This is the time of year that everyone in the US files their taxes and either owe money or get a refund. Unless of course they perfectly set up their withholding for the year and ended up with a nice $0 at the bottom of their tax return. If your final result is a tax refund, that […]
Piecing Together The Honeymoon: New Zealand and Fiji Hotels with Points
This year is shaping up to break all of our travel records up to this point. Miles flown, nights spent away from home, and even countries visited will all have new personal bests if everything goes according to plan and a good chunk of that is thanks to our honeymoon. The destination is Fiji and […]
Everyone Knows You Don’t HAVE to Manufacture Spend… Right?
I recently attended a Travel Hacking meetup in the Seattle area and met a lot of interesting people who share the common interest of traveling with miles and points, mostly earned from credit cards. After brief introductions, it didn’t take long before the discussion on various manufactured spend (MS) techniques got started, and that’s honestly the […]
Mapping Out Our Financial Rube Goldberg Machine
We recently returned from our all-inclusive trip to Cancun that only cost us a couple hundred dollars thanks to credit card rewards. I was going to write up a review of the Hyatt Zilara we stayed at, but PDX Deals Guy recently did just that and I don’t have much to add. It was an […]
The Power of Travel Flexibilty: Our Cancun Trip Gets More Complicated
Not too long ago, I discussed an awesome Cancun trip that Becky and I booked for very little money out of pocket. In fact, the title of the post was How We Booked 4 All-Inclusive Nights in Cancun for $160. A few months after booking that trip, we got an email from Southwest informing us that […]
One of Life’s Little Inefficiencies: Travel
Becky and I love to travel and are frequently looking forward to the next big trip where we can see and experience new and exciting things. Ever since we starting travel hacking with credit cards and promotions, the amount of travel we’ve been able to do each year has continued to increase (and the costs […]
Reviewing Our 2015 Expenses
Tracking what you are spending money on is probably the most important thing you can do to improve your finances if you aren’t doing it already. I started tracking pretty much every dollar we spent back in 2014 and it’s been eye-opening to say the least. Our current spending strategy is not based on specific budgets for […]
Tracking Our Miles and Points Redemption Stats
If you didn’t know yet, I’m big on statistics and tracking the ins and outs of whatever I’m involved in. Keeping track of the costs and benefits of just about anything makes it 100 times easier to make decisions such as whether or not you should keep doing that thing in the future. The first major […]
Your Credit Score Might Not Be As High As You Think
Very recently a combination of factors lined up to make refinancing our mortgage a smart financial decision for us. A year-end bonus and our house appreciating meant it was time to look into dropping Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI), as discussed here, plus interest rates are about half a percent lower than when we got the […]
The Math Behind Paying Down a Mortgage with PMI
I’ve mentioned a few times that we bought our house with only 10% down and are currently paying Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI) on a monthly basis. The PMI was necessary to get the loan because we didn’t have the standard 20% down payment required to get a traditional, non-PMI insured, mortgage loan. One of our major […]