052 - More Ways To Save Just By Changing How You Do Things (pt 2)

A continuation from the previous episode about finding ways you can save money by changing up how you do things

Nix your bank fees by switching to an online bank like Ally, Sofi, or Schwab.

Make things automatic by getting a programmable thermostat or setting up auto bill pay.

Save on travel by preplanning. Using Google Flights to find cheaper days to fly and book home rentals instead of hotels on VRBO, Airbnb or Homestays.

Renting when you use things versus buying them outright is another huge one. It all adds up and those savings are how you can fund your investing account to become a future FI.

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Transcript

Welcome to Roaming Returns, a podcast about generating a passive income through investing so that you don't have to wait till retirement to live your passions. Last episode we talked about things like bringing drinks with you to prevent the need to spend $3-$4 a pop out and about or rotating your streaming services. And now the creative ideas keep on coming. If we say anything in these two episodes that gives you an ah-ha and results in savings to fund your investments, drop us your wins via the link in the show notes. And now we're back for part 2 of the ways you can save money by changing up how you do things. Buying secondhand can be another huge one. Like if we talked about the car, you don't need brand new.
They have tons and tons of marketplaces and sites. And they even have places where like, and this is especially big for people with kids. I guess she's my sister-in-law.
She and her friends or she found this group where they rotate toys around. That way they don't all have to spend for the same toys. And you're doing all this stuff.
So like they'll just have three toys that they use in a month. And then they rotate them out to their friends. So they get new toys in and out.
But they only really, the whole pool only buys like one of that thing. And they rotate them around. They do the same thing with clothes.
They move them around the circle. I think that is genius when it comes to that. Because kids grow so quick.
And the cost of clothes and the upgrades and all that other stuff that they need. That is fantastic. And it seems like she's saying buying in bulk or in secondhand.
I mean, buying in bulk like an option to be. If you say you're a meat eater, rather than go to the grocery store every time to get your meat, just go to, I guess, a butcher that butchers cows and get like a half cow. It's going to end up being cheaper in the long run.
And they are expensive up front. So again, my brother and his friends, I think, did like a pool with two other guys where they bought like a quarter a cow or half a cow. And then they packaged it.
They paid, distributed the cost, and then they broke it amongst themselves. So they saved money there. Because I think you can only get like a quarter.
I don't think you can go below that. And actually, because I know from the time when I grew up on the farm, that actually is a lot cheaper to buy the whole cow than it is to go to the grocery store and buy parts of it. So you can do that, too.
And then a lot of stores have their stupid loyalty rewards things like make sure you're signed up for those. They freaking suck. But they do actually save you a lot of money.
You're not actually saving money. I mean, you are. You are, but you're not.
You're actually paying what they would actually charge if they didn't have the stupid loyalty program. So like what they're doing is they're overcharging people that don't have the cards and the phone number thing. Yeah.
The people that actually have the cards are paying what they actually should be paying would be paying without all this nonsense. It's really stupid. But yeah, I mean, and then you can stack that again with the credit card thing that we talked about with online cashback sites like Rock 10.
I'm not even sure if I said that right. But that one's amazing. Like you just put it on your browser.
So if you're online shopping, I'm assuming there might be something you can scan. But it's like you can just rack up points all year at a whole bunch of different places. So you don't have to have individual subscriptions to anything.
I like the ones that are more seamless for that because I don't like coupon cutting because it's just too cumbersome, too much time wasted. It's not convenient. I forget to take the stuff to the store anyway.
What they're actually doing with coupons anymore is they're making them so you just have them on your phone. You scan them at the register because they've understood that people aren't cutting coupons. It's just annoying.
But if it's an all in one site like that, like Rakuten, I think is like there's probably others I might look into this more. But that is totally a thing like you can save very easily. All right.
So DIY stuff. Not everybody is going to want to take advantage of this. But DIY saves you so much money.
Like if I had to hire a plumber for some of the stuff I'm doing, it would be thousands of dollars versus a couple hundred and just the parts that I'm buying. So if you're not savvy, you can find friends that are savvy and then trade off hobbies and do like barter trades. Like some people are good at cars.
Some people are good at the haircutting and the nail salon stuff. Some people are good at, you know, all sorts of different things. So it's like if you're not good at something yourself and you don't want to spend the time on YouTube to learn, you can definitely, you know, tap friends or make friends in these categories.
Most of the people that have skills like this, they want to actually help other people save money because they know the reason they got into it is because they know that it's cheaper to do it themselves. And the sidebars, if you own a house, you should know like rudimentary plumbing, rudimentary electrical, and you should know that. And if you don't want to know that, you probably should rent.
You really probably should. Like you need to because there's going to be times, I remember like years ago when I had a house, I didn't know how to do something with the HVAC. And just to call the guy out to look at the HVAC, it was damn near $125 just for him to come out to look at the HVAC.
And here it was something simple where I had to take a screw off, replace this filter, put this screw on and to hit this button. It was something super simple that had I had any HVAC like research at all, I would have been able to do. But I ended up paying $197 for something that took him five minutes.
I mean, and there's been stuff I don't know how to do. Our AC went out and like the prime heat the one year and I spent a little bit of time on YouTube. I looked up some videos and I'm like, oh, I'm going to order this part.
And like I figured it out. And I mean, the worst case scenario, you spend $10 for a part and then realize the thing needs replaced. Like a $10 like let's try this and see what happens thing is way better than like hiring an electrician or whatever to come try to figure that out and then charging you an arm and a leg and they still don't even have it fixed.
Try some stuff. If it's a situation where you have to potentially buy new, it doesn't matter if you screw it up. If you learn something.
And I can tell you from past experience that whenever you actually use your skills and you fix something without having to call in the quote professionals, you feel so great about yourself. You do. You feel so like empowered.
You feel like I did all that plumbing by myself and I'd have to call someone. Yeah, right. It is pretty fantastic.
And it's actually kind of easy. Plumbing is really easy. Tim likes plumbing.
He doesn't do the electric. I can do electric. Another big one is free services like when we were on the road, we didn't understand how like beneficial libraries are fantastic.
I've been printing my dad's billing over here. Like I got rid of my printer because it just didn't make sense to continue to try to limp it along and it was dumping ink and it was such a headache and frustration and Tim had a huge jar of change that I just decided to help print my dad's billing over at the local library. So I got a library pass and then I'm over there and they have so many different things available.
Like they literally have free tax classes during tax season where they'll actually bring a person in and they help you walk through. They have movies, DVDs. They have awesome.
They have audio. Audio books. The one line library is phenomenal.
So if you're a reader or somebody that likes audio books and you don't want to sign up for Audible and pay for those monthly things, like they have a lot of stuff for free through the actual local library. So that might be an option. They do a lot of stuff with kids.
They do like discount coupons for local restaurants and stuff. They do like there's just a ton and ton of things over there. So if you're looking to save with that and get your kids out of the house or whatever, do certain things or that's something that you like.
There's also local recreation centers that have stuff that's like that and there's community gardens. There's community clubs. There's like those meetup groups where you can find people that are interested in the same kinds of things where you can share tools and you know do that kind of stuff.
You'd be surprised. And then like we talked about financial advisors way back when, but we personally don't think it's worth hiring out for the stuff that you can actually do yourself. Tax preparation is a big one that we do pay for because our tax returns are super complicated.
Because I've said it previously, the financial advisor doesn't really care about your account like you will. And you're always going to be second guessing. Well, why am I in that? Or why did I sell that? Or why did I keep that? What is he doing? Some people actually like having the scapegoat.
Oh, my account should be more, but my financial advisor is a dumbass. But like it's just something that you do yourself. Yeah, when it comes to this piece of things, it is definitely better to do yourself.
When you're actually doing your taxes, if you have just the W-2, you should not be paying TurboTax the $200 to $400 for whatever it is to actually do that. That is a ripoff. It is so easy to do a W-2 tax return.
It's not even funny. Financial advisors, they don't make money on your gains. And they don't lose money on your losses.
They just make a percentage of your total amount invested. So they don't have an incentive. Say you're somebody who has $10,000 and you're contributing $500 a month.
Your account naturally is going to go up $500 times $12,000, $6,000. So you're going to have $16,000 or $15,000 or $18,000, whatever it's going to be. They're making money every time you make an automatic deposit into your brokerage account.
So they don't have any incentive to actually do well. And that's where some people may benefit more from switching over to a robo trader. You probably save a little bit of money.
So if you do need that handholding, and then at some point, we are going to have a service where we're going to... Because when I did the research on that, I was just flabbergasted. They actually don't make more money. If you make more money and they don't make less money, if you lose money, they make a percentage on the total account balance.
So if you're contributing, they're making money off you without even doing anything. They literally could just have your shit sitting in bullet shares and they'd make 2% on whatever you contribute for the year. And that adds up and depletes your accounts.
All right. So since we're in the financial category, here's another big one that people don't think about. And since we were just looking into different credit cards and other random stuff or brokerage accounts, bank fees is a huge one.
Like people don't realize they're spending an average between $300 and $400 a year in bank fees. That's whether that's account maintenance, whether that's if they have minimum thresholds that you have to meet every month. Yeah, minimum balance requirements, minimum card usage.
Sometimes they require a direct deposit situation or they tack on fees. Sometimes they have overdraft, like significant overdraft, or they have recurring ones that knock you. It's crazy when you look at some of this stuff.
And those are typically for the bigger institutions that are physical buildings. And that is changing. And again, the moving over may be cumbersome.
But once you're over, look how much money you're going to be saving. And then a lot of these non-brick and mortars have higher interest rates. If you're lazy and you want to have your savings and checking at one spot, like moving over to a bank like SoFi, which Tim just opened up, will give you a higher interest rate. They give you a $300 cashback for direct deposit. That's huge.
That is a one-time gift thing if you just link into direct deposit. So if you have direct deposit and you want a free $300, right there's your option. And then if you sign up under our link, we'll put it down in the show notes, I think you get an extra $25 for just signing up under our link, something like that.
Like it's crazy. SoFi is so awesome. I don't know if SoFi has ATM reimbursement fees.
I know Schwab does. And I think more and more banks that are not brick and mortar are starting to go that route where they're reimbursing ATM fees, depending on how often you take ATM fees out. Now, I thought this number was kind of low.
The average allegedly is only $72 for the year, but that might just be because they're so painful when you get that $4 charge real time, like pushing the buttons that people will go out of their way to go to an in-service ATM. But the extra time and effort that that costs versus the convenience, especially if you have a card that'll reimburse, that's kind of stupid. Think about that mathematically.
On average, it's $4.19 is the ATM fee. Most people only ever get $20, $40, or $60 out. If you're getting $20 out, it's a 25% penalty, basically, just to get your money out.
Yeah, it's crazy. It's absolutely crazy and unnecessary, especially when there's cards available now that they reimburse. It's insane.
And again, same thing with the banking. You do not have to pay these freaking fees. They're stupid.
Schwab doesn't have any of them. SoFi doesn't have any of them. Those are the two that I have or we're switching over to.
Wells Fargo's trash. Yeah, basically, it really is. And my local credit union is absolute garbage, too.
They're just tech. We've been a member of Wells Fargo for seven years, and they've been trash. I hate them.
I absolutely hate them. Now, they're just hot trash. It's actually been getting worse over the years.
Hot trash. I mean, the other way you could, too, is if you have any debt is get your interest rates lowered. That might not be feasible in right now's climate with interest rates sitting whatever.
But if they come down, it may make sense to negotiate with your credit cards for lower interest rates. You can totally call in and do that if you've been paying recurrent. You have leveraged chips.
The other option is doing the consolidation stuff. You've got to be careful with that, though, because a lot of times when you do consolidate, there's added fees just like a refinance with your house. There's added fees for that service.
So you have to make sure that the math comes out that you're saving in the long run to do that. But those are definitely options to lower some of this because we were looking at the average debt that people hold was I think it was like around $5,000. It was between $5,000 and $6,000.
Yeah. So at the 23% interest rate, that's $108 a month you're paying in interest. So the other one would be get your freaking debt paid off.
Like you don't need to be paying the bank. Dave Ramsey. Yeah.
Get gazelle-like intense. Guy's such a tool. Oh, my God.
His viewpoints on like crypto and what did he say? The dollar? The dollar. Oh, Jesus. Oh, my God.
He's so narrow-minded. It is. I'm not surprised.
It doesn't matter. I'm not worried about it at all if the dollar goes away. It's like, whoa.
Which country had that happen and the whole world imploded for them? Salvador? It was like Venezuela or something like that. Yeah. Oh, my God.
Like look back at the news of that. Like that's just stupid. Oh, my God.
So he's actually right about the debt. If you have debt, that's stupid. Yeah.
You really are just like wasting money. You're leveraging your future. I will give him his kudos or his snaps as they do in Legally Blonde that he's actually right about the debt.
And the other thing that's really screwed up in this world is your credit score will dictate how much money you pay for your car insurance. Sometimes it can actually prevent you from getting jobs, which blew my mind when I read that one. It can actually cost you more on your phone bills.
It can cost you more on like other types of stuff. Like the fact that your credit score has an impact on pretty much everything, a lot of things is just holy crap. I stopped caring about it, but I got to reassess that thought process because if it has that much of a difference and again, we're looking for ways to save money.
So if your car insurance is like 30% more than it should be because you have a bad credit score, I think you need to focus on that. And I know Ramsey is anti credit cards, but sometimes you might need to have credit cards to have a good credit score. We'll do an actual episode or a course or something on that at some point because there is a way to do that without even having them if you have a problem with credit cards.
So don't lose hope there. But those are big financial ways to just knock some of that crap off. All right, so here's the other one we talked about renting houses versus buying houses.
Guess what? Most of the tools and vacations and boats and recreational vehicles and all these other things that you have, unless you are using these items that you purchase on a regular basis, they are not worth the cost of maintenance, the cost of upkeep, the cost of storage, the cost of fuel usage, the cost of I don't know, headache and whatever the heck else like the upfront or possibly even the debt and loan interest that you have on those things. It just doesn't make sense. I've read countless books that talk about like a guy who literally wanted to buy an island or a resort or some crazy nonsense, but he was only actually going to be there like twice a year and they ran the math, it would have actually been cheaper for him to actually just rent the island out on the two times a year as opposed to having to deal with all those extra costs.
He was talking about the same thing with like having a private plane was another big one where it's actually not worth that cost versus just literally renting it when you need to charter a plane or something. The same thing goes for boats. Like people don't realize there's a reason they call them bust out another thousands.
My ex had two of them and it was just like constant, constant the amount of fuel that it took them to actually get to the water. Now if you live on the water and boating is part of your life and you don't have a car, disregard this because that makes more sense in this standpoint. But for people who don't have that or you're toting your boat to your vacation property and you're costing that out, that's insane.
Now the caveat to that is if it's something you already own, you can sell it or you can rent it out. There's a lot of places now where you can rent your car out for other people to drive. I don't know if I'd feel comfortable for that if I had a brand new car, but that's definitely an option for people if you don't care.
I think you can do that with your boats. You can definitely do that for your vacation rental so you can make money to justify the cost that you have. Again, completely your own adventure.
If you prefer not having the maintenance headaches, you might want to go the route that we're talking about with just renting things as you need it. And if you're doing the vacation rental, if a whole bunch of you go and do like a beach house, just split the cost among the 10 of you. Like that has to be way more affordable.
I would think, I mean I don't have any math to back this up, but I would think Airbnb is cheaper than the hotel room. Oh, absolutely. In a lot of senses, it absolutely is.
So if you want that uber, uber luxury stuff, I mean you can get really cool stuff on Airbnb, but I actually prefer the Airbnb distance versus the stacked into the cages of the hotel situation. And then we did already talk about library having free stuff for audiobooks, ebooks. Public libraries, I never knew they were that good.
Oh yeah. Fantastic. All right.
So automating certain things can save you a lot of money. We talked about those fees. So it's like if you set up your credit cards to auto pay every month, you don't have to worry about even thinking about it.
You don't have to worry about late fees. You don't have to worry about added interest if you're paying everything off. Like that is a really good way to get around that whole thing.
So you can do the same thing with some of your like bill pay. If you have a bill that is consistently the same thing every month, you might as well throw it on auto pay. Then you don't have to worry about late fees.
You don't have to worry about the headache, the things you don't have to think about and don't have to worry about, free up your time. I think David Bach, the automatic millionaire, like that's his signature thing. Make everything automatic that you can because then you just free up bandwidth.
Another big one is setting certain things up in your calendar if it's something that you can't do those automation things with. So you get these pings and notifications to remind you. Because everyone has their cell phone with them.
So, oh shit, I have to pay that bill. And you can kind of do the same thing with programmable devices. Like you can get a programmable thermostat to conserve energy on your electric bill to set it like if you work a nine to five, you can program it to like run 10 or 20 degrees different of what you would normally be if you were home.
And then you can set it to like start shifting the temperature on your way home so that it's like the right thing. Because it's like, why would you pay to heat a space that you're not actually present at for eight plus hours a day? That just makes no sense. That one's another sore spot for me, because seeing the difference in our energy bills whenever we had it set at like 76 as opposed to 80 is just astounding.
Yeah. Even a couple of degrees sometimes can save you big bucks. And then they talk about insulating your house.
If you don't own, you can't really do that. But one of the other things you can do for electric, they talk about unplugging your shit. I don't know about you, but I don't feel like unplugging everything every time I'm either thinking about it or not using it.
But what you can do, you can go get those automated timers where you can actually set them to shut off automatically at night. You can shut down your router. You can shut down your TVs.
You can shut down the things that don't need to stay on. Obviously, your refrigerator needs to stay on. But you can shut down the big stuff that's drawing.
Because most things that are plugged in are constantly leaking energy that you're paying for overnight when you're not home. So if you do those programmable electronic shutoff devices, that would be the way that I would do it and just set them. Set them and forget them, yeah.
Or plug them into a power strip and just hit the power strip on and off when you're at your, I don't know, entertainment center and when you leave. All right. So the last category is entertainment.
So travel does kind of fall into this. But if you're at home and you want entertainment, we did talk about the streaming services, which would fall into that. You can rotate them through.
Libraries have tons of free services, again. But there's tons of free stuff around you, like a lot of museums, or they'll have free days, or they'll have free kid days, or they'll have, like there's parks around you. There's museums.
There's community events. There's all sorts of stuff. So if you're trying to save money and you're still trying to get out and active, I mean, hiking is the best, in my opinion, one of the best free ways to do stuff outside.
And I mean, if you're into biking, get a bike and go bike around. You can do all sorts of stuff. I mean, you can.
Bike around, bike up, bike up, bike up and get down. I just, I don't even. I mean, camping is a fun little recreational thing to get into.
Or even just like big trips. You don't even have to go camping. Just get a tent and throw it in your backyard.
I know, I know. I've always even thought about, I've always even thought about like, I know this sounds crazy, but like doing mushrooms or smoking weed or something and just getting like one of those kiddie pools, filling it with sand and a little bit of water, and then putting on like ocean sounds and just like blindfolding yourself and sit there pretending like you're actually at the beach. Because when people go to the beach, most of them just sit on the ocean and the sand anyway.
And it's like, are you really doing too much other than that? So, you can like recreate those environments. And honestly, they have salt rooms. They have like local salt rooms where we're at, where you can, if you like the salt factor, because salt really is like a health thing, like you can pay to go like lay in their salt room.
So, if the salt's your deal. I mean, there's other ways to do it without driving four plus hours to the beach, getting the rental property, dragging the kids along, having to pay for parking. Speaking about parking, we just had Memorial Day, right? We are near Rehoboth Beach near Ocean City, Maryland.
And Rehoboth Beach only charges for parking between Memorial Day and Labor Day. So, I have to ask, why would you plan your vacations during peak season when you can go during shorter season for just as good weather and no crowds? Like less cost? I don't know. And everything costs less.
So, there's another huge way, going on your trips during off season and shoulder season, going to like off the beaten path stuff. Well, she just went to Greece in January, February. And it was off season.
And it was like, we went to Greece before and it was so much cheaper when she went. And we went in like May. April.
April's still shoulder season, yeah. So, like, but if you say you go to, I don't know, she went to Santorini. If you go to Santorini during peak season, it's obviously going to be like 500% more than if you go during off season.
I can't even imagine. I only paid, I think it was like $40 a night for Santorini. And I think if it's peak season, it's probably like $200 to $300 a night.
I wouldn't be surprised. And that goes for every big location, like where people go. Like if you can somehow plan, like, if it's just, if it's an area like Florida, that's nice year round, just go when people don't go and you're saving a shit ton of money.
So, I'd like to know why that is. The school correlation season might be a thing, but why can't you take your kids out and then go to a museum while they're down there and then justify that as like an educational trip? I don't really quite understand that whole thing. And then just let them, you know, be kids in the neighborhood during the summer.
So, I'm just saying, if you're looking for ways to save money. And travel-wise, another way to save money travel-wise is instead of using United or American, use Spirit or Allegiant. Or Frontier.
Or Frontier. You save so much money for the same flight. You're on the same, like, plane.
I mean, I don't know if they're safe. I don't know. If your brother works on the Spirit ones, probably not.
Oh, the other thing too, gas prices go up during the summer. The government knows people are traveling more during the summer, so they jack the prices up. If you travel not during summer, like summer, everything is inflated.
There's more cops out giving tickets. What else have we noticed? Prices in stores seem to be higher during all that time. Prices are higher, higher.
Like, ice is ridiculously overpriced. Ice cream. Like, any cool things higher.
You're actually, like, spending more in gas consumption because you're sitting in lines. I didn't even put the whole pool thing in here. If you're one of those people that absolutely wants a pool, get a local, like, membership.
Like, try it out. Years ago, when we were looking at real estate, like, a pool is just, it's like a money pit. My girlfriend has one, and, like, that was one of their big things that they wanted, and she's like, oh, my God.
She's like, the liner, the tears, the water stuff, needing to treat it constantly, you know, the legal component. Now you have to have extra, like, fences and all these other things. I understand this.
I mean, I don't understand, but I can see the status that comes from having a pool, but is the status worth, like, the hundreds of hours of maintenance and the thousands of dollars? I don't think it is. I will tell you, coming from somebody else who had a pool, they said it cost them more money because they constantly had people coming over. They were constantly cooking for them.
They were going through more water for the bathrooms. They were doing laundry. They were doing towels.
They were doing all these things. So it's all these added things. Now, if you're only going to get a tiny pool, like, if you're a swimmer and you need, like, one of those weird pools that rotates itself so you can swim and, like, do laps stationary, that kind of makes sense to me.
But, I mean, you can also get a Y membership for a fraction of the price and not have to deal with the headaches and all that other stuff. Again, these are just thoughts, ways, things. But to me, a pool sounds like the boat concept, bust out another thousand.
And then you don't even get to use it all year because you have to winterize it. I mean, unless you're in, like, Florida. We're coming back from getting cat food.
We were driving through the back roads of Pennsylvania. And, I mean, it was, like, every 10 houses, there was at least one or two RVs. And I know these people only use them, like, once a year.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we talked about that whole renting things out as you need them. That was the big one.
Like, it was, I swear, it was, like, every other freaking driveway had an RV. Or a pull-behind trailer. Or a recreational vehicle of some sort.
Something when they go camping. And I know they only go camping maybe three times a year. That's, like, super liberal to say three times a year.
It's generally one or two times a year. Is it worth the thousands of dollars when you can pretty much rent a van? There are so many places where you can rent RVs and stuff now. Like, is it worth having that? So it's like, again, you'll need to run these examples.
And honestly, renting an RV and going on vacations might actually be a lot cheaper than getting a hotel room and some of this other stuff. Like, it really might be. And I was just struck by my comment.
I was like, good God, there's another one. There's another one. There's another one.
I was like, what the? So I know the RV costs just as much as their house. So they've actually had a loan out on their house that they're being charged four or five percent for. They had a loan out in the RV, which they're being charged four or five percent for.
They probably haven't bought, they haven't paid off either of them. So they just have a lot of unnecessary money being sucked away on if you just live in the RV and buy a plot of land and live in the RV as opposed to having the house or get rid of the RV and live in the house, whichever. Don't do both.
That's foolish. Unless you're traveling full time, but then you don't need the other one. So it just doesn't make sense.
And a prime example of this, I actually had a guy who approached me because I have two and a half acres with my other property. And he was like, he lived next door in the trailer park. And he was like, is there any way I can park my RV here? And I was like, all right.
It was like, give me 50 bucks a month. So he was paying me 50 bucks a park his thing. And it sat there for years.
I think he took it on like two bigger trips. And these were retired people. They only took it on whatever.
And then like we went on our trip and we came back and he talked to me and he's like, it was gone when I got back. And he's like, yeah, we sold it. And I was like, good.
I'm glad you actually got rid of it if you weren't getting use of it. He's like, yeah, the loan was eating me. We weren't using it.
We're not as mobile anymore. He's like, we lucked out with, I think they got, I think their full loan amount. So didn't even make money.
They broke even because prices of RVs went up so much since when he bought it because they were in such high demand. I felt bad for him because it was like, like people take on these big, big obligations. There's so many examples in life of people that have that similar thing where they get a house or they get a vacation home or they get a second car or they, by the time they sell it, they're literally just breaking even, or they may lose a little bit of money on these things, these extra things that they thought they would use, or they thought they'd make money off of.
And it's, that's not the real realistically. It's not what happens. Yeah.
Stuff doesn't just sit. You've wasted money on something that you thought that you were going to use, or you wasted money on something that you thought that you could resell for a higher price. So you've lost so much money for so many years.
And plus the time, the time, like we don't mention it enough, but time is the only asset you do not, you do not get more of. Yeah. You can't get it back.
So it's your most sacred resource or it's your most wasting time on the foolish things that don't actually generate any money. Or things that aren't serving you. If you don't love what you're doing, that's a sign like you should rent it when you want it and do the thing, do most of the time doing the stuff you love.
So that's like circling back the intentional living. There is a lot of intentional aspects to what we just mentioned. You intentionally have to go to say grocery outlet or Audi as opposed to King Soopers or Giant.
You intentionally have to learn how to do your own oil changes as opposed to taking it to the service shop and paying 40 or $50 more to have them do it. You intentionally have to decide, okay, I'm not going to use this RV enough, so I might as well just rent an RV. So this is all your intention.
It's all a mind thing. You have to know yourself and know what you want enough to create the life that you want. Oh, I just thought of one.
Not using your dryer and hanging your clothes out to dry. Your dryer takes up a crap ton of energy. Clothes smell better when they're hung outside.
Oh, they totally do. Unless you live where we live where there's a... I still think they probably somehow smell better. There's just something about being outside.
Like you go to Europe, they don't even have dryers most of the place. You just hang everything out on your patios and wherever, wherever. And I did have one more for the entertainment factor.
So like when you're booking your vacations and your travel, if you do things last minute, you are going to pay top premium. If you get a little patient or if you try to do some early bird specials or if you try to do the longer month bookings or like those kinds of things and don't book on weekends. That again goes back to intention.
If you know that you're say you want to fly to the Grand Canyon. Well, most people will only fly to the Grand Canyon when they have enough money. But if you intentionally live your life that, okay, in two years time, I'm going to go to the Grand Canyon.
You sock away in a vacation fund or like a holiday fund in your local bank where they pay you 2.5 or 3%. So you're making a little bit of money on that vacation fund. And then you create a plan.
And then you start looking at the actual price of airfare. And then you can book your airfare at any point whenever they have a chart showing when it's highest and when it's lowest. I love Google flights.
Google flights, you can go in there, you can put flexible, flexible, flexible, and then you can change the number of days and then you can change the day of the week. And then they'll give you calendars. I bet you're saving probably, I don't know this, I'm just guessing from a past experience, probably 10 to 20% you're saving by booking it in advance as opposed to booking it like a week before.
Oh, absolutely. But you also have to like keep track because I think what happens is they book a full flight and then they won't do a new flight until like the full flight is booked. So I think what they'll do is they'll charge the most for the newest seats.
And then obviously, unless this is like up to the minute because the last minute flight seats do cost the most. But when they're trying to fill the flight, they'll actually give discounts for like the remaining seats or like the lower costs. And I think that's what happens because I've noticed over time, they'll go then and back to their datum point where it's like, oh, clearly, they have a new flight now that they're booking for that day.
And then they'll do that same process. When we were looking for Hawaii, I think we spent $500 a person on that round trip flight, which I think is really good for most people considering what I've researched. But I actually saw flights for 426.
And I freaking hesitated like a dumb ass because I didn't have the dates or I was relying on somebody else. I forget exactly why. I was relying on somebody else for the freaking thing.
And I couldn't book it because I would have absolutely booked that out and then took the time off work based on that flexible thing. Like if you can fly for that much cheaper per thing, why wouldn't you? Yeah, it's the same flight, the same location. Same location, same destination, same everything else.
It's just different dates. But you can maneuver your time to fit your financials at that point. But that is one of the reasons I prefer to drive versus fly because then you have to have everything else coordinated properly.
And when you're driving, you kind of have more flexibility. I can't stress enough that I'm just thinking of everything we talked about. Like we didn't say you need to get rid of anything.
There's nothing that like in your current life, we didn't say to get rid of anything other than maybe an RV or a boat because you can rent it. But you're not getting rid of the experience. You're just doing it a different way.
The same experience. I don't think that people understand that you are not subtracting wants from your life by going to grocery outlet. And the reason that I think it's essential to come up with these ways to save money.
I just literally just believe plugged in something into Google Sheets this morning. So I created a spreadsheet because Tim was asking. On just a pretty good, pretty conservative bond fund.
It's $1,191 a share. It's YYY. If you just start with $1,000 and you contribute $100, say you save enough that you can contribute $100 every month.
So if you cut out or you switch those expenditures up a little bit so that you're saving $100 a month, whether you choose your coffee thing, just one thing, or you do a multitude of a whole bunch of different stuff to come up with that $100. At the end of one year, you've actually, you've only increased $200 ish. But your share quantity in one year goes from $84 to $201.
And if you're getting paid per share at $0.12, you see how that stacks up. At three years, you end up with 333 shares. Two years.
Sorry, two years, you end up with 333 shares. In five years, you have 840 shares. Now, we use the single stock that was a very stagnant price for a simplistic example.
But the concept holds true. No matter what investments you get into, if you're contributing, if you start with a set amount, $500 or $1,000, and you're contributing $100, $200, $300 a month, you'll see the power of compounding with your own eyes. I know people have read about, oh, compounding is the ninth wonder of the world.
Until you actually see it in your own stuff, it doesn't really compute or it doesn't register. But once you see it, like we did $300. Say you can free up $300.
You buy that initial same 84, but in five years, you end up with 2,215 shares. You're making $21, $22 a month on those shares. So within five years, just contributing a little bit that you're saving, and you can toy around with this on your own, but just think of it in that way.
The money that you're saving going into investment is going to generate- More money. You're making $22 a month as opposed to spending the $300 a month. So you're actually up $322.
And then every month you add money to it, you compound it faster. And then every month you leave the drip turned on. Since this is a monthly payout, that payout then buys new shares.
And by no means am I saying YYY is the only one not recommending that to do it. I'm just saying it was the first one that popped up. It was the first one that popped up, and it was the one that's a pretty consistent price.
I wanted to illustrate the point. You will see how quickly you'll accumulate shares. The objective of our investing strategy is the income more than the principal, and the income is directly related to the number of shares you possess, your own.
And to buy your shares, you got to find money to free up to throw in there. So whether you do it through credit cards, whether you do it through- So we mentioned a lot of different things. The tax return is the easiest one.
If you just want a one thing, set it, forget it. The cash refund on your credit cards, because you're using them anyways, is a huge one. Yeah, the tax refund is probably the easiest.
Huge, huge. Renting versus buying. And actually, I made a bad statement on the last one where I said, oh, people already blew their tax returns.
My dad's worker was just telling me, his sister just got hers back. So she was one of those later. She got like $4,000 back, and she blew it.
I'm saying renting versus buying. We've presented so many different options for you to- Find money. To find money.
So I don't want to hear anymore that I don't have any money. I can't contribute to my retirement. There are- This is just- When you say I can't- The basic ones.
You can get creative and find all sorts of ways to save money to put in your investment. When you say I can't, you limit your brain to think of possibilities to do it. So just say, I can, or how can I? Change the question.
How can I find money to invest? And then it'll trigger your brain to turn into a tool to go, oh, maybe you could do this. Oh, maybe you could do that. Stop saying I can't.
That's the biggest takeaway. You can't- What I would have done, and that's an example you just brought up, is I actually would have taken half of the $4,000 and put it in an emergency fund and took the other half and invested it. But that's me.
Not blowing it all in, whatever. Well, that's exactly what I told him. I told him she should have took half that, put it in Worthy as the emergency fund, and then she could have taken the difference and started investing, started compounding.
I mean, we talked about how if you had 30 years to invest, just $100 a month would literally supplement a Social Security if Social Security is not going to be there. That's just a simplistic concept. Just $100 a month.
Just $100 a month. That's it. And again, that's starting a brewery or coffee at home.
How hard is that? Ways you can save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a month. Oh, and the one big one I was going to say middle of thing that I probably should drop here. So check this out.
Some of these expenses may be hard to cut out or cut down on because you might be working a job that pulls you into soothing mechanisms. That was one of the biggest things. And we'll actually talk about that in a different episode.
I'm not going to get into that here. But basically, you possibly can cut back on your expenses and minimize your income to work a job that's better for you because you don't realize there's all these rider costs associated with the job that, quote, pays higher. But your actual take home once you spend for eating out all the time or getting your coffee on the go and all the gas expenses, the car maintenance, the stress, the need to go on crazy vacations because you hate your life type deal.
Once you cut all those out, you actually decrease that hourly rage. Whereas if you worked a job that you loved, you could actually not care about some of that other stuff and have a higher quality of life and actually spend less and earn less or work part time and have more freedom. It's crazy the possibilities that are out there.
You just got to start paying attention and start being like, what if I do this? What if I do that? How can I do this? And just get creative with it, man. So that's obviously not all for saving money. But next week, I think we need to get back into tickers.
We're going to get back into tickers and stuff. Tickers and stocks and everything. And we are going to do an economic update because earning season has coming to a close or has come to a close.
It's about done. So we're going to start on a regular basis doing a quarterly earnings report. That way, we know the earnings reports are very cumbersome to read through.
So Tim is going to... And it's just a broad stroke type thing. It's not like I'm not breaking down individual earnings for different companies. But in general, you can tell by the sectors, if one sector is outperforming its earnings, that's a probably a good sector to be in.
So he'll kind of give you teasers for macro trends that might be forming. He'll also give you really, really important news that does crop up or important things for any of the stocks that we're interested in to like help to get you guys to see what the heck we're actually looking at and doing. So that'll be a really good episode coming up next week.
Earnings reports. And I think, yeah, then we'll do the portfolio updates. So two weeks.
Two weeks, we'll start with the retirement portfolio. And then three weeks will be the van life portfolio. Okay.
Hopefully, this episode gave you guys some ideas to start finding extra money to invest without actually cutting back on things that you want to be doing. That is the whole goal is to actually enjoy life. You just do it smarter.
So we will see you. It's our new catchphrase. Become FI so you can say, fuck you.
FIFU. FIFU. FIFU.
The FIFU way. Living that FIFU life. All right.
See you guys next week.