AI transcript
0:00:23 One of the fastest ways to make extra money, just stop spending as much. It goes straight to your bottom line. Hey, and you didn’t even have to come up with a new business idea. Today we’re talking tactical and creative money saving hacks with a long time listener, a serial side hustler. She’s the co-host of the Frugal Friends podcast and co-author of the new book, Buy What You Love, without going broke. Jen Smith, welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
0:00:28 Nick, thanks so much for having me. This is a for sure a full circle moment for me.
0:00:59 Well, it’s been a long time coming. Appreciate you joining me today. We I think we both uh are in agreement that it’s important to take a a holistic view of personal finance, thinking of yourself as the C_E_O_ or the C_F_O_ of your own life and really taking charge of your personal profitability, which of course includes the revenue side, which we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of episodes about, increasing your income. But it also includes the expense side, which we typically don’t talk a lot about. And with that, I wanna tee it up to you for suggestion
0:01:07 one on how to spend less monies or start saving more, or maybe a foundation that uh you need to lay on this mission to get the spending in check.
0:01:37 Yeah, I love side hustling, but you’re right. When you focus on the expense side, that’s the lowest barrier to entry, and you can start seeing more margin between your income and expenses faster when you stop spending money than if you’re just focus on side hustles. So what we tell everyone to do is yes, first track every expense, but not just your current expenses and your future expenses. First,
0:02:07 wanna start with your past expenses too. So first, look back at your last ninety days of spending and figure out what are the patterns, what are the habits, what am I already spending on. So that way you’re better prepared as you go through life and you’re spending money, you have a little bit more knowledge and a little bit more preparation on the things you’re more prone to spend on, the situations where you’re more prone to impulse spend or to overspend.
0:02:18 So we look back before we look forward, but that first tip is the same, is that you have to know what you’re doing, you have to track your expenses. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:02:28 For this, are you just uh pulling up the past three months of credit card statements and trying to figure out well where where to really go, trying to categorise this uh spending into different buckets? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:02:58 Yeah, you can really easily do it with whatever you’re using for your credit card or your debit card, wherever your transactions are. Or if you’re using a budgeting app like YNAB, Monar, Copilot, any of those, they do it automatically for you. And it’s really easy to sort by the dates that you made, so maybe you went on vacation, you wanna see maybe what you’re more prone to overspending on on vacation. You can sort by category, so maybe you’re not going to the same place over and over.
0:03:25 But you’re doing take-out over and over just at different places. Or maybe you do sort alphabetically so that you can see your expenses at each place. Like maybe I’m grocery shopping on Sunday, but I’m always heading back to the grocery store Wednesday or Thursday because I just didn’t make enough of a list or I didn’t stick to the list enough. So I’m always heading back for that one thing and getting more while in there. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:03:35 We used Monarch, which uh there’s some level of irony in it being a paid tool to help you spend less. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:03:38 I use Monarch too. Yeah, I pay for it as well. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:04:08 you know, they probably have some like new customer discount. I’ll look I’ll look that up. I’ll link it up in the show notes for you. But w what we did ’cause we we kind of had this sense of well here’s our, you know, bare bones budget or like kind of the big ticket mortgage and utilities and f f food. You know, we kind of had a general sense of what it it cost to sustain our lifestyle. But then like every month when the credit card statement would come be like oh that seems a little bit high. What did what did we buy? It was like oh well we had uh plane tickets or we had
0:04:29 uh car repair or we had s you know something else broke, it it’s like every month it’s like well wasn’t a one-off thing, it’s like a very consistent thing. So we used Monarch to look at the last twelve months and be like well what do we what do we actually spend? And it was the kind of our hunches became true and the outflow was quite a bit higher than we had kind of mentally be envisioned in our in our heads. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:04:53 Yeah, it’s it’s always more nerve-wracking before you actually look. That’s why so many people just don’t wanna look back. We just wanna start freshly, go forward looking at expenses. But you will be more effective faster if you’re trying to lower your spending by knowing where you’re starting from. And it’s always scarier not knowing than when you actually look into it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:05:12 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:05:42 So once you look back, then you can start looking forward. So then you would start to make a budget. But I would say everybody’s budgeting style is different and everybody thrives with a different level of either being very strict or being very loose. Like for me I hated the strict budget, but I thought that’s what I had to do to be in control of my spending. And what I found was when I gave myself more
0:06:06 flexibility in the categories, like created fewer categories, it actually gave me more freedom to not spend on things and to spend without guilt and it made it more sustainable for me. So but the next point is to make a spending plan for the future. You can call it spending plan, budget, whatever makes you feel good. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:08 Spending plan sounds better than budget, for sure. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:21 Right. So like the f beautiful thing about language is that there’s so many synonyms for the same thing, right. So if one word gives you like g the grow that gross feeling like budget sometimes can, you can call it something else. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:23 Yeah, so it feels so like very restrictive, yeah. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:53 right, right. So making some kind of spending plan for what I wanna do. And we recommend a zero based budget, but not just to have every dollar tied up into whatever’s most efficient, but so that you know that you have enough to put towards your financial goals and whatever you’re planning to do. So if you need a little extra capital to start a side hustle or you’re trying to pay off a debt before you can so you can work less, you have more
0:07:23 for your side hustle, you wanna make sure those things are covered first and on the timeline you wanna cover them and then with the rest that’s where we figure out our discretionary uh purchases. Obviously paying bills you know first and foremost but that’s kinda what you wanna do and you can make a budget or spending plan that you will stick to better because you already know what you’re spending on other things. You’re not just taking a shot in the dark on what you’re spending on
0:07:43 take-out or coffee or whatever, you actually know how much you’ve been spending over the past three months. So maybe you spend the same or maybe you shave it a little bit, but you’re not going to cut it by ninety percent because it’s an arbitrary thing that you think, quote unquote, you’re supposed to be spending that much. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:07:53 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:08:45 Yeah, that can be it. And I think it’s it’s not so much where the money
0:09:15 that zero based budgeting is, but it’s having a job for every dollar. So that dollar’s job could just be a miscellaneous fund, and you have a larger miscellaneous fund because you don’t wanna have a coffee budget, a take-out budget, a grocery budget, a non-food grocery budget, which I have seen like people have two check-outs at the grocery store because they wanna categorize food and non-food differently. Like if that’s you and you love that,
0:09:25 do you That’s. not me. So I would rather have bigger categories and more flexibility within them. And it can still be zero based. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:09:55 Yeah okay, I like that call to you know make sure every every dollar has a job put puttin it to work. When I’ve you know first started working and get the direct deposit I was like okay whatever they say allocate ten percent to four oh one K_ or up to whatever the company match was and then everything else just went into checking and what didn’t necessarily nee like I could probably could have accelerated my saving or investment journey and you know kind of was a natural saver to begin with but didn’t do a great job of investing that in compounding assets just kind of sat there in a lot of cases. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:10:25 Yeah, it when you are intentional about what you do with your money when you get it, it just it works better. And when you take care of the bigger things, you don’t have to stress so much about the smaller things. And so that’s like the eighty twenty rule in saving money. So when we look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics on what Americans spend on most, the biggest things are housing, transportation, and food. Those make
0:10:55 up about sixty percent, those three things, sixty percent of our monthly budget. So if we can focus on those three things first, mainly housing and transportation, where we make decisions about that maybe every five, ten, fifteen years, but if we focus on those really intentionally, then the six dollar latte or the twenty dollar take-out makes a lot less of an impact. So for me, that was when I got my last
0:11:25 I didn’t pay cash for it, I got a loan for it and that’s okay with me, like I’m not against like car loan debt, but what saved me four thousand dollars in one sitting was that after hours of negotiating for one car, which was virtually identical to another one, on the website they were the same price, but I was sitting there waiting to get this one car that after all the fees and
0:11:55 I have no idea how it inflated to four thousand dollars more than the other car. And I had this feeling like this sunk cost feeling. I’d already spent so much time negotiated, I’ve negotiated down a lot, I’ve invested a lot into the salesperson that I’ve never met before and will never see again in my life. So I was sitting there and I was about to buy the car, to just bite the bullet until I realised is this worth four thousand dollars, like what I’m sitting here for?
0:12:23 and worrying more about myself versus the time and the other people around me. And I was like no. So I got up, left and went and got the other car and in that one moment, which was very uncomfortable and I did not like it, it saved me four thousand dollars. So it’s making decisions like that that are what’s going to help us like really, really cut our spending. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:12:53 Yeah, that makes sense. It’s not so much the coffee’s here or there. I mean maybe it adds up to a lot and there’s oh, but if you if you save that four dollar latte and you compound it over it, you know, it’s like well, but if it brings you joy in life, you know, come on. But no, totally. Like on the housing, on the transportation, uh if you find some creative ways to uh stretch your uh food budget a little farther, like these are the big big levers that you can pull to make a bigger impact. More money saving hacks with Jen in just a
0:13:00 including my favourite non-confrontational negotiation tactic and four questions to ask before you make a purchase right after this.
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0:15:58 I will share on the car buying experience, I will share my most uh underrated negotiation tactic and it’s just called silence. It’s just sitting there awkwardly for what feels uh like an uncomfortable amount of time and I’ve seen this over and over again. We were kind of taught this uh when I was painting houses like once you name your price and you present the estimate, just sit there wait for wait for a reaction like don’t talk yourself out of a deal, you know. I remember uh going in take my car in for like an admissions test and there was a place nearby in California where y they had some you know
0:16:28 deal on the window. So I’d, you know, take it in and they say well because yours is an S_U_V_ it’s gonna cost more. And I was like well first of all, you know, calling my two-wheel-drive uh four-cylinder uh Ford Escape an S_U_V_ is being very generous, but but putting that aside the, remembered it’s sitting there for w what was probably just ten or fifteen seconds, but like in the moment it felt super awkward. And the guy was like okay fine, we’ll just honor that price. And I was like oh, I didn’t have to do anything for that. The other one was we were legitimately off the grid up in the mountains. Turns out like on Friday our landlord
0:16:58 that sent a note hey we’re we’re gonna have to raise your rate to to this you know maybe it was a three hundred dollar increase or something didn’t get the email ’cause we were not checking email come back on Monday night and we see like three future messages hey just making sure you saw this and then last one was like well how about if we meet in the middle and it was like hey I just saved a thousand bucks by not responding to this it works online too if you’re not in a hurry like if you have something in your shopping cart on some site just leave it leave it for a day leave it for a couple days there’s a lot of e-commerce stores have like the abandoned cart
0:17:10 sequence. So you might see a follow-up e-mail where it’s like hey, did you did you forget something? How about ten percent off if you if you check out now. And so and that’s my underrated new negotiation tactic of just waiting. Silence. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:17:31 Yeah. Oh my gosh definitely. Any time I wanna buy clothes on Poshmark, I just like it. I don’t put it in the cart, I just like it. And then like ni nine times out of ten, I get a special offer on the piece. Yeah, it’s always you just show a little bit of interest, but don’t give ’em anything else. Like you can walk away. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:17:40 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:18:06 setting that mindset well, not everything that you buy has to be brand new. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:18:36 Yeah, I try to buy as much as possible second-hand, not just because it saves money, but also because we have so much stuff on our planet that we have I think the estimate is we have enough clothing already made to clothe the next six generations of people. And so if we can stop that flow, we not only are saving money, we are and and these things are more negotiable than
0:19:06 something that you would buy in Target or Wal-Mart, right? But we’re also cutting down on like landfill waste clutter uh in our earth. So it’s just like there’s no reason to just not think second-hand first. It doesn’t mean everything you buy has to be second-hand, but if we would just shift the mindset to being like before I buy anything, I use these four questions. How can I get it for free? So like a buy nothing
0:19:36 or free on Facebook Marketplace, or from a friend either trading or borrowing. If I can’t get it for free, how can I get it for low cost? And so that’s where second-hand comes in. How can I get it on Poshmark, eBay, ThredUP, can I buy it from Facebook Marketplace, thrift store. If I can’t get that, and I don’t spend a ton of time searching for these, I’m you know, depending on how fast I need something, I’m not searching for years, right? I’m just I’m
0:20:06 looking, I’m trying to get creative before I just first go out and buy it new. If I can’t get it low cost, I ask how can I get a deal on it? Like how soon is the next sales cycle coming up ’cause they always come back around. And then if I really need it and I can’t wait for a sale, how can I buy full price and not feel guilty about it? So is there a way I can buy locally or sustainably? Something like that. So those are the four questions that I asked before
0:20:09 Or I’d buy something in order to save money. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:20:40 Yeah, I know that’s that’s a good filter to put a new purchase decision through, and I will add another layer of filtering which I just call the waiting period. Maybe it’s twenty four hours, maybe it’s thirty days, and this is something that I d uh used to do quite a bit more. So I can just put a thirty day waiting period on it and you’ll find in a lot of cases that y you know obviously can’t do this with food and other essentials, but it’s like for you know something something else where it’s like oh that’s a nice to have. You
0:20:55 find that you lived a perfectly happy existence for the thirty days in between, and you’re like uh you just set a calendar reminder, hey, buy the thing. And you might find like yeah, I don’t really need it anymore. Or I don’t really want it anymore. And if you find that you still do want it, then by all means like okay, go for it knock, yourself out. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:21:26 Yeah, there’s so much money to be made in FinTech with like frictionless payment and getting us to impulse buy. Like all an advertiser needs to do is show up in your social media feed. You have a pattern, right? You’re just scrolling. They just need to interrupt that pattern. It’s literally called a pattern interrupt. They just need to interrupt it for thirty seconds to get your attention within if you they can get you to make a purchase in thirty seconds, then they’ve got you. You know, any more than thirty
0:21:40 then we check back in with ourselves and we’re asking ourselves that question. Right right, do I really need this in my life? And it’s not necessarily out to scam anybody, it’s just like hey this was a b a novelty product. Most the time our episodes are on that pattern interrupt side where it’s like how do how do I get people to buy my stuff. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:21:49 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:22:16 I find that the longer I run a business the better I get at resisting marketing, at least for things that I don’t need. Like I truly love marketing for introducing me to things that really do improve my life, but I also know when it’s something that they’re trying to create a problem or create a solution that I didn’t need or have before. Like it’s they are creating it so I buy something. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:22:27 Yeah, I’ve had enough sales training that you start to recognise it when other people are using that stuff on you and not it’s not necessarily a turn-off, but you’re just like okay I, see I see what you’re doing here. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:22:42 It’s makes sense for us because we’re in it, but there’s so many people who don’t know what’s going on, and it’s really not their fault, that’s why we love talking about it on Frugal Friends, is so that everybody can know what we already know as business owners. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:23:12 The next uh money saving hack that I wanna introduce is what I call the substitution game. This is where you’re finding better, faster, cheaper, all lower cost alternatives to the stuff you’re already spending money on. This is kind of borrowed from Rose-Marie Groener from Busy Budgeter years ago. I was like well you’re targeting people who don’t have any money. Are you targeting like people who are like trying to be really frugal with their spending? Like that didn’t seem like a great audience. And she was like well it’s a great audience because if you can show them hey you’re already spending money on
0:23:42 have you considered this better, cheaper alternative? It’s, you know, a natural affiliate recommendation to make that switch. It’s like oh, okay, you know s so one example would be like MIT Mobile in our house, like oh say money on your cell phone bill. But they’re looking at the things that you’re already spending money, like if it’s been a while since you’ve shopped for car insurance, like you’re you keep paying the same rate, but your cars have depreciated since you last, you know, renegotiated that. So like different things that you could kind of look at um and try and get the same service for lower cost.
0:24:12 Yeah, I did that recently with insurance. It wha and actually our insurance is coming up again. So it is time to do it again. But it’s things that you’re already buying and need. I think it’s go always good to like re-think if you actually need it, and I do this a lot with our streaming services to say like okay, is this actually something I need? Because sometimes when you take a break and you come back in, then you get like a new subscriber discount. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:24:12 Mm-hmm.
0:24:20 So sometimes just like canceling for six months can save you even money more money again if you can’t negotiate it down. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:24:44 Mm-hmm mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
0:25:14 Mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
0:25:44 it’s it’s too small to even make it down. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:26:12 Yeah, I think and we also th we believe that any change we have to m make is permanent, and truly nothing is permanent. So my co-host Jill, when the before they owned a home, they lived in an R_V_ for a couple years. And they never intended for that to be a permanent lifestyle, like they were not R_V_ YouTubers who, you know, built a brand around being digital nomads, right.
0:26:42 literally did it to save money on their living expenses for two years. And that’s how we ended up meeting them ’cause they just took advantage of living in an R_V_ to take a road trip down to Florida. So so many of the things we think of or maybe it’s not having a car, a second car uh or a car at all as maybe you skip out for six months or nine months and just take an e-bike or you’re a one family car, nothing that you do to save money
0:26:51 to be permanent, but if it’s worth the money you will save for however long you do it, that could make a big dent in your future goals.
0:27:21 Yeah, we have strongly considered becoming a one-car household in this interim period where the kids are, you know, pre-driver’s license age ’cause it’s like the insurance carrying cost sits at the driveway most of the time not getting used and sometimes oh well now we gotta jump-start the battery and stuff, but uh you kind of have to do that math well how much would you spend on Uber or Lyft like on those very few occasions where you really did need two cars, like and does that outweigh the cost. So
0:27:26 there’s the kind of questioning to your point some of the the bigger ticket items in your life. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:27:56 Yeah, definitely. So I think my next recommendation, and it’s one that I’ve been talking about for years and have been delighted to be talking more about in twenty twenty five, because it is a hot topic, is no spend challenges. So I know like ha stopping spending money is extreme, right. So I don’t I don’t necessarily recommend it, but it is it’s a gateway drug to saving sustainably. So if you’re interested in it
0:28:26 it’s not bad. But I love talking about no spend challenges, which is you know extreme, but it’s extreme for a short amount of time and it’s not extreme just for the sake of being extreme. But so like when we were talking at the top of the episode about looking at what you spent in the past and making a plan for what you will spend in a future or spending plan or budget, there is this real time period between that and that’s where
0:28:56 a no spend challenge can really help you get a handle on your expenses. It goes beyond like the subscriptions and the automations and all that and gives you a really big insight into what are my spending habits, what am I spending on without thinking, what am I taking for granted that I have to spend on to meet a need when I could really get creative and meet that need for free or lower cost. So I
0:29:26 like to recommend doing at least one not thirty day no spend challenge. Maybe you’re starting out getting ahold of your expenses. Maybe you’re kind of recommitting yourself. Doing thirty days is enough. Like yes, there are books written about people doing no spend challenges for a year, like no buy, low buy years. That’s that’s fine if you wanna write a book about your experience. But if you want to just get a handle on your spending, [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:29:56 and start to retrain some of your dopamine receptors to go towards other dopamine producing habits versus automatically going to scrolling the Amazon app or going to Target or any of these shopping-induced dopamine receptor things Thirty. days really is enough. So I read uh while we were writing Buy What You Love Without Going Broke, I was reading Dopamine Nation by Anne Lemke and she was she worked with people with all kinds of
0:30:26 addictions. And the first thing she would do is put them on a quote unquote dopamine fast. And they’re not really fasting dopamine, you need dopamine. But the thing is is that you can if you abstain from what is creating these dopamine inducing actions, these quote unquote addictions, if you abstain for four weeks, one month, thirty days, whatever, the first two weeks are very hard. The the
0:30:56 week actually is the easiest, the second week is the hardest. But after two weeks, you start to see a difference in where you’re getting your dopamine hits and how you’re getting them. And after four weeks, you can truly see a ch a change to where if I’m stressed, I can go towards something that will actually treat the root cause of the stress instead of stress shopping, which is just a habit. So that’s what I
0:31:08 love about the no spend challenge is for that right there to start paying attention to spending habits and starting to change them versus just how much money you’ll save of not spending for four weeks. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:31:38 Yeah, we had some friends recently uh go through this, we th we did not participate for photo disclosure. They were allowed to buy, you know, produce and stuff, but otherwise it was like trying to eat out of the pantry, eat out of the freezer, and it’s interesting that you mentioned week two is the hardest ’cause this really aligns with uh the New Year’s resolution data that like w what is it, January twelfth is quit day. It’s like that’s, you know, the first week like, motivation is really strong, okay, I got this and then week two, uh it starts
0:32:08 wait a little bit and then by the end of week two it’s like yeah forget it I’ll just go back to my old habits and it’s like that’s uh that’s really interesting here and y my guess is because I’ve done like twenty four thirty six hour fasts but not much l longer than that and it makes you you kind of notice what it makes you notice what you’re missing makes you really grateful that you’re not doing that most of the time but it’s kind of i trying to f figure out those little emotional points where oh I normally would have bought
0:32:18 this or normally would have eaten this or normally would have spent that, and I think that’s a that’s really interesting. A little bit extreme, but maybe it kick-starts or build some awareness around where your money’s going. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:32:49 Yeah, w so we talk about finding the radical middle ’cause everybody loves to live in extremes ’cause they’re really easy to market and talk about they go viral, but where s true sustainability lies is in the radical middle. And we can find our radical middle by visiting extremes and learning about them, but we don’t wanna live in them. And that’s kinda what a no spend challenge is, right? Like it’s extreme, it helps you realise okay, what’s the thing that I can’t stop
0:33:19 thinking about wanting to spend on ’cause you’re right, I’ve done twenty four hour fasts too, and I think about food m way more than than I would if I was not s like on a fast. And so people, when they think about cutting out costs, they think about the most important things to them and be and like oh, but I don’t wanna give up this. And usually that’s the last thing you should give up. And a no spend challenge can help you figure out okay, what are the things that I am constantly thinking about that I really
0:33:37 miss and then you check back with that transaction inventory and you’re like oh, I didn’t even think about this, yet I’m always spending on it w w so I don’t I can just draw a line in the sand now and say I’m not gonna spend on this anymore. Uh so I really love it for that aspect. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:33:49 More money saving hacks with Jen in just a moment, including cash versus credit cards, some helpful browser extensions and how to take control and stop playing defense with willpower all day long right after this.
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0:36:11 O_N_E_ dot com slash side hustle for twenty percent off six months. Open phone dot com slash side hustle. And if you have existing numbers with another service, open phone will port them over at no extra charge. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:36:42 Wh what do you think about this one? ‘Cause I have been very pro credit card rewards. We have banked thousands of dollars’ worth of cash back and free flights around the world. Like it has been, you know, almost a p a part of our identity to, you know, b take advantage of these credit card bonuses. But there’s some pretty compelling data that says people spend more and consistently more and significantly more when they’re using credit cards instead of cash.
0:37:13 you have a spending plan, you can use credit cards really responsibly and take advantage of all the benefits that they have to offer. I love credit cards for the safety they afford you when you’re making transactions, for all of the flight and hotel benefits, I love them. But you have to be working on a plan because sometimes we’ve been I’ve done this before when you’re consumed about getting to those like like minimum spends to get the bonus or whatever. You can just throw
0:37:43 else on the credit card because you’re like oh I’ll make it up with the points I get. Which really isn’t and then your points just sit there like in perpetuity because you have so many and you can’t have you know can’t take off time for work to travel for six months with all your points. So being very intentional with a spending plan can help you really get the most out of credit card usage and put into perspective okay
0:37:54 what is enough? Like what vacations am I trying to take? How many points do I need to get there? And do I have to hoard points just because I can? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:38:22 No. Yeah, you can’t t you can’t take ’em with you. And and they get get ’em devalued year after year. So use ’em use ’em up. And we do think cash is important for the kids, especially a younger one, to like see that physical transaction, the money leave in his hands. For me it’s almost the opposite, where it’s like it feels like it feels like it’s free ’cause I know it’s not gonna hit the account, it’s not gonna I’m not gonna see it on my statement, it’s just like oh here’s twenty bucks, sure. But it’s you know, it’s there’s some interesting psychology around cash versus cards. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:38:42 Yeah, I definitely think it’s wise ma like when you’re starting out and if you believe you do have a pro like a real problem with overspending, just lock the credit cards for a few months and just use cash. It does it it’s not a long-term solution, but it is a good short-term exercise. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:38:57 On the shopping side, going back to getting the best deal, I like the site Cashback Monitor, um I like Rakuten. Do you have any other tools, tips, uh you know, for deal finding or or Cashback here? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:39:28 Yeah, I’ve been into CNET shopping lately. It’s one of those like price trackers so you can see if something is on is less expensive on another site. I use um B_E_N_I_. So that is a site that helps well it’s uh it’s a browser extension, and so like if I’m on if I see somebody wearing a cute Lululemon uh sweatshirt, I can look it up on the Lululemon
0:39:58 And then the Benny browser extension, I click that and I can find the sweatshirt on second-hand sites like Poshmark, ThredUP, E_Bay, RealReal, all of those resale sites. It will look at that particular new item and find it all over the internet second-hand. And so I actually love that. It saves me m way more than like any rebate app ’cause I’m saving [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:40:02 fifty percent on things that are even new with tags. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:40:07 Okay Cool. Benny, that’s a new one to me. Well we can link that up in the show notes. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:40:25 Gem it does a similar thing with if you’re more into like vintage and higher end stuff, it’s similar to Benny, but for more like vintage clothing, that’s G_E_M_. Gem search I think I’m, not 100% sure. I am not super fashion forward, so I just use Benny. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:40:38 Got it, cool. And and nor am I, so just buy clothes from and then just well that that fit well, so buy another pair of clothes or buy another one of those in a different colour or something. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:41:24 It’s hard to find hard to find if something that fits. I will say I have a transition to spending more up-front for hopefully better quality stuff than rather wearing out the you know pair of old navy shorts in six months or something. So you know what’s like the buy buy it for life or you know these brands that hopefully a little more durable or longer lasting. So it’s sometimes it’s wh what do they call it? It’s like a you know penny-wise pound, foolish or something like you know single ply you end up using more. So like a
0:41:29 there’s some certain ones where you’re just yeah it looks cheaper on the surface because it’s not gonna last. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:41:59 Yeah, that’s one of the problems with having a frugal living podcast is that people will come up to Jill and I and brag about how cheap they got their clothing or how cheap they got something. And then I’m like yeah, but did you need it? And is it gonna last? Like I think those things I obviously do not say them out loud. But it that is always what I think. It’s always people bragging about what they got, what they could
0:42:16 instead of like bragging about I d I didn’t consume this, or I didn’t buy anything on Amazon for, you know, six months or stuff like that. That is what I would love to hear our listeners brag about. And anybody I, would love to hear that from anybody. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:42:29 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:43:15 Yeah, it is a balance. Frugality for us isn’t just about stewarding your m your money well, but it’s being a good steward of all of your resources, and that includes time, your physical space, so not like cluttering up your space with a bunch of free stuff or cheap stuff from Craig’s list. Uh it’s about your mental energy and natural resources too, so it’s about stewarding all these limited resources well. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:43:32 That makes sense. One limited resource is attention. You like that transition. The um hack that I wanna share is to m either not sign up for marketing emails from different stores or brands in the first place, or you can unsubscribe from them if it is becoming a problem.
0:44:03 what I tend to do from the stores that I’d actually shop from like R_E_I_ and some of these other ones, even like pizza like Papa Murphy’s and stuff like goes into this special folder that I don’t really see, but when it’s time to order or when I’m in the market for something, I can go through and see if they sent me any deals recently. It’s like out of sight, out of mind, but I’m I’m still in control rather than like oh there’s a sale going on or oh it’s it’s like well I I don’t need to see that ’cause I wasn’t gonna buy it i th like
0:44:15 the game that they want to play. It’s like how to create more purchase activity. But it’s like I wanna do that on my own terms. And so I just have a bunch of filters set up in G_ mail to throw those into like a marketing deals or something folder. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:44:27 Mm-hmm.
0:44:48 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:45:12 Yeah, absolutely I. look at my wife’s inbox and it’s like thousands and thousands of messages. It’s like could I help clean this up for you? But she generally does okay with the impulse buys. But it’s like it’s it’s it’s somewhat exhausting to be playing defense with willpower all day long and have seen this with food or with you know m the bombardment of different marketing messages. And so you kind of have to build these little uh guardrails around uh around yourself. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:45:42 Yeah, you definitely have to remove the temptation you ha it’s so much easier to not have it in front of you than it is to decide to make a good decision. Like we always say work with your brain, not against it. Your brain wants to take the path of least resistance. So let it. But you have to put up the guard rails so that path does it like derail you from your financial goals. So we
0:46:12 uh atomic habits, uh James Clear’s like habit triggers, the cues, and so like i is it the person I’m with or is it the place that I’m heading to or coming from, is it the time of day, so we look at these cues and we’re like okay, can I change anything about these to remove the temptation, and that works so much better than trying to rely on yourself to make the good decision every
0:46:37 ‘Cause by by three P_M_ it’s you’re you’re sober. You’re just done. That’s and and you know a amount like you don’t need to be stronger. Like I think we can feel guilty for our lack of you know quote unquote self-discipline or discernment or whatever. But our body’s literally designed to d to do this for our brain. So work with your brain, not against it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:47:05 Yeah remove, the temptation and s some of the things it might be ordering delivery, like a grocery delivery. It saves you from making impulse buys in the store. Like we’ve started doing a lot of target pick-up, which for me it’s like it’s gonna it’s only a few things. Like let me just go in. It’s gonna be faster than sitting here waiting on somebody to bring out this stuff. Like it feels silly. Like I’ll just go pick it up. But the mentality is like we’ll probably save money by not going into the store and seeing oh what else is in here that we need. That jumps into the cart. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:47:37 I do this? And I think part of it is like if I’m going to target for one thing, I’m already there. So it would be an inefficient use of my time to not walk around to see if there’s anything else I need. Because then I would have to go back. And I don’t wanna go back. So then I look around and then that’s where I end up impulse buying something instead of if I had just walked in to get the one thing and and walked out. So part of it I think was is an
0:47:49 is an efficiency thing for me and, so yeah, I’ve been doing Walmart grocery pick-up for years since I had my first son and he was just impossible to go grocery shopping with. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:48:19 Alright. The next one on uh my list is to get an accountability partner. I think if you’re trying to cut back spending and all your friends don’t know about this, or they’re gonna think you’re all of a sudden this wet blanket who doesn’t wanna do anything anymore, I I think it’s helpful to have somebody else in your corner who’s on the same journey who’s rooting for you. I remember years ago, Tiffany um the budget nista, she said this was like day one of her thirty day live richer challenge, day one get yourself an accountability partner.
0:48:49 from the business and growth and marketing standpoint I was like well this is fantastic you just doubled the size of your audience you know on day one, this is great. But from um the personal like uh stick-with-itness factor you gotta have somebody else who um who can support you and say no no no we’re in this together. I remember even on the the health and fitness side like we would come home uh from from work early in our careers and be like well we said we were gonna go uh go for a run but you know it would be easier if you don’t if one person’s thinking ah I don’t
0:48:52 really wanna go like, no no no, we’re gonna back each other up, we’re gonna go do this. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:49:22 Yeah, you you have to it takes a village, and we’ve gotten so far away from from that ideology, it’s hard to find a village now. If you want to succeed in anything financially, business, health, you do have to surround yourself with people who have the same goals. So they don’t necessarily have to be on the same path, but they at least have to be genuinely supportive of the path that you’re
0:49:53 And I had to stop hanging out or talking to some people when I was paying off debt, and I hang out with them now. It’s not like I cut them off totally from my life ’cause they were toxic or something. They just weren’t good for me in that period of time. And so it being really honouring your season and whatever you’re trying to accomplish and and really making a point to create community around you to support
0:50:07 that is truly gonna make or break. I don’t think I know I would not have paid off my student loans if I hadn’t had my husband there, like when we were working together on it. Like I just I was not interested in it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:50:20 Do you have any recommendations for maybe one partner in a relationship is the spender and the other is the saver? Like how do you kind of bridge that gap and get buy-in from a a spouse or partner? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:50:50 first I think the spender and saver like personality types are a myth. I think everybody spends and everybody would save if they had enough incentive. Like if you were gonna die tomorrow unless you made five thousand dollars, like you’d find a way to make that money, right? So everybody can do it uh theoretically. But not everybody has the same values and
0:51:20 wants the same things. So it might look like and and people don’t think that they are sometimes capable or deserve the things that they truly want in life. Like we think we deserve small things and so we’ll go after small things and those are the things that are typically marketed to us, but big things like retiring in your fifties or even in your sixties or starting like going full time in a business
0:51:50 or stuff like that. Sometimes we don’t think that we can get that because that would take so much of our time and so much effort. So we we sacrifice these bigger things that we actually want to just take the smaller things. And when we recognise what our partner actually wants in life and we start to have those big higher level conversations, that’s when we can start to honour what this person would actually say
0:52:19 what would give my partner incentive to save. What is the thing that they really do want in life and would save for. That ’cause that was what happened with me. I didn’t wanna pay off her debt, but I did want to eventually foster. And that involves a lot of time. Um a lot of time investment. And it’s easier to invest that time if work is optional for me. And if I have a seven hundred dollar debt payment every month, work is not optional for me. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:52:19 Yeah.
0:52:44 So that became the catalyst for why I wanted to pay off the debt. Him just it being a good idea or something I’m quote unquote supposed to do or something that my spouse wanted me to do was not enough for me. I had to connect it to what I really wanted. And so you have to find the thing that your partner really wants enough to stop spending on the small things to focus on the big things. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:53:14 Yeah, getting on the same page in alignment with that big picture goal. What do you you know, what do you wh what do we envision for our life? Like what uh you know, having that i i and the goal posts may move, but having some sort of destination in mind rather than just saving for the sake of saving, I think that can be that can be really important or maybe that’s something that we found uh helpful uh early on in in our journey and recognising it to team sport. Like we gotta have some some buy-in here. But having that big picture
0:53:41 it’s important on the saving side, it’s important on the side hustle side too ’cause it’s like the going is gonna get tough, you’re gonna wanna quit, it’s just like what’s that driving motivation behind it and it’s a kind of it’s it’s the different side of the same coin. Well it’s like well yeah everybody says they wanna side hustle to make extra money, but why? Like what does that afford you? Like going three or four layers deep uh i and if you have a spouse or partner in the picture like then that can that can be really impo be important too. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:53:42 Yeah. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:53:45 Anyth anything else on your list? I think we’ve done uh pretty good here. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:54:15 Yeah, I I would say the last thing for me is to celebrate small wins. I think that we uh at least for me, and I think that this might be for a lot of personal finance nerds, we are so we are so quick to move the goal post. Uh we hit one goal and then we just, you know, move it back and we’re already onto the next without recognising what we’ve done and celebrating that. So really taking time
0:54:45 we achieve a goal, like what did I struggle through so that I don’t forget that. Uh and then what was really easy for me that I thought wasn’t gonna be easy. Um and and so all of these things reflecting on the journey so that the next time you’re trying to accomplish something and you’re not sure if you can do it, you can actually look back at what you did the last time and be encouraged. It can and these successes
0:54:52 pushing through setbacks, they all compound on themselves. So the goals that you reach can be bigger and bigger. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:55:23 That’s right. Keep leveling up. That’s the name of the game. And I do wanna add a point here that like as your income increases, as your side hustle starts to grow, as you level up in your career, like some level of lifestyle creep lifestyle, inflation is uh is recommended. That’s kind of the point, right? Like you reward yourself. You know, make things easier on on yourself. Uh enjoy the fruits of your labour. Tim Ferriss has this line um about well how can I waste money to improve
0:55:42 quality of life. And I think that waste line is really important because it allows you to acknowledge that it’s not necessary. Like yes, it’s an upgrade. Yes, it seems frivolous based on my, you know, you know, years of frugal habits. I so I’m gonna acknowledge that it’s a waste, but it’s worth it because it’s gonna make life better or easier in some way. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:55:53 Yeah. Lifestyle inflation is not bad as long as it’s proportionate to your income inflation and it aligns with what you truly value and what your goals are. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:56:13 Very good. Jen, this has been awesome. Congrats on the book launch. Again, buy what you love without going broke. Buy what you love book dot com Make. sure to grab a copy. Make sure to check out the Frugal Friends podcast. Now you’ve got other side hustles, other projects, self-publishing print, on demand. What what are you working on this year? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:56:43 Oh, this year is all about YouTube. We are definitely diving more into video. It’s that one thing that I think will make other things easier or unnecessary in the future. So yeah, we are starting a c a couple different uh YouTube segments for the podcast and I’m even starting to post more on my personal YouTube channel. Well, it’s called modern frugality. So it’s not like personal personal, but there are just some things where
0:56:54 like I’m just I’m gonna post more on YouTube. I’m gonna get over my fear of not being not feeling camera-ready, not feeling camera-worthy and just just try it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:57:24 Very good. Modern frugality we’ll link that up as well along with frugal friends and the book Buy What You Love Without Growing Broke. What’s that one thing that will make things easier or unnecessary? I love that line. Now we’ve been talking about saving money in this episode, but as you know there’s only so much you can cut. But your earning power on the other side is limitless, which is why we’ve got over six hundred fifty episodes dedicated to that topic. If you’re not sure where to start, I wanna invite you to grab your personalized side hustle
0:57:54 play list, all you gotta do is go to hustle dot show, answer a few short multiple choice questions, and it’ll recommend uh eight to ten episodes to start with based on your answers. Again, that’s at hustle dot show. Big thanks to Jen for sharing her insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up side hustle nation dot com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let’s go out there
0:57:59 make something happen and I’ll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show. Hustle on.
0:00:28 Nick, thanks so much for having me. This is a for sure a full circle moment for me.
0:00:59 Well, it’s been a long time coming. Appreciate you joining me today. We I think we both uh are in agreement that it’s important to take a a holistic view of personal finance, thinking of yourself as the C_E_O_ or the C_F_O_ of your own life and really taking charge of your personal profitability, which of course includes the revenue side, which we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of episodes about, increasing your income. But it also includes the expense side, which we typically don’t talk a lot about. And with that, I wanna tee it up to you for suggestion
0:01:07 one on how to spend less monies or start saving more, or maybe a foundation that uh you need to lay on this mission to get the spending in check.
0:01:37 Yeah, I love side hustling, but you’re right. When you focus on the expense side, that’s the lowest barrier to entry, and you can start seeing more margin between your income and expenses faster when you stop spending money than if you’re just focus on side hustles. So what we tell everyone to do is yes, first track every expense, but not just your current expenses and your future expenses. First,
0:02:07 wanna start with your past expenses too. So first, look back at your last ninety days of spending and figure out what are the patterns, what are the habits, what am I already spending on. So that way you’re better prepared as you go through life and you’re spending money, you have a little bit more knowledge and a little bit more preparation on the things you’re more prone to spend on, the situations where you’re more prone to impulse spend or to overspend.
0:02:18 So we look back before we look forward, but that first tip is the same, is that you have to know what you’re doing, you have to track your expenses. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:02:28 For this, are you just uh pulling up the past three months of credit card statements and trying to figure out well where where to really go, trying to categorise this uh spending into different buckets? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:02:58 Yeah, you can really easily do it with whatever you’re using for your credit card or your debit card, wherever your transactions are. Or if you’re using a budgeting app like YNAB, Monar, Copilot, any of those, they do it automatically for you. And it’s really easy to sort by the dates that you made, so maybe you went on vacation, you wanna see maybe what you’re more prone to overspending on on vacation. You can sort by category, so maybe you’re not going to the same place over and over.
0:03:25 But you’re doing take-out over and over just at different places. Or maybe you do sort alphabetically so that you can see your expenses at each place. Like maybe I’m grocery shopping on Sunday, but I’m always heading back to the grocery store Wednesday or Thursday because I just didn’t make enough of a list or I didn’t stick to the list enough. So I’m always heading back for that one thing and getting more while in there. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:03:35 We used Monarch, which uh there’s some level of irony in it being a paid tool to help you spend less. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:03:38 I use Monarch too. Yeah, I pay for it as well. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:04:08 you know, they probably have some like new customer discount. I’ll look I’ll look that up. I’ll link it up in the show notes for you. But w what we did ’cause we we kind of had this sense of well here’s our, you know, bare bones budget or like kind of the big ticket mortgage and utilities and f f food. You know, we kind of had a general sense of what it it cost to sustain our lifestyle. But then like every month when the credit card statement would come be like oh that seems a little bit high. What did what did we buy? It was like oh well we had uh plane tickets or we had
0:04:29 uh car repair or we had s you know something else broke, it it’s like every month it’s like well wasn’t a one-off thing, it’s like a very consistent thing. So we used Monarch to look at the last twelve months and be like well what do we what do we actually spend? And it was the kind of our hunches became true and the outflow was quite a bit higher than we had kind of mentally be envisioned in our in our heads. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:04:53 Yeah, it’s it’s always more nerve-wracking before you actually look. That’s why so many people just don’t wanna look back. We just wanna start freshly, go forward looking at expenses. But you will be more effective faster if you’re trying to lower your spending by knowing where you’re starting from. And it’s always scarier not knowing than when you actually look into it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:05:12 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:05:42 So once you look back, then you can start looking forward. So then you would start to make a budget. But I would say everybody’s budgeting style is different and everybody thrives with a different level of either being very strict or being very loose. Like for me I hated the strict budget, but I thought that’s what I had to do to be in control of my spending. And what I found was when I gave myself more
0:06:06 flexibility in the categories, like created fewer categories, it actually gave me more freedom to not spend on things and to spend without guilt and it made it more sustainable for me. So but the next point is to make a spending plan for the future. You can call it spending plan, budget, whatever makes you feel good. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:08 Spending plan sounds better than budget, for sure. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:21 Right. So like the f beautiful thing about language is that there’s so many synonyms for the same thing, right. So if one word gives you like g the grow that gross feeling like budget sometimes can, you can call it something else. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:23 Yeah, so it feels so like very restrictive, yeah. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:53 right, right. So making some kind of spending plan for what I wanna do. And we recommend a zero based budget, but not just to have every dollar tied up into whatever’s most efficient, but so that you know that you have enough to put towards your financial goals and whatever you’re planning to do. So if you need a little extra capital to start a side hustle or you’re trying to pay off a debt before you can so you can work less, you have more
0:07:23 for your side hustle, you wanna make sure those things are covered first and on the timeline you wanna cover them and then with the rest that’s where we figure out our discretionary uh purchases. Obviously paying bills you know first and foremost but that’s kinda what you wanna do and you can make a budget or spending plan that you will stick to better because you already know what you’re spending on other things. You’re not just taking a shot in the dark on what you’re spending on
0:07:43 take-out or coffee or whatever, you actually know how much you’ve been spending over the past three months. So maybe you spend the same or maybe you shave it a little bit, but you’re not going to cut it by ninety percent because it’s an arbitrary thing that you think, quote unquote, you’re supposed to be spending that much. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:07:53 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:08:45 Yeah, that can be it. And I think it’s it’s not so much where the money
0:09:15 that zero based budgeting is, but it’s having a job for every dollar. So that dollar’s job could just be a miscellaneous fund, and you have a larger miscellaneous fund because you don’t wanna have a coffee budget, a take-out budget, a grocery budget, a non-food grocery budget, which I have seen like people have two check-outs at the grocery store because they wanna categorize food and non-food differently. Like if that’s you and you love that,
0:09:25 do you That’s. not me. So I would rather have bigger categories and more flexibility within them. And it can still be zero based. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:09:55 Yeah okay, I like that call to you know make sure every every dollar has a job put puttin it to work. When I’ve you know first started working and get the direct deposit I was like okay whatever they say allocate ten percent to four oh one K_ or up to whatever the company match was and then everything else just went into checking and what didn’t necessarily nee like I could probably could have accelerated my saving or investment journey and you know kind of was a natural saver to begin with but didn’t do a great job of investing that in compounding assets just kind of sat there in a lot of cases. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:10:25 Yeah, it when you are intentional about what you do with your money when you get it, it just it works better. And when you take care of the bigger things, you don’t have to stress so much about the smaller things. And so that’s like the eighty twenty rule in saving money. So when we look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics on what Americans spend on most, the biggest things are housing, transportation, and food. Those make
0:10:55 up about sixty percent, those three things, sixty percent of our monthly budget. So if we can focus on those three things first, mainly housing and transportation, where we make decisions about that maybe every five, ten, fifteen years, but if we focus on those really intentionally, then the six dollar latte or the twenty dollar take-out makes a lot less of an impact. So for me, that was when I got my last
0:11:25 I didn’t pay cash for it, I got a loan for it and that’s okay with me, like I’m not against like car loan debt, but what saved me four thousand dollars in one sitting was that after hours of negotiating for one car, which was virtually identical to another one, on the website they were the same price, but I was sitting there waiting to get this one car that after all the fees and
0:11:55 I have no idea how it inflated to four thousand dollars more than the other car. And I had this feeling like this sunk cost feeling. I’d already spent so much time negotiated, I’ve negotiated down a lot, I’ve invested a lot into the salesperson that I’ve never met before and will never see again in my life. So I was sitting there and I was about to buy the car, to just bite the bullet until I realised is this worth four thousand dollars, like what I’m sitting here for?
0:12:23 and worrying more about myself versus the time and the other people around me. And I was like no. So I got up, left and went and got the other car and in that one moment, which was very uncomfortable and I did not like it, it saved me four thousand dollars. So it’s making decisions like that that are what’s going to help us like really, really cut our spending. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:12:53 Yeah, that makes sense. It’s not so much the coffee’s here or there. I mean maybe it adds up to a lot and there’s oh, but if you if you save that four dollar latte and you compound it over it, you know, it’s like well, but if it brings you joy in life, you know, come on. But no, totally. Like on the housing, on the transportation, uh if you find some creative ways to uh stretch your uh food budget a little farther, like these are the big big levers that you can pull to make a bigger impact. More money saving hacks with Jen in just a
0:13:00 including my favourite non-confrontational negotiation tactic and four questions to ask before you make a purchase right after this.
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0:15:58 I will share on the car buying experience, I will share my most uh underrated negotiation tactic and it’s just called silence. It’s just sitting there awkwardly for what feels uh like an uncomfortable amount of time and I’ve seen this over and over again. We were kind of taught this uh when I was painting houses like once you name your price and you present the estimate, just sit there wait for wait for a reaction like don’t talk yourself out of a deal, you know. I remember uh going in take my car in for like an admissions test and there was a place nearby in California where y they had some you know
0:16:28 deal on the window. So I’d, you know, take it in and they say well because yours is an S_U_V_ it’s gonna cost more. And I was like well first of all, you know, calling my two-wheel-drive uh four-cylinder uh Ford Escape an S_U_V_ is being very generous, but but putting that aside the, remembered it’s sitting there for w what was probably just ten or fifteen seconds, but like in the moment it felt super awkward. And the guy was like okay fine, we’ll just honor that price. And I was like oh, I didn’t have to do anything for that. The other one was we were legitimately off the grid up in the mountains. Turns out like on Friday our landlord
0:16:58 that sent a note hey we’re we’re gonna have to raise your rate to to this you know maybe it was a three hundred dollar increase or something didn’t get the email ’cause we were not checking email come back on Monday night and we see like three future messages hey just making sure you saw this and then last one was like well how about if we meet in the middle and it was like hey I just saved a thousand bucks by not responding to this it works online too if you’re not in a hurry like if you have something in your shopping cart on some site just leave it leave it for a day leave it for a couple days there’s a lot of e-commerce stores have like the abandoned cart
0:17:10 sequence. So you might see a follow-up e-mail where it’s like hey, did you did you forget something? How about ten percent off if you if you check out now. And so and that’s my underrated new negotiation tactic of just waiting. Silence. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:17:31 Yeah. Oh my gosh definitely. Any time I wanna buy clothes on Poshmark, I just like it. I don’t put it in the cart, I just like it. And then like ni nine times out of ten, I get a special offer on the piece. Yeah, it’s always you just show a little bit of interest, but don’t give ’em anything else. Like you can walk away. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:17:40 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:18:06 setting that mindset well, not everything that you buy has to be brand new. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:18:36 Yeah, I try to buy as much as possible second-hand, not just because it saves money, but also because we have so much stuff on our planet that we have I think the estimate is we have enough clothing already made to clothe the next six generations of people. And so if we can stop that flow, we not only are saving money, we are and and these things are more negotiable than
0:19:06 something that you would buy in Target or Wal-Mart, right? But we’re also cutting down on like landfill waste clutter uh in our earth. So it’s just like there’s no reason to just not think second-hand first. It doesn’t mean everything you buy has to be second-hand, but if we would just shift the mindset to being like before I buy anything, I use these four questions. How can I get it for free? So like a buy nothing
0:19:36 or free on Facebook Marketplace, or from a friend either trading or borrowing. If I can’t get it for free, how can I get it for low cost? And so that’s where second-hand comes in. How can I get it on Poshmark, eBay, ThredUP, can I buy it from Facebook Marketplace, thrift store. If I can’t get that, and I don’t spend a ton of time searching for these, I’m you know, depending on how fast I need something, I’m not searching for years, right? I’m just I’m
0:20:06 looking, I’m trying to get creative before I just first go out and buy it new. If I can’t get it low cost, I ask how can I get a deal on it? Like how soon is the next sales cycle coming up ’cause they always come back around. And then if I really need it and I can’t wait for a sale, how can I buy full price and not feel guilty about it? So is there a way I can buy locally or sustainably? Something like that. So those are the four questions that I asked before
0:20:09 Or I’d buy something in order to save money. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:20:40 Yeah, I know that’s that’s a good filter to put a new purchase decision through, and I will add another layer of filtering which I just call the waiting period. Maybe it’s twenty four hours, maybe it’s thirty days, and this is something that I d uh used to do quite a bit more. So I can just put a thirty day waiting period on it and you’ll find in a lot of cases that y you know obviously can’t do this with food and other essentials, but it’s like for you know something something else where it’s like oh that’s a nice to have. You
0:20:55 find that you lived a perfectly happy existence for the thirty days in between, and you’re like uh you just set a calendar reminder, hey, buy the thing. And you might find like yeah, I don’t really need it anymore. Or I don’t really want it anymore. And if you find that you still do want it, then by all means like okay, go for it knock, yourself out. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:21:26 Yeah, there’s so much money to be made in FinTech with like frictionless payment and getting us to impulse buy. Like all an advertiser needs to do is show up in your social media feed. You have a pattern, right? You’re just scrolling. They just need to interrupt that pattern. It’s literally called a pattern interrupt. They just need to interrupt it for thirty seconds to get your attention within if you they can get you to make a purchase in thirty seconds, then they’ve got you. You know, any more than thirty
0:21:40 then we check back in with ourselves and we’re asking ourselves that question. Right right, do I really need this in my life? And it’s not necessarily out to scam anybody, it’s just like hey this was a b a novelty product. Most the time our episodes are on that pattern interrupt side where it’s like how do how do I get people to buy my stuff. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:21:49 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:22:16 I find that the longer I run a business the better I get at resisting marketing, at least for things that I don’t need. Like I truly love marketing for introducing me to things that really do improve my life, but I also know when it’s something that they’re trying to create a problem or create a solution that I didn’t need or have before. Like it’s they are creating it so I buy something. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:22:27 Yeah, I’ve had enough sales training that you start to recognise it when other people are using that stuff on you and not it’s not necessarily a turn-off, but you’re just like okay I, see I see what you’re doing here. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:22:42 It’s makes sense for us because we’re in it, but there’s so many people who don’t know what’s going on, and it’s really not their fault, that’s why we love talking about it on Frugal Friends, is so that everybody can know what we already know as business owners. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:23:12 The next uh money saving hack that I wanna introduce is what I call the substitution game. This is where you’re finding better, faster, cheaper, all lower cost alternatives to the stuff you’re already spending money on. This is kind of borrowed from Rose-Marie Groener from Busy Budgeter years ago. I was like well you’re targeting people who don’t have any money. Are you targeting like people who are like trying to be really frugal with their spending? Like that didn’t seem like a great audience. And she was like well it’s a great audience because if you can show them hey you’re already spending money on
0:23:42 have you considered this better, cheaper alternative? It’s, you know, a natural affiliate recommendation to make that switch. It’s like oh, okay, you know s so one example would be like MIT Mobile in our house, like oh say money on your cell phone bill. But they’re looking at the things that you’re already spending money, like if it’s been a while since you’ve shopped for car insurance, like you’re you keep paying the same rate, but your cars have depreciated since you last, you know, renegotiated that. So like different things that you could kind of look at um and try and get the same service for lower cost.
0:24:12 Yeah, I did that recently with insurance. It wha and actually our insurance is coming up again. So it is time to do it again. But it’s things that you’re already buying and need. I think it’s go always good to like re-think if you actually need it, and I do this a lot with our streaming services to say like okay, is this actually something I need? Because sometimes when you take a break and you come back in, then you get like a new subscriber discount. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:24:12 Mm-hmm.
0:24:20 So sometimes just like canceling for six months can save you even money more money again if you can’t negotiate it down. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:24:44 Mm-hmm mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
0:25:14 Mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
0:25:44 it’s it’s too small to even make it down. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:26:12 Yeah, I think and we also th we believe that any change we have to m make is permanent, and truly nothing is permanent. So my co-host Jill, when the before they owned a home, they lived in an R_V_ for a couple years. And they never intended for that to be a permanent lifestyle, like they were not R_V_ YouTubers who, you know, built a brand around being digital nomads, right.
0:26:42 literally did it to save money on their living expenses for two years. And that’s how we ended up meeting them ’cause they just took advantage of living in an R_V_ to take a road trip down to Florida. So so many of the things we think of or maybe it’s not having a car, a second car uh or a car at all as maybe you skip out for six months or nine months and just take an e-bike or you’re a one family car, nothing that you do to save money
0:26:51 to be permanent, but if it’s worth the money you will save for however long you do it, that could make a big dent in your future goals.
0:27:21 Yeah, we have strongly considered becoming a one-car household in this interim period where the kids are, you know, pre-driver’s license age ’cause it’s like the insurance carrying cost sits at the driveway most of the time not getting used and sometimes oh well now we gotta jump-start the battery and stuff, but uh you kind of have to do that math well how much would you spend on Uber or Lyft like on those very few occasions where you really did need two cars, like and does that outweigh the cost. So
0:27:26 there’s the kind of questioning to your point some of the the bigger ticket items in your life. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:27:56 Yeah, definitely. So I think my next recommendation, and it’s one that I’ve been talking about for years and have been delighted to be talking more about in twenty twenty five, because it is a hot topic, is no spend challenges. So I know like ha stopping spending money is extreme, right. So I don’t I don’t necessarily recommend it, but it is it’s a gateway drug to saving sustainably. So if you’re interested in it
0:28:26 it’s not bad. But I love talking about no spend challenges, which is you know extreme, but it’s extreme for a short amount of time and it’s not extreme just for the sake of being extreme. But so like when we were talking at the top of the episode about looking at what you spent in the past and making a plan for what you will spend in a future or spending plan or budget, there is this real time period between that and that’s where
0:28:56 a no spend challenge can really help you get a handle on your expenses. It goes beyond like the subscriptions and the automations and all that and gives you a really big insight into what are my spending habits, what am I spending on without thinking, what am I taking for granted that I have to spend on to meet a need when I could really get creative and meet that need for free or lower cost. So I
0:29:26 like to recommend doing at least one not thirty day no spend challenge. Maybe you’re starting out getting ahold of your expenses. Maybe you’re kind of recommitting yourself. Doing thirty days is enough. Like yes, there are books written about people doing no spend challenges for a year, like no buy, low buy years. That’s that’s fine if you wanna write a book about your experience. But if you want to just get a handle on your spending, [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:29:56 and start to retrain some of your dopamine receptors to go towards other dopamine producing habits versus automatically going to scrolling the Amazon app or going to Target or any of these shopping-induced dopamine receptor things Thirty. days really is enough. So I read uh while we were writing Buy What You Love Without Going Broke, I was reading Dopamine Nation by Anne Lemke and she was she worked with people with all kinds of
0:30:26 addictions. And the first thing she would do is put them on a quote unquote dopamine fast. And they’re not really fasting dopamine, you need dopamine. But the thing is is that you can if you abstain from what is creating these dopamine inducing actions, these quote unquote addictions, if you abstain for four weeks, one month, thirty days, whatever, the first two weeks are very hard. The the
0:30:56 week actually is the easiest, the second week is the hardest. But after two weeks, you start to see a difference in where you’re getting your dopamine hits and how you’re getting them. And after four weeks, you can truly see a ch a change to where if I’m stressed, I can go towards something that will actually treat the root cause of the stress instead of stress shopping, which is just a habit. So that’s what I
0:31:08 love about the no spend challenge is for that right there to start paying attention to spending habits and starting to change them versus just how much money you’ll save of not spending for four weeks. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:31:38 Yeah, we had some friends recently uh go through this, we th we did not participate for photo disclosure. They were allowed to buy, you know, produce and stuff, but otherwise it was like trying to eat out of the pantry, eat out of the freezer, and it’s interesting that you mentioned week two is the hardest ’cause this really aligns with uh the New Year’s resolution data that like w what is it, January twelfth is quit day. It’s like that’s, you know, the first week like, motivation is really strong, okay, I got this and then week two, uh it starts
0:32:08 wait a little bit and then by the end of week two it’s like yeah forget it I’ll just go back to my old habits and it’s like that’s uh that’s really interesting here and y my guess is because I’ve done like twenty four thirty six hour fasts but not much l longer than that and it makes you you kind of notice what it makes you notice what you’re missing makes you really grateful that you’re not doing that most of the time but it’s kind of i trying to f figure out those little emotional points where oh I normally would have bought
0:32:18 this or normally would have eaten this or normally would have spent that, and I think that’s a that’s really interesting. A little bit extreme, but maybe it kick-starts or build some awareness around where your money’s going. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:32:49 Yeah, w so we talk about finding the radical middle ’cause everybody loves to live in extremes ’cause they’re really easy to market and talk about they go viral, but where s true sustainability lies is in the radical middle. And we can find our radical middle by visiting extremes and learning about them, but we don’t wanna live in them. And that’s kinda what a no spend challenge is, right? Like it’s extreme, it helps you realise okay, what’s the thing that I can’t stop
0:33:19 thinking about wanting to spend on ’cause you’re right, I’ve done twenty four hour fasts too, and I think about food m way more than than I would if I was not s like on a fast. And so people, when they think about cutting out costs, they think about the most important things to them and be and like oh, but I don’t wanna give up this. And usually that’s the last thing you should give up. And a no spend challenge can help you figure out okay, what are the things that I am constantly thinking about that I really
0:33:37 miss and then you check back with that transaction inventory and you’re like oh, I didn’t even think about this, yet I’m always spending on it w w so I don’t I can just draw a line in the sand now and say I’m not gonna spend on this anymore. Uh so I really love it for that aspect. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:33:49 More money saving hacks with Jen in just a moment, including cash versus credit cards, some helpful browser extensions and how to take control and stop playing defense with willpower all day long right after this.
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0:36:42 Wh what do you think about this one? ‘Cause I have been very pro credit card rewards. We have banked thousands of dollars’ worth of cash back and free flights around the world. Like it has been, you know, almost a p a part of our identity to, you know, b take advantage of these credit card bonuses. But there’s some pretty compelling data that says people spend more and consistently more and significantly more when they’re using credit cards instead of cash.
0:37:13 you have a spending plan, you can use credit cards really responsibly and take advantage of all the benefits that they have to offer. I love credit cards for the safety they afford you when you’re making transactions, for all of the flight and hotel benefits, I love them. But you have to be working on a plan because sometimes we’ve been I’ve done this before when you’re consumed about getting to those like like minimum spends to get the bonus or whatever. You can just throw
0:37:43 else on the credit card because you’re like oh I’ll make it up with the points I get. Which really isn’t and then your points just sit there like in perpetuity because you have so many and you can’t have you know can’t take off time for work to travel for six months with all your points. So being very intentional with a spending plan can help you really get the most out of credit card usage and put into perspective okay
0:37:54 what is enough? Like what vacations am I trying to take? How many points do I need to get there? And do I have to hoard points just because I can? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:38:22 No. Yeah, you can’t t you can’t take ’em with you. And and they get get ’em devalued year after year. So use ’em use ’em up. And we do think cash is important for the kids, especially a younger one, to like see that physical transaction, the money leave in his hands. For me it’s almost the opposite, where it’s like it feels like it feels like it’s free ’cause I know it’s not gonna hit the account, it’s not gonna I’m not gonna see it on my statement, it’s just like oh here’s twenty bucks, sure. But it’s you know, it’s there’s some interesting psychology around cash versus cards. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:38:42 Yeah, I definitely think it’s wise ma like when you’re starting out and if you believe you do have a pro like a real problem with overspending, just lock the credit cards for a few months and just use cash. It does it it’s not a long-term solution, but it is a good short-term exercise. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:38:57 On the shopping side, going back to getting the best deal, I like the site Cashback Monitor, um I like Rakuten. Do you have any other tools, tips, uh you know, for deal finding or or Cashback here? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:39:28 Yeah, I’ve been into CNET shopping lately. It’s one of those like price trackers so you can see if something is on is less expensive on another site. I use um B_E_N_I_. So that is a site that helps well it’s uh it’s a browser extension, and so like if I’m on if I see somebody wearing a cute Lululemon uh sweatshirt, I can look it up on the Lululemon
0:39:58 And then the Benny browser extension, I click that and I can find the sweatshirt on second-hand sites like Poshmark, ThredUP, E_Bay, RealReal, all of those resale sites. It will look at that particular new item and find it all over the internet second-hand. And so I actually love that. It saves me m way more than like any rebate app ’cause I’m saving [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:40:02 fifty percent on things that are even new with tags. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:40:07 Okay Cool. Benny, that’s a new one to me. Well we can link that up in the show notes. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:40:25 Gem it does a similar thing with if you’re more into like vintage and higher end stuff, it’s similar to Benny, but for more like vintage clothing, that’s G_E_M_. Gem search I think I’m, not 100% sure. I am not super fashion forward, so I just use Benny. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:40:38 Got it, cool. And and nor am I, so just buy clothes from and then just well that that fit well, so buy another pair of clothes or buy another one of those in a different colour or something. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:41:24 It’s hard to find hard to find if something that fits. I will say I have a transition to spending more up-front for hopefully better quality stuff than rather wearing out the you know pair of old navy shorts in six months or something. So you know what’s like the buy buy it for life or you know these brands that hopefully a little more durable or longer lasting. So it’s sometimes it’s wh what do they call it? It’s like a you know penny-wise pound, foolish or something like you know single ply you end up using more. So like a
0:41:29 there’s some certain ones where you’re just yeah it looks cheaper on the surface because it’s not gonna last. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:41:59 Yeah, that’s one of the problems with having a frugal living podcast is that people will come up to Jill and I and brag about how cheap they got their clothing or how cheap they got something. And then I’m like yeah, but did you need it? And is it gonna last? Like I think those things I obviously do not say them out loud. But it that is always what I think. It’s always people bragging about what they got, what they could
0:42:16 instead of like bragging about I d I didn’t consume this, or I didn’t buy anything on Amazon for, you know, six months or stuff like that. That is what I would love to hear our listeners brag about. And anybody I, would love to hear that from anybody. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:42:29 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:43:15 Yeah, it is a balance. Frugality for us isn’t just about stewarding your m your money well, but it’s being a good steward of all of your resources, and that includes time, your physical space, so not like cluttering up your space with a bunch of free stuff or cheap stuff from Craig’s list. Uh it’s about your mental energy and natural resources too, so it’s about stewarding all these limited resources well. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:43:32 That makes sense. One limited resource is attention. You like that transition. The um hack that I wanna share is to m either not sign up for marketing emails from different stores or brands in the first place, or you can unsubscribe from them if it is becoming a problem.
0:44:03 what I tend to do from the stores that I’d actually shop from like R_E_I_ and some of these other ones, even like pizza like Papa Murphy’s and stuff like goes into this special folder that I don’t really see, but when it’s time to order or when I’m in the market for something, I can go through and see if they sent me any deals recently. It’s like out of sight, out of mind, but I’m I’m still in control rather than like oh there’s a sale going on or oh it’s it’s like well I I don’t need to see that ’cause I wasn’t gonna buy it i th like
0:44:15 the game that they want to play. It’s like how to create more purchase activity. But it’s like I wanna do that on my own terms. And so I just have a bunch of filters set up in G_ mail to throw those into like a marketing deals or something folder. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:44:27 Mm-hmm.
0:44:48 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:45:12 Yeah, absolutely I. look at my wife’s inbox and it’s like thousands and thousands of messages. It’s like could I help clean this up for you? But she generally does okay with the impulse buys. But it’s like it’s it’s it’s somewhat exhausting to be playing defense with willpower all day long and have seen this with food or with you know m the bombardment of different marketing messages. And so you kind of have to build these little uh guardrails around uh around yourself. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:45:42 Yeah, you definitely have to remove the temptation you ha it’s so much easier to not have it in front of you than it is to decide to make a good decision. Like we always say work with your brain, not against it. Your brain wants to take the path of least resistance. So let it. But you have to put up the guard rails so that path does it like derail you from your financial goals. So we
0:46:12 uh atomic habits, uh James Clear’s like habit triggers, the cues, and so like i is it the person I’m with or is it the place that I’m heading to or coming from, is it the time of day, so we look at these cues and we’re like okay, can I change anything about these to remove the temptation, and that works so much better than trying to rely on yourself to make the good decision every
0:46:37 ‘Cause by by three P_M_ it’s you’re you’re sober. You’re just done. That’s and and you know a amount like you don’t need to be stronger. Like I think we can feel guilty for our lack of you know quote unquote self-discipline or discernment or whatever. But our body’s literally designed to d to do this for our brain. So work with your brain, not against it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:47:05 Yeah remove, the temptation and s some of the things it might be ordering delivery, like a grocery delivery. It saves you from making impulse buys in the store. Like we’ve started doing a lot of target pick-up, which for me it’s like it’s gonna it’s only a few things. Like let me just go in. It’s gonna be faster than sitting here waiting on somebody to bring out this stuff. Like it feels silly. Like I’ll just go pick it up. But the mentality is like we’ll probably save money by not going into the store and seeing oh what else is in here that we need. That jumps into the cart. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:47:37 I do this? And I think part of it is like if I’m going to target for one thing, I’m already there. So it would be an inefficient use of my time to not walk around to see if there’s anything else I need. Because then I would have to go back. And I don’t wanna go back. So then I look around and then that’s where I end up impulse buying something instead of if I had just walked in to get the one thing and and walked out. So part of it I think was is an
0:47:49 is an efficiency thing for me and, so yeah, I’ve been doing Walmart grocery pick-up for years since I had my first son and he was just impossible to go grocery shopping with. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:48:19 Alright. The next one on uh my list is to get an accountability partner. I think if you’re trying to cut back spending and all your friends don’t know about this, or they’re gonna think you’re all of a sudden this wet blanket who doesn’t wanna do anything anymore, I I think it’s helpful to have somebody else in your corner who’s on the same journey who’s rooting for you. I remember years ago, Tiffany um the budget nista, she said this was like day one of her thirty day live richer challenge, day one get yourself an accountability partner.
0:48:49 from the business and growth and marketing standpoint I was like well this is fantastic you just doubled the size of your audience you know on day one, this is great. But from um the personal like uh stick-with-itness factor you gotta have somebody else who um who can support you and say no no no we’re in this together. I remember even on the the health and fitness side like we would come home uh from from work early in our careers and be like well we said we were gonna go uh go for a run but you know it would be easier if you don’t if one person’s thinking ah I don’t
0:48:52 really wanna go like, no no no, we’re gonna back each other up, we’re gonna go do this. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:49:22 Yeah, you you have to it takes a village, and we’ve gotten so far away from from that ideology, it’s hard to find a village now. If you want to succeed in anything financially, business, health, you do have to surround yourself with people who have the same goals. So they don’t necessarily have to be on the same path, but they at least have to be genuinely supportive of the path that you’re
0:49:53 And I had to stop hanging out or talking to some people when I was paying off debt, and I hang out with them now. It’s not like I cut them off totally from my life ’cause they were toxic or something. They just weren’t good for me in that period of time. And so it being really honouring your season and whatever you’re trying to accomplish and and really making a point to create community around you to support
0:50:07 that is truly gonna make or break. I don’t think I know I would not have paid off my student loans if I hadn’t had my husband there, like when we were working together on it. Like I just I was not interested in it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:50:20 Do you have any recommendations for maybe one partner in a relationship is the spender and the other is the saver? Like how do you kind of bridge that gap and get buy-in from a a spouse or partner? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:50:50 first I think the spender and saver like personality types are a myth. I think everybody spends and everybody would save if they had enough incentive. Like if you were gonna die tomorrow unless you made five thousand dollars, like you’d find a way to make that money, right? So everybody can do it uh theoretically. But not everybody has the same values and
0:51:20 wants the same things. So it might look like and and people don’t think that they are sometimes capable or deserve the things that they truly want in life. Like we think we deserve small things and so we’ll go after small things and those are the things that are typically marketed to us, but big things like retiring in your fifties or even in your sixties or starting like going full time in a business
0:51:50 or stuff like that. Sometimes we don’t think that we can get that because that would take so much of our time and so much effort. So we we sacrifice these bigger things that we actually want to just take the smaller things. And when we recognise what our partner actually wants in life and we start to have those big higher level conversations, that’s when we can start to honour what this person would actually say
0:52:19 what would give my partner incentive to save. What is the thing that they really do want in life and would save for. That ’cause that was what happened with me. I didn’t wanna pay off her debt, but I did want to eventually foster. And that involves a lot of time. Um a lot of time investment. And it’s easier to invest that time if work is optional for me. And if I have a seven hundred dollar debt payment every month, work is not optional for me. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:52:19 Yeah.
0:52:44 So that became the catalyst for why I wanted to pay off the debt. Him just it being a good idea or something I’m quote unquote supposed to do or something that my spouse wanted me to do was not enough for me. I had to connect it to what I really wanted. And so you have to find the thing that your partner really wants enough to stop spending on the small things to focus on the big things. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:53:14 Yeah, getting on the same page in alignment with that big picture goal. What do you you know, what do you wh what do we envision for our life? Like what uh you know, having that i i and the goal posts may move, but having some sort of destination in mind rather than just saving for the sake of saving, I think that can be that can be really important or maybe that’s something that we found uh helpful uh early on in in our journey and recognising it to team sport. Like we gotta have some some buy-in here. But having that big picture
0:53:41 it’s important on the saving side, it’s important on the side hustle side too ’cause it’s like the going is gonna get tough, you’re gonna wanna quit, it’s just like what’s that driving motivation behind it and it’s a kind of it’s it’s the different side of the same coin. Well it’s like well yeah everybody says they wanna side hustle to make extra money, but why? Like what does that afford you? Like going three or four layers deep uh i and if you have a spouse or partner in the picture like then that can that can be really impo be important too. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:53:42 Yeah. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:53:45 Anyth anything else on your list? I think we’ve done uh pretty good here. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:54:15 Yeah, I I would say the last thing for me is to celebrate small wins. I think that we uh at least for me, and I think that this might be for a lot of personal finance nerds, we are so we are so quick to move the goal post. Uh we hit one goal and then we just, you know, move it back and we’re already onto the next without recognising what we’ve done and celebrating that. So really taking time
0:54:45 we achieve a goal, like what did I struggle through so that I don’t forget that. Uh and then what was really easy for me that I thought wasn’t gonna be easy. Um and and so all of these things reflecting on the journey so that the next time you’re trying to accomplish something and you’re not sure if you can do it, you can actually look back at what you did the last time and be encouraged. It can and these successes
0:54:52 pushing through setbacks, they all compound on themselves. So the goals that you reach can be bigger and bigger. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:55:23 That’s right. Keep leveling up. That’s the name of the game. And I do wanna add a point here that like as your income increases, as your side hustle starts to grow, as you level up in your career, like some level of lifestyle creep lifestyle, inflation is uh is recommended. That’s kind of the point, right? Like you reward yourself. You know, make things easier on on yourself. Uh enjoy the fruits of your labour. Tim Ferriss has this line um about well how can I waste money to improve
0:55:42 quality of life. And I think that waste line is really important because it allows you to acknowledge that it’s not necessary. Like yes, it’s an upgrade. Yes, it seems frivolous based on my, you know, you know, years of frugal habits. I so I’m gonna acknowledge that it’s a waste, but it’s worth it because it’s gonna make life better or easier in some way. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:55:53 Yeah. Lifestyle inflation is not bad as long as it’s proportionate to your income inflation and it aligns with what you truly value and what your goals are. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:56:13 Very good. Jen, this has been awesome. Congrats on the book launch. Again, buy what you love without going broke. Buy what you love book dot com Make. sure to grab a copy. Make sure to check out the Frugal Friends podcast. Now you’ve got other side hustles, other projects, self-publishing print, on demand. What what are you working on this year? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:56:43 Oh, this year is all about YouTube. We are definitely diving more into video. It’s that one thing that I think will make other things easier or unnecessary in the future. So yeah, we are starting a c a couple different uh YouTube segments for the podcast and I’m even starting to post more on my personal YouTube channel. Well, it’s called modern frugality. So it’s not like personal personal, but there are just some things where
0:56:54 like I’m just I’m gonna post more on YouTube. I’m gonna get over my fear of not being not feeling camera-ready, not feeling camera-worthy and just just try it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:57:24 Very good. Modern frugality we’ll link that up as well along with frugal friends and the book Buy What You Love Without Growing Broke. What’s that one thing that will make things easier or unnecessary? I love that line. Now we’ve been talking about saving money in this episode, but as you know there’s only so much you can cut. But your earning power on the other side is limitless, which is why we’ve got over six hundred fifty episodes dedicated to that topic. If you’re not sure where to start, I wanna invite you to grab your personalized side hustle
0:57:54 play list, all you gotta do is go to hustle dot show, answer a few short multiple choice questions, and it’ll recommend uh eight to ten episodes to start with based on your answers. Again, that’s at hustle dot show. Big thanks to Jen for sharing her insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up side hustle nation dot com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let’s go out there
0:57:59 make something happen and I’ll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show. Hustle on.
It’s easy to get caught up in the habit of spending without thinking.
But the good news is, it’s totally possible to break the cycle.
In this episode, we’re going to share simple, practical ways to stop spending money and start saving.
These strategies come from real experience and expert advice, so you know they actually work.
Full Show Notes: How To Stop Spending Money
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