ATHLLC7796420645

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.040 | - Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks,

00:00:04.680 | a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel.

00:00:07.340 | I'm Chris Hutchins,

00:00:08.180 | and I've been tracking my spending for years,

00:00:10.000 | trying to optimize my expenses in every category

00:00:12.920 | to save money without having to make big sacrifices.

00:00:16.380 | So I am so excited to share everything I've learned,

00:00:19.200 | including the best software to make this process easy,

00:00:21.860 | how to set everything up and avoid some common pitfalls,

00:00:24.740 | as well as all my tips and tactics for saving money

00:00:27.700 | across every category of spending.

00:00:29.780 | So if you wanna understand your spending,

00:00:31.740 | be more intentional about where your money goes

00:00:34.300 | and ultimately save some money along the way,

00:00:36.780 | I think you'll love this episode.

00:00:38.580 | So let's jump in right after this.

00:00:40.720 | I've heard too many stories from friends, family,

00:00:44.780 | and even listeners about identity theft and phishing scams

00:00:47.920 | causing so much pain and hassle,

00:00:50.180 | and it's just not something I want in my life.

00:00:52.700 | And I feel like we have the right to stay private

00:00:55.080 | and protect our personal data.

00:00:57.520 | One of the biggest reasons a lot of this happens

00:00:59.600 | is that there are dozens of data broker sites out there

00:01:02.240 | selling and sharing our personal information online.

00:01:05.220 | When I first looked up OurFamily,

00:01:06.580 | there were hundreds of pieces of our personal info out there,

00:01:09.780 | but thankfully I started using Delete.me

00:01:11.960 | to automatically get all of our personal data

00:01:14.580 | removed from the web,

00:01:15.580 | and I am so excited to be partnering with them

00:01:17.500 | for this episode.

00:01:18.780 | Delete.me is an amazing service

00:01:20.660 | that will not just find and remove your personal information

00:01:23.240 | from hundreds of data broker websites,

00:01:25.580 | but they'll continuously scan for new data that shows up

00:01:28.380 | and get that removed as well.

00:01:30.220 | Delete.me removes data from over 500 websites,

00:01:32.980 | and on average, they find and remove over 2,000 pieces

00:01:36.620 | of personal data for a customer in their first two years.

00:01:40.380 | When I first signed up,

00:01:41.300 | I was actually skeptical about needing a service

00:01:43.380 | on an ongoing basis,

00:01:44.580 | but these data brokers are relentless,

00:01:46.500 | and I've seen my personal data pop up again and again

00:01:49.380 | throughout the year,

00:01:50.220 | so I love having a service

00:01:51.780 | that continuously sends me updated reports

00:01:54.180 | on all the removals they're doing in the background.

00:01:56.980 | So, if you wanna get your personal information

00:01:59.180 | removed from the web,

00:02:00.420 | go to allthehacks.com/deleteme

00:02:03.300 | and get 20% off a plan for you or your entire family.

00:02:07.700 | Again, that's allthehacks.com/deleteme.

00:02:11.700 | Okay, so first let's talk about budgeting cashflow

00:02:16.740 | and why this even is something you might wanna do.

00:02:18.760 | It seems like everyone I know

00:02:20.300 | tracks their account balances to some extent,

00:02:22.860 | whether that's individually,

00:02:24.500 | how much is in checking or savings

00:02:26.180 | or their investment accounts,

00:02:27.460 | or more often than not,

00:02:28.700 | it's usually summed up to a number called net worth,

00:02:31.260 | where they're tracking how much they have

00:02:33.260 | and how it's growing over time.

00:02:34.860 | And a lot of people I know

00:02:35.980 | know one of those two numbers offhand.

00:02:38.020 | And I'm actually gonna do an entire future episode

00:02:40.380 | on this topic,

00:02:41.220 | how you track it, project it,

00:02:42.780 | and all that kind of stuff.

00:02:44.020 | I've tested a lot of the tools

00:02:45.300 | to play around with those projections,

00:02:46.880 | and I think it'd be really interesting.

00:02:48.540 | But while a lot of people know their net worth,

00:02:50.660 | I find that a lot fewer people know

00:02:52.620 | how much money they're actually spending each month,

00:02:54.940 | which is so important,

00:02:56.420 | because without that number,

00:02:57.760 | it's really hard to make any projection or forecast

00:03:00.700 | about how your net worth might go up or down

00:03:02.980 | every month or year.

00:03:04.420 | Also, when you understand how much you're spending,

00:03:07.140 | you can be so much more intentional

00:03:08.740 | about where you spend,

00:03:10.220 | and you can learn a lot and honestly save money.

00:03:12.740 | Just by seeing where we spend money and tracking things,

00:03:15.140 | I'm learning a lot and actually making changes.

00:03:17.560 | So let me go back to when I first started doing this.

00:03:20.260 | A long time ago, Mint launched,

00:03:22.020 | and I used it to link a few accounts

00:03:23.780 | and start tracking all my expenses,

00:03:25.660 | but very quickly, it died.

00:03:27.820 | The categorization was so terrible

00:03:29.780 | that everything seemed wrong,

00:03:31.460 | and it was really tedious.

00:03:33.040 | About five or six years ago,

00:03:34.560 | I started doing this again,

00:03:35.940 | but in a little bit of a different way.

00:03:37.520 | So at first, it was just high level.

00:03:39.400 | I would make a spreadsheet for the purposes

00:03:41.620 | of trying to figure out how much our net worth

00:03:43.460 | would change each year,

00:03:44.420 | where I outlined all the fixed expenses

00:03:46.420 | and about how much I thought I'd be spending

00:03:48.500 | on a monthly basis on everything else,

00:03:50.460 | but it wasn't that accurate.

00:03:52.180 | It was good to get a sense of,

00:03:53.460 | oh, maybe I'm gonna save this much,

00:03:55.060 | but I wasn't really sure

00:03:56.180 | if it was in any way, shape, or form true.

00:03:58.780 | So I went back to my old Mint account,

00:04:01.140 | and I linked some accounts,

00:04:02.500 | and I started asking Amy if she could help.

00:04:05.420 | And every year for two years in a row,

00:04:07.980 | we would go through at the end of the year

00:04:09.440 | and try our best to categorize

00:04:11.340 | thousands of transactions all at once.

00:04:13.660 | It was a painful process.

00:04:15.420 | It wasn't very intentional.

00:04:17.020 | And honestly, by the end, it didn't feel good at all.

00:04:19.380 | So we gave up on it very quickly.

00:04:21.500 | In the last couple of years,

00:04:22.700 | as we've been preparing for a world with no salaries,

00:04:25.380 | starting off with me, and then ultimately Amy,

00:04:27.720 | I gave it a shot again, and it got so much better.

00:04:30.760 | And now that we don't have any regular salaries,

00:04:33.220 | it's even more important for us

00:04:34.780 | to understand our spending habits and our cashflow,

00:04:37.480 | because we actually have to transfer money each month

00:04:39.500 | from our savings into our checking account

00:04:41.260 | so we can just pay our bills.

00:04:42.560 | Now, you'll notice I haven't really

00:04:44.140 | talked about budgeting yet,

00:04:45.660 | because I prefer to think about spending tracking,

00:04:48.700 | but budgeting and spending tracking

00:04:50.460 | in some ways are really the same thing

00:04:52.740 | with a little bit of different nuance.

00:04:54.320 | And if you search for spending tracking apps

00:04:56.620 | and budgeting apps, almost all of them

00:04:58.460 | will do the same thing.

00:04:59.820 | But to me, it's really different.

00:05:01.080 | When I think about budgeting,

00:05:02.260 | it's much more about setting an amount of money

00:05:03.860 | you wanna spend in different places

00:05:05.620 | and tracking whether you're doing it

00:05:07.580 | and making sure you're allocating all of your money

00:05:09.620 | into the right place so you can save.

00:05:11.640 | Whereas spending tracking for me

00:05:13.060 | is a little bit more of a reactive approach.

00:05:15.220 | I wanna see how much money I'm spending on groceries

00:05:18.120 | to decide whether I think I wanna make any changes.

00:05:21.020 | It's not about saying our goal

00:05:22.620 | is to only spend $300 a month on X

00:05:25.660 | and really tracking that week to week

00:05:27.500 | to make sure we don't go over it.

00:05:28.900 | That said, in the process of doing

00:05:30.860 | all of this spending tracking,

00:05:32.020 | I actually think it is helpful to have a budget.

00:05:34.680 | But for me, the budget is really more like a monthly

00:05:36.980 | or annual target, just so I can see

00:05:39.260 | how we're trending against our expectations,

00:05:42.260 | because those expectations are usually

00:05:43.940 | what I'm using to make projections about the future

00:05:46.440 | or just to kind of get a sense

00:05:47.580 | of whether we're spending more or less than we make

00:05:49.860 | or an idea of how much we'll be able to save each year

00:05:52.500 | or how much we might have to dip into our savings

00:05:54.360 | if we're spending too much.

00:05:55.620 | So by having a budget, it's really more for us

00:05:57.560 | about having an expectation

00:05:59.140 | of what we think we're gonna spend

00:06:00.460 | and being able to see if we're trending

00:06:01.720 | above or below that number.

00:06:03.140 | The best part about all this, by the way,

00:06:04.780 | if we talk about how to even get started,

00:06:06.820 | is that once you have a system set up,

00:06:08.900 | it is so much less work to maintain than you'd think.

00:06:11.400 | Maybe a couple of minutes a day.

00:06:13.340 | And honestly, I think if you have the right tool to do this,

00:06:16.540 | it almost feels a little bit like a game

00:06:19.460 | because every time you add more transactions,

00:06:21.560 | you get more data, you get to see how you're tracking,

00:06:24.180 | and it really doesn't feel like work.

00:06:25.980 | So let's talk about the tools you can use

00:06:28.000 | to make this really easy.

00:06:29.180 | First off, there are probably an unlimited number of tools

00:06:31.740 | and I'm gonna miss a ton of them

00:06:33.140 | because every year, new ones crop up, old ones die.

00:06:35.940 | So surely you're gonna have one that I missed

00:06:38.260 | or you're gonna have some that you find on the internet

00:06:40.100 | that I don't cover,

00:06:41.140 | and it's just impossible for me to do them all.

00:06:43.560 | But at the highest level,

00:06:44.860 | the way almost every one of these tools works

00:06:47.460 | is by pulling in your transactions from bank accounts.

00:06:50.740 | Now, yes, you could also have a budget

00:06:52.960 | by exporting all of your transactions,

00:06:54.860 | putting them into a spreadsheet, doing things manually.

00:06:57.200 | That is totally possible.

00:06:58.580 | That is not within the scope of this conversation,

00:07:00.860 | mostly because there is no way to make that system simple

00:07:03.900 | and only take a few minutes a day or week.

00:07:05.940 | And so I much prefer thinking about a system

00:07:08.160 | that's easy and simple and works in an automated basis.

00:07:11.020 | So what almost all of these products are doing

00:07:13.900 | are using one of a few service providers

00:07:16.340 | that help aggregate data from your various accounts.

00:07:20.720 | The most common ones are Plaid and Yodlee.

00:07:23.260 | There are a few others that happen on the backend.

00:07:25.620 | MX is one and there's a couple others,

00:07:27.380 | but almost every consumer app I've seen

00:07:29.660 | is using Plaid or Yodlee as the primary source

00:07:32.380 | because they have some of the widest coverage

00:07:34.760 | and the best data.

00:07:35.740 | Now, how this actually works

00:07:37.340 | and something important to keep in mind

00:07:39.020 | is when you log into an app and you say,

00:07:41.820 | I wanna link my Chase account or my Capital One account

00:07:44.420 | or my Bank of America account,

00:07:46.200 | more often than not,

00:07:47.660 | you're gonna get a screen that pops up

00:07:49.380 | and that screen's from the aggregator.

00:07:51.280 | It's not from the app creator.

00:07:52.940 | And you're gonna put your login and password on that screen.

00:07:55.860 | Now, a couple financial institutions

00:07:57.860 | have started to adopt this thing called open banking

00:07:59.960 | where instead of actually typing in your username

00:08:02.520 | and password, you get redirected to the Chase site

00:08:04.860 | or the Capital One site.

00:08:06.120 | You put in your username and password there

00:08:08.180 | and you authenticate that you're allowing Chase

00:08:10.960 | or Capital One to share your data with that app.

00:08:13.540 | I love that direction,

00:08:14.900 | but with 20,000 plus financial institutions

00:08:17.560 | needing to implement that open banking technology,

00:08:19.860 | it's gonna take a while.

00:08:20.900 | So what's important to know

00:08:21.980 | is if an institution doesn't support that,

00:08:24.020 | you're gonna type in your login and password

00:08:26.060 | into a screen that's managed by Plaid or Yodlee

00:08:29.420 | or whatever the linking provider is,

00:08:31.620 | and they're gonna go log into your bank account

00:08:34.940 | on their server and pass that information back on

00:08:38.260 | to the app in question.

00:08:39.540 | And what's important about that flow

00:08:41.460 | is that the app you're using

00:08:43.060 | should never get access to any of your credentials,

00:08:45.620 | your username or password.

00:08:46.780 | And the company that's actually doing the aggregating

00:08:48.980 | is doing everything in a much more secure and monitored way

00:08:52.700 | than you need to rely on any of these apps to do.

00:08:55.180 | I haven't had any concern using any of these apps

00:08:57.740 | in the past.

00:08:58.580 | When it comes to Plaid and Yodlee,

00:08:59.980 | I'm very trustworthy of what they're doing.

00:09:02.580 | It's read-only.

00:09:03.740 | I'm not worried about sharing my logins.

00:09:06.100 | That said, I would love them all to support open banking

00:09:09.420 | and have authentication

00:09:10.600 | instead of username and password stuff,

00:09:12.480 | because that's even more secure.

00:09:13.900 | I will caveat one important thing.

00:09:16.060 | There are a few apps I've used in the past.

00:09:18.220 | I mentioned this in a past episode

00:09:19.660 | about the Max Rewards app for credit card tracking,

00:09:22.300 | where the username and password fields

00:09:24.500 | were actually not on pop-ups that said Plaid or Yodlee

00:09:28.340 | and were run by the linking sites.

00:09:29.940 | And for those apps, I would immediately turn away,

00:09:32.860 | delete the app and not use it.

00:09:34.460 | I want to be 100% sure

00:09:36.340 | that when I'm typing in my username and password

00:09:38.540 | to my banking site,

00:09:39.700 | it is on a site of a brand I trust like Plaid,

00:09:42.580 | like Yodlee, like MX,

00:09:44.300 | like any of the other major linking providers.

00:09:46.620 | So none of the tools that I'm talking about

00:09:49.040 | are ones where I've seen a circumstance

00:09:51.260 | where they're actually trying to collect your username

00:09:53.860 | and password first and pass them on.

00:09:55.880 | So I wouldn't be worried about that with these tools,

00:09:58.100 | but in any case, if you're using an app to do this,

00:10:01.140 | I would definitely make sure

00:10:02.600 | that you're typing in your username and password

00:10:04.780 | on a pop-up or a modal or a page

00:10:07.440 | run by the linking aggregation sites.

00:10:09.700 | Okay, so let's go to the tools that I played around with

00:10:11.980 | because the way I did this project

00:10:14.020 | and it was actually a little while ago.

00:10:15.820 | So on the plus side,

00:10:17.280 | I have some history of using them.

00:10:18.820 | On the downside, some of it's not as fresh as I want,

00:10:21.260 | but I actually opened up an account

00:10:23.020 | with Copilot, Monarch Money.

00:10:25.580 | I already had one with Mint, Rocket Money,

00:10:28.300 | Tiller HQ and YNAB.

00:10:30.660 | And I went through the entire process

00:10:32.580 | of syncing 2022 transactions across all my accounts,

00:10:36.220 | categorizing them and looking at the reports.

00:10:38.800 | And since then, I've also, in the past week,

00:10:41.520 | gone in and done the same thing for Simplify,

00:10:44.060 | which is a product from Quicken.

00:10:45.360 | So I went through the process for all of these tools

00:10:47.720 | and played with all of them, categorized everything.

00:10:50.240 | And so I wanna be clear that this is not everything.

00:10:52.640 | Ultimately, I ended up picking Copilot

00:10:54.640 | as the tool I thought was the best for me.

00:10:56.920 | And after becoming such a huge fan of the product,

00:10:59.320 | I probably used it six to 12 months at the time,

00:11:02.040 | I reached out to the team and said,

00:11:03.280 | "Hey guys, I really love your product.

00:11:05.160 | I don't wanna talk about any other personal finance products

00:11:07.840 | when it comes to spending tracking.

00:11:09.840 | And could we work together?"

00:11:11.640 | Fortunately, after some back and forth,

00:11:13.360 | we found a way to make that work.

00:11:14.840 | They are now a sponsor of the show.

00:11:16.720 | However, they did not ask me to make this episode.

00:11:20.040 | They don't even know I'm making this episode.

00:11:22.080 | They're not paying me to produce this episode.

00:11:24.200 | Everything in this episode is purely my own opinions.

00:11:26.580 | I was gonna make this episode

00:11:27.560 | whether they were a sponsor or not.

00:11:29.080 | But fortunately, I'm super excited to have them as a sponsor

00:11:32.120 | because I love the product.

00:11:33.580 | So if you go to allthehacks.com/copilot,

00:11:36.240 | you can get two months free.

00:11:37.680 | And throughout this episode,

00:11:38.880 | because as I mentioned in the intro,

00:11:40.400 | it's not just about how to track all of this.

00:11:43.020 | I wanna go through every single category

00:11:45.120 | where we spend money

00:11:46.240 | and talk about all the different things

00:11:48.080 | that we've thought about

00:11:49.040 | and some of the hacks and processes and tools we use

00:11:51.440 | to try to bring down our cost

00:11:53.280 | without making a lot of sacrifices.

00:11:55.080 | And that's gonna be a lot of this conversation.

00:11:57.240 | Hopefully you'll be able to use a lot of those tips

00:11:59.140 | to save money yourself.

00:12:00.340 | Within that process,

00:12:01.400 | I actually do talk about some other brands

00:12:03.840 | that I work with in the show

00:12:05.480 | and plenty of brands that I don't.

00:12:07.360 | And I just wanna be clear again

00:12:08.640 | that none of the brands that I'm partnering with in the show

00:12:11.040 | know that I'm even mentioning them in this episode,

00:12:13.200 | have paid me to mention this episode.

00:12:15.040 | I do have sponsors.

00:12:16.240 | Those sponsors do pay

00:12:17.840 | for the advertisements you hear on the show.

00:12:19.820 | I introduce all of them with a little whoosh sound

00:12:22.420 | and you can kind of tell that there's a sponsor coming in.

00:12:24.600 | I talk about how excited I am

00:12:26.080 | to have them partnering with the podcast.

00:12:27.840 | But throughout the rest of this episode,

00:12:29.200 | you will hear me talk about some brands that I love.

00:12:31.880 | And to the extent those brands have offers

00:12:34.040 | or deals for listeners, I'm gonna mention those.

00:12:37.000 | And I just thought it was good to be fully transparent

00:12:39.400 | that some of those brands are sponsors.

00:12:41.360 | Some of those links might not be sponsors.

00:12:43.240 | They might be my personal referral links,

00:12:44.940 | but none of them have paid to be here.

00:12:47.500 | And I've tried my best to only talk about the products

00:12:50.240 | and services that I've evaluated or that I think are great,

00:12:53.440 | which fortunately is exactly how I think about sponsors.

00:12:56.240 | Whenever I find a product I love that I wanna talk about,

00:12:58.680 | I reach out to them and say, can we work together?

00:13:00.840 | Because I really wanna only work with brands

00:13:03.000 | with products I love.

00:13:03.940 | So with that aside, let's talk about some of these tools.

00:13:06.120 | And again, I've used most of them for hours at a time

00:13:09.760 | going through all of these products,

00:13:11.280 | trying to decide what makes sense.

00:13:12.980 | There is nothing better than finding a brand of clothing

00:13:17.060 | that's comfortable, functional, and looks good.

00:13:19.680 | And that's exactly how I feel

00:13:21.280 | about our sponsor today, Viori.

00:13:23.400 | If you saw me in person, you'd know I believe it

00:13:25.600 | because there are very few days that go by

00:13:27.560 | where I'm not wearing one, two,

00:13:28.920 | or even three pieces of Viori.

00:13:31.000 | They make performance apparel for men and women

00:13:33.400 | that's incredibly versatile.

00:13:35.080 | Everything is designed to work out in,

00:13:36.800 | but doesn't look or feel like it at all.

00:13:39.080 | And it is so comfortable,

00:13:40.400 | you'll wanna wear it all the time.

00:13:42.160 | I've long said that Sunday performance joggers

00:13:44.400 | were my favorites and don't get me wrong,

00:13:46.160 | I have at least three pairs

00:13:47.720 | and they are the most comfortable pants I've owned,

00:13:49.940 | but I've been running a lot more

00:13:51.280 | and it's still warm in California.

00:13:53.020 | So I'm wearing my core shorts all the time.

00:13:55.920 | Their products are incredibly versatile

00:13:57.760 | and can be used for just about any activity,

00:13:59.820 | whether it's running, training, yoga,

00:14:02.040 | but they're also great for lounging

00:14:03.600 | and running around town.

00:14:05.080 | Honestly, I think Viori is an investment in your happiness

00:14:07.840 | and for All The Hacks listeners,

00:14:09.160 | they're offering 20% off your first purchase,

00:14:11.720 | as well as free shipping and returns on US orders over $75.

00:14:15.920 | So you should definitely check them out

00:14:17.940 | at allthehacks.com/viori.

00:14:20.360 | Again, go to allthehacks.com/v-u-o-r-i

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00:14:33.240 | is kind of like being trapped on a roller coaster from hell.

00:14:35.800 | Sure, it looked fun at first,

00:14:37.400 | they probably threw in the free phone,

00:14:39.120 | but now you can't get off.

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00:15:48.760 | As I said, I loved Copilot.

00:15:50.640 | It's what I use every day.

00:15:51.960 | It's how Amy and I get on the same page about spending.

00:15:54.200 | However, it's not a free app and it's only on iOS and Mac.

00:15:58.080 | So I totally get that it's not gonna be a perfect option

00:16:00.600 | for everyone.

00:16:01.560 | For some of you, you'd rather use a free app

00:16:03.760 | and there are options.

00:16:05.520 | And for some of you, you have Android

00:16:07.120 | and you don't have an iOS or Mac and that won't work.

00:16:08.920 | So like I said, to test all of these products,

00:16:10.960 | I went through and I spent hours with each of them

00:16:12.920 | trying to figure out what worked.

00:16:14.600 | And it was really hard not to want to put Copilot ahead.

00:16:17.520 | From a speed standpoint, from a design standpoint,

00:16:19.960 | from a functionality standpoint,

00:16:21.480 | from the automatic categorization standpoint,

00:16:23.760 | you'll hear me talk about a lot of features of these tools

00:16:25.880 | that I really like.

00:16:26.800 | And a lot of them are features that I love about Copilot

00:16:29.760 | because that's what I'm using.

00:16:31.040 | However, it's not a free product.

00:16:33.120 | If you want a free product, you can use Mint,

00:16:35.320 | you can use Rocket Money.

00:16:36.560 | I think they have a lot of limitations.

00:16:38.200 | Mint is filled with ads and not as customizable

00:16:40.880 | as you'd want.

00:16:41.800 | Rocket Money was a past partner of the show

00:16:44.080 | because I actually love the product

00:16:45.720 | for canceling subscriptions and making it super easy

00:16:49.240 | to automate that process and negotiate your bills.

00:16:51.920 | But when it comes to the spending and savings tracking,

00:16:54.480 | I think it's a little slow.

00:16:55.960 | I don't think it works as well on the web as I'd want it to,

00:16:58.640 | but it is a free product if you want something free.

00:17:01.560 | But if you're willing to pay

00:17:02.760 | and you don't have an iOS or Mac on Android,

00:17:05.360 | you could use something like Monarch Money

00:17:07.440 | or Simplify is an interesting one

00:17:09.120 | because when I was prepping for this episode,

00:17:11.040 | I was doing a little bit of research

00:17:12.360 | and I wanted to see if someone had done some similar content.

00:17:14.400 | Turns out Wirecutter did a whole post

00:17:16.040 | on the best expense tracking and budgeting apps.

00:17:18.360 | And they came to Simplify as the number one.

00:17:20.640 | However, when I went to the competition section

00:17:22.800 | and looked at all the products they used,

00:17:24.760 | they left off so many options

00:17:27.080 | that it's really hard for me

00:17:28.040 | to take their recommendation too seriously.

00:17:30.440 | In fact, they didn't even include Copilot, Monarch,

00:17:33.400 | Rocket Money, and a handful of other popular tools

00:17:36.160 | in the evaluation.

00:17:37.720 | So I wouldn't trust that review too much

00:17:40.240 | until it gets updated.

00:17:41.640 | But the fact that Simplify came out ahead

00:17:44.160 | and I didn't include it

00:17:45.200 | when I went through this whole process earlier this year

00:17:47.960 | made me think maybe I should go back and give it a look.

00:17:50.480 | And after that process,

00:17:51.880 | I am totally confused how it became number one.

00:17:54.680 | I went in and tried to use the product,

00:17:56.480 | I linked all my accounts,

00:17:58.000 | and there were so many things that didn't make sense to me.

00:18:00.640 | First off, you go in and categorize all your transactions,

00:18:04.000 | but those categories don't actually get linked

00:18:06.120 | to any budget or tracking ability that I could find

00:18:09.360 | until you created a separate spending plan,

00:18:12.120 | which you had to one-by-one re-add

00:18:14.720 | all of your transactions in,

00:18:16.800 | and then everything else fell into another category.

00:18:19.760 | You couldn't look at categories and subcategories together.

00:18:22.720 | You had to pick one.

00:18:24.480 | I didn't think the design was great,

00:18:26.120 | but I thought maybe I just don't get it.

00:18:28.800 | Maybe I was not using it right.

00:18:30.760 | So I searched on YouTube for a video

00:18:32.840 | of someone else using it

00:18:34.280 | to try to see if there was someone out there

00:18:36.000 | who is a diehard fan

00:18:37.320 | to see if they could explain why it was so awesome.

00:18:40.000 | I literally only found one or two videos

00:18:41.600 | that wasn't produced by Quicken itself.

00:18:44.120 | And for both of them,

00:18:46.320 | I think they did a pretty bad job of selling it.

00:18:49.040 | And one of them,

00:18:49.880 | which actually looked like it had the most promise,

00:18:51.920 | it was someone reviewing their actual spending

00:18:54.120 | so there was real data in there.

00:18:55.720 | It seemed like multiple times,

00:18:57.560 | the woman reviewing it had to go and fix something

00:19:00.000 | or correct something 'cause it wasn't working

00:19:01.920 | or was a bit confused.

00:19:03.400 | So I don't know.

00:19:04.760 | I couldn't figure out why this was the number one tool.

00:19:07.840 | Does it do the job?

00:19:09.160 | Probably.

00:19:10.120 | Does it make sense to me?

00:19:11.360 | Was it simple and easy to use?

00:19:13.040 | Not at all.

00:19:14.000 | So I might be missing something,

00:19:15.680 | but I didn't get that recommendation at all.

00:19:18.080 | Now, if you're hearing all that and wondering,

00:19:19.760 | where is YNAB?

00:19:21.120 | Don't worry.

00:19:21.960 | I didn't leave it off completely.

00:19:23.240 | I have tested out YNAB multiple times.

00:19:25.800 | The main difference between YNAB

00:19:27.560 | and why ultimately for me it's not the right tool

00:19:30.880 | is that they really focus

00:19:32.160 | on what's called zero balance budgeting.

00:19:34.040 | YNAB calls it giving every dollar a job.

00:19:36.440 | Now what that means is every bit of income coming in

00:19:39.400 | needs to be assigned somewhere

00:19:41.480 | so that you can know where all of your money is going.

00:19:44.440 | For me, that's not what I'm trying to do here.

00:19:46.560 | I'm not trying to make sure

00:19:48.040 | that everything is going to the right place,

00:19:50.120 | including savings and all that.

00:19:52.040 | I'm really just trying to understand

00:19:53.600 | how much money I'm spending.

00:19:55.400 | And so that actually is not the process I wanted to follow.

00:19:59.080 | Even more so now that we don't have income

00:20:01.320 | from a regular job,

00:20:02.920 | we don't actually have dollars to give jobs to.

00:20:05.720 | So zero balance budgeting is definitely something

00:20:08.280 | that I think can be really valuable for people

00:20:10.720 | who are just starting to learn how to save and budget

00:20:13.240 | and want to figure out how to allocate that savings,

00:20:15.840 | who need to get a better grasp of applying money

00:20:18.120 | towards debt pay down or future goals

00:20:20.360 | or building their emergency fund,

00:20:22.080 | or just people that like that form of budgeting

00:20:24.720 | where you're actually making sure you know

00:20:26.240 | where every single dollar is and you can account for it.

00:20:28.800 | I definitely think YNAB is a great tool.

00:20:30.720 | You can even get a 34-day free trial

00:20:32.840 | at allthehacks.com/ynab.

00:20:34.440 | And you can listen to episode 16

00:20:35.800 | where I had Jesse Meacham,

00:20:37.120 | the founder of YNAB on the show,

00:20:39.440 | to give his perspective on budgets and budgeting,

00:20:42.000 | which I think will give a different perspective

00:20:43.560 | than I have.

00:20:44.400 | So if you wanna go back and listen to that,

00:20:45.720 | I'll put the link in the show notes.

00:20:47.160 | But at the end of the day,

00:20:48.120 | for the purposes of what I wanted to do

00:20:50.360 | and what I thought made the most sense for us,

00:20:52.600 | which was tracking our spending

00:20:54.400 | and understanding all the categories

00:20:56.000 | that money gets spent on,

00:20:57.440 | Copilot was the tool that I thought made the most sense.

00:20:59.720 | That said, a lot of what you need to do

00:21:01.560 | to get these tools all set up is the same.

00:21:04.160 | So I'm gonna talk about that.

00:21:05.400 | And it's a process that will apply

00:21:07.000 | to almost any tool you're using.

00:21:09.320 | So the first part of that process is setting up categories.

00:21:12.440 | Because at the end of the day,

00:21:13.480 | the main action you're gonna take that takes time

00:21:16.480 | is just making sure all of your expenses

00:21:18.960 | are tied to a specific category

00:21:21.040 | so you can do some analysis later.

00:21:22.920 | And I'm actually gonna run through all the categories I use.

00:21:25.960 | Almost every one of these tools, by the way,

00:21:27.440 | will give you a set of default categories.

00:21:29.600 | And you can choose to use them, modify them,

00:21:31.800 | use some of them.

00:21:32.880 | There's plenty of options.

00:21:34.560 | I think there's a few things

00:21:35.760 | that are important to understand.

00:21:37.320 | One, at the end of the day,

00:21:39.440 | the level of granularity you need is really up to you.

00:21:43.200 | For us, we don't need to know the difference

00:21:45.520 | between coffee shops, bars, restaurants,

00:21:48.920 | fast food, and everything else.

00:21:50.760 | We just generally wanna know

00:21:51.840 | how much we spend going out to eat.

00:21:53.640 | Also, you could decide you wanna go in

00:21:55.680 | and categorize all the shopping you do into every category,

00:21:59.040 | or you can just put it all into shopping.

00:22:01.000 | So that's a personal decision.

00:22:03.080 | I think a really important thing to keep in mind

00:22:04.960 | is you wanna get directionally important.

00:22:07.160 | You can always drill down.

00:22:09.000 | If you put everything in food and you realize it's too much,

00:22:12.160 | you can look into food and look at all the expenses.

00:22:14.360 | You can recategorize them later.

00:22:16.160 | So I would err on the side

00:22:17.680 | of not making it too much work up front

00:22:20.120 | and deciding later if you need more.

00:22:22.240 | Though I'm sure there's someone listening

00:22:23.960 | that would say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, that's so much harder."

00:22:25.600 | If you have more categories up front

00:22:27.720 | and you wanna reassign them, it's much easier.

00:22:29.960 | So I'll leave it to you to decide what you want.

00:22:31.840 | But here are the categories and subcategories

00:22:34.040 | we ended up using.

00:22:35.520 | And I'll talk a little bit about what they are.

00:22:37.880 | First off, I'll do all the categories first,

00:22:40.760 | and then I'll break each one down into subcategories

00:22:42.880 | so you can kind of get a sense of this.

00:22:44.520 | I'll probably see if there's an easy way

00:22:46.240 | to put this in the show notes

00:22:47.440 | because it's probably not the easiest thing

00:22:49.320 | for you to just sit down and write down.

00:22:50.840 | But we break everything up into household,

00:22:53.760 | car and transport, children, health and wellness,

00:22:56.880 | lifestyle, food and drink, shopping, gifts and donations,

00:23:01.600 | fees, and two others which are actually hidden categories

00:23:04.880 | for credit card payments and work expenses,

00:23:06.720 | which I'll come back to.

00:23:07.720 | Within household, we break things into home loans,

00:23:10.440 | but obviously if you rent, you'd have rent.

00:23:12.600 | Dog, could be other pets.

00:23:15.200 | Insurance, bills and expenses,

00:23:17.600 | which is things like phone, cable, internet.

00:23:20.160 | Home, which is things like furniture,

00:23:23.040 | cleaning supplies, utilities, and property taxes.

00:23:26.960 | We have car and transport, makes sense.

00:23:29.560 | For car, it's our monthly payments,

00:23:31.720 | it's any maintenance and service costs.

00:23:34.000 | And then transportation is things like taxis,

00:23:36.240 | train cards, Lyft rides, Ubers, et cetera.

00:23:38.600 | Within children, we've got childcare,

00:23:40.640 | children and education.

00:23:42.280 | I think childcare makes sense, that's our au pair.

00:23:44.480 | Children is all of the miscellaneous expenses

00:23:47.560 | that you buy for kids,

00:23:48.720 | which seems like a very big part of our budget right now.

00:23:51.600 | And also one that I think was really helpful

00:23:53.680 | to get an understanding of how much it is

00:23:56.160 | because it's something that you're kind of

00:23:57.960 | always adding little purchases to.

00:24:00.200 | And I never really had a good sense of what we're spending.

00:24:02.360 | And then education, which is cost for preschool right now,

00:24:05.760 | but in the future could include tutors

00:24:07.480 | and courses and anything like that.

00:24:08.880 | In health and wellness, we have fitness,

00:24:10.400 | healthcare and personal care.

00:24:12.480 | I think those all kind of make sense.

00:24:14.160 | Personal care, meaning things like haircuts

00:24:15.960 | or if one of us were to get a massage or a manicure

00:24:18.480 | or something like that.

00:24:19.360 | In lifestyle, I have subscriptions,

00:24:22.240 | entertainment, personal and travel.

00:24:24.640 | Subscriptions is things like Spotify or Netflix.

00:24:26.880 | Entertainment is stuff like if we buy tickets

00:24:29.000 | or go to a zoo or a museum,

00:24:31.120 | or Amy and I wanna do an escape room.

00:24:33.680 | Personal is actually a category that I created

00:24:36.240 | for all of the things that you might spend money on

00:24:39.240 | that don't fall into other categories

00:24:41.120 | that are personal to you.

00:24:42.560 | But it turns out there aren't that many expenses there.

00:24:44.480 | I don't even think we had one last year.

00:24:46.440 | So I don't know if you really need it,

00:24:48.400 | but if someone wanted to buy a nice handbag,

00:24:51.680 | maybe you don't wanna call that clothing

00:24:53.400 | and you could put it in personal.

00:24:55.040 | And then travel is a bucket for all of our travel.

00:24:57.800 | Food and drink, that's where we have only two categories.

00:25:00.720 | Groceries and dining and drinks,

00:25:02.640 | which like I mentioned earlier, encompasses everything.

00:25:05.360 | Within shopping, we really just have shops and clothing.

00:25:08.400 | I know some people wanna go in

00:25:09.600 | and break down all their expenses,

00:25:11.320 | but for us, shops is basically Target

00:25:14.040 | and a few other transactions.

00:25:16.320 | In gifts and donations, we have gifts,

00:25:18.880 | which is birthday gifts, Christmas gifts,

00:25:20.480 | all those kinds of things.

00:25:21.400 | And then donations is any money we contribute to charity,

00:25:24.880 | which mostly for us is just contributions

00:25:27.520 | to our Daffy account.

00:25:29.600 | I'll come back to that.

00:25:30.520 | Last is fees.

00:25:31.760 | This is an interesting one

00:25:32.680 | because we have a lot of credit cards with annual fees.

00:25:35.320 | This one actually is not insignificant,

00:25:37.920 | but anytime I get credits back on a credit card

00:25:41.760 | for purchases, I also throw them into fees

00:25:45.320 | if they are credits for things

00:25:46.680 | I would have normally already spent money on.

00:25:49.200 | So that's important because for example,

00:25:51.480 | with a Chase Sapphire Reserve,

00:25:53.000 | the $300 travel credits,

00:25:54.720 | I was gonna spend money on travel anyways.

00:25:56.800 | So I categorize those credits in fees

00:26:00.120 | to help offset the actual costs of those fees.

00:26:03.320 | So for example, we have a subscription to SiriusXM.

00:26:06.480 | I rarely use it, but we have it on one of our cars.

00:26:09.480 | It's free because Amex has an entertainment credit.

00:26:12.320 | So when the Sirius charge comes in,

00:26:14.280 | it's all auto-categorized as entertainment,

00:26:16.600 | but the credit from Amex for that charge,

00:26:18.840 | that digital entertainment credit,

00:26:20.200 | I categorize that credit as entertainment

00:26:23.440 | because it's not fair to offset the fees with that credit

00:26:26.240 | because I wouldn't otherwise pay for Sirius.

00:26:28.960 | So a little confusing,

00:26:30.520 | but if I'm getting credits from credit cards

00:26:32.520 | that aren't things that I would have paid for,

00:26:34.120 | I just categorize them into the fees category.

00:26:36.600 | Have another category called other,

00:26:38.200 | which is where if I don't know where something goes,

00:26:39.920 | I put it into other.

00:26:40.960 | However, we don't really have anything here,

00:26:43.600 | and if we ever found a transaction in other,

00:26:45.800 | it would probably more be a signal

00:26:47.800 | that we need to create a new category

00:26:49.320 | than that we would keep using it.

00:26:50.840 | Finally, I mentioned the last two categories,

00:26:52.960 | and I guess there's a third.

00:26:54.160 | So one is credit card payments.

00:26:56.520 | I generally want a sense of how much money

00:26:59.600 | we're spending on our credit cards each month,

00:27:01.800 | just so I can kind of understand at a very high level

00:27:04.680 | what are our monthly credit card bills

00:27:06.440 | because I need to make sure

00:27:07.280 | there's enough money to pay them, et cetera.

00:27:09.280 | So I have a hidden category in Copilot

00:27:11.240 | called credit card payments

00:27:12.720 | because all of the transactions on those credit cards

00:27:15.760 | are getting categorized as expenses,

00:27:17.640 | I don't wanna duplicate the credit card payments

00:27:20.040 | as transactions.

00:27:21.240 | So I have it as a hidden category

00:27:22.840 | that doesn't show up in our budgeting,

00:27:24.760 | but that I can look at if I wanna see

00:27:26.560 | how much am I spending each month

00:27:27.960 | on credit cards in general,

00:27:29.600 | which is actually really helpful

00:27:31.200 | just to get a sense of how many points

00:27:33.120 | did I earn last year?

00:27:33.960 | How much did I put on credit cards?

00:27:35.240 | What was my average point earning?

00:27:36.960 | And then I have work expenses,

00:27:38.160 | which is another hidden category

00:27:39.560 | because any of those expenses

00:27:41.500 | that are related to the podcast, related to business,

00:27:44.400 | I wanna make sure I separate

00:27:45.840 | and don't count in our regular budget

00:27:47.720 | because I probably wouldn't have spent them

00:27:48.920 | if I didn't have a business that makes some money.

00:27:51.160 | And so those are all hidden as well.

00:27:53.520 | I'm trying to put all of my work expenses on a work card

00:27:56.920 | that I don't actually integrate into Copilot at all.

00:28:00.200 | And the only challenge there is every now and then

00:28:02.800 | there's a purchase like a flight

00:28:04.500 | where I just really wanna earn five points per dollar

00:28:06.960 | more than I want to have those separate.

00:28:09.360 | And so there's just a handful of work expenses a year

00:28:12.280 | that I put on a personal card

00:28:13.840 | because usually there was a lot more points to be earned.

00:28:17.120 | And so I wanna hide those from the budget.

00:28:18.680 | Finally, there's a category that's a non-category

00:28:20.680 | that's just excluded,

00:28:22.240 | which I use for things that don't really matter

00:28:24.960 | or don't make sense or don't fit into any of these.

00:28:28.600 | On Copilot at least there's a whole separate thing

00:28:30.760 | where you can categorize something

00:28:32.000 | as an internal transfer or income.

00:28:34.560 | And so if you didn't hear any of those things

00:28:36.960 | that's because I put income and income.

00:28:39.000 | And if I'm transferring money between accounts

00:28:40.600 | that's an internal transfer.

00:28:42.080 | So those are all the categories.

00:28:43.380 | And with each category,

00:28:44.600 | there are budgets associated with them.

00:28:46.480 | Almost all of these tools

00:28:47.640 | will help you automatically do those budgets

00:28:50.080 | based on your prior spending

00:28:51.480 | and then you can tweak them from there,

00:28:52.880 | which is how we did it.

00:28:54.080 | One of the tricky things here

00:28:55.100 | is that almost every piece of software

00:28:57.600 | goes in and looks at budgets on a monthly basis,

00:29:00.680 | which is great except for some cases like property tax

00:29:04.120 | where we pay it twice a year.

00:29:05.780 | So some apps, Copilot being one of them,

00:29:08.280 | let you go in and set different budgets for each month.

00:29:11.360 | So you could say my property tax budget is $0 a month,

00:29:14.720 | but in the two months a year

00:29:16.120 | that we have to pay property tax,

00:29:17.920 | it's whatever that amount is.

00:29:19.880 | So that's how I've set it up for property tax.

00:29:22.000 | And it's smart enough

00:29:23.200 | that it kind of forecasts into the future

00:29:24.840 | that it's gonna be the same months every year.

00:29:27.040 | And it also looks at your past transactions

00:29:29.040 | to know when it is.

00:29:29.920 | So it's pretty smart like that.

00:29:31.580 | That's how I do some things that are annual.

00:29:34.640 | The other alternative or compliment

00:29:37.000 | is using what's called carryover budgets.

00:29:39.220 | So if you enable this on Copilot,

00:29:41.020 | you can take a budget

00:29:42.240 | and any money that's not spent

00:29:43.760 | will roll over to the next month.

00:29:45.480 | And this works really well on travel

00:29:47.360 | and any other category

00:29:48.500 | where you really probably have an annual budget.

00:29:50.920 | So it's not as much monthly,

00:29:52.580 | but the transactions happen across the year

00:29:55.280 | different times of the year.

00:29:56.780 | So let's say you wanna spend $6,000 a year on travel.

00:29:59.600 | You can create a $500 a month travel budget

00:30:02.960 | with carryover

00:30:04.440 | so that each month you don't spend all $500.

00:30:07.560 | It just rolls over to the next month.

00:30:09.760 | And so at the end of the year,

00:30:11.340 | that should all balance out.

00:30:12.920 | It also supports negative.

00:30:14.280 | So if you take your vacation in March,

00:30:16.200 | you'll just be negative

00:30:17.080 | and slowly get back to zero by the end of the year.

00:30:19.740 | And you can go in when you enable carryover budgets.

00:30:22.260 | You can actually say only on these categories

00:30:24.380 | or not on these categories.

00:30:25.620 | So you're not having every category carryover.

00:30:28.260 | So that's how we solve some of the variability each month.

00:30:30.580 | Next, almost every one of these apps

00:30:32.380 | has something to track recurring expenses.

00:30:35.140 | The good apps almost all automate this.

00:30:37.440 | They look at your past transactions.

00:30:38.860 | They identify what things happen every month

00:30:40.900 | and they create a recurring expense.

00:30:42.900 | They identify whether it's monthly,

00:30:44.940 | every other week, every two, three months, every year,

00:30:48.240 | and they create a separate place in the app for it,

00:30:50.880 | which is super helpful.

00:30:52.520 | So I can go somewhere and see

00:30:53.660 | what are all my recurring expenses,

00:30:55.400 | which is great 'cause you can identify

00:30:56.680 | ones you wanna get rid of.

00:30:58.320 | It also is great because it tracks when things come in.

00:31:01.840 | And so for an example of how this feature worked,

00:31:03.960 | I was looking in Copilot the other day.

00:31:05.600 | I noticed that one of the bills I have hadn't been paid.

00:31:08.700 | It looked like it was overdue.

00:31:10.280 | So I was like, hmm, that's strange.

00:31:11.320 | This bill's on autopay.

00:31:12.200 | What happened?

00:31:13.080 | So I logged into the site

00:31:14.300 | and I noticed that the credit card linked to that bill

00:31:16.860 | had expired and disabled autopay.

00:31:19.860 | So I quickly added a new credit card

00:31:21.860 | and I was able to pay the bill and avoid late fees,

00:31:24.300 | all because I noticed

00:31:25.500 | when I was monitoring recurring transactions

00:31:27.360 | that one of them was supposed to come.

00:31:28.740 | So I think that covers almost all of the setup

00:31:30.940 | for all of these spending tracking apps.

00:31:33.360 | Each app might have its own nuance to how it works.

00:31:35.900 | So I can't speak to every single one,

00:31:37.820 | but for the most part, it's setting up your categories,

00:31:41.260 | categorizing your transactions, setting up budgets,

00:31:44.700 | making sure that any recurring expenses

00:31:46.660 | are logged as recurring.

00:31:47.820 | And on a regular basis,

00:31:49.280 | all you need to do is go in and categorize transactions.

00:31:52.620 | And then on a monthly or annual basis,

00:31:54.460 | you'll be able to go in and see how things are trending,

00:31:56.620 | which is where the real, real value comes in.

00:31:58.860 | Now, I mentioned that on a regular basis,

00:32:00.180 | you have to go in and categorize transactions,

00:32:03.140 | but I did want to flag something that is really exciting.

00:32:05.860 | So I just saw, as I'm recording this,

00:32:08.580 | the release notes from Copilot

00:32:10.660 | that they just launched something

00:32:11.780 | called Copilot Intelligence,

00:32:13.460 | which is using your data to build a model

00:32:16.820 | to automatically categorize your transactions.

00:32:19.220 | The really cool thing about it

00:32:20.660 | is that each individual user

00:32:22.900 | actually gets their own private categorization model

00:32:26.140 | based on their data,

00:32:27.740 | and it's not being used on everyone else.

00:32:30.300 | So they're automatically looking at your past behaviors

00:32:32.920 | to suggest the categories you want, which is really cool.

00:32:36.380 | And even if they're not 100% sure on the right category,

00:32:39.120 | they're at least sorting the list

00:32:40.580 | based on the things they think are the most likely

00:32:43.040 | to be the right categories.

00:32:44.360 | I'm so excited to play with this.

00:32:46.300 | I already think the model they're using is one of the best

00:32:49.140 | based on me going through five or six apps and doing this,

00:32:52.220 | but if they can really build out a model

00:32:53.740 | based on just my past transaction categorization,

00:32:57.380 | I think it's really likely

00:32:58.620 | to be the best categorization tool out there.

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00:35:32.040 | I just wanna thank you quick for listening to

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00:35:37.060 | Your support is what keeps this show going.

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00:35:51.080 | But next I wanna talk a little bit

00:35:52.540 | about some of the things

00:35:53.620 | that make this whole process confusing or messy

00:35:56.220 | and how I go about solving them.

00:35:57.780 | So one is purchases at retailers

00:36:00.380 | that have lots of different categories assigned to them.

00:36:03.300 | So let's take Target, Amazon, anything like that.

00:36:06.560 | So one option is what I've done with Target,

00:36:08.800 | which is I just create a category called Shops

00:36:10.680 | and I throw everything in there.

00:36:12.240 | Now, we don't spend that much money at Target

00:36:14.780 | such that I think that's gonna have a big impact

00:36:17.940 | on our budget.

00:36:18.780 | However, on Amazon, we do.

00:36:19.940 | And also, by the way, on Target,

00:36:21.420 | almost everything we're doing is in a similar category.

00:36:24.700 | Whereas on Amazon, we might buy furniture,

00:36:27.500 | we might buy sporting goods,

00:36:29.020 | we might buy food and groceries,

00:36:31.540 | we might buy household goods.

00:36:33.420 | So for Amazon, I really wanna make sure

00:36:35.200 | we get the categories right.

00:36:36.580 | So two things.

00:36:37.720 | One, there is a page on Amazon

00:36:39.860 | that I can't believe I only just found

00:36:41.860 | where you can search for your transactions

00:36:43.920 | or you go to the account page and click on Transactions.

00:36:46.660 | And instead of sorting everything by orders

00:36:49.540 | and all your orders you've had,

00:36:50.780 | it sorts everything by credit card transactions.

00:36:53.500 | So you can see $37 transaction,

00:36:55.940 | click here and see what it is.

00:36:57.660 | So that screen is incredibly helpful.

00:37:00.300 | It's also helpful for refunds,

00:37:01.680 | which I'll get to in a minute.

00:37:03.260 | But Copilot actually has this amazing feature

00:37:06.320 | where you can log into Amazon

00:37:08.100 | and they'll sync with your Amazon account.

00:37:09.940 | And then whenever you have a purchase,

00:37:11.740 | they'll fill in straight natively within the app

00:37:14.020 | all of the purchased items

00:37:15.800 | that are associated with an order.

00:37:17.420 | So you might see $73 from Amazon,

00:37:20.880 | but you'll actually be able to also see

00:37:22.740 | all the items you purchased with that order

00:37:24.620 | and you'll be able to more easily categorize

00:37:26.260 | that transaction without having to go look somewhere else.

00:37:28.540 | Another one like this is Venmo,

00:37:30.140 | where you'll see a bunch of transactions

00:37:31.580 | on your checking account that say Venmo in, out,

00:37:34.180 | in, out, in, out.

00:37:35.540 | And the way Copilot solves this

00:37:36.980 | is they set up an email forwarding system

00:37:39.280 | where you can set up a Gmail filter

00:37:40.800 | to auto forward your Venmo transaction emails

00:37:43.220 | to Copilot and only your Venmo ones.

00:37:45.900 | And then they actually get data

00:37:48.100 | on what those individual transactions are.

00:37:50.660 | It's especially helpful if you ever have a balance

00:37:52.880 | in your Venmo account,

00:37:53.800 | because if someone sends you $100

00:37:55.220 | and you don't cash it out,

00:37:56.580 | and then you send someone else $50,

00:37:58.620 | your bank account won't actually see

00:38:00.220 | any of those transactions.

00:38:01.800 | So we've used that Venmo transaction to make this easier.

00:38:04.840 | Another category that can be confusing is cash and ATMs.

00:38:08.020 | So the way we think about this,

00:38:09.300 | if I see an ATM charge while we're traveling,

00:38:11.720 | I'll try to just pick the category that's most likely

00:38:14.140 | and be okay that it's not perfect.

00:38:16.120 | If we took out money 'cause we were buying food

00:38:18.020 | while we were walking around the city, I'll call it food.

00:38:20.140 | If we took out money

00:38:20.980 | because we knew we would need to buy bus tickets,

00:38:23.420 | I'll call it transportation.

00:38:24.780 | It's not a perfect solution,

00:38:26.060 | but it's a lot easier

00:38:26.940 | than logging every individual cash transaction.

00:38:30.100 | That said, we do have some cash

00:38:31.980 | that we keep around the house for various things.

00:38:34.420 | And if I'm spending any meaningful amount of money,

00:38:37.120 | let's call it something around $100 or more,

00:38:40.220 | I will go into Copilot after I do it

00:38:42.540 | and just add the transaction in my manual account.

00:38:45.580 | You could do this on any app

00:38:46.780 | where you just add a manual transaction,

00:38:48.860 | but I try to only really do it

00:38:50.620 | if I think it's enough that matters,

00:38:52.260 | because it's too complicated

00:38:54.480 | if I just have five bucks that I bought something

00:38:56.620 | at a food truck, it's too much work.

00:38:58.820 | That said, as you know, I love points,

00:39:00.620 | so I'm trying to put as little as possible on cash,

00:39:02.620 | but every now and then there's something that makes sense.

00:39:05.240 | And when I'm doing that, I wanna log that

00:39:07.020 | so that it's in there if it's enough that matters.

00:39:09.140 | So next, let's talk about refunds.

00:39:11.460 | This one can be a bit of an annoying one for two reasons.

00:39:14.260 | One, the misalignment of when it happens.

00:39:17.100 | So the easy fix there is for Amy's birthday,

00:39:19.900 | I bought her a tennis racket, but I didn't know which size,

00:39:22.060 | so I bought two different sizes.

00:39:23.780 | I bought them in one month,

00:39:25.020 | and then we returned the one

00:39:26.460 | that wasn't the right size the next month.

00:39:28.500 | So it looks like I spent twice as much on gifts in one month

00:39:31.220 | and then we got it back the next month.

00:39:33.200 | So I'll just go in on the return transaction

00:39:35.500 | and I'll just change the date

00:39:36.580 | to the purchase date transaction

00:39:38.060 | so that it all nets out in the same month.

00:39:39.820 | And then on Amazon, it's a little bit more tricky

00:39:42.460 | because you need to go find what transaction

00:39:44.980 | the refund was associated with.

00:39:46.800 | So I'll just go to that transaction screen,

00:39:48.700 | look at the category,

00:39:49.940 | and just make sure I put whatever category

00:39:52.220 | the original transaction was on.

00:39:54.140 | Next, let's talk about splitting

00:39:55.340 | because it's especially relevant to Amazon stuff.

00:39:58.220 | If I have a transaction that's not wholly in one category

00:40:01.360 | or not entirely mine,

00:40:03.060 | let's say I bought dinner for some friends,

00:40:05.020 | there's two options to deal with that.

00:40:06.480 | One, categorize the whole thing as food,

00:40:08.620 | and then if your friend Venmo's you money

00:40:09.980 | to pay you back for it,

00:40:11.020 | you can just put that deposit or credit in food as well,

00:40:15.700 | or you can just split the transaction in two

00:40:18.860 | and you can exclude half of it.

00:40:20.660 | You could say dinner was $100, I'm splitting it,

00:40:22.700 | $50 is food, $50 is exclude.

00:40:25.540 | Or maybe you're out at dinner and half of it's a work expense

00:40:29.300 | you could say 50 to work expenses, 50 to food.

00:40:32.420 | On Amazon, sometimes there are purchases

00:40:34.100 | where some of the stuff is for the house,

00:40:35.620 | some of the stuff is for the kids,

00:40:36.820 | some of the stuff is for the dog.

00:40:38.820 | And if it's a really, really big transaction,

00:40:41.980 | maybe on a rare case, I'll split the transaction

00:40:45.260 | so I can separately categorize it.

00:40:47.120 | But for the most part, I'm just choosing the category

00:40:49.440 | that makes the most sense.

00:40:50.740 | So if we spent $100, $75 on clothes and $25 on home,

00:40:55.300 | I just call it clothes.

00:40:56.900 | And I don't worry about the fact

00:40:58.620 | that there's a little bit of home purchasing

00:41:00.380 | going into the clothing category,

00:41:02.260 | it just all kind of nets out.

00:41:03.820 | One other thing is maybe you have a transaction

00:41:06.660 | that's for a long period of time.

00:41:08.700 | I mentioned earlier that one way to do it

00:41:10.660 | is separate budgets.

00:41:11.620 | So let's take insurance payments.

00:41:13.060 | A lot of car insurance, you pay every six months.

00:41:15.700 | So two options.

00:41:17.060 | One, you just go in and you set a car insurance budget

00:41:20.020 | where the budget is higher every six months

00:41:22.500 | and it's lower every other month.

00:41:24.580 | Or you can go in and you can click on the transaction,

00:41:27.140 | split it into six and allocate it

00:41:29.460 | over each of the next six months.

00:41:31.420 | It's really a personal preference how you wanna do it.

00:41:34.580 | Depending on how frequent it is, how big it is,

00:41:37.520 | it may or may not matter,

00:41:38.740 | or you may or may not make sense to do one or the other.

00:41:41.660 | For me, I'm just thankful that USAA

00:41:43.740 | allows you to split your insurance bill

00:41:45.500 | into monthly payments without charging any fees.

00:41:47.960 | So we just do that and don't worry about it for insurance.

00:41:50.580 | Next, I wanna talk about one feature

00:41:52.140 | that I wish all of these apps have.

00:41:53.460 | And to be fully transparent,

00:41:55.020 | I've emailed Copilot and said, "Please build this feature,"

00:41:57.760 | is trying to manage cashflow.

00:42:00.020 | And so I'm gonna do a whole episode actually

00:42:02.440 | on how we do this and how we take our money

00:42:05.620 | and decide where it goes and in what order

00:42:07.700 | and all the financial automation we do

00:42:09.600 | to make it all efficient.

00:42:10.920 | But I really wish that one of these apps

00:42:13.140 | would look at upcoming credit card bills,

00:42:15.740 | look at upcoming expenses we have,

00:42:17.780 | because it knows all of our recurring expenses,

00:42:20.300 | filter out the ones on credit cards

00:42:21.940 | because we don't pay for them the moment they hit,

00:42:24.260 | and show me over the next week or over the next month,

00:42:27.260 | here's how much money is estimated

00:42:29.420 | to be withdrawn from your checking account

00:42:31.220 | so I can make sure I have enough money in there.

00:42:33.700 | Why does it matter?

00:42:34.620 | Well, because if that money is in my high-yield savings

00:42:36.940 | account or my Wealthfront Cash account,

00:42:38.540 | or if it's in short-term treasuries or in treasury ETF,

00:42:41.500 | I'm earning probably around 5% on that money.

00:42:44.700 | And if it's in my checking account, I'm not.

00:42:46.620 | And so I wanna leave as little money

00:42:48.140 | in checking as possible.

00:42:49.700 | I know that all of these apps have enough information

00:42:51.700 | to tell me how much money I need in my checking account

00:42:54.060 | on any given day,

00:42:55.420 | but it's not something that any of them have built yet.

00:42:57.740 | So I can hope and cross my fingers.

00:43:00.080 | When I was looking at the AI features that Copilot launched,

00:43:03.260 | they said in the future,

00:43:04.260 | you'll be able to actually query your money

00:43:06.200 | and ask questions.

00:43:07.360 | So maybe I'll be able to write a query that says,

00:43:09.500 | how many dollars do you think will get withdrawn

00:43:11.500 | for my checking account in the next 15 days?

00:43:14.580 | Maybe I can automate asking that question,

00:43:16.880 | or maybe they will just build this feature

00:43:18.940 | because I know I've talked to them about it

00:43:20.600 | and given them a lot of ideas of what it would be.

00:43:22.940 | So, like I said, I'm gonna do a whole episode

00:43:25.000 | on how we think about all of our financial automation.

00:43:27.500 | It's really separate from budgeting,

00:43:28.980 | but I've put a lot of time into where does the money go?

00:43:31.860 | How does it go?

00:43:32.700 | How does it flow?

00:43:33.860 | So that like tracking our spending,

00:43:36.560 | we just don't spend that much time

00:43:38.200 | managing our money either,

00:43:39.540 | and it makes life really easy.

00:43:41.300 | So before I jump into all the categories

00:43:43.980 | and how we think about saving money in them,

00:43:46.020 | I thought it might make sense

00:43:47.060 | to just jump into all the benefits of doing this

00:43:50.660 | and why it even makes sense

00:43:52.220 | to spend all this effort in the first place.

00:43:54.360 | So the biggest one for me

00:43:55.460 | is that we get to see how much we spend

00:43:56.820 | in all these different categories.

00:43:58.380 | We get to see how on both a category and subcategory level,

00:44:01.860 | we get to see our month to date trends.

00:44:03.960 | I love that.

00:44:04.800 | I love that we can go in and look at

00:44:07.140 | here's how much we spend in one area

00:44:09.300 | and here's how much we spend in another

00:44:10.880 | and actually ask ourselves

00:44:12.800 | whether that's aligned with how we wanna spend our money.

00:44:15.800 | We often ask ourselves two questions.

00:44:18.780 | One, if we were gonna spend more money,

00:44:21.760 | where would we put it?

00:44:22.940 | Is there a category where we feel like we're too restrained?

00:44:26.340 | And then we ask ourselves,

00:44:27.380 | if we were to cut from our current spending,

00:44:30.180 | where would we cut?

00:44:31.220 | And then the real fun

00:44:32.700 | is when you look at those two things and compare it.

00:44:34.800 | So let's say you're looking at all of your expenses

00:44:36.580 | and you say, if we could add 10% more,

00:44:38.680 | I think we'd travel more.

00:44:39.940 | And if we could cut 10%, I think we'd eat out less.

00:44:43.220 | Well, you can actually ask yourself,

00:44:44.580 | do we actually wanna travel more and eat out less now?

00:44:47.100 | And you can consider swapping them and reallocating.

00:44:49.980 | And I think it's a really interesting exercise

00:44:51.840 | to just think about where would we spend more of?

00:44:54.060 | Where would we spend less of?

00:44:55.540 | And how do those two things align?

00:44:57.340 | Also, like I said before,

00:44:58.540 | I love that I can see these upcoming recurring expenses,

00:45:01.460 | ones that are overdue, track how they've changed over time,

00:45:04.700 | know when it's time to go call up companies

00:45:06.500 | to negotiate better prices and all of that.

00:45:08.660 | I also think it puts a lot of expenses in perspective.

00:45:11.460 | It's really easy for me to get stressed out

00:45:13.660 | when I'm going to the grocery store

00:45:15.060 | and I see something I want that's not on sale, but often is,

00:45:18.500 | especially when it comes to fruit and all the berries

00:45:20.860 | that we buy because our kids love them.

00:45:23.300 | And when you look at the grocery budget in whole

00:45:25.860 | and you look at how much money

00:45:27.020 | you're spending a year in general,

00:45:29.300 | it makes it a little easier

00:45:30.420 | to just stop sweating the small stuff.

00:45:32.620 | I like how Ramit Sethi says,

00:45:33.980 | "Don't ask yourself the $3 questions,

00:45:35.820 | "ask yourself the $30,000 questions."

00:45:38.300 | I think we can get caught up in,

00:45:39.460 | "Ooh, what if we cut this dollar here, this dollar there?"

00:45:42.420 | But when you look at it in the big picture,

00:45:44.260 | you realize that a lot of those small decisions

00:45:47.020 | could add up, but they're not really gonna move the needle,

00:45:49.640 | like making major changes

00:45:51.580 | or spending a lot more time on earning more,

00:45:54.460 | starting a side hustle,

00:45:55.700 | negotiating your salary or stuff like that.

00:45:58.180 | Also, one of the most valuable parts of doing this

00:46:00.900 | is that I can share all of this work with Amy

00:46:03.660 | and we can have a shared view

00:46:04.780 | of how we're spending all of our money.

00:46:07.140 | In most relationships I've found,

00:46:08.880 | there's one person that gets a lot more excited

00:46:11.060 | about doing all this work than the other.

00:46:12.780 | And by having a central place to do it,

00:46:15.060 | you can give the other person a login

00:46:16.940 | or in some apps, you can have shared logins

00:46:19.820 | and you can let your partner get access to all of it as well

00:46:22.860 | and see how you're spending money

00:46:24.260 | and sparks really interesting conversations

00:46:26.460 | like the one I just talked about,

00:46:28.060 | where you can be intentional and proactive

00:46:30.700 | about how you spend money.

00:46:31.740 | I've often started sharing a lot of this information

00:46:34.100 | with friends.

00:46:35.200 | So I find that I'm a lot more open with people about money,

00:46:37.780 | so maybe it's not for you,

00:46:40.060 | but I'll pull out CoPilot,

00:46:42.060 | especially with a couple of friends I know do this as well

00:46:44.700 | in CoPilot and we'll be like,

00:46:46.500 | oh, how much are you spending here?

00:46:47.820 | How much are you spending there?

00:46:49.140 | And it creates these really interesting conversations

00:46:51.540 | that I feel like we don't often have about money

00:46:54.020 | and it makes it really easy

00:46:55.460 | and almost fun to compare notes with friends.

00:46:58.220 | Finally, one thing I didn't mention

00:46:59.580 | is that with all these apps,

00:47:01.540 | there might be something you wanna look up

00:47:03.700 | or do that you can't.

00:47:05.180 | And for almost all of them,

00:47:07.020 | I know for sure within CoPilot,

00:47:08.980 | you can export all the transactions

00:47:11.060 | and all the data you've categorized

00:47:12.500 | and all the work you've done to a CSV

00:47:14.940 | and use it for whatever you want.

00:47:16.740 | And so for example,

00:47:18.220 | I wanna send all of our work expenses to our CPA

00:47:21.340 | so I can go and export everything,

00:47:23.420 | filter out everything but work expenses

00:47:25.420 | and have a really clean spreadsheet

00:47:26.980 | that I can forward on.

00:47:28.020 | So it is very possible with most of these tools

00:47:30.100 | to be able to export all your data.

00:47:31.820 | Maybe you wanna do more complicated analysis.

00:47:34.340 | At one point I was kind of thinking,

00:47:35.740 | ooh, I not only wanna know how much I spend

00:47:38.220 | but how much do I spend in the first half of the month

00:47:40.260 | versus the second half of the month

00:47:41.940 | so I can decide how much money I need

00:47:43.620 | in my checking account at certain days.

00:47:46.660 | Ultimately that just ended up being too much overhead

00:47:48.580 | but that kind of analysis,

00:47:50.460 | if you can't do it within an app,

00:47:51.900 | you can at least export your transactions

00:47:53.820 | and do it on your own.

00:47:55.060 | Ultimately, almost every time I've done this,

00:47:56.620 | it's ended up being a waste of time

00:47:58.100 | but it is something that's possible.

00:47:59.940 | So that's all the benefits of doing this.

00:48:02.300 | I hope that was really helpful.

00:48:04.180 | For the next part of this episode,

00:48:05.580 | I wanna dive in deeper to all the categories of spending

00:48:08.380 | and really talk about ways

00:48:09.700 | that you can think about saving money here.

00:48:12.340 | This is gonna be a little quick

00:48:13.620 | and for some of them,

00:48:14.460 | there's an entire episode of the show I've done about this.

00:48:17.500 | So let's just go straight into it.

00:48:19.660 | So on household, first category for me is home loans,

00:48:23.300 | could be rent for you.

00:48:24.660 | I'm gonna send everyone to episode 14,

00:48:26.460 | which was all about house hacking.

00:48:28.220 | I think there's so much good content in there

00:48:30.420 | that could help you think about that.

00:48:32.020 | So while it's not quite saving money

00:48:34.020 | and this really applies to all the categories,

00:48:36.340 | but making sure you're at least getting the most

00:48:38.260 | out of the spending on that category is another way to save

00:48:41.100 | or really to earn more, if you will.

00:48:43.220 | So if you have rent,

00:48:44.580 | definitely consider the built card

00:48:46.180 | where you can earn one point per dollar on rent

00:48:48.300 | up to $100,000 a year.

00:48:50.220 | I'm a huge fan.

00:48:51.300 | I wish I either had some rent

00:48:52.500 | or they accepted mortgage payments

00:48:54.020 | so I could make this work.

00:48:55.260 | And if you wanna check that out,

00:48:56.180 | you can use my referral link, allthehacks.com/built.

00:48:59.180 | And last, this isn't for everyone,

00:49:00.580 | but if one of your home expenses or future home expenses

00:49:03.380 | might be a second home,

00:49:05.020 | definitely take a look at Picasso.

00:49:06.900 | It's a company that finds really amazing vacation homes

00:49:10.260 | in lots of different destinations,

00:49:12.100 | puts them into an LLC

00:49:13.460 | and makes it really easy for people to buy 1/8 of them.

00:49:16.220 | So you don't have to buy the entire house.

00:49:18.460 | I can tell you that our monthly payment for our Picasso

00:49:21.780 | is way smaller than it would have been

00:49:23.180 | if we bought a similar vacation home.

00:49:25.220 | They're also a sponsor of the show.

00:49:26.860 | So if you wanna get early access

00:49:28.300 | to a lot of their properties

00:49:29.420 | or get some credits towards closing costs,

00:49:31.100 | you can go to allthehacks.com/picasso.

00:49:33.380 | Next category is dog or pets.

00:49:35.420 | I wish I had a good answer here, but I don't.

00:49:37.380 | I don't really know a great way to save money on your pet.

00:49:40.260 | Definitely shop around if you have a dog walker

00:49:42.980 | or if you're sending your dog somewhere overnight,

00:49:45.060 | maybe you can find some deals.

00:49:46.560 | But other than that, I don't really have anything here.

00:49:48.820 | I guess we've got a dog that doesn't shed,

00:49:50.540 | so we don't have a lot of grooming costs.

00:49:52.060 | But other than that, I don't have a lot.

00:49:53.980 | On the insurance category,

00:49:55.420 | I have an entire episode dedicated to this.

00:49:57.780 | It's episode 104.

00:49:59.380 | A recent email from an Apple podcast listener

00:50:01.700 | said they saved over $15,000 a year

00:50:04.500 | implementing a lot of the things

00:50:05.980 | they learned from that episode.

00:50:07.500 | So if you wanna save money on insurance,

00:50:09.060 | highly recommend going there.

00:50:10.660 | There was one other hack

00:50:11.580 | that I don't know if was in that episode,

00:50:13.060 | but was definitely in another one,

00:50:14.720 | which was just if you have an emergency fund

00:50:17.100 | that allows you to maybe increase your deductibles

00:50:19.740 | on some of your policies,

00:50:21.260 | it will ultimately result in you

00:50:22.580 | lowering your monthly expenses.

00:50:24.220 | So if you wanna use your emergency fund

00:50:26.360 | to raise your deductibles,

00:50:27.620 | you can cut your monthly insurance costs.

00:50:30.100 | On bills and expenses,

00:50:31.900 | that's phone, internet, cable, stuff like that.

00:50:34.320 | So one thing, negotiate all these bills.

00:50:36.920 | When we had cable,

00:50:37.900 | it felt like every year our cable bill would increase.

00:50:40.260 | We had to call Comcast, get them to lower the price.

00:50:42.700 | You can also use a tool like Rocket Money

00:50:44.260 | to automatically do a lot of this negotiation for you.

00:50:47.360 | Definitely shop around.

00:50:48.820 | I think bundling always seems like it's the cheapest deal,

00:50:51.420 | but that's not always true.

00:50:53.260 | And then consider canceling your TV

00:50:55.220 | for internet services, YouTube TV, or something like that.

00:50:58.700 | And last on cell phones,

00:50:59.860 | I have an episode that I'm working on

00:51:01.060 | that's almost done and ready to go,

00:51:03.020 | all about cell phones and cell phone insurance

00:51:05.460 | and saving money.

00:51:06.300 | I compare all the carriers in the US

00:51:08.980 | across a lot of different categories.

00:51:11.380 | The preview was that

00:51:13.240 | if you don't need international coverage,

00:51:14.940 | hands down, the best option was Mint Mobile.

00:51:17.220 | We use Mint Mobile in our household.

00:51:18.820 | I got a Mint Mobile account for our au pair.

00:51:21.060 | They are now a sponsor of the show.

00:51:22.300 | So thank you, Mint Mobile.

00:51:23.740 | You can go to allthehacks.com/mintmobile

00:51:25.900 | and get a plan for as little as $15 a month

00:51:28.540 | for unlimited data.

00:51:30.180 | And at the high end on the, I want unlimited data,

00:51:33.100 | I don't wanna worry about eSIMS,

00:51:35.100 | it was really neck and neck between T-Mobile and Google Fi.

00:51:37.980 | But if you're gonna make a change to any of this,

00:51:40.060 | definitely go listen to that episode.

00:51:41.740 | It will be out soon, I promise.

00:51:43.200 | I just have to wrap it up, but I hope you enjoy.

00:51:45.780 | So next is home.

00:51:47.020 | Shout out to my wife, Amy,

00:51:48.300 | who came up with a bunch of these.

00:51:49.340 | I'll just run through a few.

00:51:50.620 | First, keeping your house organized.

00:51:52.840 | So Amy just reorganized our entire pantry.

00:51:56.420 | It looks absolutely incredible.

00:51:58.180 | And through that process,

00:51:59.500 | we realized there was stuff like chicken broth

00:52:01.580 | where we had plenty of it and we were still buying it.

00:52:04.340 | So the more organized I think your house is,

00:52:07.180 | the more you know exactly what you have

00:52:08.900 | and the more you're not buying stuff you don't need.

00:52:10.860 | Next, I have two things

00:52:11.820 | that are a little bit opposing forces.

00:52:13.900 | One is depending on where you live,

00:52:15.820 | it's probably very easy to get things delivered

00:52:18.380 | same day or even next day.

00:52:20.340 | So for certain purchases,

00:52:22.420 | don't buy them if you think you're gonna need them,

00:52:24.620 | especially if they're not that urgent.

00:52:26.540 | Wait until you actually need it.

00:52:28.420 | I know that there are a lot of things in this house

00:52:29.980 | that I've said, "Oh, that's something we might need one day.

00:52:31.860 | "Let's get that."

00:52:32.940 | If I had just waited until I needed it,

00:52:34.420 | there are a lot of them

00:52:35.260 | that I never would have ended up buying.

00:52:37.100 | On the flip side,

00:52:37.940 | if there are things you absolutely know you need regularly,

00:52:40.820 | paper towels, deodorant, toilet paper,

00:52:43.180 | buy them in bulk or on sale.

00:52:44.820 | I do this at Costco all the time.

00:52:46.660 | If Costco doesn't have toilet paper

00:52:48.140 | or paper towels on sale, I don't buy it.

00:52:49.900 | If I'm going to Costco and I see it on sale, I buy it

00:52:52.420 | because I know we're always gonna need that product.

00:52:54.240 | Even better if it's things that are smaller,

00:52:56.220 | like deodorant, where whenever it's on sale,

00:52:58.340 | I buy that in bulk

00:52:59.940 | and then I just put it under the cabinet in the bathroom

00:53:02.180 | and I know that I'll have it for a long time.

00:53:04.380 | Next one doesn't really reduce your cost

00:53:06.340 | as much as it reduces your net cost,

00:53:08.100 | but if you're buying any major appliances,

00:53:10.500 | make sure to look into whether it makes sense

00:53:12.540 | to sell your used appliances.

00:53:14.500 | When we bought a new washer and dryer,

00:53:16.340 | our old ones were older, but they still worked

00:53:18.900 | and they offered to pick them up free of charge.

00:53:21.400 | But the day before delivery,

00:53:22.980 | I listed them on Facebook Marketplace

00:53:25.060 | and we ended up selling the washer and dryer for a few $100.

00:53:27.820 | Someone picked them up that same day.

00:53:29.660 | So what we thought might've been something

00:53:31.060 | we were just gonna have someone take away for free,

00:53:33.300 | we were able to sell

00:53:34.140 | and offset the cost of the new washer and dryer.

00:53:36.300 | Also, if you have gardening in your house,

00:53:38.500 | in the winter, you often don't need it as much.

00:53:40.460 | So the gardener might not tell you,

00:53:42.500 | hey, do you wanna cut back your visits

00:53:44.140 | from once every two weeks to once a month?

00:53:46.420 | But you can always request that.

00:53:47.740 | So I know in the winter we reduce ours to once a month.

00:53:50.780 | So that's all for houses.

00:53:51.900 | On utilities, I'll give one hack,

00:53:54.020 | which is to go check your energy plan.

00:53:56.340 | Some states don't have different plans,

00:53:58.080 | but at least in the Bay Area with PG&E,

00:54:00.140 | there's five or six different plans you can choose from.

00:54:02.900 | And they are basically different prices

00:54:05.180 | based on times of day and depending on your usage,

00:54:08.140 | there might be one that makes a lot more sense

00:54:09.820 | and costs a lot less.

00:54:11.060 | There's also a ton of stuff you can do

00:54:12.740 | to save money on energy, solar, batteries, LEDs,

00:54:16.340 | water heater temperatures.

00:54:17.700 | And we actually have an entire episode coming up on that.

00:54:20.740 | So I'll punt the rest of these hacks to that episode.

00:54:24.100 | And then when it comes to property taxes,

00:54:25.540 | I don't have a good way to save money on property taxes.

00:54:28.060 | So I don't know what to say.

00:54:30.860 | It sucks.

00:54:31.780 | Moving into car and transport.

00:54:33.100 | On car, a lot of people have emailed

00:54:35.500 | suggesting different ways to save money

00:54:37.460 | with gas station loyalty programs.

00:54:39.420 | So definitely look up

00:54:40.460 | those gas station loyalty programs for sure.

00:54:42.860 | I also know a lot of the grocery apps

00:54:44.740 | have gas station loyalty points that tie into that.

00:54:47.580 | Obviously make sure that those loyalty programs

00:54:49.980 | are worth the discount relative to the cost they charge.

00:54:53.900 | If they're the most expensive gas in town

00:54:55.820 | and you can get a discount,

00:54:56.980 | but it still ends up being more expensive,

00:54:58.500 | it's not really a deal.

00:54:59.620 | To be clear, I don't know a lot about these programs

00:55:01.700 | because the only vehicle we have that takes gas is a Vespa.

00:55:04.060 | And I fill it up about one gallon at a time

00:55:06.300 | and it's just not worth trying to save money

00:55:08.900 | on gas when we only spend about, I don't know,

00:55:12.900 | $100 a year on gas.

00:55:14.620 | Another one that I thought was really surprising

00:55:16.740 | the first time I did this

00:55:18.220 | was getting multiple quotes anytime you need service.

00:55:21.220 | I was blown away when we had a,

00:55:23.580 | I think it was a power steering pressure hose go out

00:55:26.620 | and the range in prices

00:55:28.540 | was like from 1,000 to $5,000 or something like that.

00:55:32.580 | I don't remember the exact price,

00:55:33.980 | but it was that wide of a range.

00:55:36.220 | So definitely make sure you get a few quotes

00:55:37.940 | anytime you need service for your vehicle.

00:55:40.860 | On transportation, if you work at a company

00:55:43.460 | that offers an FSA for transportation expenses,

00:55:46.020 | you can use pre-tax money to buy transit passes,

00:55:49.300 | often parking, so definitely look at that.

00:55:52.060 | And for ride sharing,

00:55:53.620 | your credit card might already give you discounts

00:55:55.460 | through things like a Lyft Pink membership,

00:55:57.100 | which I know you can get with a lot of chase cards,

00:55:59.420 | and link all of your cards to all these loyalty programs.

00:56:02.580 | You're not gonna save money,

00:56:03.980 | but if every dollar you spend,

00:56:05.460 | you're earning Delta miles or Hilton points

00:56:07.780 | or something like that,

00:56:08.860 | it's like saving money in that you're earning a lot.

00:56:11.160 | When it comes to children, which is the next category,

00:56:13.300 | there's actually a lot of questions you all have sent in.

00:56:15.740 | And Amy and I were talking about

00:56:17.100 | how to incorporate it into the show.

00:56:19.060 | And I think what we're gonna do next year

00:56:21.380 | is a series of episodes

00:56:23.100 | tackling a lot of the things related to kids and parenting,

00:56:26.420 | maybe even relationships

00:56:27.940 | that aren't relevant to everyone listening.

00:56:29.940 | Not everyone has kids,

00:56:31.340 | but that are relevant to a lot of people.

00:56:33.060 | And we'll probably do like a four to 10 episode mini series

00:56:37.380 | releasing those episodes,

00:56:38.620 | not on the core Wednesday release date,

00:56:40.620 | but another episode each week for a limited time

00:56:43.680 | to hit on a lot of children topics.

00:56:45.540 | So we're gonna cover a lot of those things here.

00:56:48.100 | Within childcare, we have an au pair,

00:56:50.300 | which I think is both an amazing experience

00:56:52.380 | and an amazing way to save money on childcare

00:56:55.000 | if you have the extra room.

00:56:57.100 | On children, one big thing,

00:56:58.940 | we buy a lot of the kids' toys, bikes, stuff used,

00:57:02.040 | or get hand-me-downs.

00:57:03.420 | We build up the karma for that

00:57:04.780 | by giving away a lot of our old stuff for our kids,

00:57:07.700 | but more kids' stuff in those episodes.

00:57:10.420 | On education, there's gonna be another episode on this

00:57:13.020 | in that whole series, so look out for that.

00:57:15.340 | But one thing to keep in mind is take a look.

00:57:18.100 | A lot of cities actually run their own

00:57:20.580 | afterschool programs, preschools, classes

00:57:23.900 | that are way, way cheaper than a lot of the private ones.

00:57:26.660 | So you might be able to save money there.

00:57:28.100 | Next, health and wellness.

00:57:29.820 | On fitness, I don't have much

00:57:30.980 | other than that there's a lot of free content on YouTube

00:57:33.680 | and apps that you can use to get free content

00:57:35.860 | that might save you the cost of going to classes

00:57:38.840 | or spending money on a gym.

00:57:40.420 | But honestly, I think health and fitness

00:57:42.180 | is a really important category.

00:57:43.420 | So it's one of the places where Amy and I

00:57:45.780 | often ask ourselves, if we could spend more money,

00:57:48.640 | where would we spend it?

00:57:49.540 | And our health is one of those things.

00:57:51.340 | So broader theme,

00:57:52.740 | just as I'm going through all these categories,

00:57:54.560 | I am not trying to tell you

00:57:55.620 | here's all the ways to cut your costs because you need to.

00:57:58.140 | I'm trying to tell you here are thoughts about how to do it,

00:58:00.680 | but at the end of the day,

00:58:01.620 | some of these things might be areas

00:58:03.060 | where you actually wanna spend more money on

00:58:04.740 | and you could skip right past it.

00:58:06.300 | When it comes to healthcare,

00:58:07.620 | my goal is to get an episode out before open enrollment

00:58:10.380 | this year, all about how I think about health insurance

00:58:12.740 | and different options.

00:58:13.920 | So expect that soon, but ways to save money.

00:58:17.120 | If you have access to an FSA or an HSA, they're fantastic.

00:58:20.460 | If you have healthcare bills that are really high,

00:58:22.780 | go back and listen to episode 34,

00:58:25.420 | where I talked to Marshall Allen

00:58:27.120 | about fighting the healthcare system

00:58:28.620 | and getting better deals on healthcare

00:58:30.340 | and lowering your bills.

00:58:31.720 | It is a goldmine of information

00:58:33.580 | if you're in that situation.

00:58:35.100 | And then there's some programs like GoodRx,

00:58:37.180 | which are helpful to get discounts on prescriptions.

00:58:40.000 | In personal care, a lot of things by bulk on sale,

00:58:43.740 | one option, if you live in a city

00:58:46.020 | and you're willing to accept a little bit of risk

00:58:48.700 | when it comes to your haircuts,

00:58:50.300 | if you go on Craigslist,

00:58:51.280 | you can often find beauty schools and salons

00:58:54.420 | and barber shops that need hair models.

00:58:56.540 | A lot of times they're looking for specific haircuts

00:58:58.820 | that you need, like maybe they're looking for someone

00:59:00.980 | who wants a buzz or a bob or something,

00:59:03.100 | but they're usually stylists in training,

00:59:05.180 | but they're almost always supervised

00:59:06.940 | by someone more senior.

00:59:08.360 | So definitely could be a way to save money on haircuts.

00:59:10.780 | Could be as little as $0.

00:59:12.380 | Sometimes they're just discounted.

00:59:13.980 | And then only because they're a product I love

00:59:15.820 | and use every week,

00:59:16.860 | if you wanna save money on razor blades,

00:59:18.920 | I definitely think you should check out Henson.

00:59:21.160 | They're a sponsor of the show.

00:59:23.020 | I'm a huge fan of Henson.

00:59:25.060 | It's significantly cheaper than buying cartridges

00:59:27.220 | and a traditional razor.

00:59:28.380 | And I think it's honestly a much better shave.

00:59:30.620 | I went about a week or two shaving

00:59:32.660 | with two different razors on each side,

00:59:34.480 | just to see if I really thought it was a better razor.

00:59:36.860 | And it was.

00:59:37.700 | If you wanna get a hundred free blades

00:59:39.180 | with your first purchase on Henson,

00:59:40.900 | go to allthehacks.com/henson.

00:59:43.460 | In lifestyle, I'll run through a few things here.

00:59:45.860 | In subscriptions, like I mentioned earlier with bills,

00:59:48.740 | cut them or negotiate them.

00:59:50.580 | You're gonna hear about this in the cell phone episode,

00:59:52.500 | but there are some subscriptions that are included

00:59:54.540 | with certain cell phone providers,

00:59:55.940 | or maybe even included for a premium,

00:59:58.340 | but that's less than the regular cost.

01:00:00.140 | So I know with some T-Mobile plans,

01:00:01.700 | you get free Apple TV Plus and free Netflix.

01:00:04.100 | You can save some money there.

01:00:05.740 | And then last, if you're signing up for a subscription

01:00:07.420 | that you wanna make sure you don't cancel,

01:00:09.380 | use a virtual credit card.

01:00:10.980 | Capital One has a really slick system for creating them.

01:00:14.140 | Or if you don't have them through your credit card company,

01:00:16.340 | you can go to privacy.com,

01:00:18.020 | which is a company that helps make this process easier.

01:00:20.540 | You could put in a credit card

01:00:21.940 | to set up a trial of some service,

01:00:24.020 | and you can have it deactivate the next day

01:00:26.500 | so that if you forget to cancel it during the trial,

01:00:28.840 | you won't get charged.

01:00:30.020 | On entertainment, here is one fun hack

01:00:32.700 | that's very, very specific to escape rooms,

01:00:35.460 | which Amy and I are massive fans of.

01:00:37.980 | If you happen to be listening

01:00:39.100 | and are a huge fan of escape rooms as well,

01:00:41.020 | send me any recommendations you have.

01:00:43.100 | Every time we're traveling,

01:00:44.180 | we try to do the best room in any city.

01:00:46.660 | And honestly, we also try to do them without other people.

01:00:49.780 | Like we much prefer to do a room with just the two of us.

01:00:52.500 | A lot of escape rooms though,

01:00:53.780 | make you pay for the number of people that room could hold

01:00:56.540 | if you wanna do it privately.

01:00:58.220 | So we'll sometimes look at the calendar,

01:01:00.180 | and if we see an escape room that has all the spaces free,

01:01:03.840 | we might head over there,

01:01:05.200 | knowing that someone else could book it last minute,

01:01:07.420 | walk in there right before the room starts and say,

01:01:09.500 | "Hey, we'll book two people."

01:01:11.020 | And we'll know right then

01:01:11.980 | that we're able to get it at a deal.

01:01:13.620 | If not, we'll go dinner, have drinks somewhere nearby.

01:01:16.060 | For a lot of zoos and museums,

01:01:18.180 | they're actually set up as nonprofits,

01:01:20.220 | and getting a membership could be tax deductible.

01:01:23.020 | On top of that,

01:01:23.900 | a lot of those memberships have reciprocal discounts.

01:01:26.480 | So when we're traveling

01:01:27.480 | with the two museum memberships we have,

01:01:29.760 | there are hundreds of zoos and science museums

01:01:32.020 | that we actually get access to,

01:01:33.860 | either free or for a discount with our membership.

01:01:36.760 | Another one is for last minute tickets.

01:01:38.840 | This also works with concerts and Broadway shows.

01:01:41.740 | It's just getting right near the venue,

01:01:43.680 | similar to the escape room one,

01:01:45.560 | and buying the tickets right when the event starts

01:01:48.700 | or 10 minutes before, or if it's a concert,

01:01:51.240 | even a little bit after it starts,

01:01:53.040 | if you don't care about the opening act.

01:01:55.160 | I have a couple of friends that did this

01:01:56.460 | for the Taylor Swift show.

01:01:58.000 | They bought their tickets like 45 minutes

01:02:00.480 | after the show started.

01:02:02.400 | It was before Taylor went on,

01:02:04.080 | but the owners of these tickets on StubHub

01:02:06.000 | were dropping the prices rapidly

01:02:07.640 | because they knew if they didn't sell them at some point,

01:02:09.680 | they would get nothing.

01:02:10.720 | On personal, I don't have much,

01:02:12.080 | 'cause like I said earlier,

01:02:12.920 | I don't even know what that category really was.

01:02:15.160 | On travel, a third of this entire show is about travel.

01:02:17.720 | So go listen to those episodes.

01:02:20.180 | In food and drink, when it comes to groceries,

01:02:22.400 | I think the biggest thing here is to make a plan.

01:02:24.600 | And if you have a plan and it's organized,

01:02:27.200 | you're gonna really make sure you're buying

01:02:28.520 | the things you need for that plan

01:02:30.000 | and not aimlessly buying things at the grocery store.

01:02:32.560 | We do all our planning with the Paprika app.

01:02:35.260 | I keep emailing them trying to get a deal

01:02:36.920 | for listeners and members, but I've been unsuccessful.

01:02:39.360 | We do three of our meals a week using Green Chef.

01:02:42.000 | We did that before they were sponsors of the show.

01:02:44.240 | We're such big fans of it.

01:02:45.720 | We've tried a bunch of meal kits and we like them the most.

01:02:48.540 | If you wanna get 60% off your first order,

01:02:51.000 | you can go to allthehacks.com/greenchef

01:02:53.800 | and let me know what you think.

01:02:55.000 | There's a small, tiny little hack that I think's cool.

01:02:58.400 | The average person that walks around

01:02:59.700 | the grocery store backwards saves 4% or 5%

01:03:03.320 | on their grocery bill, so that's one to try.

01:03:05.720 | And specifically, I mean walk all the way

01:03:07.420 | to the end of the grocery store and come back,

01:03:09.340 | not turn around and walk backwards.

01:03:11.500 | Definitely be using the grocery apps.

01:03:13.800 | Every time I'm going to Safeway, I pull up the Safeway app,

01:03:17.180 | and I'm pretty convinced that the coupons in that app

01:03:19.640 | save me at least 10% every single time.

01:03:22.160 | I don't know why, but it seems like every time

01:03:24.400 | I open that app, there's a $3 to $10 off

01:03:27.000 | my grocery store purchase coupon in my account.

01:03:30.080 | And then in episode 131, a couple weeks ago,

01:03:32.560 | I talked a lot about buying bulk meat,

01:03:34.120 | so go back and check that out

01:03:35.520 | if you wanna save money on meat.

01:03:36.920 | On the dining and drinks category,

01:03:39.000 | obviously you could just go out less, that's an option.

01:03:41.680 | You could go early to a lot of places

01:03:43.320 | that have happy hour specials.

01:03:45.200 | If you are regularly ordering food online,

01:03:48.280 | check if your credit card has any deals

01:03:51.100 | to get programs with them.

01:03:53.160 | For example, Chase Sapphire Reserve,

01:03:55.480 | you get DoorDash credit and you get free Dash Pass.

01:03:58.720 | So when we're ordering food, we're using DoorDash.

01:04:02.240 | Amex gets $10 off on Grubhub.

01:04:04.400 | So we're using those programs to get a deal

01:04:07.080 | if we wanna order food.

01:04:08.440 | DoorDash happens to be a sponsor of the show,

01:04:10.240 | so I will say if you haven't tried it out,

01:04:12.040 | but you have a Chase credit card

01:04:13.360 | and you wanna get a free Dash Pass and free credits,

01:04:15.580 | I would love it if you signed up

01:04:16.600 | at allthehacks.com/doordash.

01:04:18.600 | And then last, there's an app that I am very new to,

01:04:22.100 | but I just saw promoted by a friend of mine called InKind.

01:04:26.240 | And it lets you buy credits that you can use

01:04:29.360 | at restaurants for a discount.

01:04:31.560 | And normally I look at these and think,

01:04:33.500 | gosh, the restaurants on this app might be really terrible,

01:04:36.980 | but I saw some really great restaurants in San Francisco

01:04:40.000 | we would regularly go to.

01:04:41.660 | So if you wanna check this out

01:04:43.180 | and see if there are any restaurants worth going to

01:04:45.100 | where you live, they're not a sponsor of the show,

01:04:47.540 | but I do have a referral code that you can get $25 off

01:04:50.500 | at allthehacks.com/inkind.

01:04:53.780 | To be clear, I have not used this,

01:04:55.220 | so I don't wanna fully endorse it,

01:04:57.220 | but if it looks interesting and you want a free $25,

01:04:59.480 | you can use that code.

01:05:00.740 | I think that's all for dining and drinks.

01:05:02.460 | This is an area similar to health

01:05:04.780 | where we enjoy good food, we enjoy going out,

01:05:07.480 | so I'm not always looking to cut costs here.

01:05:09.700 | And in many cases when we're traveling,

01:05:11.380 | this is some of the most exciting ways we spend money.

01:05:13.840 | In shopping, there is a lot.

01:05:15.300 | So I am always trying to stack as many different deals

01:05:19.500 | when I'm buying stuff.

01:05:20.700 | So that means looking for coupons,

01:05:23.280 | sometimes buying coupons on Craigslist

01:05:25.740 | or Facebook Marketplace, which I've done.

01:05:27.780 | If you have a really big purchase,

01:05:29.240 | you can buy coupons for places like Home Depot

01:05:31.220 | or Crate and Barrel for a lot less.

01:05:32.900 | You can get them sometimes when you get the change

01:05:35.680 | of a dress pack from USPS.

01:05:37.760 | Looking for promo codes or even live chatting

01:05:40.020 | with a store to get those promo codes.

01:05:42.740 | Looking for cashback options.

01:05:44.680 | I love going to Cashback Monitor,

01:05:46.300 | which is a website that shows you the best cash

01:05:48.500 | and points back options for any purchase.

01:05:50.960 | And then last, buying gift cards for the retailer.

01:05:54.060 | Either at a discount online,

01:05:55.780 | there are sites where you can buy discounted gift cards,

01:05:57.920 | or at a minimum going to a place

01:05:59.500 | where you earn a lot of extra points.

01:06:01.480 | If you have a grocery card or an office supply store card,

01:06:04.420 | and you can go buy gift cards for other merchants

01:06:06.900 | and get a lot more points per dollar

01:06:08.380 | on the grocery card purchase, and then using those.

01:06:10.980 | There are a bunch of apps.

01:06:12.740 | Camel Camel Camel is one of them.

01:06:14.580 | There's another one, I think it's called Wistia,

01:06:16.580 | where you can track prices on Amazon

01:06:18.820 | and find out whether it's regularly cheaper and hold off.

01:06:22.340 | I love Library Extension for getting free eBooks.

01:06:25.420 | In episode 113,

01:06:26.300 | I covered all the hidden benefits of credit cards.

01:06:28.940 | Things like purchase protection.

01:06:30.860 | So definitely another way that you can make sure you save,

01:06:33.120 | especially if you buy something and it breaks,

01:06:34.940 | you can get your money back.

01:06:36.200 | There's a lot of buy nothing groups on Facebook.

01:06:38.780 | You can look on all kinds of sites to buy things used.

01:06:41.540 | I do that a lot.

01:06:42.500 | A lot of stores do price matching.

01:06:43.940 | I probably should have mentioned that in stacking,

01:06:45.500 | but definitely look around for price matching.

01:06:47.940 | And then almost every credit card issuer has offers.

01:06:51.060 | So always making sure you're looking at the Amex offers,

01:06:53.860 | the Chase offers, the Capital One offers,

01:06:55.900 | to see if there is some deal that could earn you money back.

01:06:59.540 | I know, for example, there was one on Chase a few weeks ago

01:07:02.140 | where you got 10% off Southwest.

01:07:04.120 | There's two components to this.

01:07:05.280 | One is making sure you see them and activate them,

01:07:07.640 | and the other is making sure you use the right card

01:07:10.500 | when you're spending money at the merchant.

01:07:12.760 | I'm a big fan of the Card Pointers app

01:07:14.420 | because it auto enrolls you in all of these offers.

01:07:16.980 | You do still need to look at the offers

01:07:18.560 | to make sure you use the right card to get that offer,

01:07:21.840 | but Card Pointers Pro is awesome for that.

01:07:24.080 | And you get 30% off as an AllTheHacks listener

01:07:26.580 | at allthehacks.com/cardpointers.

01:07:28.940 | In clothing, I don't have a lot.

01:07:30.620 | There are a lot of sales.

01:07:31.700 | So if what you're trying to buy isn't urgent,

01:07:33.440 | maybe just wait for a sale.

01:07:34.860 | So last category is gifts and donations.

01:07:37.140 | When it comes to gifts, one thing is just buying early.

01:07:39.560 | So you're not scrambling last minute,

01:07:41.260 | paying extra for shipping or not being able to shop around.

01:07:44.580 | Another one is gifting experiences.

01:07:46.580 | It's kind of cool if you really love something

01:07:48.900 | and you wanna give someone a gift,

01:07:50.260 | can you combine those two

01:07:51.540 | so you're getting both an experience and a gift

01:07:54.700 | with someone you care about?

01:07:56.580 | Another one is just being thoughtful.

01:07:57.980 | For me, I would rather get a $10 gift

01:08:00.540 | that was really thoughtful

01:08:01.740 | that someone spent a lot of time thinking about

01:08:04.120 | than a $500 gift that was just some random thing

01:08:06.940 | they found on the internet that they thought I would like

01:08:09.220 | or that I was gonna buy myself anyways.

01:08:10.900 | So I give, I don't know what the right multiple is,

01:08:13.620 | but it's probably somewhere between a two to five X multiple

01:08:16.740 | for thoughtful gifts in terms of the value they have for me.

01:08:19.700 | And then last is probably a controversial one,

01:08:21.860 | which is just remove gifting.

01:08:23.460 | I am not someone, given what I said about thoughtful gifts,

01:08:26.520 | I'm not someone who likes gifting things that are on a list.

01:08:29.740 | And I remember one Christmas in one of our families,

01:08:32.540 | people were like, what's on everybody's list?

01:08:34.280 | Can everyone share their lists

01:08:35.380 | so we can buy all the Christmas gifts?

01:08:36.980 | And I was like, I feel like what's going on

01:08:40.060 | in the background is everyone is just thinking,

01:08:42.780 | I wanna spend X dollars on each person.

01:08:44.820 | Let's look at their list,

01:08:45.940 | let's buy them something on their list.

01:08:47.460 | And then we're all just passing money around each other.

01:08:50.140 | What if we all just said

01:08:51.180 | what we'd wanna spend on each other?

01:08:52.460 | We netted it out on a spreadsheet

01:08:53.820 | and we Venmoed each other.

01:08:55.160 | And people were like, that's a horrible idea.

01:08:57.140 | And I was like, but it's kind of the same thing,

01:08:58.980 | except it's even worse.

01:08:59.980 | Because if I'm gonna go buy something,

01:09:02.220 | I'm gonna do all the things that I mentioned earlier

01:09:04.180 | to stack and save.

01:09:05.820 | And I know a lot of the people in our family aren't.

01:09:07.840 | So they're actually gonna end up spending more

01:09:09.900 | to get this thing than I would,

01:09:12.140 | which just inside drives me nuts.

01:09:15.300 | So what we ended up doing ultimately was saying,

01:09:17.900 | look, if we're not together for the holidays,

01:09:20.860 | which we often alternate between my and Amy's family,

01:09:24.100 | no gifts.

01:09:25.300 | And if we are together,

01:09:26.580 | we started switching to say,

01:09:27.980 | maybe every sibling and parent picks one other person.

01:09:31.980 | And we even did it for just couples.

01:09:34.180 | So there were four couples

01:09:35.700 | between three siblings and parents,

01:09:37.380 | each one got one other one

01:09:39.000 | and did one nice gift for that couple.

01:09:41.260 | Removed a lot of the money that we were all spending

01:09:43.440 | to just buy things for, in my opinion,

01:09:46.060 | the purpose of buying things.

01:09:47.520 | You could also set up gift caps to try to lower the cost.

01:09:50.160 | There's a lot of stuff you could do.

01:09:51.760 | I have some controversial opinions on gifts,

01:09:53.880 | totally hear that, it might not be for you.

01:09:56.020 | And then last on donations,

01:09:57.480 | there are a lot of tax benefits of donations.

01:09:59.580 | It can be a lot of headache

01:10:01.000 | because you've got to keep and track all of your receipts.

01:10:03.540 | One way we solve this is we do all of our donating

01:10:06.640 | to our Daffy account, which is a donor advised fund.

01:10:09.740 | If you want to learn more,

01:10:10.600 | I did a whole episode with Adam Nash

01:10:12.640 | who started the company in episode 50.

01:10:14.760 | The basic premise is you get an account

01:10:16.600 | and you can donate money, stocks, crypto.

01:10:19.200 | And at the time of that donation, it's a tax deduction.

01:10:22.800 | However, you don't have to allocate that money right away.

01:10:25.640 | So we were able to, in one of our higher tax years,

01:10:28.760 | donate a lot of appreciated shares of stock

01:10:31.300 | to our Daffy account.

01:10:32.440 | And now we have a pool of funds

01:10:33.760 | that anytime we want to make a donation to,

01:10:36.200 | we can type in the name of the charity quickly.

01:10:38.280 | Both of us have access to Daffy

01:10:39.960 | and we can send money to that charity.

01:10:41.640 | So actually when you look at our donations line item

01:10:44.960 | in our budget, it's almost zero every single year

01:10:48.120 | because we upfront loaded about 10 years of donations

01:10:52.220 | into our Daffy account

01:10:53.880 | because it was a really advantageous year

01:10:56.280 | to take that tax deduction.

01:10:58.000 | We had some really highly appreciated stocks

01:11:00.120 | we wanted to sell.

01:11:01.280 | And so we're able to get a really big benefit that year.

01:11:03.960 | And now we can actually invest the money

01:11:06.000 | in our Daffy account.

01:11:07.120 | So it's been growing every year

01:11:08.600 | and hopefully it should give us money to donate to charity

01:11:12.440 | for at least 10 years, if not more.

01:11:15.160 | If you wanna check it out,

01:11:16.000 | you can get a free $25 to donate to the charity

01:11:18.120 | of your choice at allthehacks.com/daffy.

01:11:20.600 | Or like I said, go back and listen to episode 50.

01:11:23.040 | (upbeat music)

01:11:24.280 | Okay, that was a lot.

01:11:25.760 | Thank you for sticking with me.

01:11:27.240 | Hopefully that was super helpful.

01:11:28.340 | I would love to know what you guys think of this episode.

01:11:30.440 | If you have any feedback, questions,

01:11:32.160 | or other tips that should have been in here to save money,

01:11:35.040 | please send them to me.

01:11:36.460 | I'm gonna do another mailbag episode

01:11:38.720 | where I'd love to share all the tips that I missed.

01:11:41.280 | So please send them my way.

01:11:43.020 | And if you're listening to this sometime in the future,

01:11:45.540 | go look for that next mailbag episode

01:11:47.480 | 'cause there's probably gonna be a lot of awesome ways

01:11:49.220 | to save from all of our listeners

01:11:51.320 | that I'd love you guys to hear as well.

01:11:53.120 | If you have any thoughts or experiences

01:11:54.760 | with any of the apps we shared, I'd love to hear them.

01:11:56.920 | If you have questions, please shoot me an email,

01:11:59.520 | podcast@allthehacks.com.

01:12:01.600 | We check it every day.

01:12:02.840 | I love hearing from you guys,

01:12:04.440 | and I try to get back to everyone

01:12:05.920 | and bring up a lot of what I hear from you on the show.

01:12:08.240 | That's it for this week.

01:12:09.320 | Thank you so much for listening.

01:12:10.960 | I will see you next week.

01:12:12.200 | (upbeat music)

01:12:14.780 | (crickets chirping)

01:12:17.780 | [BLANK_AUDIO]