Seems like the going guess was right around $10k so you’re not far off with your internal thought process! But us being us, we had to find a way to keep costs low ha!

Thanks Paddy glad you enjoyed the post! The rental income definitely helps. We had signed up for Trusted Housesitters this past year and nothing ended up panning out for us. We found it to be much more of a hassle trying to find a location + dates that work for both parties. Most people want to visit Canada in the summer vs we want to travel over the winters. In theory it’s a great idea but in reality it’s a bit tough to pull off! Of course, lots of people do, but we preferred the flexibility of getting to pick whichever location worked best for us.

Noted, thanks! I feel like we aren’t really doing anything too advanced in the churning word other than continually churning CC’s but I’ll think about how I can put something together in a post. There are quite a few US IHG cards out there where you can get 70-100k points. We do that between the both of us a few times over the years and there we go. Our overall 2,000,000 airline points are spread across a whole bunch of airlines not just a specific one. I happen to like AC Aeroplan as it’s partners with United which I love flying (right now we’re working on a US based Aeroplan cc giving us 70,000 Aeroplan points). We also find that most of the US travel/airline related CC’s come with no foreign transaction fees for the most part. Hope this helps!

Haha bag o tricks around here Bob! The prize is an invite to meet us on our next adventure – wanna come!?

Hahah! Yea it makes us cringe a bit when we hear people going abroad for 2 weeks and spending $10k on the trip! So many ways for my little brain to hyper-optimize 😆 Of course there’s more to it all than just optimizing but can’t help that that’s where my thoughts go first

You wouldn’t have been too far off if we didn’t have rental income coming in to offset most things!

Glad there’s someone else out there that appreciates the details like I do ha! Appreciate the kind words Karena 🙂

Haha, thanks Tracy! Team Hack here! 🙂