👋 Hi Reader,

Happy Friday! Here's a sneak peek of today's newsletter:

• 👨🏻‍💻 130+ things I use for life & work
• 💳 New $2,000 welcome bonus
• 👑 Latest trends with loyalty programs
• 📧 New AI search for email
• 💰 Free $40 shopping portal bonus
• 👾 SSN data leaked on >2B people

I really hope you enjoy reading and please forward this to someone who might enjoy it too! And if that's you, make sure to subscribe here :)

Thanks in advance!

-Chris

👨🏻‍💻 My Favorite Stuff I Use

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Today, I want to share 100+ of the must-have products and services in my life. They include my favorite tech, travel products, financial tools, health and fitness gear, smart home gadgets, kitchen tools, and essentials for kids, and more. I also wrote everything up as a blog post for those that would prefer to read over watching/listening.

🛫 Travel, Points & Miles

💸 Best Ever Welcome Offer on Capital One Biz Card

The Capital One Spark Cash Plus has an exciting welcome offer of $2,000 after a $30k spend in 3 months. Since it also earns 2% cash back on everything, you'd be earning a total of $2,600 on your first $30k, which is an effective 8.67% cash back!

Even better, if you have a Capital One card that earns miles, you’ll also be able to convert all your Spark Cash Plus earnings into miles and maximize your rewards by transferring to airlines. If you don't have one, or you're more interested in a consumer card, the Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card has a limited time offer of 75k miles + a $250 travel credit.

👑 Loyalty Program Trends in August 2024

​This Frequent Miler article covers the latest trends in loyalty programs for airlines, hotels, and credit card rewards. They’ve done a great job highlighting both the positive and negative changes, offering valuable insights into how these programs are evolving and what we can expect going forward.

🛫 Global Entry Fee Hike: What You Need to Know

I’m a big fan of Global Entry and it probably saved us at least 30 minutes on Wednesday at SFO. However, the fee is increasing from $100 to $120 on 10/1/24. But there’s good news! First, kids under 18 will get Global Entry for free if their parents have it, so I’d hold off adding them till October. Second, many major credit card issuers are adjusting their benefits to cover the higher fee, so be sure to check if your card will cover the new fee.

🤑 Latest Deals

💳 Best Card-Linked Offers

Check out these card-linked offers that I found recently, with expiration dates in parentheses.

Amex

• French Bee: $100 off $750+ (10/1/24)
• Icelandair: $225 off $1,500+ (11/5/24)
• Dell: 10% back up to $1,000 (12/15/24)

Another Popular Bank*

• Southwest Airlines: 10% back up to $40 on $50+ (9/6/24)
• Shake Shack: 15% back up to $30 (8/21/24)
• RadPowerBikes: 7% back up to $100 (8/22/24)
• Plunge: 5% back up to $295 (9/25/24, stacks with $150 off)
• Tonal: $250 back (9/14/24)

Note: Not every cardmember might see these offers but if you want to automate them, try Cardpointers Pro with 30% off here!

*For compliance reasons, we can’t include names of all banks.

🛒 RebatesMe: Free $40 New Customer Bonus

The RebatesMe shopping portal, which is very similar to Rakuten, is offering a new member bonus of $40 cash back when you sign up through a referral link. Mine referral offer was only for a free $5, but I found this one from FrequentMiler that is offering $40 in cash back after earning earn $10 cash back within a year of joining. I wouldn't go out of my way to buy something I don't really need for $40, but I might use their browser extension for a few months until I have a purchase that'd earn me the $10 necessary to get the bonus.

🥗 $25 off Bryan Johnson's Project Blueprint

In my interview with Bryan Johnson (Ep #165), he talked about his goal to create the most nutritious program in history (Project Blueprint). He publishes it all for free here, but he also had a private beta group to buy some everything online. I was intrigued and even though the beta wasn't free, I decided to try out the protocol and have started pretty much every day since mid-February with their Nutty Pudding, Blueberry Nut Mix and Longevity Mix. I've really enjoyed it, but of course do your own research and if you are interested in trying out Blueprint, I got this link yesterday that you can use for $25 off your first purchase.

📺 Free HBO Max with DashPass

DoorDash is giving annual DashPass members (who pay $96) a complimentary HBO Max subscription with ads, valued at $99.99. You can also upgrade to ad-free HBO Max for just $10.99 per month. Note that this offer isn’t available if you’re using the free (and recently extended) DashPass benefit through these popular credit cards.

🕵️ Great Finds

🔒 Massive Data Breach Affecting 2.7B People

A massive data breach recently exposed 2.7 billion records, including names, social security numbers, and addresses. The hack appears to have originated from National Public Data, a company that collects and sells personal data for background checks, criminal records etc.

As for what to do about it, I don't personally think any of the paid credit monitoring services are worth it, but I am doing three things:

1. My credit is frozen at all three major bureaus (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion), which is free to do. Just remember to unfreeze before applying for any credit cards.
2. At least once a year I review my credit reports from the same three bureaus for free at annualcreditreport.com.
3. In an effort to make more of my personal information (address, phone #, email addresses, relatives, etc.) isn't accessible on the web, I got a subscription to DeleteMe for my whole family (including both sets of our parents). You can get 20% off here.

And of course, please use a two-factor authentication, a password manager, and be cautious of phishing attempts on all platforms!

📧 AI Search for Email

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I've been excited about using AI to index and search my personal info, but I finally got to test it out on my email and it's so amazing. I did it with Superhuman's new Ask AI, which let's you query your email with questions like “when's my flight to NY" or "what do I need to do before my daughter's school starts?" It was such a magical experience and further reinforces why I love the product.

Now, just to be thorough, I went and tried to use Google's version of this feature, which took me a while to enable and required Gemini Advanced for $20/mo. While it was a similar feature, it was so much slower, less accurate and I never could figure out how to add it to my Google workspace account.

So I'm going to continue using Superhuman, which has saved me so much time managing my email. If you want to check it out, you can try it free for a month here and let me know what you think!

💰 Should You Max Out Your 401(k)?

I love a good contrarian take and while most conventional wisdom suggest that contributing to your 401(k) is a great deal, maxing out contributions might not always be the best strategy. I touched on this a little in episode #186 but Nick Maggiulli dives deep into this topic in this recent article to help you make a more informed decision.

💬 Parting Thoughts

As always, thanks so much for reading - I hope you enjoyed it!

Please feel free to reply to this email with any thoughts, feedback or even if you just want to say hi! :)

Chris