Tentmaking Tips

We haven’t added an Airbnb to this property yet, although we’re still considering ideas.

Here’s some of what we’ve been working on in the last 6 months:

• We recently submitted a protest for our property taxes this year which I encourage people to do each year. Initially when I protested, they didn’t offer me any reduction in value. As a result, I appealed to the board. While waiting on hold for a board hearing, another appraiser jumped on the call and was ready to negotiate. They initially offered $42,000 off the current assessed value. I negotiated them to $59,000 off. This resulted in a tax assessed value even less than the one from last year. I was pumped!

• We’ve done some updating to our home & we believe the value has gone up significantly. We’re just over 2 years in, so we’re able to flip for tax free profit if we want, but we think w
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I’ve planned some pretty cool trips over the past 6 months & have earned just over 1.1 million new points & miles in the process.

I’m earning most of these points by completing a minimum spend for welcome bonuses on new cards. Instead of optimizing our usage of our cards for various categories like groceries, restaurants, travel, etc, we are typically trying to work on hitting the minimum spend for a new welcome bonus. This is by far the best way to earn the greatest number of points in the shortest amount of time.

Here are the bonuses we’ve worked on since the last update:

• American Express Business Gold - 200,000 points

• American Express Business Platinum - 250,000 points

• Capital One Business Spark (x2) - $4,000 or 400,000 points

• Citi AA Executive - 70,000 points

• IHG Business - 200,000 points

We planned the following trips (u

I'm Simon Holley. I lead King's Arms Church in Bedford, UK, and oversee the Catalyst Network of 800+ churches across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

Catalyst are in an exciting season, called by God to train 1,000 church planters. These will take many forms - traditional churches, house churches, DMM-style churches, and even 'under-a-tree churches' (as many of our African congregations are!).

Here's the reality: most of these future leaders will need to be tentmakers. The places and models they're called to make this inevitable. And I knew I couldn't be the guy calling others to do something I wasn't willing to do myself.

But I faced a major obstacle - I didn't believe it was possible to effectively combine ministry AND tentmaking! Sure, I'd run several 'hobby businesses' in my spare time. The most successful reached $30k annual turnover, which wasn't bad for a few hours a week, but it wasn't en

Actually, we’re back!

I took a 6 month break from writing these weekly newsletters & I’m going to resume again with help from my friend Simon Holley, a fellow pastor & tentmaker in the UK. Check out his bio on the Tentmaking Pastors site here. 

Simon oversees a network of churches across Europe, Africa & the Middle East. As a tentmaker, his focus has been on helping people use their skills, passion & expertise to develop online coaching programs. He’ll tell you more about this in future newsletters.

My vision with Tentmaking Pastors has been to help pastors, missionaries & Christian leaders supplement or replace their income with tentmaking like the Apostle Paul.

Simon shares that vision & adds an additional component of helping leaders “around the world,” not just in the US where I’ve been a tentmaker. Our plan is to continue to help leaders in developed countries, but we also want to write & develop resources to help leaders in the developing world as well.

We’ll

I invited newsletter subscribers to share any additional “hacks” they’ve used.

One of my good friends and fellow pastor at our church, John Bradshaw, responded back with some other great “hacks” that his family used to put their kids through college.

He shared 3 additional “hacks” and I’m going to quote him here:

1. Stay at home - Don’t go to UT Austin (in the case of someone whose family lives in Lubbock). Stay in Lubbock, go to Tech, and live at home (one of my kids did this). And your community college point from the last newsletter makes this even better. Go to South Plains Community College (again using Lubbock as the example) for two years and then go to Tech.

2. Apply for every scholarship available (there are a ton) - When one of my daughters said she wanted to go to Hardin Simmons (a private school) we said, “That’s great but we can’t pay for it and we don’t...

I had heard of these before but wasn’t quite sure how they worked.

I started doing more research and quickly became convinced that I needed to add this tool to my financial life. I just set mine up this past week.

Let me share with you a high-level overview of what these are and how they might benefit you.

What is a Donor Advised Fund?

Let me quote Fidelity Charitable:

A donor-advised fund, or DAF, is like a charitable investment account for the sole purpose of supporting charitable organizations you care about. When you contribute cash, securities, or other assets to a donor-advised fund at a public charity… you are generally eligible to take an immediate tax deduction. Then those funds can be invested for tax-free growth, and you can recommend grants to any eligible IRS-qualified public charity.

This definition gives at least two of t

Tuition prices are sky rocketing.

Add the cost of room and board if your child chooses to leave for college.

Books aren’t cheap either.

My oldest daughter is a Senior in High School & my youngest is a Freshman.

You can imagine that were talking a lot about college these days.

My girls are asking questions like, “Should we even go to college? If so, where should we go? And, if we go, what should we major in?”

If they end up choosing to go to college, it raises the question, is it hackable?

Turns out, it is.

I’ll share some of the hacks we’ve discovered & then I welcome you to email me any additional hacks you’ve used. I’d love to do more emails on this subject because it’s such a big financial commitment for families. Especially if you’re trying to keep your children far from student loans, which I certainly am.

Ok, let’s begin.

1. Dual Credit Classes - my oldest daughter is taking as many of these as she can. Me and my wife did
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Honestly, both are fantastic!

I recommend people start with Chase cards first because of the 5/24 rule.

But once you’ve maxed out your Chase cards, AMEX is a great place to go next.

While Chase UR points are still the most flexible in my opinion, AMEX MR points are a close second.

Unlike Chase, AMEX has cards like the Blue Business Plus card that get 2x on everything (up to $50,000 in purchases).

But unlike AMEX, Chase allows you to transfer points back & forth from your spouse.

Instead of choosing between them, I get both, but I prioritize Chase if I’m under 5/24.

And once you get an AMEX card, they’ll start sending you additional offers in your account.

I recently got an offer for up to 99 employee cards where they’d give me 15,000 MR points for $4,000 in spend over 6 months. Wow!

I went ahead and got 5 employee cards (they can be in your name) and plan to get 75,000 MR points in the next few months.

Also, AMEX right now has the ability to tr