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Financial Fluency Episode #30: Mind The Gap

April 5, 2016/0 Comments/in Podcast /by Jen

Today, I want to talk about a book that I’ve been reading recently, or rather, just a chapter really. The book is called, “Daring Greatly” by Brene Brown, the chapter that I really like is Chapter 5, it’s called “Mind the Gap” and it’s looking at the gap between aspirational and practiced values.

What she wants people to do in this chapter is pay attention to the space between where they’re standing now and where they want to be and aligning their values with their actions.

I feel like having children has made me more acutely aware of when I spout something off to them, some kind of high-value type of thing and then inside of my own head, I start worrying about them seeing me do something where I’m not living up to that value that I just espoused to them.

Before having kids, you know you can kind of get away with these things, having values, maybe your actions are a bit different but you’re not really being witnessed as much. You may witness yourself but you can also ignore it yourself.

With those two sets of eyes watching almost all of my moves all the time, it really makes me aware of my own hypocrisy and it also really makes me want to change it.

It makes me want to be the person who does all the things that I tell them they should always do, right? And I’m sure I’m not the first person to say this. I think a lot of people feel that when you have children and you’re trying to teach them values, it makes you more acutely aware of whether or not you’re living up to those values.

You can listen in below and Tweet it out here

So, How Does This Relate to our Finances?

Here’s how it relates to our finances. Money is our culturally accepted system of valuation and it’s a perfect place to examine the difference between our aspirational and practiced values.

So one way, I think, is a great way to look at this is to ask yourself, “What things do you believe to be most important in life? What is most important to you?” Take out a pen and a paper and write at least your top 3 things down. For me, the things that pop straight into my mind were family, creativity, and contribution. Yours maybe something more like security, spirituality, eradicating malaria, you know, like the Gateses, maybe.

So anyways, whatever those first 3 values are that pop into your head, write those down and now let’s go to your money tracking app. If you don’t have one, quickly download mint.com or something like it, hook up all of your accounts and then let’s go through your recent transactions.

I think it’s great to do this both with your recent transactions and your calendar

Our time and our money, those show what we truly value in our life regardless of what we say, where we’re putting our time and our money, that speaks volumes. Tweet that

Looking into those accounts and this isn’t about guilt or shame in any way, obviously, we’re talking about Brene Brown, this is not about shame. It’s about releasing shame and releasing guilt to make sure you don’t feel that guilt and shame when we’re looking at your transactions.

Pretend for a moment that this is the transaction of somebody else, some other person and you are trying to find out about them. Pretend that you are in a mystery movie and this is what you have to go on to figure out what kind of person this person is, maybe you’re the detective, that’s a great idea!

So, you’re the detective, you find this sheet of transactions and you want to know what this person is all about, what are they like. So go through transaction by transaction, set up some categories for your top 3 values and see how much goes towards those.

When you’re looking at it too, what other big categories are coming up? What are your big areas that you’re spending in? And when we look at transactions, it may be hard to decide exactly which categories some go in, but I see things as like saving and investing and putting stuff towards retirement, that is you valuing the future, your family, your stability.

Here’s A Common One

For a lot of people, a big category that comes up is “Debt”. Again, no guilt, no shame, let’s just be scientists, explorers, detectives and look at what does the debt get you? What are you getting in exchange for the debt that you’re taking on.

For a lot of people, the biggest debt that they take on in life are things like their home which could be again, family, security, that kind of thing. Cars, most people need cars in order to get to and from work if they work on any kind of job that’s outside of the home so that could be going towards your income capacity, your capacity to earn income and that’s pretty important.

Another thing that a lot of people take on debt for is their education. And again, education, in some ways there’s a measurable ROI in terms of if it leads directly to a job. So say you go to Law school, you become a lawyer, that has a measurable ROI. You’re going to pay that off through the job, potentially. Becoming a doctor, you know, there’s a lot of things like that but education has so many other benefits and facets to it.

I went to a Liberal Arts college, I went to Bryn Mawr College and I was a Creative Writing Major. That has not had a directly measurable ROI in my life but it has really gone towards one of my big values, which is creativity. I do like to write, I like to write songs, I like to write music, I like to do podcasts, I like to write articles, I like to write books even though I have not yet finished one on my own.

I’m stating it here because that’s one of my values. I would like to be an author, I would like to complete a book. I’ve done some e-book type writing but not a real actual novel and I would also like to write a book about women and finance. I feel like I’m learning so much on this show, there’s so much fascinating stuff going on that I could see this some day going towards a book.

So, me putting in the time and money to do this podcast besides the fact that I get to interact with so many amazing women on the interviews and get to hang out like this, talking to a microphone. I don’t know, I like microphones. I feel creative when I’m doing this, it’s fun. This is me investing in some of my values.

Is The Debt Worth It?

But getting back to the debt question. So we have the home, the car, the education, those are pretty massive things that people go into debt for often but you’re putting it towards an asset, like a home or a car, you know. Cars don’t last forever but still. We have a 1998 Subaru which is, honestly, we are trying to drive it into the ground, I think it’s going to last forever. We may never be able to replace this car because it is lasting so long but back to the point.

There are other things that we go into debt for and let’s take a look at those because on the one hand, there’s the thing that you get for going into debt. If you put it on a credit card, you’re buying a specific thing, then there’s also the interest that we pay on it. So depending how long that interest goes out, it makes that thing more and more valuable. Valuable in terms of how much money you’ve put towards it because it may be, I don’t know, a $50 item but if it takes you a really long time to pay it off, you could pay $20 more on it which makes it now worth $70 instead of $50. So really, even if it was on sale, by buying it with debt, you’ve gotten a bad deal. So what are you valuing by buying that thing with debt?

Are you valuing immediate gratification?
Was it something you needed immediately for some reason?
Were there extenuating circumstances that made it very time sensitive?

Again no guilt, no shame, let’s just do some exploration here because I put things on credit cards plenty of times. My college credit card story is one that I’m going to tell at some point, I don’t think I’ll tell it right now because I like these solo episodes pretty short and that one gets a little involved but suffice to say that I had one of those first credit card experiences where no one had ever really explained to me how the “magic”, of compound interest works when the interest is credit card interest and not interest that you’re earning.

There are some lessons I wish I’d learned before I got my first credit card. I learned them with my first credit card but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t put things on a credit card since that I wish I hadn’t. I think we all do, we all do it at different times throughout our lives and there are different reasons for doing it.

Elementary, Dear Watson

So, again just exploring, looking at it, if this was a story, if you were a private detective who found this in a hotel room of a suspect and you were trying to determine what was important to this person, to figure out how to follow them and what their next move would be, what would you say were the top three most important things to this person based on their financial transactions?

And once you do that, take a look at how that compares to those top three values that you wrote down. Is there a gap between them? What is the gap between your aspirational values in terms of finance and your practice values in terms of finance?

And the next step after you look at that is to start taking some actions to get them more aligned, figure out what are some things you can do to shift things in your finances? What are some actions that you can take right now and moving forward that would help to align those aspirational values and practice values?

Let’s Keep On Talking

Okay, that is my show for today. I’m going to keep it pretty short. I’m going to thank Brene Brown even though I’ve never personally interacted with her because her book is fantastic. I feel like women and shame and money are such hot topics and Brene, if you happen to hear this somehow, if I share it and you’re tagged then you listen to it, I would love to have you on the show someday to talk about shame and money because I feel like this is one place where a lot of people feel a lot of shame especially around debt and loss and making financial decisions that don’t pay out the way that they think they should.

If you would like to join the conversation about aspirational versus practised values in terms of money and shame and guilt and how we can release it and not attach all of that crap to our money, then go over to the Financial Fluency Facebook group and let’s talk about it, join the conversation. I’m loving that group right now, it’s still pretty small but we’re building and it’s really nice to have conversations over there.

And if you want even more in depth conversations and actual help and content from me, we also have my “Mastering Money Matters” monthly membership group which you can join. It’s relatively low price because I want it to be a pretty easy thing for people to get into, I don’t want you to go into more debt to work with me.

I recently had someone who joined the group tell me how surprised she was to find out that I do actually work with the women in the group. I do a free call for everyone, we have weekly blabs on Tuesdays and weekly co-working hours on Fridays where we all sit down and tackle our financial tasks. No one has to tell anyone else anything about their finances, it’s just that we’re being accountable and we’re making sure that we do the things that we want to get done that we say we want to get done. We’re trying to align our actions with our values.
Thank you.

Financial Fluency Episode #22: Dragon Wings and Unicorn Horns

March 4, 2016/1 Comment/in Podcast /by Jen

Today I want to talk to you about the internet and our money, and I want to tell you a true story from my own life. It may sound a little extreme, but it could happen to any of us, and it’s a story of dragon wings and unicorn horns.

You can listen in or read below and Tweet it out here

This Is What Started Me Thinking

My story starts with a new study that I read on statista.com that says that Americans are now averaging 11 plus hours a day hooked up to and actively using the internet. When we think about the fact that there are some people who have no internet access in the US, it’s kind of mind boggling how much time some of us spend on the internet.

What happens when we’re spending all of that time on the internet?

We surf
We Google
We search
We follow links
We Pinterest
We scroll
We go from one thing to another

and you know what we’re doing all of that time? We are giving internet marketers a ton of information about us.

They know what we like, what we don’t like, what we click on, what we click away from, when we leave sites, what makes us go to sites. They track all of this data, and it teaches them a whole lot about us.

My Story

My story is about two of the animals that we own. If you’ve been listening for very long you probably know that I have two kids with autism, and that we also run a ranch and a record label as well as me doing this. Between having the ranch and the fact that my husband as a child was not able to have any animals, and that my kids love animals, we kind of have a bit of a menagerie.

Because we have the ranch, when Talullah was diagnosed with autism in 2010, we looked into a lot of different kinds of therapies. Pretty much anything that claimed it could provide reasonably scientifically proven results in the positive direction for kids with autism we at least looked at. There was one point where I was looking into equine therapy, and I mean to say nothing against genuinely talented and trained and skilled equine therapists, it was just the person we found – we live in rural Arizona – probably wasn’t a therapist at all.

She had a fantastic course and her horse was awesome with Lu, but the woman was very strange, and when I left there, my takeaway was that the horse was great, the woman was weird and I don’t really want her working with my daughter.

Because we had a ranch, we kind of looked at the cost of equine therapy and driving a long distance to get this, and of statistical evidence of the effectiveness of equine therapy. In the end we decided that what we really wanted to do was find a bomb proof pony and buy it for her, as that would be a lot cheaper than going to some of these not totally reputable people who are claiming to be equine therapists.

Again, nothing against real equine therapists, this was just a very odd situation.

We eventually bought her an Amish pony named Cinnamon, who had a baby named Nutmeg, and she was fantastic, she’s a lovely little pony. So far, so straightforward.

Another animal in our house is a bearded dragon, which is a type of lizard.

My husband called me from the pet store shortly before my oldest daughter’s eighth birthday and told me that he wanted to get her a lizard and bring it home. I said, if you take care of it, sure, we can get it.

So he brought it home, and it wasn’t all that big to start with, but they live for 15 years and they can grow to be two and a half feet long, not counting the tail. So this is a pretty big commitment, to be honest.

Our Miss Salty Salty Pascal

While I wasn’t a super fan to begin with, there’s something really zen about a lizard that will just sit on your shoulder and hang on your shirt, and you can walk around doing things during your day. I got to where I would sit and hang out with it for a little bit of each day and just get used to it. At first we called it Mr Salty Salty Pascal, but then after a few months I looked up on the internet how to determine the sex of a bearded dragon and we discovered it’s a Miss Salty Salty Pascal.

As she grew and got too big for the first terrarium and then the second terrarium – she’s now on her third – we realized that she wasn’t getting enough exercise now she’s so big. Pretty much her tail takes up a lot of the space in there, so as she turns around, she has this long train of a tail behind her.

And so we come to the part about what exactly we are telling the internet

This is where the story starts. I started looking online for leashes for lizards. Did you know such a thing existed? Because you can’t really put anything round a lizard’s neck I wanted a harness and a leash for our bearded dragon so we could take it out in the backyard with the dogs penned up, so it could run around in the grass.

I had this joyful image of the giant lizard frolicking in the backyard

In my mind we’d put the leash on so I could walk around with it, the kids could walk around with it, and it wouldn’t get hurt because it had this nice harness on.

Salty, showing off her harness

I started Googling, I started clicking on links, I went from one thing to another, and I did finally purchase a very small, cute, modest harness with a leash attached. It’s mainly like a bit of rope and a little piece of leather with some leg holes cut in it.

However, because I did all this clicking and searching, for days afterwards I got a crazy amount of not just lizard stuff, but dragon stuff, dungeons and dragons stuff, how to train your dragon stuff. Then it seemed to hone in on the fact it was an actual living bearded dragon, and I started getting these amazing handmade translucent wings for your bearded dragon that attach onto a harness.

The truth is, if I’d seen this before I bought the harness, I might have done it because I think my kids would love it so much. Every now and then it comes back somewhere in a feed of some kind and I click on it. It’s in Etsy, someone makes these, you can find there here. I have it saved because it was such a surprise.

I discovered a whole world of clothing and costumes for your bearded dragon.

So this is what the internet learned about me, that I own a bearded dragon and I’m willing to spend money on accessories.

And Then THIS Happened…

In the midst of this somewhere, I came across a handmade unicorn horn that you can attach onto a bridle for your horse, and like I said, we have a pony, super calm, easy going, a favorite at birthday parties, all the kids ride her, she’s super sweet. My kids would so love to have a unicorn that I had this moment of just picturing the next birthday party. What if I quietly buy this horn and hide it until the next birthday party? When we bring Cinnamon out for the birthday party ride, she has a horn, oh my gosh! Maybe I could spray some glitter in her hair?

So I start going down this fantasy land of like, what would I have loved at my six year old birthday party? I would have loved to have a unicorn that everyone could ride with glitter in its hair.

I’m sure you see where this is going. These are kind of extreme examples, because dragon wings and unicorn horns are not things that most people put on their shopping list, but they ended up in my searches. I will admit that in the end, thanks to the amazing photography on the unicorn horn website of the little girl in rapturous ecstasy when she sees the horse come out with this unicorn horn on, I bought a unicorn horn.

Did I need a unicorn horn? No, I did not (who does?!). It’s going to be a very special thing for a birthday party.

And, That is How it Works

My point is, this is how internet marketers get us to buy things. We click on something, we’re interested, and the day I was looking for the dragon harness and leash, I didn’t have to buy it that day, I was interested and I was curious about the options. I tried using a harness for a hamster and that didn’t work, so I was like, okay, I need something that’s specifically built for a bearded dragon.

What I ended up coming to was these exotic and quite expensive handmade beautiful translucent dragon wings that you could see through to the bone structure in the wings. They had a little hook on the finger part of the wing at the top, so it was basically like bat wings made for the bearded dragon. If your bearded dragon is at the center of your world, then this is awesome.

There are so many outfits, costumes and accessories for the bearded dragons, but even for the horse, again, just buying the basics for a horse gets pretty expensive, not to mention when you start adding on things like custom made unicorn horns.

The nice thing about the horn is that it’s soft and made of fabric, but it has form to it, and the way it attaches is very secure. If the horse shakes its head and does bump somebody, it’s not going to impale them or injure them.
So basically I got suckered into buying a unicorn horn, I’m just going to admit it here.

We ALL do it, Even Me!

On this show I have never held myself up as any kind of financial guru of any kind. Tess Wicks tried to call me that on her show, Words and Money, and I absolutely refused it. I’m facilitating conversations, I’m your comrade at arms, I’m here with you to talk about it, I’m here to talk about mistakes I make as well as things we all do and how we can improve things, so buying a unicorn horn probably was not the wisest purchase of the moment.

I did resist the wings for now, but I may revisit that when she’s a foot bigger!

That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, because when we spend so much time online, and especially time that we spend clicking on things, we’re really allowing people to seduce us into buying these things that we never knew existed before. I now think about these things relatively frequently, both the fact that I bought a unicorn horn, and I haven’t yet bought the dragon wings. How happy would it make the kids? Is that worth the cost? It’s not exorbitantly priced, but it’s handmade, so this is something someone spent some time on.

Even in our regular life, just looking at regular things, think about all the times you’ve clicked on something on Amazon and decide not to get it and go away. Next thing you know in your Facebook feed you’re getting ads for that thing. People are really learning a lot about us with all the time we spend on the internet, so we need to be kind of thoughtful and aware, because online marketers are so slick, and so good at persuasion.

They look at all of these behavioral psychology tactics and what causes people to take certain actions like clicking the ‘buy’ button without going and investigating if there are any better options or prices elsewhere. They really like to hook us in on the emotions, things like the little girl looking up ecstatically at this unicorn with the horn on it, and they’re good at making the buy that we make at the end of our decision making process almost like a kneejerk reaction.

We go through this process, they show us these different things, maybe we don’t buy it the first time, then they show us some more ads, maybe we click to learn more, maybe we join a mailing list here or there, and then we start getting some emails about these things. Slowly, slowly, with each step, the marketers are convincing us of what they want us to do.

And We Can All Use These Techniques

If you are an online business person, this is great to learn from, and I actually totally recommend Bushra Azhar’s Persuasion Revolution. She has a fantastic free group, she also has some paid groups, a membership site and then some courses too, but she really looks at this from a very kind and gentle perspective of, the big guys are already doing this, the man, the corporations, the people who have control of the most money are already using these interesting psychological persuasive techniques.

Why don’t we use them too, but for good?

We can learn how to talk to people in the language that makes them feel the emotions that we want them to feel, in order to get into the mood to buy these things.

Hopefully we do it in terms of things that will actually serve a greater purpose for them, things that will actually help them better their lives, make good decisions, get rid of bad habits, start paying more attention to the things that are most important to them in their lives, those kind of things. It’s important for the people that don’t have these bigger agendas and are honest business people to have some of these skills as well.

That’s the two sides of the coin. One is protect yourself and try to have some awareness of how your time online is affecting people’s ability to sell things to you that you may not want and may not really need, and on the other hand, if you are a small business owner and if you are a freelancer or an entrepreneur, how are these sales funnel tactics and email marketing and pay per click affecting your customers? How are the big corporations – who may or may not be your competition – using these sorts of tools and skills to affect people who may be your customers, who may be able to benefit from service you have?

If you enjoyed this episode you can subscribe to Financial Fluency here on iTunes and listen every week. If you like what you hear, please also leave an awesome iTunes review

I’m doing two episodes now every week, one solo and one interview.

I also have the fantastic Mastering Money Matters group, a monthly membership group where you can join and we talk about all the different pieces week by week of getting our money systems set up and how we look at, think about and value money and all areas of our lives.

It’s a very supportive and private group just for women and it’s a safe place to hang out and talk. It’s kind of the extension of the interviews I’ve been doing with mainly entrepreneurs on this show, and it’s where we can talk about the things we may not want to broadcast out to a broader audience.

Let’s Keep the Conversation Going

If you’re enjoying the podcasts and something has lit a fire for you, carry on the conversation over on the Financial Fluency Facebook Group.

See you there!

Jen x

Financial Fluency Episode #20: Making Changes in Your Financial System

February 25, 2016/0 Comments/in Podcast /by Jen

Today I want to talk about how to make changes in your financial life and your financial systems. The two main levers for making change in a system are changing what goes in and what comes out of that system.

In the case of your finances – especially your personal finances – that is the income that flows in and the expenses that flow out. Part of that is also looking at efficiencies, but I’m going to group that under expenses because those systems are about how to get more out of the money that you are spending right now.

You can listen in here or read below and Tweet it out here

Income

A lot of people in the personal finance world like to look first at the expenses because that seems like an easy thing that we have control over on a daily basis, but I’m going to go for the income first, because let’s be honest, in terms of long term changes, that system can make a greater change than anything else can.

If You’re Employed

If you work in a job for somebody else, the main way to get a change in your income is to ask for a raise. I’m not an expert in negotiating raises, but I know that in Tim Ferriss’s book and Ramit Sethi’s book, ‘I will Teach you to be Rich’, they both talk about some great ways to lead up to asking for that raise. I think they both talk about maybe three or even six months of steps you can take to start setting the stage to establish the value you bring to the company to show and track your progress over time, and to show that you really are bringing a lot more to the company that what you’re paid for right now. It’s then easier to ask for the raise.

Other ways you can interact with your boss ahead of time are to ask for feedback on projects you’re doing, ask for feedback on what you can do to be more valuable, to be more of a long term player and asking for educational opportunities, for the business to send you to trainings in different things to make you more valuable.

Other options for when you work in a job already are asking to take on a new project, to seek more customers for commission, if applicable, to ask to be involved in things that are at a higher level than what you’ve been doing before or just start doing more things. If you see things that need to be done, start doing them, and make sure people notice that you’re doing them.

If you’ve been doing the newsletter or something else on top of your regular job that you aren’t being paid for, make sure everyone knows and recognizes what effect that has on the company. If you’re doing the social media on top of your regular job, make sure you’re tracking all the Google Analytics that show how social media brings more traffic to the website, and how that has increased conversions. Whatever it is, really track it and make sure you can show your bosses just now much you’re doing to bring value to the company.

Another option, even if you have a job, is to start moonlighting or start a side gig to offer your services in some way. Maybe make a list of all the things that you could do for money, go out there and start brainstorming. Ask people if they need your help with different things, and those things can change your income if you are employed in a job.

If You’re Self Employed

If you’re self-employed, there are a number of things you can do as well.

The first and most obvious one is to raise your prices for current services, and let your clients know that prices will be going up in so many months. This obviously depends on whether you are a time based service provider or a product based service provider or a project based service provider.

You could finish up current projects and let people know that prices will be going up on the next round of projects, or let them know that prices will be going up on a certain date or on the products at a certain time, or the next version of the products, or something like that.

You can also create some new offers you’ve never had before.

What is it your clients have been asking you about?
What are they interested in? Are there any burning pains they have that you haven’t addressed that you could now?
You can also bundle together old offers or even old content into a new product or service. I’ve seen a lot of people do this with blog content being bundled into an ebook that’s then sold, so that’s something to think about.
You can also have a limited time sale on products you already have. You can expand it to a new niche or market. If you are a website designer for tech companies, say, maybe you could start taking on smaller entrepreneurs or small businesses, people who’ve been on Etsy but have got too big and now need a new website. You could talk to people you know, people you like to work with, the kinds of people and kinds of projects you like to do, and see if that can be expanded into a new niche.
You can also reach out to people in similar niches for joint venture and collaboration type projects to reach clients that you don’t have access to right now, but you could by working with somebody else.
Another option is to be an affiliate for someone else’s products to your existing audience, so that’s where you find someone who has a product that you already like and use, and find out if they have some kind of affiliate program. You can then offer those products to your audience, and that is helping them reach a new audience, and it helps you by giving you some portion of those sales.
Or you could create an affiliate program for your own product, offer your own clients the opportunity to be affiliates for you, and they can share your products or services with their audience and network.

Expenses

Let’s switch over to the other lever for change which is the outflow, the expenses.

The first place it’s easiest to start is the low hanging fruit. Look at subscriptions, gym memberships, those sorts of things, how much are you using them and is it really worth what you’re paying per year?

A lot of us think we go to the gym enough, and if you’re taking a class or if your kids have swim lessons or whatever it is and you’re using it every single week, that’s totally legit. You can always try to negotiate for a different price, it’s worth asking, and you never know.

Think about things that are subscriptions where you can potentially pay for single uses instead, like a day pass for your gym if you’re only going now and then and not every single week. If you’re using cable, try downloading individual movies instead, or use one of the streaming services like Netflix or Amazon Prime. This serves the purpose that you’re using it for right now, but it costs less for the amount that you actually use it.

If You Don’t Want To Cut It, Reduce It

You can also negotiate the bills that you don’t want to cut, your cellphone bill, internet or cable, if you have it, and you can sometimes bundle those together and get savings for that, or you can call and ask them if there are any current promotions going on that they can apply to your account. A lot of the time they have promotions for new people who sign up, and if you call and say, I’ve been a customer for five years, I would like to take advantage of this promotion you’re offering to new people as I’m a loyal customer, a lot of times they’ll go ahead and apply it to your account.

Another option is to look at your car insurance, home insurance or rental insurance and if you can bundle those together for savings, and then you can call your credit cards and ask for lower interest rates, ask for promotions, ask if they have anything going, or if there’s any other card that would better suit your need.

Plan, Plan, Plan

Even for things like eating out, your variable spending, you can schedule when you’re going to eat out and you can even pick the restaurants to figure out how much you’re going to spend ahead of time, and then also schedule out those shopping trips. There are a lot of online meal plans with shopping list type services now that you can use, so you can really plan out how much you’re going to spend each week on your variable spending.

As long as you stick to it or close to it, you can really control some of that spending that gets out of control relatively frequently.

There are also some options for things that you use a lot like paper products, paper towels and toilet paper. You can set them on delivery order from Amazon using the Amazon subscription service which is a pretty great thing. We used to use it for things like diapers back in the day, and there was a while where I did put things like toilet paper, paper towels, wipes and diapers on there, because we could kind of predict how frequently we were going to run out, and I always had them arrive a little before we actually needed them, because with diapers you don’t want to run out!

That did save some time and money and trips to the store, and I was able to plan things out a little better when we had that going on. I haven’t done it for a while now because we no longer get diapers (phew!). That was a huge saving, that and having my kids both start full days of school have made such a massive difference in our personal finances.

That’s All, Folks!

So those are a few things that you can look at in terms of changing both the inflow and the outflow for your financial system. Setting up some of these things, especially the ones that you can put on autopay, or the ones that you can reduce the monthly amount, the effect of that really builds up month by month.

If you can save ten dollars per line on three family lines for your cellphone, that’s 30 dollars per month over the course of a year, and that really adds up. If you do that across a number of different categories in your spending, it can come to a significant amount of money that can really change how quickly you can pay off debt or build up savings.

So those are my tips for you for today, I hope that is helpful. If you like this podcast, please subscribe and listen every week, and I would love it if you would leave an awesome iTunes review too. Thank you so much. If you want to reach me, I’m jen@jenturrell.com, you can find me at the website, I read my own emails and answer them as much as I can. Talk to you soon.

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