If you want to fly in business class or even fly in coach but take your whole family,

if you want to stay at a luxury hotel or even stay at a mid-level hotel but stay longer,

these trips could be very expensive, but they're made cheaper through the use of points.

But most of us are inefficient at accumulating point balances and inefficient at knowing

how to redeem those points. And to help us with that

is Chris Hutchins, the absolute master of deals. He is the host of All the Hacks, a podcast with

over a million listeners that helps you accumulate and spend miles and credit card points in

addition to overall helping you optimize and upgrade your travel, money, and life. He's the founder

of Grove, which was acquired by Wealthfront, and Milk, which was acquired by Google, and he

led new product strategy at Wealthfront, and he was a partner at Google Ventures. He joins us to

talk about the fact that as we're heading into 2026, premium credit cards are more expensive and more complicated than ever.

And so it's fair to ask whether the points game is still worth the effort.

That's what we're going to talk about today.

Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything, not everything.

This show covers five pillars, financial psychology, increasing your income, investing,

real estate and entrepreneurship. It's double-eye fire. I'm your host, Paula Pant, and joining us

today is Chris Hutchins. Enjoy.

Chris, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me back. It's been a while. Chris, the year is

coming to an end. As we close out 2025, I want to know, what is the current state of credit cards?

Because we haven't talked about this topic on the show in a while, and there have been some big shake-ups this year.

Most notably, Chase Sapphire Reserve, which was the gold standard in credit card rewards, is now so expensive that a lot of people are saying it's not worth it. Yeah, 2025 was the year that every credit card, and not every, we'll come back to that, but it seemed like we often call it like the couponization of credit cards. Everyone said, you know, let's charge higher fees and add a bunch of perks and credits and things so that we can say, hey, our fee went up by $300, but we're giving you $1,000 of more value, assuming you're actually going to use any of these things and actually use them in a way that they're really worth it. If you were never going to go to, you know, some event and now you've been forced to go to this event to use this credit, I'm not sure it's fair to say that you got that value. Chase came out and said, you know, we're going to increase our annual fee on that card and it went up to $795. And then Amex came out and said, hey, we're not going to tell you what's happening, but we're going to increase our annual fee for the platinum card to $8.95. We just, we can't be anything other than the highest

consumer fee card. Then eventually they did announce all the changes they made. And they were kind of the

...