I assume you saw my last video?
The one about growing your awareness around your current financial health situation?
If not, uh - you should pause this - and go watch that one.
I'll put a link in the description.
We'll wait for you.
You think they're back yet?
At this point, I assume if you're watching this, you have your expenses listed out.
Well now comes the fun part - we get to address what you want to spend your money on.
After consciousness comes control.
There are three steps to this process.
Step one is to set goals,
step two is to make a plan,
and step three is the one that I have in the title:
actually setting up automation, adjusting your habits, and finding easy ways to save
money.
We're going to start with step one, but if you want to skip to
step three, go to this time mark.
So, for step one, for setting goals, you get to think about what you want your future life
to look like.
Do you want to go back to college?
Do you want to send your kids to college?
Buy a house?
Pay for a wedding?
Travel the world?
Do you want to just retire, buy an RV, and road trip around the continent?
Do you just want to focus first on getting out from under the burden of your debts?
Feel free to dream wildly or to keep it pretty tame.
This is just to provide you with some inspiration, motivation, and
something to construct a plan around.
And when you're then tempted to stray the course, it's going to provide you with a "why."
Why are you doing this?
At this point, you may also need to do some research, talk to someone
who has personal experience in getting the thing that you're trying to get,
or hire a professional to determine how much money and time
you're going to need to actually accomplish these goals.
And you may need to delve into investment banking at this time, if your dreams are big
enough...
but that's a topic for another day.
Step two, once you've figured out those goals is to make a plan to actually reach them.
In my last video, I brought up (really briefly) about determining whether the thing
you're already spending money on is actually worth the expense -
because it might be!
Personally, I don't want to spend my free time grocery shopping.
So I spend more money than I need to on getting my groceries delivered.
It would be less if I just went to the grocery store myself,
but right now, I can afford to get my groceries delivered,
and it's providing enough value that I think it's worth it.
However, I do still do my own laundry,
which I also hate,
but the 1.5 hours of pretty passive time that I have to spend a week doing laundry
is not worth the expense if I was to actually go to a dry-cleaners'
and have them do my laundry for me every week.
So you have to think about your life,
what you want to spend your time and your money on,
and determine if the things you are already spending money on are still worth it to you,
or if there are things that are probably not needing the
amount of money that you're currently throwing at them.
Try and see if there's some way that you can twist this into a fun experiment
rather than making it feel like you're restricting yourself.
As part of this "planning" stage, I would also say that you want to
make sure that you're looking at your budget on a monthly basis
and determining for that exact month what are the FLEXIBLE and OPTIONAL spending items
going to look like.
So, for December, when a lot of people are buying presents,
the OPTIONAL spending might be a bit more than March or April,
when people usually aren't buying presents unless it's somebody's birthday.
I take the opportunity of paying my rent once a month as a cue to also check my budget.
So as I pay my rent, I also look at my budget for the month,
and those two things kind of remind me of the other thing I have to do,
and it's just become a habit.
Okay, here we go: step three.
Finally here.
These are five pretty easy ways to save money.
Number one (surprise surprise) is to automate EVERYTHING.
I won't dwell too much on this, because I've talked about it immensely before, in other videos,
but truly, this is the one way that you rely on to not take any willpower,
and you will save and invest and only have a chunk of your money left to spend.
It's the best way to just make it all seamless and
require no stressful thought.
And yes, it's going to be a little bit of a time investment up front,
to get it all set up, but then you're never going to miss a bill,
you're never going to deal with fees, ever again.
Another thing you might want to do in this realm is
call up all of the companies that are automatically billing you,
and have them all bill you on specific dates.
So, for example, if you get paid once a month, or if you get paid twice a month,
you might want to either have all of your expenses paid immediately when you get your paycheck,
or you might want to have your expenses
divided into multiple occasions so that they're kind of spread out along with your paychecks.
You can totally just call up your utilities company and say,
"Hey, I would like to get my bill sent to me on THIS date."
"Is there anything that I need to do in order for that to happen?"
My second tip is if you have any subscription services, see if there's some way that you can
figure out different tactics so that you don't have to pay as much or anything at all.
I personally use streaming services that belong to other members of my family and my friends.
I actually don't pay for any streaming services.
Am I lucky?
Or am I just a very good friend and good person
and they were happy to give me their log-ins?
You decide.
I also have a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud for Photoshop and Premiere Pro,
and I found out from a friend that if you go in to cancel the account,
it will oftentimes give you offers of a lower monthly fee that
you can sign up for, and there's no extra contract or anything.
I am now paying ten dollars less a month than I was before because
they offered me this thing to NOT CANCEL!
Instead, we'll offer you this same membership,
same subscription, but for less money.
So there might be ways that you can do that with other subscription services as well.
If you have a roommate, or you live with someone and you both use Spotify,
you can sign up for a "Spotify duo account," I believe that's what it's called,
where you each pay $6 a month rather than $10 a month.
And just in general, the things that are on your budget under FIXED
aren't necessarily set in stone.
You might be able to find a way to get your insurance lowered.
You might be able to find a way to get your phone bill lowered.
Some things that we take for granted as "this is the way it is,"
"this is how much I pay," aren't necessarily the case.
So maybe ask your friends how much they're paying,
in the same general location in which you live,
and perhaps there's a better deal out there that you didn't realize
you had the option of.
The things we put under FIXED are not permanently fixed.
They are a bit flexible.
Speaking of flexible, the third tip I have is to address your lifestyle expenses.
Instead of eating at restaurants, where you're trying to get this experience of being served,
learn to cook and get the experience of figuring it out for yourself,
learning something new, gaining a new skillset.
Or make it a rule that you're never going to eat restaurant food unless
you're with other people who are eating restaurant food.
If you're going to serve yourself food, if you're going to eat alone,
make sure that it's something you cook.
There are ways that you can create rules around your lifestyle habits
that aren't completely restrictive.
They're not saying "I'm NEVER going to eat at restaurants!"
But they create a little bit of boundary, a little guideline,
that you could follow so that you're not just mindlessly spending.
If you spend your free time doing a lot of online shopping,
maybe you should spend your free time doing something else,
such as exercise - or skill acquisition.
YouTube is free.
The library is free.
Well... you actually pay for both of them already, so you might as well use them.
Just like the food rule, you could come up with an entertainment rule:
if you're by yourself, you're not going to spend money on entertainment.
If you're with other people, you could do it, but
why do it when you're just alone and you're the only one
who's dealing with this expense?
Some people find that it's helpful to use an envelope system with cash
in order to restrict your spending.
So if you do go out with your friends, but you're only using cash,
then you're pretty much limited to what you can spend money on.
I actually have my debit card set up so that I'm not allowed to overdraft.
I went to the bank and told them, "I don't want to be able to go over the amount in my account,"
so they locked it, so that if I swipe my debit card, and I don't have enough money in my account,
it'll actually deny the payment.
When you do want to hang out with people, it could be fun
to try to think of things that aren't spending a bunch of money.
I mean, it depends on your friends and what they're into,
but there are totally ways to still have fun and still socialize
and not end up doing away with fifty dollars
every time that you're hanging out with your friends.
Here are some ideas for you:
You could host a dinner party, pot luck style, where everyone brings something.
You could host a grilling party, where you have the grill, and everyone brings something
to grill.
You could have a board game night, a video game night...
Host a "happy hour" BEFORE you go to a restaurant, pre-drink and pre-snack
BEFORE you go to the restaurant, and then when you get to the restaurant,
all you need to do is buy one drink and some appetizers and everybody's good.
Still got the restaurant experience.
You could take up some kind of fitness activity together.
So, walking around the neighborhood,
going to a local forest preserve or hiking area,
doing yoga in someone's backyard,
or finding someone with a home gym, who you could...
go... work out...
with them... in.
If you're super into photography, or just super into social media,
go have some photoshoot days with your friends.
I used to do that in high school - it was really fun.
Local festivals and farmer's markets and flea markets
are so much fun to walk around.
You don't need to buy anything, but even if you do, it's not going to be THAT expensive.
Honestly, needing to find less-expensive solutions for hanging out with your friends
actually adds a layer of creativity onto things and
makes things more exciting, in my opinion.
It's less predictable, AND it offers you an opportunity to be "real"
about money with your friends
and open up, have a little bit of vulnerability,
maybe you'll learn something you didn't know.
The final tip I have is to unsubscribe from email newsletters,
physical junk mail, and anyone on social media
who makes you feel like you want to buy things.
You can go to the bottom of any email that a marketing company sends out, and click "unsubscribe."
Yes, these things take a little bit of time to set up;
it's just going to be so much better going forward,
you're not going to have to think about it,
you're not going to have to use any willpower to resist those things.
They have spent SO MUCH MONEY trying to learn human psychology
and how to best get you to buy things,
get YOU to spend YOUR money on things that THEY care about.
So, rather than try to resist your human tendencies,
just don't do it!
Don't give 'em your money!
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Ok...
That's all I got now.
'til next time!
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