Next Level 264: How to Book Luxury Travel for FREE with Eli Facenda

Hilton points and Amex points are vastly different value. And people see the Hilton signup bonus for 150,000, they think it's better than the Amex card for 60,000. When in actuality, 60,000Amex points are way more than 150,000 Hilton points.

Welcome to the Next Level Income show where it's our goal to take your income, your investments and your life to the next level. I'm your host, Chris Larsen. If you haven't yet, get a copy of our book for free at our website, Next Level Income.com. that's www.nextlevelincome.com. just click on the book link and I'll even send you a copy if you put your address in. On today's show, we have Eli the Travel Guy fascenda. He's the founder of Freedom Travel Systems where they help entrepreneurs take $50,000 bucket list trips for 90% off by maximizing their points, probably with money you're already spending in your business or in your personal life. Eli has become known as the industry leader for entrepreneurs who want to fully leverage their points to travel in style to the world's most incredible destinations. He'll pull back the curtain today to show you how to maximize your credit to create your dream first class travel lifestyle without having to pay for it. And if you listen to the end, he's going to give you a free gift where you can learn how to do this for yourself. Eli the Travel Guy, great to see you.

Good to be here, Chris. Excited to be chatting with you from Portugal today.

Yeah, that's what. So you know, for those of you that weren't watching here before we started recording because you couldn't, Eli had to move around because he's, he's, he's, he's on a whirlwind tour of the country and look, Eli, we love helping people become financially independent so they can, they can have control over their time. You, you exemplify that lifestyle. And I just got a notice in the mail from, actually in my email from Chase. They're, they're changing kind of some of the terms of my, my travel card and different things. And I was like, I was, I couldn't wait to get you on today because it's a of ton topic that I love, I love getting stuff for free when I don't have to change my behavior. But I also love optimizing every area of my life and I love traveling because people are always like, where's your luggage? And I'm like, this is my luggage. I I carry. I carry, like, one, maybe two bags with me, whether I'm traveling around the world or whether I'm. I'm traveling with my boys. But today, you're gonna. You're gonna share with our audience how they can optimize their credit card strategy and their points to get more value out of that. And I love it. So share a little bit about you and your business and where. Where you are in your travels.

Absolutely. Yeah. Happy to dive in. I think you nailed a really key word that's been at the heart of not just my business, but my quest in life. And it's around optimization. Not just for optimization sake. I think about what optimization really means, and to me, it's, how do I get the outcome that I want more efficiently with less effort, less waste time, less things that I don't actually want to do? How do I just get the result? And so I'll take you back 10 years ago, when I first discovered this credit card points thing, I went to a school near New York City, and I had a bunch of really wealthy friends that went to Wall Street. And I decided early in my career, like, I'm going to do this entrepreneur thing. Like, I don't want to screw. I was like, you know, screw the man. Screw. Like, I was in mindset, right? And I actually remember telling my friends, I was like, if I can't wear a sleeveless shirt at my work, I don't want the job. Like, that was my mentality, right? So I was very against the system at the time, but basically it left me in a spot where I had a bunch of friends who were making a lot of money, and we wanted to take trips and they could all just pay for it. Like, hey, let's go to Thailand. And I. So I remember at 23 years old, I'm in my mom's basement, and I get this text from friends, and they're like, hey, man, we're going to go to Thailand. And my heart sank. I was like, oh, crap, I'm not going to be able to, you know, participate in this trip. And is this going to be a life of, like, all my friends making money and doing things and I'm. We left out. And I was, like, starting to doubt myself. And.

But I realized you have to put sleeves and a tie on, man. Geez.

I. I was. I was getting nervous that, like, the sleeves might have to come on. Exactly. And so. But I realized I was like, okay, there's this credit card points thing. I'd heard it once, and I was like, Maybe this could help. And so I started do some research. I got my first trip to Asia. It was economy. I messed up. I pretty much made every mistake you. But I was stoked. So that was when I got bit with the travel bug, is when I got really in love with points. And I spent the next 10 years really just getting obsessed with this stuff until I built the business in actually 2020. So we've been doing this for five years and happy to dive into what the company does, but that's my. My backstory and really my journey into this, too.

Yeah, man. When we met down in Miami, I was like, oh, you got to come on the podcast. I beeline for you. I was like, I got to. I got to get this guy on the podcast. My audience is going to love this because, you know, now. Now having my own business. Like, our. Our points are crazy. And it's like, you know, we got kids and we're spending money at Amazon. So I guess let's. Let's kind of start at the beginning. Eli, you know, talk about the different cards out there, because, you know, my first card is just a regular old, you know, Visa card. I didn't get any points or anything. I actually still have it in a different incarnation, and I've. I've developed my own strategy around that. But let's kind of. If you could start with, like, what are the types of cards that are out there? And we'll also talk about things like credit, because I think one of the things that I've learned is that you don't want to close out credit cards because it's actually a negative. I just saw my. My credit score is. Is well over 800 and nice. You know, I've got. I've got a ton of lines of credit. I've got a ton of credit cards out there. So as I've learned these things, I've watched my credit go from, you know, mid-700s to, you know, well over 800 and do that. So let's start there. Let's talk about. Because people might say, I'm not getting another credit card. Forget that. I don't want to ding my credit. Can you start with that?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you brought that up because it is such a misconception. And this idea, kind of the Dave Ramsey mentality, in a lot of ways, gives people these. These unnecessary fears around credit and kind of misinformation. So first off, to raise your credit or. There's five factors of credit, right? And this is for your personal credit Report, and there's two credit reports. If you have a business and you're doing investments, there's your business credit report and your personal credit. The things that are going to make up your credit score are on your personal credit report. Now, let me just draw the distinction. If you get a business credit card, you will get an inquiry on your personal credit card credit report. Because they're saying, hey, you know, Chris, your business is two years old. We don't know anything about it, so you're going to personally guarantee it. So we're going to check your credit. But anything you do with that card, the payment history, the amount of utilization you have on that card, that does not show up in your personal credit report. So that's a big thing, because if you get more cards over time, if the majority business cards, it's going to have almost no effect on your personal credit whatsoever. So that's kind of distinction number one. To understand distinction number two is that because there's five factors, you want to really pay attention to, how much these are weighted because payment history is the most important thing, and then amounts owed or utilization is the second. The thing that's at the bottom of that credit profile is how many new inquiries you have. So a lot of people have this misconception, if I open a new card, it's going to hurt my credit and my score is going to go where, in fact, you're actually onto it. You want to have a lot of different credit lines open. And I said different credit lines because not just credit cards, but maybe credit cards, student loan, home loan, auto loan. They want to see a variety of different lines open. But the more lines of credit you have open with a variety of lenders and you've been on time payments and you have low percentage utilization, that is what shows a lender, this person, is not risky. They borrowed from lots of people. They've been on time. They've done it for years. They've done it across three. Let's give them more. So if you actually want to increase your credit score, most people slowly, over time, actually need to get a few more cards. So it's a big misconception. And of course, you don't want to run into anything like late. But there's really, really easy ways to mitigate that, which we can talk about, too.

Yeah. So, all right, so let's talk about these five factors. Number one is your payment history, you said correct. Number two is the number of accounts, number of accounts you have open. Is that right?

So number two is actually your Utilization.

Your utilization percentage.

Yeah. How much you're. How much you're using. And the key thing about this, Chris, is it's when your statement closes. Yeah. So here's the thing. It's when your statement closes, not when it's due. Right. So if your statement closes on the 15th and it's a personal credit card and you make the on time payment 100%, but on the 15th, when you're maxing out the card, it's going to report on the statement close date, not the payment due date. So the simple thing is just, you know, if you want to have really low utilization, just pay it down before it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, whenever the statement close date is, just make sure before that it's paid down. That will count as an on time payment as well. Because you paid before the payment due date. Well, but that's kind of the technicals behind that one.

Yeah.

Most people shouldn't have an issue with it because we don't really want to be charging crazy amounts on our personal cards anyways. But maybe you got a home renovation or something like that on a personal card. That's kind of thing where you want to make sure you pay that on time.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. All right, what's factor number three?

So that's going to be the average age. So that's going to basically be how long you've had credit and how. Yeah. Essentially across your different lines, how long to have them. Now the hack here is if you have young credit, because this is a common issue for people that are starting new or maybe starting over. Maybe they had a business issue in the past or something. You can actually get something called authorized user. Yeah. So one of the things I did in my 20s was my dad added me to one of his personal cards. Now I intentionally got a card with three main things. Number one, it was really old. So it increased my average age because I was young and there wasn't a lot I could do to increase my average age on my own. I was 25, whatever. Right. So didn't have a lot of options there. So he added me to an older card. But it also had tons of on time payments and it had a high credit limit with low utilization. So my payment history went up, my utilization went down, which meant my score went up and then my average age went up. So this boosted my score by about 50 points, which was significant. So that's a really big strategy you can do of those. And they have to be personal cards, but there's no risk to the person who's doing that for you as well. Like, the only issue my dad could have had is if he actually gave me the card and I spent money, technically he's liable. But he just sent the card to himself at his home address. I never even saw it. So I get the benefit. No downside to him.

I like that. What? At what age? So I got two teenage boys and I'm like, they're working and we started Roth IRAs for them and they're 15, 13. What age can you start a credit card for? You know, some of the parents out there.

Yeah, it's not going to matter until they're 18. Because until they're like, you could do this. Yeah, until they're applying for their own card, that's when it matters. It's not like if you add them when they're 13, that gives them five years of credit history. You could add them on their 18th birthday and it's all going to show up right then anyway. So it doesn't really. It doesn't matter really when you do it.

Yes. That's great. So for you parents listening that are like me, that have teenagers have a card that maybe you're like, well, I don't really use this card anymore. Or you do use it, you can say, hey, I'm going to add my kid to this card when they get old enough. And then like you said, you just stick it in the drawer and say, well, they're not even going to have access to it necessarily. They're just a user on that.

Bingo.

So that's great. Okay, so and if I'm hearing this correctly, like number two and number three here, percentage utilization and average age. Having additional cards is actually going to increase both. Both of these if, if you're both of your credit scores.

Right, exactly. And that's why I said you want to open cards slowly over time because if you open too many too fast. The thing isn't like the banks don't generally like to see that it's what it's going to do to your SC or is it's going to reduce the average age and it's going to increase the number of overall inquiries. But over time because the payment history is a, a heavier weighted part of the score, as you make payments, it will actually increase your score. So that's why if you're opening more cards, doing a mix of business cards and personal would be a good way to do it. But we can get into this too. But are my recommended isn't to open a bunch of cards anyways, you really only need three to max really six cards between personal and business to really, really optimize the game. Because I've worked with thousands of entrepreneurs, investors, like most people are busy. They want a simple plan that gives them the 80, 20 and really optimizes things but doesn't create. So that's important to know too. This isn't a recommendation to get 20 credit cards. 3 to 6 total, you're good to go.

Awesome. So. And we know that the. So, so just to recap, payment number one, payment history number two, percent utilization number three, average age number five was inquiries, I think you said.

Correct. Yeah. New credit or inquiries.

New credit or inquiries. What's number four?

It's gonna be credit mix. So that's going to be. How many different types of credit do you have if you only have one credit card? And that's not a very good mix. You have a credit card and student loan. Better credit card, student loan, car loan. Now we're seeing, you know, more variety of different, different lines. So that's going to be the number of accounts, it's going to be the variety of the accounts. So again, having more accounts over time is better. And having a mix of those is better too.

Fantastic. So yeah, if I'm younger, I could add myself to a parent's card. I could take out a car loan. And then it actually may be advantageous to get a student loan, even if you don't necessarily need it, just so you can have another type of account and then you could pay that off in an efficient way. That's interesting.

Totally. Yeah, exactly. There are, there are some use cases for that. Obviously you'd want to calculate like am I just paying extra money for that? But. Right, but there's, you know, there's some, there's some tools out there. I don't know, I forget exactly what it was. But there's somewhere like you can report rent, for example, on your credit. Things that. That can help you just show another trade line. And that's really going to give you that mix. But generally that one's going to kind of going to be a one that moves over time on its own. The two to really focus on are going to be your overall payment history and the number of payments you've made. It's not just the percentage, also the total number and then the utilization. If you get those right and then you start to get the age good, your score is going to be great.

Awesome, awesome. So this is great for everybody that's out there as well. As if you're helping your children or people in your family do that. So I think you, you kind of preluded this already, Eli. So, you know, the optimum number of cards, you said is three to six. And I think everybody's wanting to know, just tell me what cards to get. So, yeah, and that's, you know, I, I followed. I followed one of the other points guys that were out. Out there and, you know, put together my own little system about 10 years ago. So are there different, like, what types of cards should we get?

Yeah, yeah. So let me. Let me give some context because this is. Now we're entering the really important territory. We got the foundations, but what's important to know. So I'm gonna. I'm gonn context to look at this entire game through first and then we can about the cards because this is what's really missing from the big blogs and Instagram. Like, people that talk about different cards is there's. There's not like a frame. Look at this. And it's kind of like, you know, you're playing this big puzzle game and you have a random piece and you're like, where does this fit? Like, this is a big board. How do I, you know, I see this random credit card. What do I do with it? Here's the three buckets to. To keep it simple. First, so the first bucket is going to be to maximize your return on spend. So that's like our metric ros. That basically means are you getting the maximum value back from every dollar you spend in your household and in your business? You do that by getting the right credit cards, the right expenses. I could talk about how to do that in a minute. But that's the first thing. Right credit cards and right expenses to get the maximum amount of overall return back. Okay. The second thing is going to be to upgrade and really optimize your travel. So this is your domestic trips, your family trips, your kids, sporting events, things like that. Getting the lounges right in the free bags like you said, you know, getting the upgrades to suites at hotels, the free breakfast, the free WI fi, the early check in, late checkout, the first boarding, the first off the plane, all the things that just take the. Honestly, the things that are kind of a pain in the butt for travel.

Oh, yeah.

And they either eliminate them or make them comfortable. Right? Yeah. You know what I'm talking about?

Oh, yeah, man, I got two boys. It's like, man, hanging out in the airport sucks. But now I get to go to the lounge for free. I bring my Boys in there, they eat for free, they hang out, they think, they think it's amazing.

And that, that's exactly what I'm talking about. A lot of people that have, have never been to lounge, they don't even know. I'll just go back there and, and that's, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Because a lot of people who have never been to lounges don't even know that that part of the game exists. Right? So that's like one, one piece. But there's a lot of these kind of small little things that when you start to get them right, you get, you know, big suites that are worth a thousand, fifteen hundred, two thousand dollars a night for free. You're getting the free upgrades from stats or these suite night certificates. That's what I mean by optimizing your travel. It's the trips you're already going to do and they just become better. Okay, so that's the second bucket, the third bucket, which is probably where the biggest amount of confusion and difficulty in time and frustration, but also the most value comes from, is to maximize the value of your points for your dream trips. Okay, now I specifically say dreamtrips because when I think about the overall role that points can play in your life, getting a flight domestically is a cool thing. Like that is a nice win. But when you get to take your boys on an unforgettable trip across the world to do it in business class, where you show up refreshed and energized and you get to have like a, a true cultural experience with the people you love, you get to cover all the expenses and save 20, 30, 40, $50,000 trip. Those are moments that, to me, that pays like the sole memory dividend, right? That's fulfilling. That's like the long term gratification. So I'm, I tend to focus like, sure, let's do the domestic stuff too, but, and maybe there's some big domestic trips. But let's figure out what are the trips that are really on your heart, the things that you really would love to do, the experiences you really want to have. And let's reverse engineer how to leverage the points that you're earning to get that in the smartest and most efficient way possible.

Love it.

So that's kind of the three buckets. So it's maximize the return on spend, upgrade the travel, and then maximize the value of the points for your big dream trips. Awesome. Hopefully that's a clear way to think about this.

First we got the five factors of your Credit score. We got the three buckets to focus on. This is fantastic. I love the framework, Eli. I'm a framework kind of guy.

Me, too.

So. So we're speaking my language. So now we get into the meat of it. How do we. How do we apply? Apply these.

Yeah, yeah. So that first bucket, right? The right card. This is really important to know that there's not a one size fits all. There are best recommended cards. But if I came to you and said, I've got half a million to invest, where should I put it? What's your first. You're not gonna be like, real estate fund, right? You're probably gonna ask some questions. What kind of risk do you want? What kind of returns? How long do you want your money locked up? There's a lot of variables that. A different answer for me versus the next guy, right? Well, the same goes with cards. I call this your travel DNA, because what you and I spend on the amount we spend, what we purchase, where we're based, how frequently we're traveling, where we're traveling to and from, what we actually care about. Is it first class for domestic flights, is it only international? Do we care about hotels? Airbnb? All of those things are going to form your travel DNA, which is like your unique travel fingerprint. That is what your card stack should be built around. Because if you don't care about getting hotel suite upgrades, we don't need you having the Hyatt business card. But I really like those because I stand a lot of Hyatt, so for me, that's part of it. Okay.

Yeah.

So that said, there are some best recommended cards, and the best rule of thumb I can give is that you want to earn the right type of points first. That's important thing number one. The next most important thing is that based off of what you spend, you find the card that earns the most of that currency. So to break that down one step further, think of it this way. If I was going to invest in something in a deal, right? And the deal was a hundred thousand dollars, and I said, Hey, 100,000 Mexican pesos, you'd laugh. You'd be like, absolutely not, right? But that's kind of what people are doing with their points, right? Because Hilton points and Amex points are vastly different, the value. And people see the Hilton Signup bonus for 150,000, they think it's better than the AmEx card for 60,000, when in actuality, 60,000AmEx points are way more than 150,000 points. Yeah, so. So these Transferable bank points are kind of the holy grail. This is going to be Chase, Amex, Capital One, those are the big three cities and Wells Fargo. Yeah, Chase is great. And the reason is because they have this ability to transfer the points to the airline hotel loyalty programs and each has different partners. So that's again why these points are kind of custom. If you live in a United hub, let's say, you know, I grew up in the D.C. area, it's a United hub. You may want to be transferring your points to United quite a bit. Well, Chase partners with United Amex does not. Okay.

Yeah.

So that might mean, okay, we want to earn more Chase points. And then we'd start to look at based off of my spending, which of the Chase cards are going to be the highest earning cards for me? Love it. So again it's kind of a, you could follow the conditional logic on that.

Like if you're getting your, you got a, you got a new client here July. So we're going to be, we're going to be having this conversation here soon.

Very, very cool. Very cool. So yeah, so that, that's how it goes. So, so okay, if you, if you want default, like what's the bare minimum? Amex and Chase, the top two. Capital one's the third. And you want to look for the cards that are in the most on your top spend a car pretty much anyone's going to want to have is the Amex Gold. Why? Amex points are very valuable. They transfer to most of the major airlines and third grade for hotels you can get four for dollar on groceries and dining and everyone's going to eat. So that's the highest earning card for basically general food that you can have. So that's like a personal card off the bat. Almost every should be using that card. Okay. The second card that be on the business side if you have a business that's operational, maybe not like a real estate business but maybe you know, active running, you have software, advertising, dining, stuff like that. The Amex Business gold similar earns 4 points per dollar on software advertising and dining. So that is a really good card for most businesses. But it does change and you know, new cards come out. The Chase Sapphire Reserve business card just came out. They didn't have a business version until literally week and so that's now a new contender for people that have high amounts of advertising spend. So you can see it really again it really depends and there's a whole other game about lead status and if you should get airline cards or not in Most cases you probably shouldn't, but sometimes you should. So we can, we could dive down any of those rabbit holes if you want.

Yeah, I think it, I think, you know, as you said, I think it depends. Right. On what it is. And that's, we could, we could jump down there, we could say, hey, like I have a business actually already have the Chase Sapphire card. And I, we have an American Express, I'm sorry, an American Airlines is, is one of the main airlines that we have because we go to Charlotte a lot out of that and we have, I've got Marriott, I've got status with lifetime status with Marriott from my prior life with doing those things. So yeah, I mean, maybe you could use that as an example. Say like how would I, how would I optimize with American Airlines and Marriott, for instance?

Sure. So I'll kind of give this conditional thinking, maybe if them thinking, right. Because that's, that's really how it works for these status decisions. So the only, one of the most overrated things in the game is getting a airline status. Okay, now here's, here's what we're going to zoom out and kind of think about for a second. These banks and airlines, they are masters of gamification and advising loyalty. And this is, this is their world. Right. This isn't like these aren't some like dumb dumbs who made this up. This is like billion dollar institutions that are. Yeah. Creating this. Right. So when it comes to gamification, their job is to get you to get a card to stay loyal and to use it for as long as you can. They make money on interchange, you know, fees, maybe interest other lending products, things like that.

Yeah.

So what they're going to do is try and get you to basically get an airline card because you're flying to Charlotte. Well, unless you're going to get to the highest level of American airline status and you aren't already paying for first class and you're traveling enough where first class upgrades are meaningful and will actually save you enough doing all those things, then it would probably make sense to have an American card. But if you're not going to get to the top levels of status, which are pretty hard to get to, and you're not traveling a few times a month on American and you're not already flying first class, then the benefits really aren't that good because the opportunity cost of the spend that you would have to put on that card will earn you much higher returns on a card like the Amex cards or Chase cards, because those points are so much more valuable.

Great point.

So that's, that's why for airline, I pretty much say universally, there are exceptions for sure, but loyalty doesn't make sense. Now, it doesn't mean you shouldn't have an American card because let's say you do travel America once a month, right? You want the free bags and maybe you have the card that gets you lounge access, stuff like that. Those are good perks. But that means you may have the card, but you're not putting the spend on that card.

Right.

So there's different cards that you're going to hold just for the benefits, different cards you're going to use for the spend. So you almost want to split the card in two when you think about why you might hold it.

Yeah, that's a great point. I think that's, you know, that's, that's as you, as you look through these, that's where, that's where you come in. So talk about what, like what does your business do, Eli? Because you said, hey, you know, I help people make this happen. So how does your business help people optimize these? Because I probably have the cards I need and I'm probably not utilizing them to the best of my ability, the points. So how can you, how can you help people like me?

Yeah, so we have two levels to what we do, but the entire business is oriented, as I mentioned, the beginning optimization to your outcomes. So when we work together, who going to look at? Chris, what's important to you when it comes to travel? What's meaningful, what's measurable? Is it about just getting the total value back? Is it about unlocking new experiences or comfort? Is there family you're traveling with? Is it about the business spend? So we assess that first and then we start to put together basically your overall card and travel plan. Here's the card you want to have, how to use them. Okay, you have this card, downgrade that one, put those expenses on this card, move this one over here, that's going to unlock two and a half times more points. So an example, if you're getting 500,000 points a year now you get over a million, right? It's going to unlock upgrades and status. So we do all of that part first.

Yeah.

And then when you have your trips, you say, hey, I want to take the family to Greece for 10 days. We want to do business in first class. We want to get that Emirates flight with the shower and the inflight bar. We want to stay at a five star resort. You know, show us what you Got. And then we'll provide different options, whether it's Italy, Greece, Europe, Japan, you know, different parts of Asia, really anywhere in the world. So we're kind of like on one level, higher level of service is like essentially a travel agency on credit card points built for high net worth individuals, entrepreneurs and investors that don't have the time to spend 15, 20 hours piecing together a credit card points trip. But they also don't want to spend 40 or $50,000 when there's a much smarter way that's kind of the core into the business. And then we have a community level too where that's more for people that are interested in and getting some more like the hacks and the shortcuts themselves and they want to do on their own. They just need that expert touch to be like, hey, do I have this right? Or can you find a better deal? And we'll help find deals and give recommendations in that level too. So that was obviously lower investment. More about giving you the shortcuts to do on your own rather than us doing it for you.

I love it. I love it. And you're, you're living this in action. Eli, tell, tell the audience where you are today and where you've been in your recent travels here.

Oh man. I mean this year has been insane. So it started off with an, with a proposal in, I mean basically over New Year's. So I took my fiance on a surprise trip. Thank you so much. Took her on a surprise trip to. We flew into Milan, we flew Emirates class. We got an in flight shower bar. That trip alone. We flew back on Virgin retreat suites. We went to this, to the Swiss Alps, went to Paris, to London. It was, it was, that was a $50,000 trip. I paid two grand out of pocket.

Amazing.

Okay, so if I use those points, by the way, through Amex Traveler, the bank sites, which is talk about using points, that's what we want to avoid. That's the trap the banks want you to fall into.

Yeah.

They want you to redeem them through their site and they're going to have you thank them for it when through you. So it's like this whole game. Right. So that would've been 5 million points through their site. I did it for about 600,000 points.

Okay.

So I saved about grand. That was the first trip of the year.

Yeah.

We then put everything in storage. We went to Japan for three weeks in March, came back for a month in Florida. That's where we met. And then we've been in Europe the last basically Month and a half, Berlin, the Dolomites. We were in Florence for a few weeks. We went to Cinque Terre Porto. I was actually in Egypt for a week on a kite boarding trip stop in Dubai and now I'm in Portugal. And so it's a, it's a crazy life, man. It's pretty, it's pretty fun.

So incredible. Well, I got, I got a little bit of envy there because I'm chasing my boys around, going to lacrosse tournaments. We got a good life too. Yeah, totally. You've really shown how you can create a business around your lifestyle. If people want to learn more, how to optimize the points that they're getting, the spend that they're using, learn about your community, the different services you have, what's the best way to find that out?

Yeah, so there's two ways. My personal Instagram. I share all the stuff and stories. It's just Eli travel guy. And then the website is freedomtravelsystems.com NLI for you. And we have some free gifts, by the way. We have a custom playbook that I built and this is normally 150 bucks. And we're going to give it to anyone that listens to the show for free. And actually on the kiteboard trip is really cool. It's just in Egypt, one of the guys on the trip used the playbook. He bought it, actually. He bought it and sent. Gave it to his wife. His wife then gave them $20,000 on business class flights to the Middle east in about 30 minutes of reading the book. So it's pretty killer level stuff. So that's going to be on the site too.

Awesome. Well, thank you for that. And Will, if you're listening, if you're on YouTube, you can click those links down below. If you're listening, go into the show notes, you can click that there. But say that website one more time for the audience.

Yeah, so it's freedom. Travelsystems.com NLI Perfect.

Perfect. Eli, thank you so much, man. This has been a blast. You got my, my mind working. I cannot wait to tell my wife about this because she's going to love when I say, hey, here's our points and here's how you can, you can now totally for these trips that we have coming up.

Absolutely. Yeah. There's one thing I could leave with every. This is just again, personal. Just kind of the message on my heart with the business is to become an expert, a millionaire in experiences, not just in the bank account. So, you know, we've got one life to live. And the moments we get with our loved ones are some of those precious pieces of the ride. And so we all want to build wealth, but the whole idea of using points is that you can have these peak life experiences today in the chapter you're in while your kids are in high school, while they're in the stage they're in, and not wait 10, 20, 30 years to have a good life in the future. So this is a smart way to do it and hopefully some people can take action on that.

I love it, man. This is all, this is what we are about here at Next Level Income. Eli is helping you optimize your financial picture so you can optimize your life. And Eli, you've filled a big piece of that right now. Thanks so much for taking the time out of your trip to join us today.

Yeah, thank you, Chris. Appreciate it, man.

Hey, Chris, here again. I hope you found this episode valuable. Now I have one more thing to gift you. We have a page for my coaches coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Just check out nextlevelincome.com coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook and much more. I'll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for listening to the podcast. Also, please like share and take just 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.