0.5
um but because again I'm not over optimizing for the sake of optimizing I'm optimizing for let my
life I often redeem for gift cards and so A good rule of thumb is Chase gift cards are at least
or are usually one cent per Point while an Amex gift card is usually less than one cent per point
however Wild Card Chase is actually the biggest offender when it comes to financing fossil fuels
so it is probably morally like one of the worst things to uh be you know supporting so yeah if
you even consider that you know if you if you'd like to consider that into your calculations
so at the end of it all after doing all my calculations I put groceries on Amex I put
travel on Chase I split restaurants between Chase and Amex and I do online shopping on Bank of
America to optimize my cash back for credit cards okay so number two in terms of Chrome extensions
for cashbacks there's actually quite a few of them but the two that I use in conjunction with
each other are Ebates Rakuten as well as Honey by PayPal in case you're wondering how I think they
work is that the brands pay them to actually give you some of this cash back and I'm pretty sure
they're just selling your data or something like that but everyone's selling your data
your data why do I use Ebates and honey in conjunction that's because I use them for
different things also I seriously am not sponsored by any of these I this is genuinely my system but
I will link my referral codes below so how Ebates work is works is it's pure cashback meaning when
you download the Chrome extension anytime you visit a site that's a partner's life to Ebates
they will say like X percentage cashback so for example in terms of travel you can often get
like one two three percent cash back which four thousand dollar purchases is huge or it like is
amazing um and then for a lot of online shopping it's like three to ten percent cash back which is
pretty amazing on a quarterly basis they will send you either cash which goes straight to your PayPal
account or if you choose they can also send it as Amex membership points and they send that straight
to your Amex account and again they do that on a quarterly basis that's how you get the cash back
so to a lot of people they think honey is the same thing as Ebates because they're
both cashback Chrome extensions but I actually use honey a little bit differently so the three
things that I use honey for in conjunction with ebays is one honey tries all of the promo codes
that they can scrape off the internet for you so they'll just run through like 30 promo codes
if they can find it and then give you the best deal instead of manually Googling like coupon
for Target or whatever it'll just try all the codes that I can possibly find and then give
you the best deal for Relevant um promo codes that are not expired it's awesome the second thing is
some websites that don't have an Ebates cashback partnership will have a honey cashback partnership
so in this case you get honey gold points I think is what they call them and then whenever
like those are valid which is like within like a week or so or like some return window you can
then redeem those for gift cards from a variety of places and then finally the third reason
uh I use honey is because every once in a while on the item level as opposed to the store level
they'll have coupons so for example when I bought a like air filter for the apartment
um there was a 50 like cash back for buying that item which you couldn't find a coupon that good
on any other site but for some reason honey has coupons for specific items sometimes and those
can be really useful so that's why I use honey and cashback sorry honey and Ebates together
okay so now to talk about travel programs I feel like there's probably the most content on
there around how to maximize travel programs and how to travel hack and stuff like that
um but I'm going to talk about two things so the first is travel programs that exist for
like big travel Brands like United or Marriott or things like that and then I'm also going to talk
about hotels.com so when it comes to Airlines the general rule of thumb is that you should
just if you can use the same like Airline and always get rewards there so that you compound
your points there so that you get more benefits now this is actually the thing that I'm bad like
the worst at in terms of cashback and I'm going to go learn this and then maybe make a video about it
the reason why I'm bad at it is because I often go for the cheapest one and the cheapest one is often
different airlines depending on what flight you're optimizing for so that's why I have not actually
done this very well but um I'm going to do it more now again by choosing one to two airlines that I
fly fairly frequently and that I actually like and make sure that those airlines are relevant for the
flights you take so for example if you only fly in the southwest of America then Southwest might be
a great Airline if you fly only in the US and you really like JetBlue JetBlue might be the
best option versus if you fly US and Canada all the time then you probably want like an airline
that does that so those are some things that I have to tell myself to consider as I figure out
travel rewards um when it comes to hotels.com so hotels.com has a built-in program where for every
10 nights you stay you get one night free and that one night can cost up to the average of the cost
of those 10 nights did that make sense anyway so if you think about it a little bit the math is
approximately that you get 10 off which is amazing in addition Ebates often has hotels.com rewards
for like one to two to maybe three percent cash back and if you're spending like a fair amount
of travel which because you don't travel is really expensive then combined you can actually have huge
savings the other reason why I like hotels.com as opposed to having like a Hilton Rewards program
or Merit Rewards program is that you can try different hotels in different locations as opposed
to having to find the same brand every time and finally one random Wild Card cashback app that's
like absolutely mind-blowing again I'm literally not sponsored on any of these I wish I was
um it is called seated so seated is a restaurant's cashback but it's only valid in certain cities and
that is New York Dallas Boston Atlanta Chicago Philadelphia but what's amazing about seated is
you're not just getting like one to five percent cash back you can get up to like 30 plus percent
cash back on a meal which means if you spend 100 on a meal you can get thirty dollars back or if
you're you're you and your friends spend 100 on a meal you could get 30 back because you are 30
back because you have seated um so you know if you're living in one of those cities you
can choose unseated from a ton of restaurants for pickup delivery dine in or walk-in like
it's amazing and you can get a ton of cash back this way I know a lot of people who get dinners
for their work and they use seeded and they pay for all of their vacations that way okay so now
to walk through two examples to really nail and hold why this is actually a great Money Saver
um okay let's say you're online shopping you want to buy something for a hundred dollars well first
I would go to honey and I would say like test all promo codes and then it runs through them
usually the lowest promo code that you'll get is like 10 off so let's say we get 10 off and
then Ebates let's say has a five percent cash back which they sometimes do for online shopping stores
and then because I pay with my Bank of America card which has three percent cash back on online
shopping purchases as a result if you do that math out um I would actually save 18 or 18 on
100 order which is pretty amazing especially if you do this like all the time which I did
okay example number two you are booking a hotel and let's say in total the cost is five hundred
dollars while let's say you book this through hotels.com which is effectively a 10 discount
and then Ebates often has like a one percent cashback on hotels.com so let's say there's a
one percent cash back and remember with Chase you get 3x on travel so you get 1500 points which each
can be redeemed for gift cards um at around one cent per point if you do all of this math out it
actually comes out to four hundred and thirty dollars meaning you're saving about 14 which
is seventy dollars on a five hundred dollar hotel stay AKA from these two examples you can see that
you actually can save a ton of money using this whole system that um I've figured out over time
and I I use all the time and I like it and I'm sharing okay so I will leave my referral codes
below to all of these things should you want to check them out they probably do sell your data
you can decide to totally not use them but if you want to use them I do think you'll actually save
a ton of money this way especially over time I save thousands every single year so check
it out if you want to and let me know if you have more tips because I love optimizing these systems