RPF0661-Back_to_Basics-The_Power_of

00:00:00.000 | - Big Boyz Comedy Kings is coming to Yamaha Resort and Casino

00:00:03.200 | Saturday, December 9th with D.L. Hughley.

00:00:05.840 | - That sweater so tight, it look like a snap between the legs.

00:00:08.240 | - Cedric the Entertainer.

00:00:09.540 | - Once we stop running, I'll find out what it was we was running about.

00:00:13.080 | - And Paul Rodriguez.

00:00:14.340 | - What is it about old Mexican men?

00:00:15.980 | They could be missing a leg, they still want to get into a fight.

00:00:18.480 | - Hosted by my man Eric Blake and a special performance by Mario.

00:00:21.880 | Big Boyz Comedy Kings, December 9th at Yamaha Resort and Casino.

00:00:25.320 | Tickets can be purchased at AXS.com.

00:00:27.920 | This is a 21 and over event.

00:00:30.800 | - Today on Radical Personal Finance, we talk about cash and the power of cash

00:00:33.760 | to transform your financial life.

00:00:36.560 | ♪ [music] ♪

00:00:39.560 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the

00:00:55.220 | knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich

00:00:58.180 | and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years

00:01:01.820 | or less.

00:01:02.560 | My name is Joshua, I am your host.

00:01:04.360 | And today, we're going to talk about the transformative power of cash.

00:01:08.660 | If you are interested in moving into an improved financial situation,

00:01:12.560 | if you're not satisfied with the progress that you're making,

00:01:15.500 | I have one simple suggestion.

00:01:18.000 | Start using cash.

00:01:19.240 | ♪ [music] ♪

00:01:24.740 | Throughout the course of this show, I'm going to defend that suggestion to you.

00:01:27.720 | I'm going to tell you some of the benefits of cash, some of the perceived

00:01:31.120 | drawbacks of cash, and also some of the actual drawbacks of cash.

00:01:35.080 | This series is part of our Back to Basics series here on Radical Personal Finance,

00:01:38.540 | a series of shows intended to go back to the nuts and bolts,

00:01:41.240 | the basics of personal finance.

00:01:43.120 | And I'm specifically targeting people who are dissatisfied with their progress.

00:01:47.680 | If you are making great progress and you're on all your financial plans,

00:01:50.360 | this show is not for you.

00:01:52.000 | But if you are dissatisfied with your progress and you would like to be able

00:01:54.920 | to do a little bit better, then this show may be for you.

00:01:58.160 | And I would encourage you to consider listening and consider trying

00:02:00.720 | out some of my ideas.

00:02:02.520 | Today's show is sponsored by the Radical Personal Finance store.

00:02:05.720 | Did you know that I actually sell products?

00:02:07.640 | I sell courses, digital products at the moment.

00:02:09.960 | I have other things in the works.

00:02:11.560 | As soon as I can get them out, I will.

00:02:13.080 | But today, I want to talk to you about my course called,

00:02:15.440 | "How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Crisis."

00:02:19.280 | There are a lot of people who are concerned about the potential

00:02:22.520 | of future economic crises.

00:02:24.640 | And I address this whether it's broadly with a broad scale crisis or whether it's

00:02:28.480 | just simply a crisis in your own personal life.

00:02:31.080 | I think all of these are worth considering.

00:02:33.160 | You lose your job, that's a crisis.

00:02:34.640 | We talked about that in the previous episode.

00:02:36.720 | If you don't have a good solid plan to prepare for the economic crisis,

00:02:39.560 | go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/store, sign up for my course called,

00:02:42.760 | "How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Crisis," and I will help

00:02:46.760 | you create and build a workable plan.

00:02:50.760 | Won't cost you a lot of money, but it will help you to put in place some

00:02:54.200 | useful plans to protect yourself from the threat of a future economic

00:02:59.040 | crisis in your life.

00:03:01.160 | And one of the techniques that we will talk about, that we talk about in that

00:03:03.640 | course, is the value of cash.

00:03:05.280 | I'm a big proponent of the use of cash.

00:03:07.920 | So let's begin with, what do I mean by cash?

00:03:10.240 | Because, of course, depending on the context, that word,

00:03:12.400 | it could actually have many different meanings.

00:03:14.280 | For example, you have in your 401k, you have access to a cash account,

00:03:18.440 | or a cash equivalent account, some sort of security, like a money market security.

00:03:22.480 | And a lot of times we call that cash.

00:03:25.040 | We refer to cash as the money in your bank account as cash sometimes.

00:03:29.160 | Well, in this context, I'm talking about physical currency.

00:03:32.520 | I'm talking about bank notes, little green pieces of paper with dead

00:03:36.120 | presidents on them, if you trade in US dollars, or little purple or red or blue

00:03:40.360 | pieces of paper with some other people and things on it, depending on your

00:03:44.640 | country of origin, that's what I'm talking about.

00:03:47.320 | I'm talking about physical bank notes, paper money.

00:03:51.520 | And I'm convinced that one of the best things that most people could do to

00:03:55.840 | massively improve their finances is to simply start using the stuff.

00:04:02.720 | Now, for context, you should know that I am a millennial.

00:04:06.640 | I am a millennial.

00:04:07.880 | And as a millennial, I'm what's known as a digital native.

00:04:11.480 | I've never really known a period of my life where digital technology was not

00:04:15.440 | integrated into my life.

00:04:17.240 | And that influenced how I managed my money when I was younger.

00:04:22.600 | I cannot remember a time when I did not have some kind of digital money

00:04:28.880 | management system of some kind or other.

00:04:32.240 | I think my first one was probably Microsoft Money.

00:04:35.440 | I think it used to be just a standard part of the Windows suite of software.

00:04:39.240 | And so I used to use Microsoft Money.

00:04:40.800 | When I was 18 years old, I was using Microsoft Money and tracking my money

00:04:46.280 | in that electronic system.

00:04:47.440 | And I've done all kinds of things over the years.

00:04:49.240 | I've used spreadsheets.

00:04:50.840 | I use YNAB right now.

00:04:53.240 | Lots of different things that I have done over the years.

00:04:56.440 | But being a digital native, using physical paper money was not something

00:05:00.520 | that I used to do.

00:05:02.480 | I always just simply carried a debit card or a credit card.

00:05:05.840 | And most of my peers always spend all of their money using a debit card

00:05:10.840 | or a credit card.

00:05:11.560 | It's very unusual for me to go out to dinner with friends and all of a sudden

00:05:15.720 | at the end of the dinner, there's not six different credit cards produced and

00:05:19.640 | the waiter is being asked to divide the bill into six different parts so

00:05:23.400 | everyone can pay with their card.

00:05:24.720 | It's very unusual for somebody to pull out their wallet and pull out a $20 bill.

00:05:28.920 | Generally, I'm the only one who does that.

00:05:30.640 | And I don't do it all the time.

00:05:31.760 | Sometimes I run out of money.

00:05:33.160 | But generally, if there is somebody who does it, I'm usually the only one

00:05:36.520 | who does it.

00:05:37.560 | And there are a number of arguments that people present.

00:05:40.200 | There are a number of arguments that many of my friends would give as to why they

00:05:43.560 | use a credit card for everything that they do.

00:05:47.160 | And some of the arguments are really silly and some of them really make a lot

00:05:50.240 | of sense.

00:05:50.600 | For example, a lot of people would say, "Well, I like to use my debit card

00:05:54.280 | because then I can track how much money I'm spending."

00:05:57.040 | It's very easy.

00:05:57.840 | Most of our banks have some kind of built-in software where they analyze the

00:06:01.080 | transactions in our accounts.

00:06:03.640 | And so we can look at the end of the month and we can kind of see, "Hey,

00:06:07.440 | here's where all my money went."

00:06:08.560 | Or perhaps you're using some online tool such as Mint or maybe using YNAB or maybe

00:06:15.640 | you're using some other piece of software and all your transactions are automatically

00:06:19.480 | imported from your credit card and automatically categorized because of all

00:06:22.000 | the rules that you have.

00:06:22.800 | And so you can pull up a nifty little spreadsheet and show exactly how much

00:06:26.640 | money you're spending.

00:06:27.880 | That's a reasonable thing.

00:06:29.600 | A lot of people use credit cards and debit cards simply because they're

00:06:32.360 | convenient.

00:06:32.920 | They don't have to worry about making sure they have enough money in their pocket.

00:06:36.240 | They don't have to worry about going to an ATM machine and taking cash out.

00:06:39.800 | And so they just like the convenience of it.

00:06:42.240 | Some people look at credit cards and debit cards as a source of security.

00:06:46.200 | For example, the protection from theft.

00:06:48.440 | Well, if my wallet's stolen, I won't be liable for any of the purchases

00:06:51.560 | on my credit or debit card, so I'm protected.

00:06:53.920 | Whereas if I have a bunch of cash, the money is gone, I can't get it back.

00:06:56.920 | Or perhaps security of actually return policy.

00:07:00.360 | For example, lots of people like to use their credit card because they can do a

00:07:03.640 | chargeback on an expense if somebody rips them off on something.

00:07:08.160 | Or perhaps they have extra warranty benefits.

00:07:10.640 | Bought a fancy new TV at Best Buy and they get a double manufacturer warranty

00:07:14.560 | by swiping their Amex card, things like that.

00:07:17.360 | There are other arguments that people would use.

00:07:20.400 | For example, maybe I get airline points or I get cash back, I get a rebate

00:07:24.440 | percentage off from my credit card.

00:07:26.800 | Or just simply it's convenient because there's no denying it is convenient.

00:07:30.560 | Maybe you've got your credit card loaded up with your Apple Pay or your Google Pay

00:07:33.560 | on your phone and you just simply use that to pay for your transactions.

00:07:38.160 | There is a level of convenience to using cards.

00:07:42.600 | But here is what I observed at one point in time in my own life when I used to make

00:07:47.160 | those arguments and exclusively use digital forms of, you know,

00:07:51.280 | plastic cards for my spending mechanisms.

00:07:54.920 | I wasn't actually getting ahead.

00:07:57.600 | I wasn't actually making much progress with regard to building wealth.

00:08:04.240 | And if I had to do an informal survey of many people, I would say that many people

00:08:09.120 | feel the same way.

00:08:10.960 | If I were to look at finances of a representative sample of my friends,

00:08:15.480 | a lot of them are not making progress.

00:08:17.920 | Now, I don't think that you can't make progress using digital money,

00:08:23.240 | using plastic cards.

00:08:24.720 | Certainly you can.

00:08:26.800 | You absolutely can.

00:08:28.680 | But if you're not making progress and you're not satisfied with your progress,

00:08:32.240 | I think it's a good thing to do to stop and say, "Hmm, maybe I could change something.

00:08:36.480 | Maybe there's something I could do."

00:08:38.560 | And over the years, one of the things that I have learned is whenever I'm not making

00:08:42.200 | progress, I've got to change.

00:08:44.760 | And I'm going to stop being proud and arrogant and saying all my ways are perfect,

00:08:48.600 | and I'm going to start doing different things.

00:08:50.920 | And as I've had to work my way out of various holes that I put myself in over

00:08:54.200 | the years, I've learned that one of the best things I can do is stop swiping

00:08:59.040 | plastic cards and start using physical currency.

00:09:05.320 | For me, this goes all the way back to when I first started to budget.

00:09:08.440 | I was 19, 20 years old, something like that.

00:09:10.440 | I started to budget.

00:09:11.600 | At the time, my budget was eminently simple.

00:09:14.280 | I had about six or eight line items on it.

00:09:16.720 | And I took care of a few expenses.

00:09:20.400 | I wrote a check for my rent.

00:09:23.400 | I had a few digital bill pay options.

00:09:26.280 | And then to cover my spending money, I got in the habit of just simply taking a

00:09:31.880 | couple hundred bucks out of the ATM once a month, and that was the money that I

00:09:34.880 | would use to spend on eating out with my friends.

00:09:38.000 | And if somebody said, "Hey, let's go out," if I looked at my wallet, if there was

00:09:40.320 | money there, I would go out.

00:09:42.000 | If there wasn't money there, I would either go along and drink water or not go out.

00:09:45.440 | And it became a very simple way for me to manage my kind of fun expenses, my going

00:09:49.760 | out to eat, my hanging out with friends, doing fun things, by simply just simply

00:09:53.360 | looking at my wallet and saying, "Is there money there or not?"

00:09:56.680 | And I started to learn the simplicity of actually having cash, the simplicity of

00:10:01.080 | being able to do a budget in about 10 lines on a yellow pad.

00:10:04.880 | Now, of course, as I grew older and probably you too, we find that our budgets

00:10:09.360 | become more complex.

00:10:11.320 | My process is not as simple today.

00:10:14.160 | But in many ways, if you use cash, your budgeting is very simple.

00:10:21.160 | So I want to try to sell you a little bit on the idea of simply using physical

00:10:25.560 | currency instead of swiping plastic cards and tell you some of the benefits that I've

00:10:30.080 | learned and experienced over the years.

00:10:32.360 | To be clear, very few of us would be able to go to a 100% cash position, nor would

00:10:40.280 | that necessarily be advisable for most of us.

00:10:43.240 | Now, I have tried.

00:10:44.600 | In fact, during the year 2018, I had a personal project where for the entirety of

00:10:50.960 | the year, I tried to live exclusively on cash.

00:10:57.400 | I cashed every check that I got, deposited none of them in the bank.

00:11:01.720 | I used cash to pay all my expenses.

00:11:04.160 | I tried to see, is there a way that I could in the modern world pay with cash?

00:11:09.920 | And I failed.

00:11:11.600 | It was not possible for me to pay 100% with cash.

00:11:14.600 | I learned a lot along the way.

00:11:16.280 | I experienced some really good benefits.

00:11:17.640 | I'll tell you about some of those, but I failed.

00:11:19.960 | There were times where it was insufficient for me to use cash.

00:11:23.480 | It's especially difficult to do things like run a business and use software.

00:11:29.720 | The way that I'm speaking to you right now, I pay for audio hosting fees.

00:11:33.880 | Well, they don't take cash.

00:11:35.080 | It's a company that I've never been to.

00:11:37.840 | Libsyn is the company that hosts my audio fees.

00:11:42.400 | So they don't take cash.

00:11:43.640 | I have to use a card.

00:11:45.040 | I think most of us have lots of those experiences, but I've tried to go hardcore.

00:11:49.000 | It was an interesting experiment that I did.

00:11:50.840 | I learned a lot from it.

00:11:52.200 | So I recognize and acknowledge that very few of us would go all the way.

00:11:57.440 | So don't think that you have to go all the way with this.

00:12:01.200 | I've tried to go to the extreme position to see what I could learn from it.

00:12:04.520 | I recommend it to you sometime.

00:12:06.000 | And I'll talk about that extreme position in a moment.

00:12:09.160 | But even if you just go a little bit of the way.

00:12:11.260 | So why would you want to do this?

00:12:13.040 | Well, the number one reason I think you should consider using cash is because if

00:12:18.560 | you use cash, physical currency, for your transactions, you will find that it's

00:12:23.440 | impossible for you to spend more money than you have.

00:12:26.440 | By restricting yourself to using physical currency, you will find that it is

00:12:34.120 | impossible to spend more money than you have.

00:12:39.440 | And if you made one change in your habits and your skills, and that was you

00:12:45.440 | didn't spend money that you don't have, you would, by virtue of that decision,

00:12:51.440 | find yourself consistently in at least the top half of our society in terms of

00:12:58.440 | wealth and freedom.

00:13:01.040 | Because most people spend lots of money that they don't have.

00:13:04.440 | Now, of course, we could talk about the other side of the coin.

00:13:07.440 | Now, of course, we could talk about spending money that you don't have with

00:13:10.440 | credit cards, credit card debt.

00:13:12.440 | Many households maintain some amount of credit card and credit card debt.

00:13:16.440 | We could talk about not spending money that you don't have with other forms of

00:13:19.440 | debt, student loans, or car payments, etc.

00:13:22.440 | But even for the person who is the most devoted to they don't have a credit

00:13:27.440 | card, they're not taking out a car payment, sometimes, even if you're just

00:13:30.440 | using a debit card, you wind up spending money that you don't have.

00:13:34.440 | Especially if you don't have a good tracking system or a good budgeting system.

00:13:38.440 | My observation has been that many people have a budgeting system that works like

00:13:44.440 | this.

00:13:45.440 | They use a debit card for all of their expenses, they have a checking account,

00:13:49.440 | they put their paychecks in the checking account, they know that some bills are

00:13:52.440 | going to get deducted from those paychecks, and most people can mentally track

00:13:55.440 | the bills, their power bill, their rent, etc., the big bills that they have and

00:13:58.440 | when those things come out.

00:14:00.440 | And then beyond that, when they know if they want to spend money, they just

00:14:03.440 | simply pull out their phone, open their banking app, see if they have money in

00:14:06.440 | the account, and if they feel like they have enough money, they go ahead and

00:14:08.440 | swipe their debit card and buy more.

00:14:11.440 | That seems to be how a lot of people run their money.

00:14:14.440 | And yet, even if you do that, sometimes you wind up spending more money than

00:14:18.440 | you have.

00:14:19.440 | You wind up with not insufficient fund fees.

00:14:21.440 | And if you think this is wacky that nobody does that stuff because you're

00:14:25.440 | super hardcore, study the data.

00:14:28.440 | Huge amounts of revenue are generated for banks based upon non-sufficient fund

00:14:34.440 | fees.

00:14:35.440 | It's a huge source of revenue for many of them.

00:14:38.440 | Well, by simply choosing to use and pay for things with cash, you will find that

00:14:43.440 | you can't spend more money than you have.

00:14:48.440 | And that's incredibly valuable.

00:14:50.440 | Now, it may be possible for you if you simply put all of your money into one

00:14:57.440 | -- you took all your money, put it in a wallet, and just had one giant pot of

00:15:00.440 | money.

00:15:01.440 | It may be possible for you to spend more money than you intend on certain

00:15:05.440 | categories, but at least you won't spend more money than you have.

00:15:09.440 | Now, cash and the restrictions of cash can do wonderful work of helping you to

00:15:15.440 | not spend more money than you intend on certain categories.

00:15:20.440 | For example, the place where most of us spend the most money with actual

00:15:25.440 | interactions with merchants would be on things like food, combination of

00:15:29.440 | groceries and dining out.

00:15:32.440 | And it can be difficult to track the amount of money that you spend on food.

00:15:37.440 | It can be difficult for you to actually know how much money you're accumulating

00:15:41.440 | when you're in the store, or at least if you're buying a decent amount of food.

00:15:46.440 | If you do like my wife and I and you're buying carts full of food to feed hungry

00:15:50.440 | little children, then it's pretty easy for things to get out of hand.

00:15:54.440 | Now, you can impose some disciplines in that.

00:15:57.440 | What I suggest, I do a couple of things.

00:15:59.440 | Number one is I'll carry a piece of paper with me, a little notebook, and as

00:16:03.440 | I'm totaling, adding things to my cart, I keep a running total on the piece of

00:16:06.440 | paper.

00:16:07.440 | I keep it super simple.

00:16:08.440 | I just round up.

00:16:09.440 | If it's $1.79, $2.

00:16:10.440 | And you can do that math very easily and keep a running total of how much money

00:16:13.440 | is in your cart.

00:16:14.440 | Some people carry a calculator.

00:16:15.440 | I've recommended an app that a listener turned me on to called Solver, S-O-U-L-V-E-R,

00:16:20.440 | available on the iOS platform.

00:16:22.440 | It's a very useful spreadsheet app that allows you to put in the name of

00:16:26.440 | something and the amount of money that you accumulate on that thing so that you

00:16:32.440 | can keep track of your total balances.

00:16:34.440 | I found those two practices to be very helpful for me.

00:16:37.440 | But at the end of the day, still, that's just simply totaling how much there is.

00:16:42.440 | And it can be very easy if Costco is your kryptonite like it is for me, it can be

00:16:48.440 | very easy to go thinking, "Okay, I'll spend $200 today," but all of a sudden

00:16:51.440 | there's $350.

00:16:53.440 | Well, if you have a budget where your money that you're going to spend on food

00:16:57.440 | or whatever is in your wallet, you can't spend more money than is in your wallet.

00:17:03.440 | And that's really helpful.

00:17:05.440 | It imposes restrictions on you so that you can't overspend.

00:17:08.440 | And so if that overspending is broadly of all your income or just simply in

00:17:12.440 | categories, you can't overspend.

00:17:14.440 | And this is really useful.

00:17:15.440 | I find these restrictions really, really helpful.

00:17:18.440 | If I decide here's how much money we're going to spend dining out and doing fun

00:17:23.440 | things, and you look in your wallet and there's $100 there, then you may make one

00:17:27.440 | choice.

00:17:28.440 | If you look in your wallet and there's $20 there and it's Saturday evening and

00:17:30.440 | you're thinking, "How do I do something fun for my family?"

00:17:33.440 | you make an entirely different set of choices.

00:17:36.440 | And there's nothing that provides that immediate feedback like cash.

00:17:41.440 | Yes, even if you have the most perfect YNAB budget set up and you're all

00:17:46.440 | synchronized with your phone and everything's up to date, all the transactions

00:17:49.440 | have been categorized and you can go and look at that, at the end of the day,

00:17:53.440 | still, the digits on the screen are not nearly as powerful as the pieces of paper

00:17:59.440 | in your wallet.

00:18:01.440 | Now, the other thing that makes this incredibly useful is the tangibility of

00:18:06.440 | cash leads to a number of important benefits.

00:18:12.440 | Very, very important benefits.

00:18:15.440 | Now, you have probably heard arguments such as, "You'll wind up spending less

00:18:18.440 | money when you use tangible, physical cash."

00:18:22.440 | There's good data on that.

00:18:23.440 | I think it's true.

00:18:25.440 | I haven't gone and tried to find the scientific data on that in a while, but I

00:18:28.440 | do think it's true.

00:18:30.440 | The place where I most remember it was years ago.

00:18:33.440 | I used to eat a lot of fast food.

00:18:35.440 | It was because I was a college student and it was convenient and whatnot.

00:18:38.440 | And that same time, I was working for a fast food market research company that

00:18:43.440 | was doing a lot of work with big fast food brands.

00:18:46.440 | And at the same time, the fast food industry was going through a change where

00:18:50.440 | they went from accepting only cash to accepting cards with a certain minimum

00:18:54.440 | purchase to accepting cards for anything.

00:18:57.440 | And I quickly discovered that it was very easy for me to drive through the drive

00:19:01.440 | out, the drive through, and buy a $1.32 drink or a $1.32 burger or whatever when

00:19:08.440 | I could just swipe the card.

00:19:10.440 | And then in my work, I was seeing all the inside confidential market research

00:19:14.440 | information that showed how much higher the checks were, the average check was,

00:19:18.440 | if they would accept cards.

00:19:21.440 | And by experience, I know that to be true.

00:19:24.440 | It's much easier to buy the $7.63 fancy meal instead of the $3.25 cheapskate meal

00:19:33.440 | if you are swiping a card versus cash.

00:19:37.440 | And so I think there's a lot of evidence to that, that you wind up spending less

00:19:41.440 | money because of the tangible nature of cash when it comes to actually making

00:19:46.440 | transactions.

00:19:47.440 | But here's another way you spend less money.

00:19:49.440 | You wind up actually buying fewer things because it's harder to buy things when

00:19:55.440 | you pay cash.

00:19:57.440 | For example, many of us do a lot of online shopping.

00:20:02.440 | I would say the average person, the average one of my friends at this point

00:20:06.440 | could not have really imagined their life without Amazon and Amazon Prime,

00:20:09.440 | being able to just simply buy something whenever you want.

00:20:12.440 | And I have thoroughly used and appreciated Amazon Prime in the past myself.

00:20:17.440 | I find that Amazon is a--it's been wonderful.

00:20:21.440 | The access to anything in the world, inexpensive prices, open market,

00:20:25.440 | very competitive, it's a wonderful boon for consumers.

00:20:29.440 | And yet most of us spend a whole lot of money at Amazon.

00:20:34.440 | Well, as part of my year of spending cash, I had to look at it and say,

00:20:39.440 | "Well, I'm not going to buy things on Amazon."

00:20:41.440 | Now, to show that I'm not that hardcore, part of this was circumstantial.

00:20:46.440 | In the year that I wasn't spending cash, we were also--or I was spending cash

00:20:49.440 | most of the year we were traveling.

00:20:51.440 | And when traveling, it was a little bit hard to line up Amazon deliveries,

00:20:54.440 | especially if you don't know where you are going to be.

00:20:57.440 | But with the commitment to spend cash and with the commitment to--and with the travel,

00:21:04.440 | I learned a whole new appreciation for things like stores.

00:21:10.440 | Being a millennial and a digital native, shopping online has never been foreign to me.

00:21:15.440 | It's always how I've shopped.

00:21:17.440 | And I'm the kind of guy, I never would understand why anybody wouldn't shop online

00:21:20.440 | and then go to stores to try to figure out who's got the best deal at the store.

00:21:24.440 | Well, if you cut off online shopping because you use cash,

00:21:28.440 | you find a different appreciation for stores

00:21:31.440 | and different appreciation for simply someone having the thing that you want.

00:21:35.440 | So the transformation for me was usually you would go on Amazon and you say,

00:21:39.440 | "Okay, there's 15 different things that are available that would solve the need,"

00:21:42.440 | and you read the reviews and you try to figure out which one is the best one.

00:21:45.440 | One of the things I found was that you get excited when a store has something

00:21:50.440 | that you need and you just buy what they have.

00:21:52.440 | And you trust their purchasing agent to have done a good job.

00:21:55.440 | But the point is when we cut out online shopping,

00:22:00.440 | yes, we paid more money for some things by buying them from the physical store.

00:22:05.440 | It's very hard for a physical store that has to pay large amounts of rent

00:22:09.440 | and lots of local taxes, et cetera, to sell things as inexpensively as Amazon can.

00:22:15.440 | But we wound up spending a lot less money overall.

00:22:19.440 | When you go to a physical store and when you're interacting with physical cash,

00:22:23.440 | you wind up thinking more carefully about those purchases.

00:22:26.440 | It's also inconvenient to go and get things.

00:22:29.440 | If I need a little cable or a little widget for this thing or,

00:22:33.440 | "Oh, that would be a fun little gadget to have,"

00:22:35.440 | it's inconvenient to go and buy that if I've got to go to a store.

00:22:40.440 | Even if the store has it, I know what store has it, I'm going to go to Walmart,

00:22:43.440 | Walmart's going to have it, it's inconvenient to get in the car,

00:22:46.440 | go to Walmart, stand in line for 45 minutes, and then get out.

00:22:49.440 | That's inconvenient.

00:22:51.440 | It's convenient to go to Amazon and buy it.

00:22:56.440 | But that convenience comes with a price tag.

00:22:58.440 | You buy more stuff, usually stuff that you don't necessarily have to have.

00:23:02.440 | And so the tangibility of cash has benefits of lowering your overall expenses,

00:23:07.440 | which is one of the major goals.

00:23:09.440 | If you are going to improve your financial situation,

00:23:12.440 | you have to earn more money, lower your expenses,

00:23:16.440 | and improve your investment returns.

00:23:18.440 | That's all that matters.

00:23:21.440 | And so anything that's resulting in your spending more money

00:23:25.440 | is by definition hurting your financial results.

00:23:33.440 | So you can look at it as a benefit or a disadvantage,

00:23:36.440 | depending on where you are in terms of the tangibility of cash.

00:23:41.440 | Anything, again, that helps you to spend less money is valuable for you.

00:23:46.440 | But more importantly than that,

00:23:49.440 | the tangibility of cash means that it's more familiar,

00:23:54.440 | it works better with the human brain.

00:23:57.440 | When you spend money, it has a greater friction.

00:24:01.440 | You're more aware of what you're spending when you actually spend physical money.

00:24:07.440 | Here's my example.

00:24:09.440 | If you were to go out with a credit card,

00:24:11.440 | and you were to go out for a day of shopping,

00:24:13.440 | and you go to five different stores, Home Depot, Kohl's, Costco,

00:24:18.440 | I don't know, shoe store and sports store,

00:24:21.440 | whatever the local ones are for you.

00:24:23.440 | And you go to five stores and you buy something in each of those five stores.

00:24:26.440 | If I ask you at the end of the day or perhaps the next day,

00:24:29.440 | "How much money did you spend?"

00:24:33.440 | there's a good chance that you would not be able to keep that math straight in your head,

00:24:38.440 | because you wouldn't actually remember.

00:24:40.440 | "Okay, it was $124 at Home Depot, then it was $270 at Costco,

00:24:45.440 | then we went to Kohl's, it was $160 there."

00:24:48.440 | That's hard math to do.

00:24:49.440 | I mean, I can't even keep track of it if I'm simply saying it.

00:24:51.440 | So, as I'm saying it, I can't remember it.

00:24:54.440 | So how could I possibly do it if I'm actually just swiping the card?

00:24:57.440 | Now, you could quickly tell me the answer by pulling out your phone,

00:25:01.440 | looking at your credit card, or pulling out the receipts and doing that.

00:25:04.440 | So I'm not saying you couldn't, there's not value in the tracking aspect of it.

00:25:07.440 | But it's not really intuitive.

00:25:08.440 | The math just doesn't click in your head.

00:25:11.440 | If you compare that to one of the things that I do,

00:25:14.440 | is I do things $1,000 at a time.

00:25:17.440 | So I say, "Okay, I got $1,000, I get $100 bills, $1,000 bills."

00:25:20.440 | And every time you pull off $100, I have a wallet with two different sections in it.

00:25:25.440 | So I keep the hundreds in the back section, and I keep the smaller in the front section.

00:25:29.440 | So every time you pull off $100, you know there's another $100.

00:25:34.440 | And you can mentally track, "Well, it was $140 here, and that, and you know."

00:25:39.440 | And at the end of the day, when there are $200 bills left on the backside of your wallet,

00:25:43.440 | you know, "I spent about $800 today."

00:25:46.440 | It's much more tangible.

00:25:47.440 | You can track it just fluidly.

00:25:50.440 | You have a feeling that's fairly accurate of how much money you're spending.

00:25:55.440 | I can fairly accurately estimate how much I'm spending when I spend cash.

00:26:01.440 | And this is super important because the digits are not--

00:26:06.440 | for most people, the digits are not particularly--

00:26:10.440 | it's hard to wrap your mind around them.

00:26:12.440 | Now, the good thing is those of us who live in places with relatively small currency,

00:26:15.440 | maybe you spend U.S. dollars or Canadian dollars or British pounds,

00:26:20.440 | it's a lot easier to track that than it is if you live in a place with highly inflated currency.

00:26:25.440 | It's a little bit hard to track the numbers even better when it comes to, you know,

00:26:32.440 | the Venezuelan bolivar, which is 20,000 to 1.

00:26:36.440 | It's a little bit harder if you're dealing with Japanese yen, things like that.

00:26:39.440 | But still, there's still more tangibility with cash than there is with a card.

00:26:46.440 | And that tangibility has incredible benefits from the perspective of budgeting.

00:26:52.440 | See, most people who are dissatisfied with their financial station in life

00:26:57.440 | and with the progress that they're making,

00:26:59.440 | the basic problem is not that they don't have income.

00:27:02.440 | If they didn't have income, they would be working on that.

00:27:04.440 | The basic problem is they don't know how to get--

00:27:06.440 | it's not that they don't know how to get a good deal on something.

00:27:08.440 | Most people know how to save money.

00:27:11.440 | The basic problem is that most people who are struggling

00:27:14.440 | don't seem to be able to handle the totality of their financial life.

00:27:19.440 | They can't handle paying the mortgage and paying the electricity bill

00:27:23.440 | and having all the different shopping trips and the kids' clothes

00:27:26.440 | and the books and the everything.

00:27:28.440 | It's a lot.

00:27:30.440 | And it seems difficult for most people to be able to engage with those numbers and understand.

00:27:37.440 | Most people don't seem to enjoy sitting down with a piece of paper and a calculator

00:27:41.440 | and working out that month's budget.

00:27:43.440 | Now, do I think they should learn?

00:27:45.440 | Yeah, I think their lives would be incredibly improved if they did learn.

00:27:48.440 | But most people could handle a budget with cash.

00:27:52.440 | Let's say your budget were $4,000 a month, right?

00:27:57.440 | Medium budget, $4,000 or $5,000 a month.

00:27:59.440 | You get a couple of paychecks a month.

00:28:01.440 | And let's say that you actually did the hardcore system.

00:28:04.440 | You took your paycheck, you took it either to the bank that it was drawn on

00:28:07.440 | and cashed it there or you cashed it at your own bank.

00:28:09.440 | And you walked out with $1,500 bills from your paycheck

00:28:13.440 | or 20 different $100 bills.

00:28:16.440 | It's not that difficult to now go home and just make some very simple piles.

00:28:21.440 | Here goes $1,200 bills over here for the mortgage.

00:28:24.440 | Here goes $150 for the electric bill, etc.

00:28:27.440 | That leaves us $800 left over here for whatever we want to do.

00:28:31.440 | It's a very simple intuitive process, stacks of money on a kitchen table.

00:28:36.440 | And by handling your money in that way, you're going to not overspend

00:28:40.440 | and you can clearly see where the money is going.

00:28:43.440 | And thus, you can look at it and say, "You know what? We'd like to make a change there."

00:28:47.440 | The old envelope system works where you then take those piles of money

00:28:51.440 | and put them into envelopes.

00:28:53.440 | It works and it helps people to actually control their expenses.

00:28:58.440 | And it helps people to intuitively understand where their money is going.

00:29:03.440 | You don't need great math skills to balance a checkbook perfectly.

00:29:08.440 | You don't need great software electricity--or electricity--

00:29:13.440 | digital phone and computer skills to make your software work perfectly.

00:29:17.440 | It's very, very simple.

00:29:19.440 | You get the big things right with your $20 and your $100

00:29:22.440 | and everything else just falls out in the wash.

00:29:25.440 | It's a really powerful system.

00:29:28.440 | The most powerful thing about cash and cash budgeting

00:29:32.440 | is that you are engaging in proactive money management,

00:29:37.440 | which is the only thing that actually counts.

00:29:41.440 | This is back to when I used to say, "Well, I use a credit card

00:29:44.440 | because it makes it easy for me to track my money."

00:29:46.440 | Here's the problem with that objection to using cash.

00:29:50.440 | It doesn't matter where your money went because you can't really change that.

00:29:56.440 | What matters is where the money that you have right now is going to go

00:30:00.440 | because that's the only thing you can change.

00:30:03.440 | Yes, it can be useful to generate a spreadsheet of 2018's living expenses.

00:30:07.440 | That's useful. I do it. I do track that.

00:30:10.440 | But if you're working with somebody who's not a math nerd,

00:30:13.440 | who's not a personal finance nerd,

00:30:15.440 | who doesn't get pleasure out of spreadsheets and reports

00:30:17.440 | and generating all little charts and graphs,

00:30:20.440 | what you need to change is you need to change their behavior going forward,

00:30:24.440 | looking at the future. That's what you need to change.

00:30:27.440 | The only way that you can change that is by affecting their future decisions.

00:30:32.440 | That's where cash really shines.

00:30:34.440 | Because when you take your money and you divide it into little piles,

00:30:37.440 | now you're getting the benefit of budgeting affecting decisions,

00:30:41.440 | not the informational benefits of tracking.

00:30:45.440 | Let's use a diet example.

00:30:47.440 | Is it good for you to keep a food log of everything that you ate?

00:30:52.440 | I think most people would recommend that for someone who's trying to change how they eat.

00:30:56.440 | It's a pretty standard thing where you write down everything that you eat

00:30:59.440 | or you take pictures of everything that you eat.

00:31:01.440 | And can that food log of everything that you ate make a difference in your habits?

00:31:06.440 | I think pretty obvious that it can.

00:31:09.440 | You don't really want to take a picture of the whole tub of ice cream

00:31:12.440 | and tell your diet coach that I ate the whole tub of ice cream,

00:31:15.440 | and so you naturally tend to change things a little bit.

00:31:18.440 | I think most people, when they just start tracking what they ate in a rear-looking manner,

00:31:23.440 | wind up changing a little bit of what they do eat because of the influence of that.

00:31:28.440 | And so in that sense, money tracking is good.

00:31:30.440 | But for maximum benefit, does it really matter what you ate

00:31:34.440 | or does it matter what you're going to eat right now?

00:31:40.440 | So the analogy here, it's much more powerful for you to clear all the junk food out of the house

00:31:47.440 | and make sure that there are good quality food choices available when it comes time to snacking

00:31:52.440 | and then make sure that the portions are pre-controlled.

00:31:55.440 | Think of cash budgeting.

00:31:56.440 | I think of it like when you hire the chef service that delivers you all your meals

00:32:00.440 | in little plastic trays where the portions are already squared away

00:32:03.440 | and all you got to do is the right time of day, grab the right tray and eat it.

00:32:07.440 | How easy is it to get skinny if you're in that situation?

00:32:11.440 | Much easier than if your house is filled with junk and temptation.

00:32:16.440 | And that's what cash budgeting is.

00:32:18.440 | You have an envelope and that tells you, "Here's what I can spend right now."

00:32:21.440 | And then you can make real-time purchase decisions differently.

00:32:25.440 | That's where cash is really powerful.

00:32:27.440 | It affects your proactive money management.

00:32:30.440 | If you give me the choice and somebody's going to adopt one system or the other,

00:32:35.440 | the first system they're going to adopt is tracking every dollar they spend to the penny.

00:32:42.440 | Every penny they spend, that's system one.

00:32:45.440 | Or the second system is they're not going to track anything

00:32:49.440 | but they're going to take all of their income, turn it into cash,

00:32:53.440 | decide in advance which envelope it goes in and only spend the money out of the envelopes.

00:32:57.440 | And if they need money from one envelope, they take it from the other.

00:33:02.440 | Day and night I'll choose option two.

00:33:04.440 | If you have to choose between them, option two.

00:33:07.440 | Every single time.

00:33:09.440 | Because that's proactive.

00:33:11.440 | It's changing their future decisions, which is where they'll wind up in time

00:33:16.440 | spending less, saving more.

00:33:20.440 | When you spend and budget cash, you don't need great math skills.

00:33:24.440 | You don't even need great organizational skills.

00:33:27.440 | And that opens up financial success to more people.

00:33:32.440 | Finally, there are other little benefits of cash that can come along.

00:33:36.440 | I've talked about the cheapness.

00:33:38.440 | It's cheap to spend cash because you'll spend less.

00:33:41.440 | Sometimes it can be cheap to spend cash because you get deals.

00:33:44.440 | You ask for discounts.

00:33:46.440 | You say, "Hey, you got a cash discount."

00:33:48.440 | I always try to get cash discounts on stuff that I'm doing.

00:33:51.440 | And it really works, especially in areas where people have a little bit more flexibility.

00:33:56.440 | You've hired a tradesman to come and work at your house.

00:33:58.440 | Pay him cash. Get a cash discount.

00:34:00.440 | Pay your mechanic with cash. Get a cash discount.

00:34:02.440 | Every single time you go into your mechanic's shop,

00:34:05.440 | they say your bill is $1,200.

00:34:07.440 | Say, take $1,100 cash or $1,000 of cash.

00:34:10.440 | Almost every time they'll do it.

00:34:12.440 | And that stuff adds up big time.

00:34:14.440 | You can't do that with a credit card and a debit card.

00:34:17.440 | And part of it is because of the processing fees.

00:34:20.440 | And part of it is, of course, whether or not the person reports the income.

00:34:23.440 | When you swipe a credit card at your mechanic,

00:34:26.440 | they're going to be charged 3% on their processing fee.

00:34:28.440 | And they have to make sure that's perfectly included in all of their income statements.

00:34:33.440 | If you hand over $1,100 bills and they slide it in the pocket,

00:34:37.440 | they'll figure out the back-end stuff with the IRS,

00:34:39.440 | and they can save the 3% on the processing fees.

00:34:42.440 | It's a much, much better deal for everybody.

00:34:44.440 | So cash will save you money.

00:34:47.440 | And it's cheap to own cash.

00:34:49.440 | Cheap to get.

00:34:51.440 | Cheap to own.

00:34:52.440 | No insufficient fund fees.

00:34:55.440 | It's wonderful.

00:34:56.440 | Now those are some of the benefits of cash.

00:34:59.440 | Let's talk about some of the problems.

00:35:01.440 | We'll begin with the perceived problems,

00:35:05.440 | and then the actual problems.

00:35:08.440 | There are two basic problems that I think are largely perceived problems,

00:35:13.440 | not actual problems.

00:35:14.440 | The first is, well, I can't do my subscriptions.

00:35:19.440 | I can't have my--if I'm spending cash,

00:35:21.440 | I can't pay my electric bill automatically with cash.

00:35:25.440 | I can't pay my Netflix payment automatically with cash.

00:35:29.440 | I can't have my computer data backup plan paid automatically with cash.

00:35:34.440 | And that is true for the most part.

00:35:37.440 | Now some things that are usually paid with digital money,

00:35:41.440 | you can actually physically pay.

00:35:44.440 | For example, you can pay your electric bill with cash.

00:35:48.440 | You can pay your water bill with cash.

00:35:52.440 | You can pay your phone bill with cash.

00:35:55.440 | I never did that, never in my entire life,

00:35:57.440 | until last year when I decided to try this experiment.

00:36:00.440 | I was like, "There's got to be ways to do this."

00:36:02.440 | I had never in my life known that you could just simply go to all kinds of places

00:36:05.440 | and pay your power bill.

00:36:08.440 | Call me naive.

00:36:09.440 | I guess maybe I didn't--maybe it was too strong to say I didn't know it.

00:36:12.440 | I guess I was aware that it was possible, but I had never done it.

00:36:16.440 | My entire life, my cell phone bill was just automatically billed to my credit card

00:36:20.440 | or drafted out of my checking account.

00:36:22.440 | Why am I going to do the hassle of paying a bill manually

00:36:24.440 | when I can just automatically have it deducted?

00:36:26.440 | That was always what I did.

00:36:29.440 | But I said, "I'm going to do this."

00:36:30.440 | And so what I found out is if you want to pay a cell phone bill,

00:36:33.440 | you can just simply go and pay it.

00:36:35.440 | Now if you have a subscription service,

00:36:37.440 | I learned people go and pay it all the time.

00:36:39.440 | You go to the Verizon store or the T-Mobile store.

00:36:41.440 | With me, I always did prepaid.

00:36:43.440 | So I grabbed a prepaid card at the grocery store.

00:36:45.440 | That was how I always generated my phone plan

00:36:48.440 | because I do prepaid phone plans, which is also nice.

00:36:51.440 | Saves money there versus the other things.

00:36:54.440 | But then electric bill, you can pay your electric bill in lots of places.

00:36:56.440 | You can pay it at the grocery store.

00:36:58.440 | You can go to the company and pay it.

00:36:59.440 | You can pay your water bill in lots of places.

00:37:01.440 | You can pay your CAVA bill in lots of places.

00:37:03.440 | There are lots of people all around you who do everything in cash,

00:37:07.440 | and they figure out how to get the stuff done,

00:37:09.440 | and the companies still have to serve them.

00:37:11.440 | And so you can do a lot of those subscriptions.

00:37:14.440 | Now there are subscriptions that you can't.

00:37:17.440 | And some of those are subscriptions that it's probably a good thing that you can't.

00:37:22.440 | I don't want to pick on Netflix, but that would be an obvious example.

00:37:25.440 | For many people, Netflix, we've got to have it.

00:37:26.440 | Is it a bad idea?

00:37:27.440 | Hey, it's cheap entertainment, certainly, or whatever the other ones are.

00:37:30.440 | But you're not going to pay your Netflix bill in cash.

00:37:33.440 | So the first thing is recognize that if you are frustrated with where you are,

00:37:37.440 | it's probably all of that stuff that's really killing you.

00:37:40.440 | And so the fact that you can't pay for this is probably actually a good thing to lower your expenses.

00:37:47.440 | You should consider that first.

00:37:50.440 | Whenever I have subscriptions that are charged to a credit card,

00:37:54.440 | I find that there is a lot more stuff that I wind up signing up for with my subscriptions

00:38:00.440 | than is strictly necessary.

00:38:03.440 | And it's probably the same for you.

00:38:06.440 | It's a lot easier to keep that New York Times subscription,

00:38:09.440 | or it's a lot easier for you to keep that monthly book club subscription,

00:38:13.440 | or Amazon Unlimited, or whatever, when it's just billed automatically to the credit card.

00:38:18.440 | And so if you're in a situation where you're trying to make big changes,

00:38:21.440 | go hardcore. Cancel everything.

00:38:25.440 | And then go a few months, and then only add in the things that you really need.

00:38:29.440 | Now there are solutions if you aren't going to use a traditional credit card.

00:38:33.440 | There are solutions where you can still use cash and have those subscriptions.

00:38:38.440 | So things like using a prepaid card.

00:38:40.440 | You can go to a grocery store, you can buy a prepaid card with $100 or $500 of cash on it,

00:38:45.440 | and then you simply load that up and you can use that for subscriptions.

00:38:49.440 | Unless you have some serious risk to yourself, for example,

00:38:52.440 | you're hiding from a stalker or something like that,

00:38:55.440 | I don't think that's worth it for most people.

00:38:57.440 | A conventional credit card or a conventional debit card is certainly adequate for those things.

00:39:02.440 | But if you're in a place where you're trying to really move things in a different direction financially,

00:39:09.440 | do consider going all the way.

00:39:11.440 | Do consider going hardcore.

00:39:13.440 | Because I think there are benefits of it.

00:39:15.440 | Even if Amazon, you say, "I can't live without Amazon."

00:39:17.440 | Okay, well, buy Amazon cards and fund your account with the Amazon cards.

00:39:22.440 | So that way you don't wind up spending more at Amazon than you actually physically separated from with the cash.

00:39:27.440 | I'm not saying this has to--what I'm describing is inconvenient.

00:39:32.440 | And so if you have lots of income, your expenses are low, you have lots of money,

00:39:36.440 | there's no reason for you to go through this inconvenience.

00:39:39.440 | What I'm targeting is people who are frustrated and don't have any money.

00:39:42.440 | Inconvenience is a good thing because it means you spend less money.

00:39:46.440 | So don't be scared of inconvenience.

00:39:49.440 | Now, there are subscriptions that can be a major problem, especially if things like running a business.

00:39:55.440 | With my business, I could not do the important things with cash.

00:39:59.440 | I guess--I hate to ever say I could not.

00:40:01.440 | I bet you I could.

00:40:02.440 | I bet you I could call my media hosting company, and I bet you I could send them once a year a bunch of cash from my account,

00:40:09.440 | and it would be it done.

00:40:10.440 | That would be one thing.

00:40:12.440 | So there are perceived problems, like that I can't make my subscriptions.

00:40:16.440 | But try canceling first, and then after a while, see how things go.

00:40:21.440 | The second big perceived problem is I can't track my expenditures as easily when I spend cash.

00:40:28.440 | And it is true that you can't track things as easily as when you swipe a card for everything.

00:40:33.440 | As previously discussed, though, that's not necessarily a bad thing because just tracking doesn't change your habits,

00:40:41.440 | whereas proactive budgeting and changing your decisions, that can.

00:40:45.440 | So it's not the tracking that is key.

00:40:47.440 | It's the other things that are key.

00:40:49.440 | But with a little bit of discipline and a little bit of inconvenience, you can actually track things.

00:40:55.440 | What I do now, I still spend.

00:40:57.440 | I don't spend 100% on cash, but the vast majority of expenses that I have are with cash.

00:41:03.440 | What I do is I carry in my wallet.

00:41:05.440 | I carry a little three-by-five card folded in half, and I always carry a pen.

00:41:09.440 | And whenever I pull out money, I either get a receipt, in which case the receipt goes in my wallet, or I write it down.

00:41:16.440 | And so one of those two things always happens.

00:41:18.440 | I either have a physical paper receipt or I write it down.

00:41:23.440 | Then every couple, three days, I sit down with my accounting software, and I manually enter all of those things into the computer.

00:41:30.440 | Is it inconvenient?

00:41:32.440 | Yes, it is.

00:41:35.440 | But I'm making a lot of progress towards my financial goals, and it helps keep me focused on my financial goals.

00:41:45.440 | See, I don't really get the idea where somebody says, "Hey, I want to be rich, but I'm not willing to spend any time or any effort whatsoever towards that goal."

00:41:55.440 | I don't deny that it can be done.

00:41:57.440 | If somebody has a high income, and they just naturally don't spend much money, and they automate all of their investing up front, you can become, over time, very rich without much inconvenience or much hassle.

00:42:11.440 | I'm not targeting you in this particular case.

00:42:16.440 | I'm not trying to get to you.

00:42:18.440 | What I'm trying to get at is the person doesn't feel like they're making that much progress.

00:42:22.440 | If you're going to make progress financially, you're going to have to focus on your finances.

00:42:27.440 | There are a lot of expressions of that, but sitting down every few days, pulling the receipts out of your wallet, and writing everything into or entering everything into your software system or writing it into your budget tracking system, this is really valuable time for you to be focusing on your financial goals.

00:42:44.440 | You can look at an expense, and you can say, "I wish I'd spent less money there," and you can think about it.

00:42:51.440 | Most people don't think about their individual transactions, but you have a chance to think about it when you're entering it into your software system.

00:42:59.440 | You can think about, "What was it that triggered me?

00:43:01.440 | Why did I wind up spending an extra $100 at the sporting goods store when I didn't have to do that, when I didn't go in planning to do that?

00:43:07.440 | Or why did I do that?

00:43:08.440 | Why did I make that expense?"

00:43:10.440 | Over the years, many of the improvements that I have made in my life have come from simply this analysis.

00:43:16.440 | Just an obvious example.

00:43:18.440 | If you're a parent like me, one of the things that gets you is you have certain obligations to your family, and your children have really unique ways of letting you know about their needs.

00:43:29.440 | It usually comes with their voices, and their voices are expressed in some ways that often are not particularly pleasant to be around.

00:43:35.440 | Let's say you're on a road trip.

00:43:37.440 | You're visiting your family in the next town over, and it's a three-hour drive.

00:43:42.440 | Well, usually there comes a place on three-hour drives that children start to have certain needs.

00:43:48.440 | Now, when I was a new parent, I would get really annoyed because that need that they had for a little bit of food would turn into a $25 fast food expense.

00:43:57.440 | I would look at it, and it's a true need.

00:43:59.440 | I've got to actually feed my children.

00:44:03.440 | But the $25 stop at Wendy's, yeah, we solved the need, but that seems like a really inefficient way to do it.

00:44:11.440 | With simple things like being annoyed when I would sit there and write $25 of fast food expenses into my budget helped me to start to create plans, what I do in my budgeting system.

00:44:22.440 | I have three categories for restaurants.

00:44:28.440 | I don't just call them restaurants.

00:44:29.440 | I have one category that's called Meals Out for Convenience.

00:44:33.440 | I have another category that's called Meals Out for Celebration, and then I have a third category that's called Sweets Out.

00:44:38.440 | The way I track it is Meals Out for Convenience are basically a failure of planning.

00:44:44.440 | A Meal Out for Convenience means that we needed food, and I didn't plan well enough to make sure that we had food by some more frugal option.

00:44:53.440 | And so we're eating out because we needed to eat out.

00:44:57.440 | That's a failure on my part of planning.

00:44:59.440 | Meals Out for Celebration is how I identify, "Hey, this was a carefully planned experience."

00:45:05.440 | Whether it was my wife and I went on a nice date, and I wanted to do it at a nice restaurant, or we're celebrating something.

00:45:12.440 | It was preplanned.

00:45:13.440 | It was pre-known.

00:45:14.440 | It was considered, and it was a thoughtful decision to put spent money on a restaurant.

00:45:18.440 | So Meals Out for Celebration obviously has to be moderated, but it's not something I'm trying to get to zero.

00:45:23.440 | I don't want to say we're just never going to ever eat out.

00:45:26.440 | We're never going to spend money.

00:45:28.440 | I track Sweets Out because oftentimes it's a little treat, and it's nice, but I want to make sure we don't have too many sweets.

00:45:36.440 | And a lot of times Sweets Out can be very inefficient as compared to sweets at home.

00:45:41.440 | And so if we're going to go for Sweets Out, oftentimes I could save 50%, but it's going to a grocery store and then grabbing something and taking it to the park instead of doing the Sweets Out.

00:45:50.440 | So that's how I track it.

00:45:52.440 | So the point of it is that by actually sitting down and having the annoyance of writing in $25, Meals for Convenience, and recognizing that was because I didn't plan ahead,

00:46:02.440 | now I can proactively change, and I can make sure that part of my checklist, we're going to see so-and-so four hours away.

00:46:10.440 | I'm going to make sure that we have food, and it's got to be palatable food that solves the problem, and I've got to make sure that I have this so I don't spend the $25.

00:46:18.440 | Why spend $25 when I could spend three and have the same thing?

00:46:23.440 | Now, if we're going to have out for celebration, it's going to be an intended thing.

00:46:26.440 | We want to eat at this restaurant because it's really wonderful and it's on our way.

00:46:29.440 | Then I need to make that plan, and then I can be happy.

00:46:32.440 | Meals for celebration, no problem.

00:46:34.440 | That's how I do it.

00:46:36.440 | So the entering things in manually, is it inconvenient?

00:46:41.440 | Certainly.

00:46:42.440 | Is it a little bit of a hassle?

00:46:44.440 | Sure.

00:46:45.440 | Does it take time?

00:46:46.440 | Yes, but my money is important to me, thus it's worth my taking time.

00:46:55.440 | I care about becoming financially independent in 10 years or less, and so because of that, I'm going to spend time on the things that influence that.

00:47:05.440 | A lot of that is on the income side, but a big component is on the expense side.

00:47:10.440 | And so just because something takes time doesn't mean by definition it's something not worth doing.

00:47:18.440 | And so if you're one of those persons who says, "Well, I've got this super great system.

00:47:22.440 | I just swipe my credit card for everything.

00:47:24.440 | It's super fast. It's convenient.

00:47:25.440 | I don't have to plan ahead, and I've got a wonderful system where everything is automated," ask you the question,

00:47:30.440 | are you making substantial financial progress?

00:47:34.440 | If you are, I'm not saying you have to do more, but if you're not, consider if your obsession with automation

00:47:39.440 | and convenience and the fact that I never have to do anything is kind of a problem.

00:47:43.440 | It's not bad to have to do things if it's something that you care about.

00:47:48.440 | And with that little rant, I've actually inadvertently moved on to the next section of my outline, which is actual problems.

00:47:54.440 | Time is actually a problem.

00:47:57.440 | It takes more time to spend cash.

00:48:00.440 | It takes more time to get cash.

00:48:03.440 | For example, if you automatically have your paycheck deposited with direct deposit,

00:48:09.440 | that doesn't take as much time as for you to get issued a physical paycheck

00:48:13.440 | and then to take that physical paycheck to the bank and cash it.

00:48:17.440 | It takes time to stand in line at the bank and cash it.

00:48:20.440 | There's no way around it.

00:48:21.440 | It takes time to go and get cash.

00:48:23.440 | If you have to go to the ATM and get cash, it takes time to do that.

00:48:27.440 | It takes time to go to the bank and do that.

00:48:30.440 | You may be, like many of my listeners and me, where you don't even have a local bank.

00:48:37.440 | Many of us work with online banks.

00:48:40.440 | All my life I've worked with online banks.

00:48:42.440 | And so you may not even just have a local bank.

00:48:44.440 | You're not accustomed to doing that.

00:48:46.440 | It takes time to make sure that you have money.

00:48:48.440 | There have been times where, many times, where I needed to get money

00:48:52.440 | and so I would go and stop at an ATM on the way to the store to go and get money.

00:48:58.440 | It takes time.

00:49:00.440 | It takes time to do the tracking.

00:49:01.440 | It takes time to do all of these things.

00:49:03.440 | That is an actual problem.

00:49:05.440 | Now, I've already given a defense why I don't think it's that big of a problem.

00:49:08.440 | I think spending time on things that are important to you is okay.

00:49:12.440 | But it is a problem.

00:49:14.440 | It does take more time.

00:49:16.440 | No question about it.

00:49:18.440 | I think the benefits are worth it.

00:49:20.440 | I haven't even gone over some of the other benefits of cash,

00:49:22.440 | but I've focused here on the financial benefits.

00:49:24.440 | But I think the benefits are worth it.

00:49:26.440 | And in time, you can become pretty quick, so it's just not that much time.

00:49:31.440 | Very few of us are so busy and so productive that we can't afford an extra 30 minutes a month

00:49:36.440 | for some other benefits if you get other benefits.

00:49:39.440 | Next actual problem is this.

00:49:41.440 | There are some things that can't actually be paid in cash.

00:49:45.440 | There are things that cannot actually be paid in cash.

00:49:48.440 | An obvious, blindingly obvious example would be a mortgage.

00:49:53.440 | If you have a mortgage payment, you can't pay a mortgage payment in cash.

00:49:55.440 | Maybe, well, maybe there's an exception.

00:49:58.440 | Unless perhaps your mortgage is drawn with your local bank that you physically can go in

00:50:03.440 | and you can physically make a mortgage payment.

00:50:05.440 | But that's got to be a tiny percentage of people that would qualify in that circumstance.

00:50:11.440 | So what can you do?

00:50:12.440 | Well, obviously, you can just simply use a check.

00:50:14.440 | You can write a check.

00:50:16.440 | And for most of us, the best system is going to be a hybrid system

00:50:20.440 | between some basic things done with normal bill pay, credit cards, checking,

00:50:25.440 | and some things done with cash.

00:50:27.440 | Now I'm happy to present the extreme scenario because you learn a lot with it.

00:50:31.440 | You learn a lot from the extreme example.

00:50:33.440 | And there are many people who need to be extreme.

00:50:36.440 | For example, let's say that you're in a battle with creditors.

00:50:39.440 | You can't have a checking account because your wages are being garnished

00:50:43.440 | or your creditors may have access to it.

00:50:45.440 | I've counseled people in that.

00:50:47.440 | And in that situation, you've got to be defensive.

00:50:48.440 | You've got to have everything in cash just for your own defense

00:50:51.440 | so that you can actually have money.

00:50:53.440 | Well, there are ways that you can do it.

00:50:55.440 | You can actually pay your mortgage with a money order.

00:50:57.440 | You can go and get a money order, a postal money order,

00:50:59.440 | or a local grocery store money order, Western Union, whatever.

00:51:03.440 | Postal money orders, they max out at $1,000.

00:51:05.440 | You may have two of them.

00:51:06.440 | You may have a $1,000 one and a $300 one as well.

00:51:09.440 | So you can do it.

00:51:10.440 | You can take your cash and you can turn it into physical paper money--

00:51:15.440 | or it didn't work--a check that you could then put in an envelope

00:51:18.440 | and send off to your mortgage company.

00:51:20.440 | Is that a hassle?

00:51:21.440 | Certainly.

00:51:22.440 | I don't think most people need to do something like that

00:51:24.440 | for an ongoing period of time.

00:51:26.440 | But if somebody's trying to turn their life around

00:51:28.440 | and they're doing what I described and they're learning how to budget,

00:51:30.440 | I would be thrilled to see somebody who's deep in debt, not budgeting, etc.,

00:51:34.440 | do that for six months, do that for 12 months.

00:51:37.440 | Again, standing in line at the post office might give you

00:51:39.440 | a little bit of an opportunity to think about,

00:51:41.440 | "Well, we have to make this payment.

00:51:43.440 | I've got to send this $1,300.

00:51:45.440 | Is there a different living thing that we can do

00:51:47.440 | that would be a better use of money than what we're doing here?"

00:51:50.440 | It's not necessarily a bad thing.

00:51:52.440 | So you might buy a money order if there's something that you can't do with cash.

00:51:56.440 | The same thing could apply to shopping, for example, catalog shopping.

00:51:59.440 | Now, my fellow millennials may not know this

00:52:03.440 | because most of us have never in our lives done it,

00:52:06.440 | but you can buy things from catalogs that distance order

00:52:10.440 | by using money order and sending things in the mail.

00:52:13.440 | Is that necessarily the best thing to do?

00:52:15.440 | No, of course not.

00:52:16.440 | But is that something that's still worth considering

00:52:18.440 | to slow down your shopping and to say,

00:52:20.440 | "Hey, I can still buy things that aren't locally if I do something else"?

00:52:23.440 | Yes. Putting friction in the way, making it harder for yourself to spend money,

00:52:28.440 | is not, by definition, a bad thing.

00:52:31.440 | It's not something you need to do forever, just like--

00:52:34.440 | never-- it's not something you need to do forever.

00:52:37.440 | But beyond that, there are things that can't actually be paid in cash.

00:52:40.440 | Most important, again, would be things like certain business subscriptions,

00:52:43.440 | the website hosting plan for your website that's making you money.

00:52:47.440 | Well, you can solve that with getting a prepaid card as well.

00:52:51.440 | Ultimately, the best plan is not to do everything in cash.

00:52:54.440 | The best plan is to do a hybrid scenario.

00:52:57.440 | But you learn a lot by doing things all in cash and going extreme.

00:53:01.440 | Another actual problem with cash is theft or loss.

00:53:05.440 | You actually can have money taken from you that you will never get back

00:53:08.440 | when stuff is stolen.

00:53:10.440 | Now, the risk of theft is, in my opinion, massively overblown.

00:53:15.440 | I don't think muggers expect to get a wallet full of cash these days.

00:53:19.440 | I really don't.

00:53:21.440 | And so that is just-- I think somebody's saying,

00:53:25.440 | "Well, I'm concerned about having money in my purse because it's going to get stolen."

00:53:29.440 | I can't imagine that being an actual concern, really, at this point in time.

00:53:33.440 | But loss can be a significant concern, and there's no way around it.

00:53:36.440 | When you lose money, you lose money, and it's gone.

00:53:39.440 | And there's no worse feeling than losing money.

00:53:42.440 | And it can happen for various reasons, so be careful.

00:53:46.440 | But in general, I think the risk there is very small.

00:53:49.440 | Most of us are not going to lose money, and we lose money in all kinds of ways,

00:53:53.440 | with overdraft bank fees and spending too much money, etc.,

00:53:57.440 | and other things that we're often just not-- we don't pay attention to.

00:54:00.440 | So I think it's kind of a wash, but there can be a risk there.

00:54:06.440 | And then finally, the actual problem-- currency restrictions.

00:54:09.440 | Currency restrictions.

00:54:11.440 | If you want to recognize-- and this is one of the reasons why I did my personal experiment.

00:54:16.440 | For years, I've thought about, read about, just kind of considered the concept

00:54:20.440 | of what some people term "the war on cash."

00:54:23.440 | Some people use this term.

00:54:25.440 | The idea behind the term is that government figures who desire control over society

00:54:31.440 | and over you don't want there to be cash because the government can't regulate

00:54:35.440 | what happens with cash.

00:54:37.440 | If you hire a mechanic to work on your car, and you hand over $1,000 in physical cash,

00:54:45.440 | and the mechanic hands you a working car back, there is no way whatsoever--

00:54:52.440 | practically speaking, no way whatsoever-- how the government could regulate that guy,

00:54:57.440 | how they could prove what he's doing.

00:54:59.440 | There's practically no way whatsoever that the IRS can be aware of that transaction.

00:55:03.440 | And so you have the freedom and the ability to engage in free market transactions

00:55:08.440 | with other people for whatever you want.

00:55:10.440 | Let's say that you are hiring a prostitute.

00:55:14.440 | You can go, and you can use cash, and you can hire a prostitute,

00:55:18.440 | and there's practically no way, unless you got busted in a sting operation,

00:55:22.440 | that anybody would know about that illegal transaction because of the use of cash.

00:55:28.440 | And so constantly governments are trying to minimize the use of cash.

00:55:33.440 | And so you see this happening around the world, sometimes with actual law changes,

00:55:37.440 | sometimes with softer mechanisms, etc.

00:55:41.440 | And I've often wondered, is this actually true?

00:55:43.440 | Is this just kind of a wacky conspiracy theory where people say,

00:55:46.440 | "No, it's not actually true," or is this actually--

00:55:48.440 | is there really a press by people to do it?

00:55:51.440 | And so I said, "Well, let me see. Let me see what I can do."

00:55:54.440 | Well, I'll just give you the results.

00:55:56.440 | Maybe sometime I'll do a--at some point--a bit more extensive show on the actual data,

00:56:00.440 | other countries, etc., and kind of the proof.

00:56:02.440 | But I became convinced that it's not all kind of a secret conspiracy.

00:56:08.440 | Most people choose to use cash simply because it's more convenient for them.

00:56:12.440 | Most people recognize that cash takes time.

00:56:15.440 | It's hard to account for, etc.

00:56:16.440 | And so they just use credit cards because it's convenient.

00:56:19.440 | But there is, I'm convinced, an element, very certainly,

00:56:23.440 | where people desire more control over you.

00:56:25.440 | And it is astonishing how difficult it is to actually use cash

00:56:30.440 | in many situations in our modern world.

00:56:33.440 | The worst is a place like the post office.

00:56:35.440 | If you go into the post office and you want a money order,

00:56:37.440 | if you get more than $3,000--3 or 4--$3,000 or $4,000 of money orders,

00:56:42.440 | the post office will write you up with a--they'll verify your ID.

00:56:47.440 | They'll give you all kinds of hassle.

00:56:49.440 | You can't actually cash a money order, a decent-sized check--or, sorry, a money order--at most places.

00:56:54.440 | If somebody gives you a $500 money order--and the point of a money order is that

00:56:58.440 | money orders can be a fairly anonymous form of transfer that doesn't require cash.

00:57:03.440 | Take a $500 money order into the post office and try to cash it.

00:57:07.440 | And they generally almost never have the money.

00:57:09.440 | They don't--we can't cash that.

00:57:11.440 | You've got to come back at the end of the day when you have money.

00:57:13.440 | It's astonishing.

00:57:15.440 | And then you look at perhaps the most insidious effects of it,

00:57:18.440 | simply the massive devaluation of currency.

00:57:23.440 | If--I'll cover this another time and save the actual data for it.

00:57:28.440 | But if you go back and you study the currency transaction reports that are required

00:57:31.440 | by the Bank Secrecy Act from the '70s that imposes all these requirements

00:57:37.440 | where you've got to be reported to the government

00:57:39.440 | if you spend more than $10,000 of cash for a certain transaction.

00:57:44.440 | And you go back and you look at how just simply the insidious effects of inflation

00:57:48.440 | and how worthless it is that now--what used to be about $60,000 that you could spend

00:57:53.440 | in cash in today's dollars, now it's $10,000.

00:57:57.440 | That's how bad the inflation is.

00:57:59.440 | You look at the bills that are available.

00:58:01.440 | The fact that the biggest bill you can get now is a $100 bill,

00:58:03.440 | which is effectively pretty much what a $20 bill was

00:58:06.440 | when the $100 bill was standardized as the biggest bill.

00:58:09.440 | It is, for me, infuriating.

00:58:11.440 | If you care about liberty, one of the simplest things that you could do

00:58:14.440 | is just simply fill the cash economy up

00:58:17.440 | and stop spending anything but cash if you care about liberty.

00:58:20.440 | Now, do I think--I don't think it'll make a difference.

00:58:22.440 | Nobody's going to listen. Nobody's going to do it.

00:58:24.440 | But if you care about it, it's one of those little micro-protest things

00:58:28.440 | that maybe will make you feel good.

00:58:29.440 | I certainly feel good about it.

00:58:32.440 | But the currency restrictions are hard to get around.

00:58:34.440 | The physical currency restrictions that most people have on their ATMs,

00:58:37.440 | where the ATM won't give you more than $400,

00:58:40.440 | which is actually far higher than many places in the world.

00:58:42.440 | If it's capped at $150, you can get out of the ATM.

00:58:45.440 | Now, you can get around some of that stuff by cashing checks with your bank,

00:58:48.440 | cashing checks with the banks that drew it on you,

00:58:51.440 | cashing--getting increased ATM limits.

00:58:54.440 | I've recommended that many times.

00:58:56.440 | Everybody should have increased ATM withdrawal limits on their card

00:58:58.440 | so you can get thousands of dollars out in a day

00:59:00.440 | instead of being capped at $500 or $1,000.

00:59:03.440 | But it's infuriating also the fees that banks charge.

00:59:07.440 | For example, you go and cash a check.

00:59:09.440 | I learned all this the hard way.

00:59:10.440 | Let's say that somebody pays you, and that person is from Chase Bank.

00:59:17.440 | Somebody pays you that has an account with Chase Bank.

00:59:19.440 | And so you don't have an account with Chase Bank,

00:59:21.440 | but you want to go and cash the check.

00:59:22.440 | You can always take a check that's issued by a bank,

00:59:25.440 | and you can take it to the check that wrote it out on,

00:59:28.440 | and you can cash it there at that branch.

00:59:30.440 | So you take it to Chase Bank.

00:59:32.440 | Well, Chase Bank will charge you $6, $8, $10, something like that

00:59:36.440 | if you don't have an account there.

00:59:37.440 | And so your $200 check will be destroyed by $10 if that's what it is.

00:59:42.440 | Now, little tip, you can get around some of that stuff

00:59:44.440 | if you have any kind of business.

00:59:45.440 | You may not have a Chase checking account,

00:59:47.440 | but if you have a Chase credit card, you give them your Chase credit card,

00:59:50.440 | and you can do that.

00:59:52.440 | So they'll get you around it that way.

00:59:54.440 | So that's one thing that you can do.

00:59:56.440 | There are other things that you could do as well,

00:59:58.440 | but the currency restrictions and the amount of invasiveness

01:00:01.440 | is insane.

01:00:03.440 | For example, Wells Fargo.

01:00:04.440 | If somebody gives you a check for Wells Fargo,

01:00:06.440 | and you go to Wells Fargo to cash it,

01:00:08.440 | first, of course, you have to present multiple forms of identification.

01:00:11.440 | It's got to be government identification.

01:00:13.440 | So you have to have a picture ID, driver's license, passport,

01:00:16.440 | something like that, and then a second form of identification as well.

01:00:20.440 | But in addition to that, they take your thumbprint.

01:00:23.440 | They want your thumbprint on a check simply for cashing a check.

01:00:27.440 | I caused many a scene in Wells Fargo lobbies

01:00:30.440 | just complaining and whining about the invasion of privacy.

01:00:33.440 | But at the end of the day, what's your choice?

01:00:36.440 | What option do you have?

01:00:37.440 | Well, I always give them the back of my palm and smudge it.

01:00:40.440 | You can try that.

01:00:41.440 | But it's ridiculous.

01:00:43.440 | And the American society has gotten so soft

01:00:46.440 | and so just cowed

01:00:48.440 | that nobody stands up and says,

01:00:50.440 | "No, I'm not giving you my thumbprint to cash a check.

01:00:53.440 | This is off your bank. This is off your account.

01:00:56.440 | So I'm going to pay you $8 and give you a thumbprint."

01:00:58.440 | It's ridiculous.

01:01:00.440 | But there is almost no discernible--maybe it's out there--

01:01:03.440 | almost no discernible desire for freedom, liberty, etc.

01:01:07.440 | Nobody's--in the name of drug war and illegal immigration,

01:01:11.440 | people will give up every single one of their bits of liberty.

01:01:16.440 | It's remarkable.

01:01:19.440 | I guess I shouldn't end a show like this on a personal rant,

01:01:22.440 | but it's infuriating.

01:01:23.440 | If you doubt that there's a war on cash, do what I did.

01:01:26.440 | Go hardcore and say, "Let's figure this out for myself."

01:01:29.440 | And you tell me a year from now what your results are.

01:01:32.440 | I don't see how a person who is running any kind of normal-sized financial life--

01:01:40.440 | if I were 16 years old and just taking care of myself

01:01:42.440 | and living on a small financial life,

01:01:44.440 | yeah, I could do it with cash.

01:01:46.440 | I don't see how any of us, though,

01:01:47.440 | that are running a normal-sized financial life can do it,

01:01:52.440 | let alone get into dealing with the police and the cash currency seizures

01:01:58.440 | if you get caught with cash.

01:02:00.440 | There are some really remarkable things about it.

01:02:02.440 | But those are an impediment.

01:02:04.440 | But at the end of the day, I try not to complain.

01:02:07.440 | Forgive me for complaining if I have done so here.

01:02:09.440 | I try to just say, "What can I do?"

01:02:11.440 | And the thing that I try to do is to normalize cash.

01:02:14.440 | I don't want to lose the ability to pay with cash.

01:02:17.440 | I am deeply concerned.

01:02:18.440 | At some point I have a show in my outlines

01:02:21.440 | which is called the number one risk that many of us face,

01:02:23.440 | which is the deplatforming of people from financial systems.

01:02:28.440 | When all of a sudden PayPal tells you,

01:02:30.440 | "No, you can't do business on our system,"

01:02:33.440 | that can be really, really devastating.

01:02:35.440 | When all of a sudden Bank of America says,

01:02:36.440 | "No, we're not going to do business with you

01:02:38.440 | because we don't like the product that you sell,"

01:02:40.440 | even though it's completely legal and completely--

01:02:43.440 | we're not dodging the tax man.

01:02:45.440 | Everything is completely legal.

01:02:46.440 | "But we just don't like the business that you're in."

01:02:49.440 | That's a major, major risk.

01:02:51.440 | About the only solutions that we have are cash

01:02:55.440 | or possibly alternative forms of currency.

01:02:58.440 | But cash is the simplest. It's the best.

01:03:01.440 | If you want to make a difference, just start using cash.

01:03:03.440 | It can be a small protest thing that you can do.

01:03:06.440 | It's good for you.

01:03:07.440 | It's good for the people that you work with.

01:03:09.440 | It is good.

01:03:10.440 | It will probably be a learning curve.

01:03:13.440 | It'll probably be unusual.

01:03:14.440 | I remember the first time I started asking people for cash,

01:03:16.440 | to pay me in cash.

01:03:18.440 | It was weird for me because I felt like,

01:03:20.440 | "Oh, I'm some kind of tax cheater or something,

01:03:22.440 | sending people to give me cash."

01:03:24.440 | But if you care about having something,

01:03:26.440 | you've got to use it.

01:03:27.440 | So if you care about the local store

01:03:29.440 | that you can just go to and buy something

01:03:32.440 | and have it in your hands right away

01:03:34.440 | without giving ID and giving a home address

01:03:37.440 | and giving all kinds of stuff,

01:03:38.440 | you've got to go and shop there

01:03:39.440 | and be willing to pay a little bit more

01:03:40.440 | if that's what it takes.

01:03:41.440 | If you care about having cash available to you, do it.

01:03:44.440 | I don't see a loss.

01:03:46.440 | I've acknowledged where there are shortcomings,

01:03:48.440 | time, etc., theft.

01:03:51.440 | I've acknowledged that.

01:03:52.440 | But since...

01:03:54.440 | One of the things I've found is just simply,

01:03:56.440 | with me, I spend less money when I use cash.

01:04:00.440 | I feel more of a sense of control.

01:04:01.440 | I feel confident that I'm not overspending,

01:04:03.440 | which makes me feel good.

01:04:05.440 | When I'm overspending, I feel out of control

01:04:07.440 | and it's very uncomfortable.

01:04:09.440 | When I spend cash for the majority of things,

01:04:11.440 | anything that I do in person,

01:04:13.440 | I feel in control.

01:04:15.440 | And that, in my experience,

01:04:17.440 | is a very powerful feeling.

01:04:19.440 | So if you've never done it, give it a try.

01:04:21.440 | Run an experiment for a few months.

01:04:23.440 | I think you'll learn some lessons from it,

01:04:26.440 | as I learned.

01:04:27.440 | You'll learn lessons from it.

01:04:28.440 | And you may grow that you enjoy certain things

01:04:30.440 | and you start to benefit from it.

01:04:32.440 | You'll have to grow.

01:04:34.440 | I remember I used to always top off my tank,

01:04:36.440 | for example, because you just swipe the credit card

01:04:38.440 | and fill up the tank.

01:04:39.440 | Well, I switched to paying cash for gas.

01:04:41.440 | So what does that mean?

01:04:42.440 | Well, you either have to make two trips in.

01:04:44.440 | You pay, you walk in, you give them your $60

01:04:46.440 | and you come back and get the change.

01:04:48.440 | It's not that big of a deal.

01:04:49.440 | Or you get good at estimating how much money

01:04:51.440 | you can fit in your gas tank

01:04:52.440 | by just simply looking at your cage.

01:04:54.440 | So just fun little things like that.

01:04:56.440 | But I've gained a lot from my experiments with cash

01:04:58.440 | and I have grown a lot wealthier

01:05:00.440 | since I stopped overspending by using cards.

01:05:04.440 | So I recommend that to you.

01:05:06.440 | As I close today's show, I'll remind you

01:05:08.440 | about my "How to Survive and Thrive

01:05:10.440 | During the Coming Economic Crisis" course.

01:05:12.440 | And cash is a very, very important part

01:05:16.440 | of planning for any economic crisis.

01:05:19.440 | Whether it's a broad-scale economic crisis,

01:05:22.440 | you know, lights went out and there's no power

01:05:25.440 | and you've got cash in your pocket, right?

01:05:26.440 | That's going to be a minor economic crisis.

01:05:28.440 | Nobody can get on the trains, nobody can buy food.

01:05:30.440 | Well, you got cash in your pocket

01:05:31.440 | or after a hurricane, something like that.

01:05:32.440 | Or whether it's a personal crisis, right?

01:05:34.440 | You got thrown in jail and somebody's got to bail you out.

01:05:37.440 | Well, where are you going to get the money?

01:05:39.440 | Well, if you do what I recommend,

01:05:41.440 | is make sure that you, maybe you got a home safe.

01:05:45.440 | When you keep $10,000 of cash in the home safe,

01:05:47.440 | well, now your spouse or your family

01:05:49.440 | can grab out a few thousand dollars

01:05:51.440 | and come bail you out of jail

01:05:52.440 | so you don't have to spend the night in prison.

01:05:54.440 | Things like that matter.

01:05:56.440 | And those can be minor crises, big crises, minor crises.

01:05:59.440 | Cash plays a role in all of those things.

01:06:02.440 | But if you're going to manage cash,

01:06:03.440 | you've got to be able to manage it effectively,

01:06:06.440 | keep it safe, keep it private, et cetera.

01:06:08.440 | And one of the interesting things

01:06:10.440 | that many of my students in that course really enjoy

01:06:13.440 | is in that course, I actually go through extensively

01:06:15.440 | and talk about how to do things like travel safely with cash,

01:06:19.440 | how to manage cash, how to go abroad

01:06:22.440 | and follow the laws about, usually,

01:06:25.440 | about a $10,000 limit on moving with cash,

01:06:28.440 | but yet how to actually physically move abroad

01:06:30.440 | with significant amounts of cash.

01:06:32.440 | Talk about how to secure your cash,

01:06:34.440 | how to travel with secure suitcases.

01:06:36.440 | So if you have valuable items with you,

01:06:38.440 | they're protected from theft.

01:06:39.440 | I go through a lot of that interesting content

01:06:44.440 | on how to travel.

01:06:45.440 | I teach in that course about how to travel

01:06:48.440 | through airport security with a fully locked suitcase.

01:06:52.440 | I'm talking about a silly TSA lock,

01:06:56.440 | but a fully locked suitcase,

01:06:57.440 | where I teach you how you can actually

01:07:00.440 | transport yourself around the world

01:07:02.440 | with a suitcase that the TSA agents

01:07:04.440 | and security screeners can't open,

01:07:07.440 | and actually a secure suitcase.

01:07:08.440 | And this can help with, I talk about secure suitcases,

01:07:11.440 | what makes a secure suitcase.

01:07:12.440 | That can be really helpful.

01:07:13.440 | If you're walking around the world with $10,000 of cash,

01:07:16.440 | that's a lot of money.

01:07:17.440 | And you're in hotels, and you're moving here and there.

01:07:20.440 | It can be super important.

01:07:21.440 | I mean, imagine yourself living in an economic collapse.

01:07:23.440 | One of the most important things that you need

01:07:26.440 | is to be able to manage your cash,

01:07:27.440 | but yet you have to protect that,

01:07:29.440 | because if the cash disappears or it's stolen,

01:07:31.440 | you've got major problems.

01:07:33.440 | So I give you a bunch of strategies

01:07:34.440 | about how to hide cash, about how to protect cash,

01:07:37.440 | about how to move with cash around the country,

01:07:39.440 | around the world.

01:07:40.440 | You need to know the laws,

01:07:41.440 | and you need to know how to follow them

01:07:43.440 | and protect yourself.

01:07:44.440 | So it's just some of the interesting things

01:07:45.440 | that I talk about in that course.

01:07:46.440 | If any of that piques your interest,

01:07:48.440 | I think you'll really enjoy it.

01:07:49.440 | Go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/store.

01:07:51.440 | Sign up for my How to Survive and Thrive

01:07:53.440 | During the Coming Economic Crisis course.

01:07:55.440 | Super proud of that one.

01:07:56.440 | Reworking some things and adding some things,

01:07:58.440 | but it's really good stuff,

01:08:00.440 | a really good course for you.

01:08:01.440 | How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Crisis.

01:08:03.440 | Go now to radicalpersonalfinance.com/store.

01:08:08.440 | With Kroger Brand products from Ralph's,

01:08:10.440 | you can make all your favorite things this holiday season.

01:08:13.440 | Because Kroger Brand's proven quality products

01:08:15.440 | come at exceptionally low prices.

01:08:17.440 | And with a money-back quality guarantee,

01:08:20.440 | every dish is sure to be a favorite.

01:08:22.440 | Whether you shop delivery, pickup, or in-store,

01:08:29.440 | Kroger Brand has all your favorite things.

01:08:32.440 | Ralph's. Fresh for Everyone.

01:08:35.440 | (upbeat music)

RPF0661-Back_to_Basics-The_Power_of_Cash