If you enjoy to travel, and you'd like to travel for free or a heck of a lot less money, well, you're going to want to stay tuned for this episode. This episode today is going to be the first episode in a three part series in which I am unveiling all of my travel hacking tips. This has been very much requested, and, well, I'm here to please, so here you go.

Stay tuned. I'm Nicole Bagley, a zoological animal trainer turned pet and family photographer. Back in 2010, I embarked on my own adventure in photography, transforming a bootstrapping startup into a thriving six figure business by 2012. Since then, my mission has been to empower photographers like you, sharing the knowledge and strategies that have helped me help thousands of photographers build their own profitable businesses. I believe that achieving two to $3,000 sales is your fastest route to six figure businesses.

That any technically proficient photographer can consistently hit four figure sales. And no matter if you want photography to be your full time passion or a part time pursuit, profitability is possible. If you're a portrait photographer aspiring to craft a business that aligns perfectly with the life you envision, then you're in exactly the right place. With over 350,000 downloads. Welcome to the Freedom Focus Photography podcast. Hey, everybody, Nicole Bagley here from the Freedom Focus Photography podcast.

Today's episode is a special one and a really, really fun one. Today we are going to dive into my tips and tricks for travel hacking. This has been requested so many times from so many of my students. Even though it's not directly photography related, it is 100% freedom related. And it is definitely a way that our photography business can help us really travel more for free if this is something that you'd like to do.

So let's start off first by, like, just talking about what is travel hacking? Travel hacking is really taking our credit cards and utilizing them responsibly, of course. And then the rewards that we earn utilizing them, maximizing those points in order to travel really inexpensively or even for free, whether you want to do just normal kind of basic accommodations and. And fly economy to make your miles go further, or if you wanna go all in and do some lux travel, some business class, some high end hotels for very little money, but just a little bit of awards and reward miles.

So that's what we're gonna be diving in here today. Now, I will say that there are a lot more reward mile opportunities for people. Based in the US, we have by far the most generous credit card rewards programs. However, other countries do still have some of these but most of the details of the banks and the credit cards that I like and recommend are going to be based more for us clients.

But if you are outside of the US, then I do recommend you still listen to this and maybe look and see if some of these are available to you. Because kind of the overview of what we're going to be doing here today might still be very applicable to you. You just are going to have different banks, different offers, and a couple a little bit different in the details of how you use this.

So let's start off. What is that travel hacking? Like I said, it's just utilizing the points that we're earning for buying things that we're going to buy anyway on credit cards, whether for personal or for business, and turning them into free or discounted travel. During this three part episode or this three episode series, we're going to be talking about really today, about introduction to it. What is it?

How to choose the right credit cards, the redemptions, these different travel point ecosystems, annual fees, and, you know, will it hurt your credit score? All those different things? We're diving into that today. And then episode two, we're going to come back and we're going to talk about how to earn points. And our last episode, we'll be redeeming the points. So we're going to dive into those as we go.

So let's get started. First of all, what is possible with this travel hacking? And really, it can be anything you want it to be, whether you want to fly business class round trip to Europe for 120,000 points, or if you want to fly economy round trip for 40,000 points and go three times for that same amount of points. So really it totally depends on what you want to do with your points, whether you want to go kind of more points for more luxurious travel experiences or less points for just a little bit more basic, but you just want to get more, more out of it or more trips out of it.

Same thing with hotels. We can also use our credit card points for travel and hotels from like a $6,000 hotel stay for 100,000 credit card points, or for that 100,000 credit card points, you might be able to stay like eight nights, you know, at basic hotels when you're just like needing a hotel for a horse show or a dog show or some sort of just kind of weekend travel type thing.

So again, so many different options. What I do want to talk about here, though, is really travel related. So there are other things that you can use for your credit cards because there are different kind of rewards cards, and not all of them are created equal. So some things that you can get rewards for with reward cards, you might see cash back cards or travel cards for hotels, travel cards for airlines, travel cards that are just general kind of travel cards.

There are just so many different kinds. There's ones that, you know, an Amazon card, there's a Costco card, there's cards that earn specific things back. Everything under the sun, it seems. What I want to focus on today are those cards that, are you going, that you're going to redeem your points for travel? Now we'll kind of get into this. Hold on. This is why I created this outline, because I'm like, my brain's jumping to all these things I want to tell you, and it would get very impossible to follow along.

So actually I'm going to come back to that. I'm going to stick with my outline and I'm not going to go off on any tangents. So back to the outline. Why are credit cards better than debit cards? How many of you guys out there use your debit card either for personal transactions or business transactions more often than credit cards? Question for you is why? Why do you do that?

Oftentimes people do it because they want the money to come out of their account right away, which I totally get. It's very important if you guys are going to start to play this credit card travel hacking game that you do so responsibly because you do not want to be spending a whole bunch of money on your credit cards and not paying them off every month because any awards you're earning are going to be negated by the high interest fees that you're going to be paying for any balances that you're carrying forward.

So want to make sure that you're using them responsibly. But I definitely recommend using credit cards over debit cards because they're more secure. Number one, you know, credit cards, if it gets hacked or stolen and people buy a car on it or run up all sorts of fraudulent charges, you're not liable. The credit card company takes them off your bill, you don't have to pay. You don't have to think about it.

Worst case scenario, you get a new credit card and you have to update some billing. A little bit of a pain in the butt, but it's really not a huge deal. Whereas if somebody breaks in and steals your debit card information and then they are utilizing your debit card for purchases, but that money is coming out of your actual bank account. Yes, the bank likely will still be able to recover that money for you.

But in the meantime, maybe, you know, they charge $5,000 out of your checking account and you needed that to run your business or to pay your mortgage or things like that. So for that reason alone, I really do not like using debit cards, period. Ever done anywhere? Um, I just. I just really dislike using them. If I do need to do something that will not take a credit card, I can do like an ACH transfer, but I really just do not like to have to, you know, be putting my debit card information out there on the Internet.

And then the second reason why I think credit cards are much better than debit cards is credit cards can earn you all sorts of things in return, which is what we're going to talk about. So what are the right types of rewards? I kind of see a lot of people in two camps. There's either the cashback camp or the travel points camp. And then of course, there's kind of an outline camp that are people that are like Costco and Amazon points and those kinds of things.

Generally, I'm going to lump those in with the cash back points because you're only getting a certain fixed amount back per spend on those redemptions. But another reason that I love this business travel or the travel piece of these rewards is that especially in a business card, let's say you have your business credit card and it's a business credit card, but it's a cash back credit card that gives you 2% cashback on everything you spend in your business.

Sounds great, except everything you spend in your business is a tax deduction that cash back is now coming back kind of as profit that you're going to have to pay taxes on. So it's not really as much cashback as you think because that cash back is taxable either directly or really just indirectly in a business where it is coming back on your profit loss statement, whereas your credit card reward redemptions are not taxable at this time.

So let's say, for instance, you spend $10,000 on your business credit card and you get, for the sake of ease, let's say 1% back. So you're going to get $10,000, you're going to get $100 back, right? Hold on. Let me do that math. All right. I checked my math. Yes. Confirm. So if you spent $10,000 on your credit card and it was a 1% cashback card, you would get dollar 100 statement credit back.

Great. Awesome. Super. That's usually also the same as if you were turning in for gift cards or things like that. But if you're getting the actual cash cash, then that's going to become a credit on that business card. And so that's going to be reflected in your profit loss. So you're going to end up having to pay maybe $30 of that in taxes to the government. Whereas if you were using it for travel points, that $10,000 of spend would give you 10,000 points, which would allow you to book $100 worth of travel in the portal, which would be free, no taxes, it doesn't come off your profit loss.

Um, or you could also transfer that to a travel partner, and with that 10,000 miles, um, you know, 10,000 points on american, I can usually book a one way to Pittsburgh or a one way domestic, if I time it right. Um, ticket, that might be 200, $300 even, because a round trip flight from Charlotte to Pittsburgh is usually dollar 600 on american, which is highway robbery and insane.

So, um, do you guys see the difference there where if you're doing cashback, you're actually getting less cash back, especially on a business side, because it's going to show up on your profit loss and you have to pay taxes on that money. So even if you were getting one to one travel, or you could use it for like gift cards, you know, if you wanted to get a restaurant gift card or something like that.

If you're not into traveling, that's another way that you can utilize that, but that would not be taxable. But you can get outsized redemptions for booking with the airlines directly with those credits. So does that make sense? Okay, we're going to keep moving on. So the point of that whole little rant was that cashback, not my favorite, because you can get a lot more value out of the points in using them correctly, which we will show you how in this podcast series.

All right, so there are also two kinds of credit cards. We can have personal credit cards and we can have business credit cards. Of course, very important little just business. Important note here is that you need to keep your business expenses and your personal expenses separate. Highly recommend if you're running a photography business, do you have a separate business credit card? You can have several separate business credit cards if you like, but you should not be coming expenses or charges on the same credit card for personal stuff and business stuff.

Because should the state Department of Revenue or the IR's ever come knocking for an audit and you have mixed personal and business expenses on a credit card. Well, then they're going to start looking at all your personal accounts, everything else, because you're not keeping those expenses separate. So save yourself a lot of headache, a lot of time, and make sure you keep those separate, you know, starting now.

So make sure you have a separate business credit card, a separate business checking, separate business savings, and then separate personal items for those. So those money pieces, like those pots of money, stay completely separate. Really, really important. Now, there are some times where maybe you have to put a business expense on a personal card that is okay, and you can reimburse yourself, but I don't recommend ever putting personal expenses on your business card because it's just a little bit harder to reconcile that way should you ever get audited.

So, for instance, if I ever have to put, well, let's just say because I'm going to maximize these points that I'm earning. So I have an american, an american airlines credit card that earns, I think it's 5 miles per dollar spent. And I buy a lot of american airline tickets, but it's a personal card. So when I buy an airline ticket that's for work, I will use that personal card and I will reimburse myself with a check from my business to pay that card, putting the receipt into my business.

So it would just be like if you were an employee for a company and you had to book a flight or you had to have some sort of expense and the company reimburses you. So that is completely legal. Just make sure you have receipts. Make sure you keep in your memo what it was for. And again, keeping those receipts, it's really, really important. So you can do that.

But again, best practice keeping things totally separate. And remember not to go the other way around. So don't just like, you know, you're out shopping, you're like, I see this shirt, I want to get it. Let me just put it on my business card. No, no, no. Make sure you keep that on your personal card. Okay. So keeping going on this little thread here, there are other types of, we're talking about the different types of credit cards, right?

So we have these different types of reward cards, cashback versus travel versus point for specific things like Amazon, we have our personal and our business. And then the other way that I just kind of want to chunk up these cards is that we have kind of individual brand cards. So these are your things, like your Delta Airlines card, your American Airlines card, your United Airlines card, marriott card, Hilton Card, IHG card, like your specific Pacific, excuse me, specific brand cards and then you have what are called the transferable, I call them ecosystem cards because you're going to earn chase points or Amex points for capital one points or city points.

And then those points can either be used by going to their portal or you can transfer those points to various transfer partners. Generally being able to transfer those points to other transfer partners are going to be where you find those sweet spot redemptions, especially if you're going to be looking to fly in the front of the plane on long haul flights. That is where the magic happens is those transferable points, because you might have experienced this.

Say you're a regular American or Delta Flyer. You're like, okay, I want to go to Europe. And you go to their website and you search in, you know, your city to Paris and you see the redemptions and you're like, oh my gosh, it's 200,000 miles for a round trip economy ticket or 600,000 miles for a round trip business class ticket. And you're thinking, wait, do I have to spend $200,000 on my credit card to get this, you know, economy ticket or $600,000 on my credit card to get this business class ticket?

No, those are rarely good redemptions. This is where when you earn points on cards like Chase or American Express or Capital one, and then you can transfer them to the airlines or to their portal. Gives you so much more flexibility. Now, we're not going to dive into how to actually redeem the miles yet. That's going to be on episode three. I just wanted to kind of give you right here just an overview of these different types of credit cards that are available to us.

So remember the difference, what the reward is. So cashback versus points and then personal versus business, and then like the specific brands versus a transferable kind of point currency. Okay, so let's keep cruising. The first half of that is choosing that right credit card, and then the second half of that is choosing the right redemptions. Like I said, episode three, we're going to dive deep into all of this.

But for an overview is there are three ways. If you have a credit card that you're earning points, so say you have an American Express card that earns membership rewards points. You can go into the American Express membership rewards portal and book hotel rooms and airline tickets and redeem them there. So they would be redeemed at one penny per point. So if you were booking $1,000 ticket, it would be a hundred thousand points that you would need to book that thousand dollar ticket.

The second way that we can redeem those points is we can transfer those points to an airline to book directly. So that is, say you have, again, those hundred thousand dollar or, sorry, 100,000 American Express membership rewards points and you want to transfer them to Delta to book a flight on Delta. You can also do that. And then, of course, you can book directly by going to the Delta website and using your actual delta miles that you earned in another way to book a flight as well.

So those are our three main ways of making these redemptions. Like I said, episode three, we're going to dive in much deeper. But the one thing that I want you to start to look into is trying to figure out, like, all right, where do I even get started? Because this is kind of the main question that people have, is they just get a little bit overwhelmed, rightfully so, of like, how the heck do I even get started with all of this?

You know, where, where do I go? So what I would recommend that you do is that you start to list your travel goals. So where do you want to go? Like, is there a certain vacation that you're thinking about? Are there certain parts of the world that you like to go to regularly? Are there certain airlines that you like to fly on most often? So if you start to think about that, then you can start to see, all right, is that airline part of any of these credit card ecosystems, is what I like to call them.

We have four main credit card ecosystems to choose from. That is chase, American Express, Capital one, and Citibank. All four of those banks have various travel credit cards that will earn points of whatever their points are called. You can book in their travel portal, or you can transfer to different airlines or hotels. So what I recommend you doing is looking up Google Chase Travel partners, their ultimate reward.

So chase, ultimate reward, travel partners, American Express membership reward, travel partners, Capital one venture travel partners or Citibank credit card travel partners. If you start to, I think they're thank you points. I don't do the city ecosystem, but yeah, they're city thank you points travel partners. So you can look that up and kind of see the list of what airlines they travel to or they transfer to, and then you can start to, you know, kind of figure out which ecosystem you might want to start playing in again.

We're going to dig into this more in episode two. This first episode here is just to kind of give you a 30,000 foot view of all this stuff and what's going on. So anyway, we have those four main ones, but let's jump into a couple reasons. That people might think that they're not going to do credit card hacking or they're just like, oh, I don't know, it sounds great, but, you know, I'm worried about that.

It's going to hurt my credit score. Now let's talk about that. I have approximately 20 credit cards, maybe, maybe 25 between my personal and business cards, and my credit score is over 800. So it will not hurt your credit score. The thing that will hurt your credit score is if you carry balances you don't pay off or you're late with payments on credit cards or any other payments, you know, for mortgages or other loans and things like that.

So as long as you use credit cards responsibly, they will not hurt your credit score. Now, there might be a slight dip, like we're talking 20 points maybe at the most, when you open a new credit card. So, you know, that is normal. And then it goes right back up pretty darn quickly. So I wouldn't be concerned about that. The one thing to keep in mind, though, is if you are going to be buying a car or you're applying for a new mortgage or you're refinancing your mortgage, you don't want to be opening a credit card, you know, right before you're starting that process, because that is the only time that, you know, the, the banks, when they're starting to look at your history, your credit history for one of those bigger installment loans, and they see you just open a credit card, they might be like, oh, why did they just open a credit cardinal?

And it might ding you a little bit. So if you're getting ready for some sort of other loan that you're applying for and just hold off, make a plan, and then you can apply for your credit card after your mortgage or your car loan or whatever other loan that you needed to get is in place. Okay, so new credit card will not harm your credit score as long as you use so responsibly.

The other question that I get a lot is, man, I just don't want to pay any annual fees. I get that a lot of these credit cards, these travel cards have annual fees. Some of them can be quite high. And people look at them and they're like, well, why would I do that? Why would I pay for that? The key comes down to making sure you are going to get more than that, that fee, more value than that out of your card, like pretty much every year.

And the way you can do that is each of these cards has a lot of fantastic benefits that could be things like insurance. My travel credit cards have saved me and paid for themselves several times over. Whenever I have anything come up with various trips that then I can turn into travel insurance. For instance, just in the past, really, year and a half, I was supposed to go to my mastermind meeting this past February, and my son was having surgery that Tuesday.

So I shifted everything. I was going to leave after surgery on Tuesday and go out there and stay for a couple days and come right home. And after surgery, that's when we found out there was an infection in the bone. That's why it wasn't healing. And they wanted to admit him into the children's hospital for a couple of days to do iv antibiotics to get started on getting that bone infection under control.

So I had to cancel my trip. And at that point, nothing was refundable because it was past the refund period for any hotels. And, you know, my airline I could get a credit for. But, you know, I had quite a few hotel expenses that were not refundable. So I was able to turn that into my credit card, travel insurance, because it was a trip cancellation issue. It was a covered reason.

Someone in my family was hospitalized and sick of. I couldn't go. And so they refunded me. The $500 that I had to pay actually ended up being like 600 because there were two different hotels that were non refundable. $600 refunded right back to me, no problem. Pretty darn easy. And so that worked out really well. Another time that I utilized, that was when I was coming home from Barcelona.

I was about to board my flight home, and they canceled it last minute, and they were going to rebook me the next morning on a flight from Barcelona to Heathrow to Charlotte with a 40 minutes connection in Heathrow. Now, I don't know how much you guys have traveled through Heathrow, but a 40 minutes connection in Heathrow is never going to happen, especially for an international flight in which you have to change terminals and go through security again.

So, yeah, I was like, no, no, no, that's not going to work. They were going to give me a hotel in Barcelona, but I instead could tell the airline, you know, but if they did that, there was no way I was going to make that flight from Heathrow to Charlotte. So instead, I asked them, you know, hey, just get me to London tonight and I'll fly home on that London Charlotte plane tomorrow morning, but I need to get to London tonight.

And then I asked them, you know, can I get a hotel in London? And they said, well, we can't give you a hotel in London, but you can stop and check with, you know, the american personnel in London, and they could potentially give you a hotel. Why didn't I want to deal with all that? Like, finding the people and explaining and trying to get a hotel seemed like a monumental pain in the butt.

So instead, I just said, okay, great, book me on the flight, went onto my phone, booked myself a hotel room at the hotel that's in terminal three in the international terminal of Heathrow. It was like $500 for the night, but I didn't care because I get $700 a night for trip delay insurance. So since my trip was delayed, the airline canceled my flight. I was able to get home, turn that into my travel insurance, and get refunded that.

So having that travel insurance, if you travel for any amount of time, for personal or business, is a lifesaver and will pay for itself over and over again. And you know that travel insurance is on two chase cards have fantastic benefits at this point in time. This is mid 2024. Credit cards are always changing their benefits, but they've been pretty much a staple, and that is the Inc.

Business preferred and also the Sapphire preferred are two kind of staple chase cards. They're dollar 95 annual fee for the year. And really, that insurance benefit is worth every penny of that. It also includes a primary car rental insurance benefit, so I don't have to get any of the insurances when I rent rental cars for business or personal. And so again, $95 a year, heck, yes, I'll do that.

Plus, it has all these other benefits. And, you know, I think it has at this point, like a dollar 50 United travel bank purchase. On one of them, you get bonus points for earning on spending on certain categories. They're fantastic cards. And the annual fee is not high. Now, like I said, there are cards that have a much higher annual fee. The American Express Centurion. No, not Centurion card.

That's an invite only. The American Express platinum right now, I think is like almost $700, which you look at that and you're like, oh, my gosh, Nicole, no way. But if you look at the benefits and you ask yourself, all right, of these benefits, what do you think? What do I think? I'll actually use? Then you can do the math and you can see, like, oh, okay, this card will actually cost me about $250.

Are the other benefits that I get? Is the lounge access that I get worth it? For this card only, you can then decide some of them, like the Capital one venture card, Venture X actually, card is what it is. The Capital one Venture X. That card currently is $395 a year, but it includes a $300 travel credit. So if you book in their travel portal $300, you get that completely refunded.

So essentially the annual fee is really $95 if you're going to book $300 worth of hotels, car rentals, plane tickets, something at some point during the year. So anyway, that's another way to kind of look at those annual fees, some other things that you might get with those annual fees. Like I said, lounge access once you start traveling and going to the lounge. You guys, I'm so spoiled and I'm very bougie now.

And I'm sorry, not sorry, but there, you know, I am at this point, like back myself in the corner that I can't not have some nice credit cards to give me lounge access because that's just a non negotiable for me anymore. But some other things that they have too is some might have, you know, hotel certificates. Like my one Marriott card gives me 80,080 thousand point point room certificate that I can use once a year that can be worth, you know, I just used one for London for $800 hotel night for my certificate on a card that cost me, I don't know, dollar 400 a year.

But then there's other benefits that are much more that are helpful for me too. So I was making money with that cardinal. I realize this is like girl math slash travel hacking math. But really what you need to do is once a year, I actually do it twice a year is I will sit down and look at the credit cards that I have and what the annual fee is and what the benefits are, and I just kind of do my own math of like, all right, what am I actually going to be using that I would be using anyway?

Like, I don't want to count it as, you know, um, benefits that I would use, but stuff that I wouldn't actually use. So really if you sit down, look at that credit card, look at those cardholder benefits, and you're like, oh yeah, I'm definitely using that. I would definitely be using that. This one, maybe I use it, maybe I don't like, okay, maybe you don't put that into like how worth it is, that annual fee.

But that's how I start to look at it and see which cards are worth the annual fee and which aren't. And if they aren't, then I'll cancel them and look for something else that fits a little bit better. So anyway, those are just some of the different things that, that you get with these different annual fees, some of them, like a lot of the chase cards and also the American Express cards have actually, capital one does now, too, have special offers.

So they might have, you know, if you purchase, you know, something at Butcherbox, you get $50 back. Or if you're going to a Marriott and you spend $250, you get $50 back. So again, I don't count those as like definite money. I'm for sure getting back because it doesn't really matter. Like if you weren't going to purchase it, then that's not money you're saving. But if it's stuff that you were going to purchase anyway, it is a nice little bonus that helps pay for those annual fees as well.

So anyway, long story short, just you got to look at the card, look at what the options are, what the benefits are, and just kind of do your own math to figure out what's worthwhile for you. Okay, so let's wrap up this episode one just to give you guys a quick recap. We talked about why I prefer credit cards over debit cards. We talked about the different types of cards from cashback versus travel, business versus personal, the branded credit cards versus like the general travel ecosystem, transferable points cards.

We talked about those four different points ecosystem. So chase cards, Amex cards, capital one and Citi cards, we talked about annual fees. We talked about credit scores. So your homework now is to sit down and just kind of dream for a minute, list down what your travel goals are, maybe write down what airlines you fly on most often, talk about, or look up the credit card ecosystem, the transferable points for those four cards, Chase, Amex, City and Capital one, and see which airlines and hotels are on there that you're interested in.

So that might kind of give you an idea of where to start when we start talking about earning points next week. And then also, yeah, you can look for hotels. All right, so I hope that you guys enjoyed this first episode to kind of give you, again, 30,000 foot view, pun not intended, since this is a travel card episode. But hopefully that gives you a little bit of an overview of where we're going with this.

Next week, I'm coming back. We're going to dive into earning points. So how you earn points on your cards and really kind of start to dig into what cards you might want to utilize. And then we're also going to come back in two weeks for redeeming points. So now that you've earned points, how the heck do you redeem them for the best value. So we will see you in the next couple of weeks.

Don't forget that we have a whole bunch of travel [email protected]. travel.