RPF0532-Spending_Money_to_Save_Money
00:00:00.000 | Hey parents, join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th for an unforgettable kids day
00:00:04.960 | presented by Pear Deck. Family fun, giveaways, and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now
00:00:10.480 | at lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones.
00:00:14.720 | How much money would you be willing to spend now if it would help you to spend less overall?
00:00:24.960 | How much money would you be willing to spend to curb your desires to spend more money?
00:00:31.920 | Have you ever thought about that? And no, here I'm not talking about the value of buying things
00:00:37.280 | on sale. My parents, when I was growing up, used to have a funny joke about the fact that my mom
00:00:42.640 | would come home from the store and be thrilled about the fact that she saved a dollar to buy
00:00:47.360 | a $2 item that she didn't really need. And my dad would always say, they would always laugh because
00:00:52.560 | my dad was the kind of person who would pay $3 to buy a $2 item that he actually did need.
00:00:58.560 | And my mom would run into a good sale and say, look how much money I saved. My wife and I like
00:01:03.760 | to joke about that as well. If you find a good sale, look how much money I saved. No,
00:01:08.640 | you didn't really save money. If you're buying things you didn't have,
00:01:12.240 | that you didn't intend to spend. But no, I'm not talking about that little funny thing that we talk
00:01:17.120 | about. I'm talking about controlling yourself from influences and protecting yourself from influences
00:01:23.120 | that will lead you to spend more money. I recently was speaking with a listener of the show,
00:01:30.320 | and this listener was sharing with me how he spent on average something like $60 a month
00:01:37.440 | in order to remove as many commercials as possible from his life. And the examples that he gave was
00:01:44.480 | spending on YouTube Red. Instead of watching the YouTube videos for free, he subscribes to YouTube
00:01:51.840 | Red so that he can avoid the advertisements. And he subscribes to, I think it was a music
00:01:58.000 | streaming service, and he avoids the advertisements there. And he primarily listens to podcasts for
00:02:03.040 | his audio input so he can avoid the advertisements that are on commercial radio. And he spends money
00:02:09.120 | on various bits of cable equipment and TV watching equipment so he can avoid the advertisements on TV.
00:02:16.880 | And his estimate was the total, speaking largely at the worst possible, probably costs him about
00:02:24.320 | 50 or $60 a month to save the money, sorry, just 50 or $60 a month on avoiding those advertisements
00:02:32.640 | completely. But the peace that he gains in his mind from not being exposed to all those influences
00:02:40.560 | and the curbing of impulses on his pocketbook made that financial expenditure well worth it to him.
00:02:49.760 | And I've noticed a similar thing in my own life. When I was younger, I subscribed to magazines
00:02:58.960 | that basically had the primary function in my life of causing me to feel dissatisfied with my life.
00:03:08.160 | I was cleaning out some old bins of things. We've been downsizing our possessions to get ready for
00:03:14.000 | doing some extended family travel this year. And it gives me a good opportunity to go through
00:03:18.000 | some of my junk bins that are still hanging around. And I found some, what I call lookbooks,
00:03:23.760 | that I created in years past. When I was younger, I would subscribe to various magazines, frequently
00:03:31.040 | men's interest magazines. And at one point, I actually subscribed to a male version of Domino
00:03:38.080 | magazine, if that's still around. I think that the Domino is the female version, but it was all about
00:03:42.160 | men's fashion. And I would go through this magazine and all the time that I was reading it,
00:03:48.160 | I would be constantly exposed to articles on men's style and men's fashion and the latest
00:03:53.920 | clothing this and the latest footwear that. And at the time, I would create for myself
00:04:01.200 | a lookbook. I would take scissors and I would trim out the particular item that I thought was
00:04:07.360 | interesting, whether it was a new cashmere sweater. I don't, I live in Florida, but
00:04:12.320 | maybe a new cashmere sweater or a new pair of boots that was well-renowned or this awesome new
00:04:19.520 | kayak that was the latest, greatest bit of gear. And I would cut these out of the magazine and I
00:04:24.160 | would paste them into a separate journal that I kept of things that I wanted, all of them primarily
00:04:33.920 | financial. So all of them requiring money for me to buy. And as I was flipping through these
00:04:40.960 | books recently, I realized that none of those desires that I had then that I was feeding
00:04:49.280 | are present in my life anymore. And yet I was feeding a discontentment with those activities.
00:05:00.800 | I was feeding a sense of discontentment. I was putting in myself desires to buy things
00:05:10.880 | just simply by exposing myself to this constant flow of information.
00:05:17.680 | And I've seen this happen to a lot of us. A lot of us do that. We expose ourself to a particular area
00:05:26.800 | and as we focus on it, what we focus on grows in importance to us.
00:05:31.200 | So if we focus on the physical, tangible items, fashion items, a new car, whatever those things
00:05:38.240 | are, they tend to grow in their meaning and their importance to us. Now, many times this is,
00:05:45.040 | as far as I'm concerned, morally neutral. It's not a good thing or necessarily bad thing. The
00:05:50.800 | key is to look at it and say, "What is this doing in me? Is this creating discontentment
00:05:56.880 | and nurturing a sense of discontentment, or is this nurturing a sense of contentment?"
00:06:04.160 | And as thinking, rational creatures, we have the ability to insert our minds
00:06:15.680 | between impulse or stimulus and response. Animals don't have that ability. They have a stimulus
00:06:25.680 | and they respond. But you and I have the ability to stop between stimulus and response.
00:06:33.840 | But that's an ability that needs to be nurtured and cultivated. And it's an ability that needs
00:06:42.880 | to be nurtured and cultivated in light of a larger macro system of values.
00:06:49.120 | If you value something like financial independence, if you value financial freedom,
00:06:58.640 | if you value frugality or thriftiness, then you should cultivate the disconnect between
00:07:08.400 | stimulus and response. Cultivate your ability to insert your rational thinking mind
00:07:14.480 | between those things. Now, just because you see something in a fashion magazine, like I used to
00:07:22.480 | read, doesn't mean that you automatically have to desire that and go out and pull out your credit
00:07:26.880 | card, run down to the mall and buy it. You can stop and think in the middle.
00:07:31.840 | But one of the important expressions of that thinking in between stimulus and response
00:07:40.720 | could be you're simply removing the stimulus from yourself.
00:07:48.480 | Consider the example of my friend and listener. Would it be worth it for you to
00:08:01.520 | remove the commercials from your life, remove the advertisements from your life, or remove many of
00:08:06.160 | them so that you don't nurture that sense of discontent that the advertiser is trying to
00:08:11.600 | inspire in you? Would it be a good idea for you to do, as I did in the past, to cut off
00:08:21.360 | the influences of things that were nurturing within me a sense of discontentment?
00:08:29.440 | I ultimately canceled all my subscriptions to all of those magazines, all the men's magazines that
00:08:34.400 | I enjoyed. I canceled my subscriptions to all of the car magazines I used to love reading.
00:08:39.920 | This last week, I was driving with my wife and we were driving along behind a big
00:08:44.240 | lifted pickup truck, big one-ton with big mud tires on it. I was looking at it and thinking
00:08:50.800 | abstractly, "That's a really nice pickup truck." And I used to nurture in myself the love
00:08:57.040 | of trucks like that. I would subscribe to four-by-four magazines and think about how
00:09:02.080 | great they were. And I would admire them. And I knew all the gear and the technology,
00:09:05.200 | and I was obsessed with it. But over time, as I cut off the influence of those things,
00:09:10.480 | all those desires just melted away. And now I looked at it and thought abstractly, "Oh,
00:09:16.560 | it's a nice truck, but it's hard to climb up into. It's poor on gas mileage.
00:09:22.400 | It's inefficient. It's hard to load things into. It messes up the longevity of the truck by having
00:09:28.800 | the big tires, et cetera." And I've observed with things like cars that you can nurture a love for
00:09:33.680 | just about anything. You can nurture a love for big lifted up mud trucks. You can also nurture
00:09:39.600 | a love for lower down street trucks. You can nurture a love for big giant trucks. You can
00:09:45.840 | nurture a love for little tiny trucks. You can nurture a love for vehicles that are incredibly
00:09:52.320 | fuel inefficient. There are whole communities of people dedicated to giant monster mud trucks.
00:09:58.400 | You can also nurture a love for very fuel efficient vehicles. There are whole communities
00:10:04.720 | of people who nurture their love for hypermiling. I've always had an interest in long-lived
00:10:10.960 | vehicles. There are whole forums of people gathered together to celebrate hitting 300,000
00:10:16.320 | miles on a car or 400,000 miles or a million miles on a car. There are communities of people that
00:10:23.520 | gather to celebrate the latest new car and are constantly swapping things in and swapping things
00:10:29.680 | out. These communities are related to your finances. Imagine the financial impact
00:10:40.000 | for your finances if you nurtured an interest in very efficient driving as opposed to inefficient
00:10:47.840 | driving and long-lived cars instead of new cars. That would have a measurable impact on your
00:10:56.720 | finances. Imagine if you nurtured an interest in frugal fashions as compared to the latest fashions.
00:11:07.920 | It doesn't have to be one over the other. You can figure out how to frugally accomplish the
00:11:11.520 | latest fashions, but the point is you can choose. You don't have to continually fall prey to
00:11:18.000 | automatic reflexive stimulus response. I see, I buy. I see, I buy. I see, I buy.
00:11:24.880 | You can stop and think. You can see. You can stop and think. And then you can buy or not buy.
00:11:37.360 | And my encouragement to you today is control what you see
00:11:40.240 | while you're building the habit of stopping to think.
00:11:45.440 | So control what you hear. Consider maybe paying to remove commercials. Control what you see by
00:11:54.320 | considering removing influences that are causing you to want to spend money.
00:12:01.520 | You may even control where you go. I, a number of years ago, read a book, I can't summon the
00:12:08.960 | title at the moment, about marketing to children and how marketing is done to children. At the time
00:12:16.880 | I was in the marketing business and I've become very sensitive to marketing to children. It
00:12:22.080 | concerns me because children are much more, they don't have the defense mechanisms built in them
00:12:28.320 | yet. They're very vulnerable to outside influences. Children don't have their operating systems
00:12:34.400 | matured yet. That has to be instilled in them appropriately by their family and by the society
00:12:41.280 | around them. And so I personally am concerned about the manipulation of children that happens
00:12:47.440 | in much of modern marketing. And when I read this book, I realized how deep the marketing messages
00:12:54.720 | go. And so to whatever extent we've practically been able to, my wife and I have worked to try
00:13:00.400 | to limit the marketing messages that our children are exposed to. But one of our little tools and
00:13:07.040 | techniques that we use is recognizing that we can't eliminate their desire to want things.
00:13:12.960 | Children always ask for things. They want certain things. It's normal. "Daddy, may I have this,
00:13:19.520 | please?" When you're in a store and you see something. But one of our tools is, of course,
00:13:25.280 | and we do teach them to stop, to think. I teach my teaching. I am teaching my children to
00:13:30.560 | put their desired things on a list so they can consider over time and try to instill that stop,
00:13:37.040 | that habit of stopping, saying, "Okay, stimulus, desire. Let me stop and think," before automatically
00:13:43.680 | responding. So we're teaching that. But one of the parenting techniques that we use is just to limit
00:13:48.960 | exposure, limit the places that we go. And I was so... I chuckled the other day when I was shopping
00:13:57.440 | with my son. We were grocery shopping and we went to this neat little market that we
00:14:02.480 | frequently go to, to buy vegetables and fruits. And it's a market that's run by an Asian family.
00:14:10.480 | And with a heavy Asian influence, there is a much broader array of vegetables and fruits. They have
00:14:17.200 | a whole section of Asian-themed products in the store, but a much more diverse
00:14:22.560 | stock of vegetables and fruits than is normal in a mainstream grocery store. And so my children
00:14:32.560 | enjoy going in there and they love to impulse shop or they have the same response.
00:14:38.000 | So we're in there the other day and we see some dragon fruit that are for sale. And my son,
00:14:43.600 | of course, goes, "Daddy, can we please have that?" And it was relatively easy for me to say, "Sure.
00:14:49.120 | Yes, we can go ahead and do that. I thought it would be fun to try the honey dragon fruit." And
00:14:55.520 | they'd never had dragon fruit. I thought it would be a fun thing to expose them to.
00:14:59.440 | And then we went on and we saw some beets and we hadn't had beets for a while. And then my children
00:15:06.000 | said, "Daddy, can we please have... Can we try those?" And I was struck by the fact that my
00:15:10.800 | children were doing the thing that children do in stores to see something and ask to have it.
00:15:19.120 | But by virtue of the fact that we were in a produce store, it was easy for me as a parent to
00:15:25.920 | say, "Yes, paying a dollar for a honey dragon fruit isn't going to break my budget, nor is it going to
00:15:33.280 | break their health. So I can either take them into a candy aisle and have the stimulus response work
00:15:42.400 | there, or I can take them into a fruit and vegetable store and have the stimulus and response work
00:15:49.840 | there." As a parent, it's my job to choose which environment will serve my children better.
00:15:55.280 | Which environment do I put them into? And it really made me consider my own actions. As I
00:16:02.880 | went back and I reflected on that, I thought, "Am I being effective in controlling the things in my
00:16:08.480 | life? Am I being effective in controlling the influences that are near me? Am I being careful
00:16:13.920 | with the things that I'm allowing into my life?" There are many examples of this that we know.
00:16:19.200 | Some of those examples have an impact on our finances. Some of them don't. I've given various
00:16:25.200 | examples so far that have impact on finances. But finances are not just affected by things that are
00:16:32.240 | directly related to a transaction now. Finances are affected by everything in life.
00:16:38.960 | That's why it's so important. Many dieting books, how to eat healthier, recommend,
00:16:45.840 | don't just try to get a little bit of healthy food and put it in your house.
00:16:49.520 | Go through your house and remove all of the unhealthy food. That way, you don't have to make
00:16:58.960 | so many hard decisions. Consider that. When it comes to specific financial transactions,
00:17:07.120 | make it more difficult for yourself to engage in the transaction. If you are prone to compulsive
00:17:16.560 | impulse spending, cut up your plastic, leave it at home, freeze it in the freezer as some people
00:17:27.120 | do. Lock it in your safe. Give it to a friend. I recently had to cut off a social media addiction
00:17:38.240 | that I had used in the past and I needed to use it again. So I locked the account down. I secured
00:17:44.960 | it with a two-factor authentication that had required a physical key. And then I locked the
00:17:50.480 | physical key in my safe. Now, if I need to go and use it, I could do that, but at least that way,
00:17:55.760 | I'm not tempted in a moment of weakness where I'm trying to do hard work and I want to go do
00:18:00.320 | something easy and hit that dopamine rush with a social media feed. Put that in place.
00:18:06.000 | So if you are finding yourself spending compulsively, perhaps Amazon is the biggest
00:18:15.280 | budget category. Cut off your prime, finish it out, or delete your payment information,
00:18:20.640 | turn off one-click ordering or whatever those things are. Yes, it's convenient to spend money,
00:18:25.440 | but sometimes that's not helpful for you. Control the environment that you're in.
00:18:31.120 | This last week, I watched a show on Netflix that I would commend to you. It was a show that was
00:18:38.000 | recommended to me called The Push. And the premise of the show, it's a reality show,
00:18:45.200 | could a normal person be manipulated through the use of psychological manipulation techniques
00:18:54.320 | of peer influence? Could a normal person be manipulated into murdering an innocent person
00:19:02.880 | in less than 75 minutes? That's the premise of the show. And it's a fascinating
00:19:11.360 | picture of the influence of social pressure.
00:19:21.840 | I commend it to you. It's on Netflix as I record this in March of 2018. It's called The Push.
00:19:26.640 | So just one individual show about an hour and 15 minutes long.
00:19:30.800 | There are a lot of lessons. It's very sobering as a depiction. And yet we're all subject to
00:19:42.320 | those influences. Psychological pressures and influences are significant, but you can stop
00:19:49.600 | and fight back. You can cultivate your ability to think.
00:19:54.400 | In closing, it may be worth your spending some money to free yourself from financial temptations
00:20:05.440 | and to disconnect yourself from places where you're prone to spending more money.
00:20:11.760 | So consider controlling carefully what you hear. Consider controlling carefully what you see.
00:20:20.160 | Consider controlling carefully where you go. Consider the environment that you place yourself
00:20:26.480 | in. Consider the people with whom you associate. And make sure that these things are a force for
00:20:32.400 | good. These things are a force for positive change. That since you're going to be influenced
00:20:38.800 | by others, make sure that they're going to influence you in a positive direction,
00:20:44.560 | to move you closer to your goals, to live in accordance with your values.
00:20:49.200 | Even if it costs you a little bit of money, it may be worth it.
00:20:56.960 | Thank you for listening. You've honored me with your time and attention,
00:21:04.080 | and I'm grateful for that. And I hope that I've effectively served you today with some ideas and
00:21:09.840 | strategies and tactics and techniques and tools that will help move you towards your goals. Before
00:21:15.920 | you go, three simple requests. One, if there's an idea that's been helpful to you in today's show,
00:21:22.320 | make a plan to take action on it. Listening does lead to learning, but learning in and of itself
00:21:30.240 | doesn't automatically lead to a life change. It's action that leads to a life change. So take action.
00:21:39.440 | Two, take something that was helpful to you in today's show and share it with somebody that you
00:21:45.520 | care about. I'm depending on you to be a co-laborer with me in helping me to propagate the message
00:21:53.840 | that I'm seeking to share. That helps the person that you are engaging with, and it also helps you
00:22:00.720 | because teaching others is one of the most effective ways for you to learn and for you to
00:22:06.800 | cement your learning. Three, if there's an idea that's been specifically helpful to you,
00:22:12.880 | and if you're gaining financial benefit from Radical Personal Finance, I'd be grateful if
00:22:17.200 | you'd consider paying me for this work voluntarily. Come by radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron,
00:22:24.240 | and you can sign up there to support the show at whatever level you feel is right for you.
00:22:28.960 | This is a voluntary support. That's my Patreon page. You can support me with a dollar a month,
00:22:34.320 | five dollars a month, ten dollars a month, any number that seems right to you. But if you're
00:22:38.480 | gaining financial benefit from this show, and if it's achieving financial results in your life,
00:22:44.800 | I'd be grateful for your financial support at radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron.
00:22:50.560 | Hey there, treasure hunters and bargain seekers. Are you on the lookout for a local thrift store
00:22:57.440 | that has it all? Look no further. Picks Exchange is your thrifting paradise right here in the heart
00:23:03.120 | of Torrance. Picks Exchange offers a wide variety of new and used clothing, shoes, new scrubs,
00:23:08.720 | uniforms, new and used furniture, all at low prices. Don't miss out on the ultimate thrifting
00:23:13.920 | experience at our Picks Exchange parking lot anniversary sale at our Torrance location.
00:23:18.320 | Visit PixExchangeHHH.org for more details.