(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm Chris Hutchins, and I've been tracking my spending for years, trying to optimize my expenses in every category to save money without having to make big sacrifices. So I am so excited to share everything I've learned, including the best software to make this process easy, how to set everything up and avoid some common pitfalls, as well as all my tips and tactics for saving money across every category of spending.

So if you wanna understand your spending, be more intentional about where your money goes and ultimately save some money along the way, I think you'll love this episode. So let's jump in right after this. I've heard too many stories from friends, family, and even listeners about identity theft and phishing scams causing so much pain and hassle, and it's just not something I want in my life.

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And a lot of people I know know one of those two numbers offhand. And I'm actually gonna do an entire future episode on this topic, how you track it, project it, and all that kind of stuff. I've tested a lot of the tools to play around with those projections, and I think it'd be really interesting.

But while a lot of people know their net worth, I find that a lot fewer people know how much money they're actually spending each month, which is so important, because without that number, it's really hard to make any projection or forecast about how your net worth might go up or down every month or year.

Also, when you understand how much you're spending, you can be so much more intentional about where you spend, and you can learn a lot and honestly save money. Just by seeing where we spend money and tracking things, I'm learning a lot and actually making changes. So let me go back to when I first started doing this.

A long time ago, Mint launched, and I used it to link a few accounts and start tracking all my expenses, but very quickly, it died. The categorization was so terrible that everything seemed wrong, and it was really tedious. About five or six years ago, I started doing this again, but in a little bit of a different way.

So at first, it was just high level. I would make a spreadsheet for the purposes of trying to figure out how much our net worth would change each year, where I outlined all the fixed expenses and about how much I thought I'd be spending on a monthly basis on everything else, but it wasn't that accurate.

It was good to get a sense of, oh, maybe I'm gonna save this much, but I wasn't really sure if it was in any way, shape, or form true. So I went back to my old Mint account, and I linked some accounts, and I started asking Amy if she could help.

And every year for two years in a row, we would go through at the end of the year and try our best to categorize thousands of transactions all at once. It was a painful process. It wasn't very intentional. And honestly, by the end, it didn't feel good at all.

So we gave up on it very quickly. In the last couple of years, as we've been preparing for a world with no salaries, starting off with me, and then ultimately Amy, I gave it a shot again, and it got so much better. And now that we don't have any regular salaries, it's even more important for us to understand our spending habits and our cashflow, because we actually have to transfer money each month from our savings into our checking account so we can just pay our bills.

Now, you'll notice I haven't really talked about budgeting yet, because I prefer to think about spending tracking, but budgeting and spending tracking in some ways are really the same thing with a little bit of different nuance. And if you search for spending tracking apps and budgeting apps, almost all of them will do the same thing.

But to me, it's really different. When I think about budgeting, it's much more about setting an amount of money you wanna spend in different places and tracking whether you're doing it and making sure you're allocating all of your money into the right place so you can save. Whereas spending tracking for me is a little bit more of a reactive approach.

I wanna see how much money I'm spending on groceries to decide whether I think I wanna make any changes. It's not about saying our goal is to only spend $300 a month on X and really tracking that week to week to make sure we don't go over it. That said, in the process of doing all of this spending tracking, I actually think it is helpful to have a budget.

But for me, the budget is really more like a monthly or annual target, just so I can see how we're trending against our expectations, because those expectations are usually what I'm using to make projections about the future or just to kind of get a sense of whether we're spending more or less than we make or an idea of how much we'll be able to save each year or how much we might have to dip into our savings if we're spending too much.

So by having a budget, it's really more for us about having an expectation of what we think we're gonna spend and being able to see if we're trending above or below that number. The best part about all this, by the way, if we talk about how to even get started, is that once you have a system set up, it is so much less work to maintain than you'd think.

Maybe a couple of minutes a day. And honestly, I think if you have the right tool to do this, it almost feels a little bit like a game because every time you add more transactions, you get more data, you get to see how you're tracking, and it really doesn't feel like work.

So let's talk about the tools you can use to make this really easy. First off, there are probably an unlimited number of tools and I'm gonna miss a ton of them because every year, new ones crop up, old ones die. So surely you're gonna have one that I missed or you're gonna have some that you find on the internet that I don't cover, and it's just impossible for me to do them all.

But at the highest level, the way almost every one of these tools works is by pulling in your transactions from bank accounts. Now, yes, you could also have a budget by exporting all of your transactions, putting them into a spreadsheet, doing things manually. That is totally possible. That is not within the scope of this conversation, mostly because there is no way to make that system simple and only take a few minutes a day or week.

And so I much prefer thinking about a system that's easy and simple and works in an automated basis. So what almost all of these products are doing are using one of a few service providers that help aggregate data from your various accounts. The most common ones are Plaid and Yodlee.

There are a few others that happen on the backend. MX is one and there's a couple others, but almost every consumer app I've seen is using Plaid or Yodlee as the primary source because they have some of the widest coverage and the best data. Now, how this actually works and something important to keep in mind is when you log into an app and you say, I wanna link my Chase account or my Capital One account or my Bank of America account, more often than not, you're gonna get a screen that pops up and that screen's from the aggregator.

It's not from the app creator. And you're gonna put your login and password on that screen. Now, a couple financial institutions have started to adopt this thing called open banking where instead of actually typing in your username and password, you get redirected to the Chase site or the Capital One site.

You put in your username and password there and you authenticate that you're allowing Chase or Capital One to share your data with that app. I love that direction, but with 20,000 plus financial institutions needing to implement that open banking technology, it's gonna take a while. So what's important to know is if an institution doesn't support that, you're gonna type in your login and password into a screen that's managed by Plaid or Yodlee or whatever the linking provider is, and they're gonna go log into your bank account on their server and pass that information back on to the app in question.

And what's important about that flow is that the app you're using should never get access to any of your credentials, your username or password. And the company that's actually doing the aggregating is doing everything in a much more secure and monitored way than you need to rely on any of these apps to do.

I haven't had any concern using any of these apps in the past. When it comes to Plaid and Yodlee, I'm very trustworthy of what they're doing. It's read-only. I'm not worried about sharing my logins. That said, I would love them all to support open banking and have authentication instead of username and password stuff, because that's even more secure.

I will caveat one important thing. There are a few apps I've used in the past. I mentioned this in a past episode about the Max Rewards app for credit card tracking, where the username and password fields were actually not on pop-ups that said Plaid or Yodlee and were run by the linking sites.

And for those apps, I would immediately turn away, delete the app and not use it. I want to be 100% sure that when I'm typing in my username and password to my banking site, it is on a site of a brand I trust like Plaid, like Yodlee, like MX, like any of the other major linking providers.

So none of the tools that I'm talking about are ones where I've seen a circumstance where they're actually trying to collect your username and password first and pass them on. So I wouldn't be worried about that with these tools, but in any case, if you're using an app to do this, I would definitely make sure that you're typing in your username and password on a pop-up or a modal or a page run by the linking aggregation sites.

Okay, so let's go to the tools that I played around with because the way I did this project and it was actually a little while ago. So on the plus side, I have some history of using them. On the downside, some of it's not as fresh as I want, but I actually opened up an account with Copilot, Monarch Money.

I already had one with Mint, Rocket Money, Tiller HQ and YNAB. And I went through the entire process of syncing 2022 transactions across all my accounts, categorizing them and looking at the reports. And since then, I've also, in the past week, gone in and done the same thing for Simplify, which is a product from Quicken.

So I went through the process for all of these tools and played with all of them, categorized everything. And so I wanna be clear that this is not everything. Ultimately, I ended up picking Copilot as the tool I thought was the best for me. And after becoming such a huge fan of the product, I probably used it six to 12 months at the time, I reached out to the team and said, "Hey guys, I really love your product.

I don't wanna talk about any other personal finance products when it comes to spending tracking. And could we work together?" Fortunately, after some back and forth, we found a way to make that work. They are now a sponsor of the show. However, they did not ask me to make this episode.

They don't even know I'm making this episode. They're not paying me to produce this episode. Everything in this episode is purely my own opinions. I was gonna make this episode whether they were a sponsor or not. But fortunately, I'm super excited to have them as a sponsor because I love the product.

So if you go to allthehacks.com/copilot, you can get two months free. And throughout this episode, because as I mentioned in the intro, it's not just about how to track all of this. I wanna go through every single category where we spend money and talk about all the different things that we've thought about and some of the hacks and processes and tools we use to try to bring down our cost without making a lot of sacrifices.

And that's gonna be a lot of this conversation. Hopefully you'll be able to use a lot of those tips to save money yourself. Within that process, I actually do talk about some other brands that I work with in the show and plenty of brands that I don't. And I just wanna be clear again that none of the brands that I'm partnering with in the show know that I'm even mentioning them in this episode, have paid me to mention this episode.

I do have sponsors. Those sponsors do pay for the advertisements you hear on the show. I introduce all of them with a little whoosh sound and you can kind of tell that there's a sponsor coming in. I talk about how excited I am to have them partnering with the podcast.

But throughout the rest of this episode, you will hear me talk about some brands that I love. And to the extent those brands have offers or deals for listeners, I'm gonna mention those. And I just thought it was good to be fully transparent that some of those brands are sponsors.

Some of those links might not be sponsors. They might be my personal referral links, but none of them have paid to be here. And I've tried my best to only talk about the products and services that I've evaluated or that I think are great, which fortunately is exactly how I think about sponsors.

Whenever I find a product I love that I wanna talk about, I reach out to them and say, can we work together? Because I really wanna only work with brands with products I love. So with that aside, let's talk about some of these tools. And again, I've used most of them for hours at a time going through all of these products, trying to decide what makes sense.

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That's allthehacks.com/mintmobile, M-I-N-T, mobile, and cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at allthehacks.com/mintmobile. As I said, I loved Copilot. It's what I use every day. It's how Amy and I get on the same page about spending. However, it's not a free app and it's only on iOS and Mac.

So I totally get that it's not gonna be a perfect option for everyone. For some of you, you'd rather use a free app and there are options. And for some of you, you have Android and you don't have an iOS or Mac and that won't work. So like I said, to test all of these products, I went through and I spent hours with each of them trying to figure out what worked.

And it was really hard not to want to put Copilot ahead. From a speed standpoint, from a design standpoint, from a functionality standpoint, from the automatic categorization standpoint, you'll hear me talk about a lot of features of these tools that I really like. And a lot of them are features that I love about Copilot because that's what I'm using.

However, it's not a free product. If you want a free product, you can use Mint, you can use Rocket Money. I think they have a lot of limitations. Mint is filled with ads and not as customizable as you'd want. Rocket Money was a past partner of the show because I actually love the product for canceling subscriptions and making it super easy to automate that process and negotiate your bills.

But when it comes to the spending and savings tracking, I think it's a little slow. I don't think it works as well on the web as I'd want it to, but it is a free product if you want something free. But if you're willing to pay and you don't have an iOS or Mac on Android, you could use something like Monarch Money or Simplify is an interesting one because when I was prepping for this episode, I was doing a little bit of research and I wanted to see if someone had done some similar content.

Turns out Wirecutter did a whole post on the best expense tracking and budgeting apps. And they came to Simplify as the number one. However, when I went to the competition section and looked at all the products they used, they left off so many options that it's really hard for me to take their recommendation too seriously.

In fact, they didn't even include Copilot, Monarch, Rocket Money, and a handful of other popular tools in the evaluation. So I wouldn't trust that review too much until it gets updated. But the fact that Simplify came out ahead and I didn't include it when I went through this whole process earlier this year made me think maybe I should go back and give it a look.

And after that process, I am totally confused how it became number one. I went in and tried to use the product, I linked all my accounts, and there were so many things that didn't make sense to me. First off, you go in and categorize all your transactions, but those categories don't actually get linked to any budget or tracking ability that I could find until you created a separate spending plan, which you had to one-by-one re-add all of your transactions in, and then everything else fell into another category.

You couldn't look at categories and subcategories together. You had to pick one. I didn't think the design was great, but I thought maybe I just don't get it. Maybe I was not using it right. So I searched on YouTube for a video of someone else using it to try to see if there was someone out there who is a diehard fan to see if they could explain why it was so awesome.

I literally only found one or two videos that wasn't produced by Quicken itself. And for both of them, I think they did a pretty bad job of selling it. And one of them, which actually looked like it had the most promise, it was someone reviewing their actual spending so there was real data in there.

It seemed like multiple times, the woman reviewing it had to go and fix something or correct something 'cause it wasn't working or was a bit confused. So I don't know. I couldn't figure out why this was the number one tool. Does it do the job? Probably. Does it make sense to me?

Was it simple and easy to use? Not at all. So I might be missing something, but I didn't get that recommendation at all. Now, if you're hearing all that and wondering, where is YNAB? Don't worry. I didn't leave it off completely. I have tested out YNAB multiple times. The main difference between YNAB and why ultimately for me it's not the right tool is that they really focus on what's called zero balance budgeting.

YNAB calls it giving every dollar a job. Now what that means is every bit of income coming in needs to be assigned somewhere so that you can know where all of your money is going. For me, that's not what I'm trying to do here. I'm not trying to make sure that everything is going to the right place, including savings and all that.

I'm really just trying to understand how much money I'm spending. And so that actually is not the process I wanted to follow. Even more so now that we don't have income from a regular job, we don't actually have dollars to give jobs to. So zero balance budgeting is definitely something that I think can be really valuable for people who are just starting to learn how to save and budget and want to figure out how to allocate that savings, who need to get a better grasp of applying money towards debt pay down or future goals or building their emergency fund, or just people that like that form of budgeting where you're actually making sure you know where every single dollar is and you can account for it.

I definitely think YNAB is a great tool. You can even get a 34-day free trial at allthehacks.com/ynab. And you can listen to episode 16 where I had Jesse Meacham, the founder of YNAB on the show, to give his perspective on budgets and budgeting, which I think will give a different perspective than I have.

So if you wanna go back and listen to that, I'll put the link in the show notes. But at the end of the day, for the purposes of what I wanted to do and what I thought made the most sense for us, which was tracking our spending and understanding all the categories that money gets spent on, Copilot was the tool that I thought made the most sense.

That said, a lot of what you need to do to get these tools all set up is the same. So I'm gonna talk about that. And it's a process that will apply to almost any tool you're using. So the first part of that process is setting up categories. Because at the end of the day, the main action you're gonna take that takes time is just making sure all of your expenses are tied to a specific category so you can do some analysis later.

And I'm actually gonna run through all the categories I use. Almost every one of these tools, by the way, will give you a set of default categories. And you can choose to use them, modify them, use some of them. There's plenty of options. I think there's a few things that are important to understand.

One, at the end of the day, the level of granularity you need is really up to you. For us, we don't need to know the difference between coffee shops, bars, restaurants, fast food, and everything else. We just generally wanna know how much we spend going out to eat. Also, you could decide you wanna go in and categorize all the shopping you do into every category, or you can just put it all into shopping.

So that's a personal decision. I think a really important thing to keep in mind is you wanna get directionally important. You can always drill down. If you put everything in food and you realize it's too much, you can look into food and look at all the expenses. You can recategorize them later.

So I would err on the side of not making it too much work up front and deciding later if you need more. Though I'm sure there's someone listening that would say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, that's so much harder." If you have more categories up front and you wanna reassign them, it's much easier.

So I'll leave it to you to decide what you want. But here are the categories and subcategories we ended up using. And I'll talk a little bit about what they are. First off, I'll do all the categories first, and then I'll break each one down into subcategories so you can kind of get a sense of this.

I'll probably see if there's an easy way to put this in the show notes because it's probably not the easiest thing for you to just sit down and write down. But we break everything up into household, car and transport, children, health and wellness, lifestyle, food and drink, shopping, gifts and donations, fees, and two others which are actually hidden categories for credit card payments and work expenses, which I'll come back to.

Within household, we break things into home loans, but obviously if you rent, you'd have rent. Dog, could be other pets. Insurance, bills and expenses, which is things like phone, cable, internet. Home, which is things like furniture, cleaning supplies, utilities, and property taxes. We have car and transport, makes sense.

For car, it's our monthly payments, it's any maintenance and service costs. And then transportation is things like taxis, train cards, Lyft rides, Ubers, et cetera. Within children, we've got childcare, children and education. I think childcare makes sense, that's our au pair. Children is all of the miscellaneous expenses that you buy for kids, which seems like a very big part of our budget right now.

And also one that I think was really helpful to get an understanding of how much it is because it's something that you're kind of always adding little purchases to. And I never really had a good sense of what we're spending. And then education, which is cost for preschool right now, but in the future could include tutors and courses and anything like that.

In health and wellness, we have fitness, healthcare and personal care. I think those all kind of make sense. Personal care, meaning things like haircuts or if one of us were to get a massage or a manicure or something like that. In lifestyle, I have subscriptions, entertainment, personal and travel.

Subscriptions is things like Spotify or Netflix. Entertainment is stuff like if we buy tickets or go to a zoo or a museum, or Amy and I wanna do an escape room. Personal is actually a category that I created for all of the things that you might spend money on that don't fall into other categories that are personal to you.

But it turns out there aren't that many expenses there. I don't even think we had one last year. So I don't know if you really need it, but if someone wanted to buy a nice handbag, maybe you don't wanna call that clothing and you could put it in personal.

And then travel is a bucket for all of our travel. Food and drink, that's where we have only two categories. Groceries and dining and drinks, which like I mentioned earlier, encompasses everything. Within shopping, we really just have shops and clothing. I know some people wanna go in and break down all their expenses, but for us, shops is basically Target and a few other transactions.

In gifts and donations, we have gifts, which is birthday gifts, Christmas gifts, all those kinds of things. And then donations is any money we contribute to charity, which mostly for us is just contributions to our Daffy account. I'll come back to that. Last is fees. This is an interesting one because we have a lot of credit cards with annual fees.

This one actually is not insignificant, but anytime I get credits back on a credit card for purchases, I also throw them into fees if they are credits for things I would have normally already spent money on. So that's important because for example, with a Chase Sapphire Reserve, the $300 travel credits, I was gonna spend money on travel anyways.

So I categorize those credits in fees to help offset the actual costs of those fees. So for example, we have a subscription to SiriusXM. I rarely use it, but we have it on one of our cars. It's free because Amex has an entertainment credit. So when the Sirius charge comes in, it's all auto-categorized as entertainment, but the credit from Amex for that charge, that digital entertainment credit, I categorize that credit as entertainment because it's not fair to offset the fees with that credit because I wouldn't otherwise pay for Sirius.

So a little confusing, but if I'm getting credits from credit cards that aren't things that I would have paid for, I just categorize them into the fees category. Have another category called other, which is where if I don't know where something goes, I put it into other. However, we don't really have anything here, and if we ever found a transaction in other, it would probably more be a signal that we need to create a new category than that we would keep using it.

Finally, I mentioned the last two categories, and I guess there's a third. So one is credit card payments. I generally want a sense of how much money we're spending on our credit cards each month, just so I can kind of understand at a very high level what are our monthly credit card bills because I need to make sure there's enough money to pay them, et cetera.

So I have a hidden category in Copilot called credit card payments because all of the transactions on those credit cards are getting categorized as expenses, I don't wanna duplicate the credit card payments as transactions. So I have it as a hidden category that doesn't show up in our budgeting, but that I can look at if I wanna see how much am I spending each month on credit cards in general, which is actually really helpful just to get a sense of how many points did I earn last year?

How much did I put on credit cards? What was my average point earning? And then I have work expenses, which is another hidden category because any of those expenses that are related to the podcast, related to business, I wanna make sure I separate and don't count in our regular budget because I probably wouldn't have spent them if I didn't have a business that makes some money.

And so those are all hidden as well. I'm trying to put all of my work expenses on a work card that I don't actually integrate into Copilot at all. And the only challenge there is every now and then there's a purchase like a flight where I just really wanna earn five points per dollar more than I want to have those separate.

And so there's just a handful of work expenses a year that I put on a personal card because usually there was a lot more points to be earned. And so I wanna hide those from the budget. Finally, there's a category that's a non-category that's just excluded, which I use for things that don't really matter or don't make sense or don't fit into any of these.

On Copilot at least there's a whole separate thing where you can categorize something as an internal transfer or income. And so if you didn't hear any of those things that's because I put income and income. And if I'm transferring money between accounts that's an internal transfer. So those are all the categories.

And with each category, there are budgets associated with them. Almost all of these tools will help you automatically do those budgets based on your prior spending and then you can tweak them from there, which is how we did it. One of the tricky things here is that almost every piece of software goes in and looks at budgets on a monthly basis, which is great except for some cases like property tax where we pay it twice a year.

So some apps, Copilot being one of them, let you go in and set different budgets for each month. So you could say my property tax budget is $0 a month, but in the two months a year that we have to pay property tax, it's whatever that amount is. So that's how I've set it up for property tax.

And it's smart enough that it kind of forecasts into the future that it's gonna be the same months every year. And it also looks at your past transactions to know when it is. So it's pretty smart like that. That's how I do some things that are annual. The other alternative or compliment is using what's called carryover budgets.

So if you enable this on Copilot, you can take a budget and any money that's not spent will roll over to the next month. And this works really well on travel and any other category where you really probably have an annual budget. So it's not as much monthly, but the transactions happen across the year different times of the year.

So let's say you wanna spend $6,000 a year on travel. You can create a $500 a month travel budget with carryover so that each month you don't spend all $500. It just rolls over to the next month. And so at the end of the year, that should all balance out.

It also supports negative. So if you take your vacation in March, you'll just be negative and slowly get back to zero by the end of the year. And you can go in when you enable carryover budgets. You can actually say only on these categories or not on these categories.

So you're not having every category carryover. So that's how we solve some of the variability each month. Next, almost every one of these apps has something to track recurring expenses. The good apps almost all automate this. They look at your past transactions. They identify what things happen every month and they create a recurring expense.

They identify whether it's monthly, every other week, every two, three months, every year, and they create a separate place in the app for it, which is super helpful. So I can go somewhere and see what are all my recurring expenses, which is great 'cause you can identify ones you wanna get rid of.

It also is great because it tracks when things come in. And so for an example of how this feature worked, I was looking in Copilot the other day. I noticed that one of the bills I have hadn't been paid. It looked like it was overdue. So I was like, hmm, that's strange.

This bill's on autopay. What happened? So I logged into the site and I noticed that the credit card linked to that bill had expired and disabled autopay. So I quickly added a new credit card and I was able to pay the bill and avoid late fees, all because I noticed when I was monitoring recurring transactions that one of them was supposed to come.

So I think that covers almost all of the setup for all of these spending tracking apps. Each app might have its own nuance to how it works. So I can't speak to every single one, but for the most part, it's setting up your categories, categorizing your transactions, setting up budgets, making sure that any recurring expenses are logged as recurring.

And on a regular basis, all you need to do is go in and categorize transactions. And then on a monthly or annual basis, you'll be able to go in and see how things are trending, which is where the real, real value comes in. Now, I mentioned that on a regular basis, you have to go in and categorize transactions, but I did want to flag something that is really exciting.

So I just saw, as I'm recording this, the release notes from Copilot that they just launched something called Copilot Intelligence, which is using your data to build a model to automatically categorize your transactions. The really cool thing about it is that each individual user actually gets their own private categorization model based on their data, and it's not being used on everyone else.

So they're automatically looking at your past behaviors to suggest the categories you want, which is really cool. And even if they're not 100% sure on the right category, they're at least sorting the list based on the things they think are the most likely to be the right categories. I'm so excited to play with this.

I already think the model they're using is one of the best based on me going through five or six apps and doing this, but if they can really build out a model based on just my past transaction categorization, I think it's really likely to be the best categorization tool out there.

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Again, that's allthehacks.com/G-E-L-T. I just wanna thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com/deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. But next I wanna talk a little bit about some of the things that make this whole process confusing or messy and how I go about solving them.

So one is purchases at retailers that have lots of different categories assigned to them. So let's take Target, Amazon, anything like that. So one option is what I've done with Target, which is I just create a category called Shops and I throw everything in there. Now, we don't spend that much money at Target such that I think that's gonna have a big impact on our budget.

However, on Amazon, we do. And also, by the way, on Target, almost everything we're doing is in a similar category. Whereas on Amazon, we might buy furniture, we might buy sporting goods, we might buy food and groceries, we might buy household goods. So for Amazon, I really wanna make sure we get the categories right.

So two things. One, there is a page on Amazon that I can't believe I only just found where you can search for your transactions or you go to the account page and click on Transactions. And instead of sorting everything by orders and all your orders you've had, it sorts everything by credit card transactions.

So you can see $37 transaction, click here and see what it is. So that screen is incredibly helpful. It's also helpful for refunds, which I'll get to in a minute. But Copilot actually has this amazing feature where you can log into Amazon and they'll sync with your Amazon account.

And then whenever you have a purchase, they'll fill in straight natively within the app all of the purchased items that are associated with an order. So you might see $73 from Amazon, but you'll actually be able to also see all the items you purchased with that order and you'll be able to more easily categorize that transaction without having to go look somewhere else.

Another one like this is Venmo, where you'll see a bunch of transactions on your checking account that say Venmo in, out, in, out, in, out. And the way Copilot solves this is they set up an email forwarding system where you can set up a Gmail filter to auto forward your Venmo transaction emails to Copilot and only your Venmo ones.

And then they actually get data on what those individual transactions are. It's especially helpful if you ever have a balance in your Venmo account, because if someone sends you $100 and you don't cash it out, and then you send someone else $50, your bank account won't actually see any of those transactions.

So we've used that Venmo transaction to make this easier. Another category that can be confusing is cash and ATMs. So the way we think about this, if I see an ATM charge while we're traveling, I'll try to just pick the category that's most likely and be okay that it's not perfect.

If we took out money 'cause we were buying food while we were walking around the city, I'll call it food. If we took out money because we knew we would need to buy bus tickets, I'll call it transportation. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a lot easier than logging every individual cash transaction.

That said, we do have some cash that we keep around the house for various things. And if I'm spending any meaningful amount of money, let's call it something around $100 or more, I will go into Copilot after I do it and just add the transaction in my manual account.

You could do this on any app where you just add a manual transaction, but I try to only really do it if I think it's enough that matters, because it's too complicated if I just have five bucks that I bought something at a food truck, it's too much work.

That said, as you know, I love points, so I'm trying to put as little as possible on cash, but every now and then there's something that makes sense. And when I'm doing that, I wanna log that so that it's in there if it's enough that matters. So next, let's talk about refunds.

This one can be a bit of an annoying one for two reasons. One, the misalignment of when it happens. So the easy fix there is for Amy's birthday, I bought her a tennis racket, but I didn't know which size, so I bought two different sizes. I bought them in one month, and then we returned the one that wasn't the right size the next month.

So it looks like I spent twice as much on gifts in one month and then we got it back the next month. So I'll just go in on the return transaction and I'll just change the date to the purchase date transaction so that it all nets out in the same month.

And then on Amazon, it's a little bit more tricky because you need to go find what transaction the refund was associated with. So I'll just go to that transaction screen, look at the category, and just make sure I put whatever category the original transaction was on. Next, let's talk about splitting because it's especially relevant to Amazon stuff.

If I have a transaction that's not wholly in one category or not entirely mine, let's say I bought dinner for some friends, there's two options to deal with that. One, categorize the whole thing as food, and then if your friend Venmo's you money to pay you back for it, you can just put that deposit or credit in food as well, or you can just split the transaction in two and you can exclude half of it.

You could say dinner was $100, I'm splitting it, $50 is food, $50 is exclude. Or maybe you're out at dinner and half of it's a work expense you could say 50 to work expenses, 50 to food. On Amazon, sometimes there are purchases where some of the stuff is for the house, some of the stuff is for the kids, some of the stuff is for the dog.

And if it's a really, really big transaction, maybe on a rare case, I'll split the transaction so I can separately categorize it. But for the most part, I'm just choosing the category that makes the most sense. So if we spent $100, $75 on clothes and $25 on home, I just call it clothes.

And I don't worry about the fact that there's a little bit of home purchasing going into the clothing category, it just all kind of nets out. One other thing is maybe you have a transaction that's for a long period of time. I mentioned earlier that one way to do it is separate budgets.

So let's take insurance payments. A lot of car insurance, you pay every six months. So two options. One, you just go in and you set a car insurance budget where the budget is higher every six months and it's lower every other month. Or you can go in and you can click on the transaction, split it into six and allocate it over each of the next six months.

It's really a personal preference how you wanna do it. Depending on how frequent it is, how big it is, it may or may not matter, or you may or may not make sense to do one or the other. For me, I'm just thankful that USAA allows you to split your insurance bill into monthly payments without charging any fees.

So we just do that and don't worry about it for insurance. Next, I wanna talk about one feature that I wish all of these apps have. And to be fully transparent, I've emailed Copilot and said, "Please build this feature," is trying to manage cashflow. And so I'm gonna do a whole episode actually on how we do this and how we take our money and decide where it goes and in what order and all the financial automation we do to make it all efficient.

But I really wish that one of these apps would look at upcoming credit card bills, look at upcoming expenses we have, because it knows all of our recurring expenses, filter out the ones on credit cards because we don't pay for them the moment they hit, and show me over the next week or over the next month, here's how much money is estimated to be withdrawn from your checking account so I can make sure I have enough money in there.

Why does it matter? Well, because if that money is in my high-yield savings account or my Wealthfront Cash account, or if it's in short-term treasuries or in treasury ETF, I'm earning probably around 5% on that money. And if it's in my checking account, I'm not. And so I wanna leave as little money in checking as possible.

I know that all of these apps have enough information to tell me how much money I need in my checking account on any given day, but it's not something that any of them have built yet. So I can hope and cross my fingers. When I was looking at the AI features that Copilot launched, they said in the future, you'll be able to actually query your money and ask questions.

So maybe I'll be able to write a query that says, how many dollars do you think will get withdrawn for my checking account in the next 15 days? Maybe I can automate asking that question, or maybe they will just build this feature because I know I've talked to them about it and given them a lot of ideas of what it would be.

So, like I said, I'm gonna do a whole episode on how we think about all of our financial automation. It's really separate from budgeting, but I've put a lot of time into where does the money go? How does it go? How does it flow? So that like tracking our spending, we just don't spend that much time managing our money either, and it makes life really easy.

So before I jump into all the categories and how we think about saving money in them, I thought it might make sense to just jump into all the benefits of doing this and why it even makes sense to spend all this effort in the first place. So the biggest one for me is that we get to see how much we spend in all these different categories.

We get to see how on both a category and subcategory level, we get to see our month to date trends. I love that. I love that we can go in and look at here's how much we spend in one area and here's how much we spend in another and actually ask ourselves whether that's aligned with how we wanna spend our money.

We often ask ourselves two questions. One, if we were gonna spend more money, where would we put it? Is there a category where we feel like we're too restrained? And then we ask ourselves, if we were to cut from our current spending, where would we cut? And then the real fun is when you look at those two things and compare it.

So let's say you're looking at all of your expenses and you say, if we could add 10% more, I think we'd travel more. And if we could cut 10%, I think we'd eat out less. Well, you can actually ask yourself, do we actually wanna travel more and eat out less now?

And you can consider swapping them and reallocating. And I think it's a really interesting exercise to just think about where would we spend more of? Where would we spend less of? And how do those two things align? Also, like I said before, I love that I can see these upcoming recurring expenses, ones that are overdue, track how they've changed over time, know when it's time to go call up companies to negotiate better prices and all of that.

I also think it puts a lot of expenses in perspective. It's really easy for me to get stressed out when I'm going to the grocery store and I see something I want that's not on sale, but often is, especially when it comes to fruit and all the berries that we buy because our kids love them.

And when you look at the grocery budget in whole and you look at how much money you're spending a year in general, it makes it a little easier to just stop sweating the small stuff. I like how Ramit Sethi says, "Don't ask yourself the $3 questions, "ask yourself the $30,000 questions." I think we can get caught up in, "Ooh, what if we cut this dollar here, this dollar there?" But when you look at it in the big picture, you realize that a lot of those small decisions could add up, but they're not really gonna move the needle, like making major changes or spending a lot more time on earning more, starting a side hustle, negotiating your salary or stuff like that.

Also, one of the most valuable parts of doing this is that I can share all of this work with Amy and we can have a shared view of how we're spending all of our money. In most relationships I've found, there's one person that gets a lot more excited about doing all this work than the other.

And by having a central place to do it, you can give the other person a login or in some apps, you can have shared logins and you can let your partner get access to all of it as well and see how you're spending money and sparks really interesting conversations like the one I just talked about, where you can be intentional and proactive about how you spend money.

I've often started sharing a lot of this information with friends. So I find that I'm a lot more open with people about money, so maybe it's not for you, but I'll pull out CoPilot, especially with a couple of friends I know do this as well in CoPilot and we'll be like, oh, how much are you spending here?

How much are you spending there? And it creates these really interesting conversations that I feel like we don't often have about money and it makes it really easy and almost fun to compare notes with friends. Finally, one thing I didn't mention is that with all these apps, there might be something you wanna look up or do that you can't.

And for almost all of them, I know for sure within CoPilot, you can export all the transactions and all the data you've categorized and all the work you've done to a CSV and use it for whatever you want. And so for example, I wanna send all of our work expenses to our CPA so I can go and export everything, filter out everything but work expenses and have a really clean spreadsheet that I can forward on.

So it is very possible with most of these tools to be able to export all your data. Maybe you wanna do more complicated analysis. At one point I was kind of thinking, ooh, I not only wanna know how much I spend but how much do I spend in the first half of the month versus the second half of the month so I can decide how much money I need in my checking account at certain days.

Ultimately that just ended up being too much overhead but that kind of analysis, if you can't do it within an app, you can at least export your transactions and do it on your own. Ultimately, almost every time I've done this, it's ended up being a waste of time but it is something that's possible.

So that's all the benefits of doing this. I hope that was really helpful. For the next part of this episode, I wanna dive in deeper to all the categories of spending and really talk about ways that you can think about saving money here. This is gonna be a little quick and for some of them, there's an entire episode of the show I've done about this.

So let's just go straight into it. So on household, first category for me is home loans, could be rent for you. I'm gonna send everyone to episode 14, which was all about house hacking. I think there's so much good content in there that could help you think about that.

So while it's not quite saving money and this really applies to all the categories, but making sure you're at least getting the most out of the spending on that category is another way to save or really to earn more, if you will. So if you have rent, definitely consider the built card where you can earn one point per dollar on rent up to $100,000 a year.

I'm a huge fan. I wish I either had some rent or they accepted mortgage payments so I could make this work. And if you wanna check that out, you can use my referral link, allthehacks.com/built. And last, this isn't for everyone, but if one of your home expenses or future home expenses might be a second home, definitely take a look at Picasso.

It's a company that finds really amazing vacation homes in lots of different destinations, puts them into an LLC and makes it really easy for people to buy 1/8 of them. So you don't have to buy the entire house. I can tell you that our monthly payment for our Picasso is way smaller than it would have been if we bought a similar vacation home.

They're also a sponsor of the show. So if you wanna get early access to a lot of their properties or get some credits towards closing costs, you can go to allthehacks.com/picasso. Next category is dog or pets. I wish I had a good answer here, but I don't. I don't really know a great way to save money on your pet.

Definitely shop around if you have a dog walker or if you're sending your dog somewhere overnight, maybe you can find some deals. But other than that, I don't really have anything here. I guess we've got a dog that doesn't shed, so we don't have a lot of grooming costs.

But other than that, I don't have a lot. On the insurance category, I have an entire episode dedicated to this. It's episode 104. A recent email from an Apple podcast listener said they saved over $15,000 a year implementing a lot of the things they learned from that episode. So if you wanna save money on insurance, highly recommend going there.

There was one other hack that I don't know if was in that episode, but was definitely in another one, which was just if you have an emergency fund that allows you to maybe increase your deductibles on some of your policies, it will ultimately result in you lowering your monthly expenses.

So if you wanna use your emergency fund to raise your deductibles, you can cut your monthly insurance costs. On bills and expenses, that's phone, internet, cable, stuff like that. So one thing, negotiate all these bills. When we had cable, it felt like every year our cable bill would increase.

We had to call Comcast, get them to lower the price. You can also use a tool like Rocket Money to automatically do a lot of this negotiation for you. Definitely shop around. I think bundling always seems like it's the cheapest deal, but that's not always true. And then consider canceling your TV for internet services, YouTube TV, or something like that.

And last on cell phones, I have an episode that I'm working on that's almost done and ready to go, all about cell phones and cell phone insurance and saving money. I compare all the carriers in the US across a lot of different categories. The preview was that if you don't need international coverage, hands down, the best option was Mint Mobile.

We use Mint Mobile in our household. I got a Mint Mobile account for our au pair. They are now a sponsor of the show. So thank you, Mint Mobile. You can go to allthehacks.com/mintmobile and get a plan for as little as $15 a month for unlimited data. And at the high end on the, I want unlimited data, I don't wanna worry about eSIMS, it was really neck and neck between T-Mobile and Google Fi.

But if you're gonna make a change to any of this, definitely go listen to that episode. It will be out soon, I promise. I just have to wrap it up, but I hope you enjoy. So next is home. Shout out to my wife, Amy, who came up with a bunch of these.

I'll just run through a few. First, keeping your house organized. So Amy just reorganized our entire pantry. It looks absolutely incredible. And through that process, we realized there was stuff like chicken broth where we had plenty of it and we were still buying it. So the more organized I think your house is, the more you know exactly what you have and the more you're not buying stuff you don't need.

Next, I have two things that are a little bit opposing forces. One is depending on where you live, it's probably very easy to get things delivered same day or even next day. So for certain purchases, don't buy them if you think you're gonna need them, especially if they're not that urgent.

Wait until you actually need it. I know that there are a lot of things in this house that I've said, "Oh, that's something we might need one day. "Let's get that." If I had just waited until I needed it, there are a lot of them that I never would have ended up buying.

On the flip side, if there are things you absolutely know you need regularly, paper towels, deodorant, toilet paper, buy them in bulk or on sale. I do this at Costco all the time. If Costco doesn't have toilet paper or paper towels on sale, I don't buy it. If I'm going to Costco and I see it on sale, I buy it because I know we're always gonna need that product.

Even better if it's things that are smaller, like deodorant, where whenever it's on sale, I buy that in bulk and then I just put it under the cabinet in the bathroom and I know that I'll have it for a long time. Next one doesn't really reduce your cost as much as it reduces your net cost, but if you're buying any major appliances, make sure to look into whether it makes sense to sell your used appliances.

When we bought a new washer and dryer, our old ones were older, but they still worked and they offered to pick them up free of charge. But the day before delivery, I listed them on Facebook Marketplace and we ended up selling the washer and dryer for a few $100.

Someone picked them up that same day. So what we thought might've been something we were just gonna have someone take away for free, we were able to sell and offset the cost of the new washer and dryer. Also, if you have gardening in your house, in the winter, you often don't need it as much.

So the gardener might not tell you, hey, do you wanna cut back your visits from once every two weeks to once a month? But you can always request that. So I know in the winter we reduce ours to once a month. So that's all for houses. On utilities, I'll give one hack, which is to go check your energy plan.

Some states don't have different plans, but at least in the Bay Area with PG&E, there's five or six different plans you can choose from. And they are basically different prices based on times of day and depending on your usage, there might be one that makes a lot more sense and costs a lot less.

There's also a ton of stuff you can do to save money on energy, solar, batteries, LEDs, water heater temperatures. And we actually have an entire episode coming up on that. So I'll punt the rest of these hacks to that episode. And then when it comes to property taxes, I don't have a good way to save money on property taxes.

So I don't know what to say. It sucks. Moving into car and transport. On car, a lot of people have emailed suggesting different ways to save money with gas station loyalty programs. So definitely look up those gas station loyalty programs for sure. I also know a lot of the grocery apps have gas station loyalty points that tie into that.

Obviously make sure that those loyalty programs are worth the discount relative to the cost they charge. If they're the most expensive gas in town and you can get a discount, but it still ends up being more expensive, it's not really a deal. To be clear, I don't know a lot about these programs because the only vehicle we have that takes gas is a Vespa.

And I fill it up about one gallon at a time and it's just not worth trying to save money on gas when we only spend about, I don't know, $100 a year on gas. Another one that I thought was really surprising the first time I did this was getting multiple quotes anytime you need service.

I was blown away when we had a, I think it was a power steering pressure hose go out and the range in prices was like from 1,000 to $5,000 or something like that. I don't remember the exact price, but it was that wide of a range. So definitely make sure you get a few quotes anytime you need service for your vehicle.

On transportation, if you work at a company that offers an FSA for transportation expenses, you can use pre-tax money to buy transit passes, often parking, so definitely look at that. And for ride sharing, your credit card might already give you discounts through things like a Lyft Pink membership, which I know you can get with a lot of chase cards, and link all of your cards to all these loyalty programs.

You're not gonna save money, but if every dollar you spend, you're earning Delta miles or Hilton points or something like that, it's like saving money in that you're earning a lot. When it comes to children, which is the next category, there's actually a lot of questions you all have sent in.

And Amy and I were talking about how to incorporate it into the show. And I think what we're gonna do next year is a series of episodes tackling a lot of the things related to kids and parenting, maybe even relationships that aren't relevant to everyone listening. Not everyone has kids, but that are relevant to a lot of people.

And we'll probably do like a four to 10 episode mini series releasing those episodes, not on the core Wednesday release date, but another episode each week for a limited time to hit on a lot of children topics. So we're gonna cover a lot of those things here. Within childcare, we have an au pair, which I think is both an amazing experience and an amazing way to save money on childcare if you have the extra room.

On children, one big thing, we buy a lot of the kids' toys, bikes, stuff used, or get hand-me-downs. We build up the karma for that by giving away a lot of our old stuff for our kids, but more kids' stuff in those episodes. On education, there's gonna be another episode on this in that whole series, so look out for that.

But one thing to keep in mind is take a look. A lot of cities actually run their own afterschool programs, preschools, classes that are way, way cheaper than a lot of the private ones. So you might be able to save money there. Next, health and wellness. On fitness, I don't have much other than that there's a lot of free content on YouTube and apps that you can use to get free content that might save you the cost of going to classes or spending money on a gym.

But honestly, I think health and fitness is a really important category. So it's one of the places where Amy and I often ask ourselves, if we could spend more money, where would we spend it? And our health is one of those things. So broader theme, just as I'm going through all these categories, I am not trying to tell you here's all the ways to cut your costs because you need to.

I'm trying to tell you here are thoughts about how to do it, but at the end of the day, some of these things might be areas where you actually wanna spend more money on and you could skip right past it. When it comes to healthcare, my goal is to get an episode out before open enrollment this year, all about how I think about health insurance and different options.

So expect that soon, but ways to save money. If you have access to an FSA or an HSA, they're fantastic. If you have healthcare bills that are really high, go back and listen to episode 34, where I talked to Marshall Allen about fighting the healthcare system and getting better deals on healthcare and lowering your bills.

It is a goldmine of information if you're in that situation. And then there's some programs like GoodRx, which are helpful to get discounts on prescriptions. In personal care, a lot of things by bulk on sale, one option, if you live in a city and you're willing to accept a little bit of risk when it comes to your haircuts, if you go on Craigslist, you can often find beauty schools and salons and barber shops that need hair models.

A lot of times they're looking for specific haircuts that you need, like maybe they're looking for someone who wants a buzz or a bob or something, but they're usually stylists in training, but they're almost always supervised by someone more senior. So definitely could be a way to save money on haircuts.

Could be as little as $0. Sometimes they're just discounted. And then only because they're a product I love and use every week, if you wanna save money on razor blades, I definitely think you should check out Henson. They're a sponsor of the show. I'm a huge fan of Henson.

It's significantly cheaper than buying cartridges and a traditional razor. And I think it's honestly a much better shave. I went about a week or two shaving with two different razors on each side, just to see if I really thought it was a better razor. And it was. If you wanna get a hundred free blades with your first purchase on Henson, go to allthehacks.com/henson.

In lifestyle, I'll run through a few things here. In subscriptions, like I mentioned earlier with bills, cut them or negotiate them. You're gonna hear about this in the cell phone episode, but there are some subscriptions that are included with certain cell phone providers, or maybe even included for a premium, but that's less than the regular cost.

So I know with some T-Mobile plans, you get free Apple TV Plus and free Netflix. You can save some money there. And then last, if you're signing up for a subscription that you wanna make sure you don't cancel, use a virtual credit card. Capital One has a really slick system for creating them.

Or if you don't have them through your credit card company, you can go to privacy.com, which is a company that helps make this process easier. You could put in a credit card to set up a trial of some service, and you can have it deactivate the next day so that if you forget to cancel it during the trial, you won't get charged.

On entertainment, here is one fun hack that's very, very specific to escape rooms, which Amy and I are massive fans of. If you happen to be listening and are a huge fan of escape rooms as well, send me any recommendations you have. Every time we're traveling, we try to do the best room in any city.

And honestly, we also try to do them without other people. Like we much prefer to do a room with just the two of us. A lot of escape rooms though, make you pay for the number of people that room could hold if you wanna do it privately. So we'll sometimes look at the calendar, and if we see an escape room that has all the spaces free, we might head over there, knowing that someone else could book it last minute, walk in there right before the room starts and say, "Hey, we'll book two people." And we'll know right then that we're able to get it at a deal.

If not, we'll go dinner, have drinks somewhere nearby. For a lot of zoos and museums, they're actually set up as nonprofits, and getting a membership could be tax deductible. On top of that, a lot of those memberships have reciprocal discounts. So when we're traveling with the two museum memberships we have, there are hundreds of zoos and science museums that we actually get access to, either free or for a discount with our membership.

Another one is for last minute tickets. This also works with concerts and Broadway shows. It's just getting right near the venue, similar to the escape room one, and buying the tickets right when the event starts or 10 minutes before, or if it's a concert, even a little bit after it starts, if you don't care about the opening act.

I have a couple of friends that did this for the Taylor Swift show. They bought their tickets like 45 minutes after the show started. It was before Taylor went on, but the owners of these tickets on StubHub were dropping the prices rapidly because they knew if they didn't sell them at some point, they would get nothing.

On personal, I don't have much, 'cause like I said earlier, I don't even know what that category really was. On travel, a third of this entire show is about travel. So go listen to those episodes. In food and drink, when it comes to groceries, I think the biggest thing here is to make a plan.

And if you have a plan and it's organized, you're gonna really make sure you're buying the things you need for that plan and not aimlessly buying things at the grocery store. We do all our planning with the Paprika app. I keep emailing them trying to get a deal for listeners and members, but I've been unsuccessful.

We do three of our meals a week using Green Chef. We did that before they were sponsors of the show. We're such big fans of it. We've tried a bunch of meal kits and we like them the most. If you wanna get 60% off your first order, you can go to allthehacks.com/greenchef and let me know what you think.

There's a small, tiny little hack that I think's cool. The average person that walks around the grocery store backwards saves 4% or 5% on their grocery bill, so that's one to try. And specifically, I mean walk all the way to the end of the grocery store and come back, not turn around and walk backwards.

Definitely be using the grocery apps. Every time I'm going to Safeway, I pull up the Safeway app, and I'm pretty convinced that the coupons in that app save me at least 10% every single time. I don't know why, but it seems like every time I open that app, there's a $3 to $10 off my grocery store purchase coupon in my account.

And then in episode 131, a couple weeks ago, I talked a lot about buying bulk meat, so go back and check that out if you wanna save money on meat. On the dining and drinks category, obviously you could just go out less, that's an option. You could go early to a lot of places that have happy hour specials.

If you are regularly ordering food online, check if your credit card has any deals to get programs with them. For example, Chase Sapphire Reserve, you get DoorDash credit and you get free Dash Pass. So when we're ordering food, we're using DoorDash. Amex gets $10 off on Grubhub. So we're using those programs to get a deal if we wanna order food.

DoorDash happens to be a sponsor of the show, so I will say if you haven't tried it out, but you have a Chase credit card and you wanna get a free Dash Pass and free credits, I would love it if you signed up at allthehacks.com/doordash. And then last, there's an app that I am very new to, but I just saw promoted by a friend of mine called InKind.

And it lets you buy credits that you can use at restaurants for a discount. And normally I look at these and think, gosh, the restaurants on this app might be really terrible, but I saw some really great restaurants in San Francisco we would regularly go to. So if you wanna check this out and see if there are any restaurants worth going to where you live, they're not a sponsor of the show, but I do have a referral code that you can get $25 off at allthehacks.com/inkind.

To be clear, I have not used this, so I don't wanna fully endorse it, but if it looks interesting and you want a free $25, you can use that code. I think that's all for dining and drinks. This is an area similar to health where we enjoy good food, we enjoy going out, so I'm not always looking to cut costs here.

And in many cases when we're traveling, this is some of the most exciting ways we spend money. In shopping, there is a lot. So I am always trying to stack as many different deals when I'm buying stuff. So that means looking for coupons, sometimes buying coupons on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, which I've done.

If you have a really big purchase, you can buy coupons for places like Home Depot or Crate and Barrel for a lot less. You can get them sometimes when you get the change of a dress pack from USPS. Looking for promo codes or even live chatting with a store to get those promo codes.

Looking for cashback options. I love going to Cashback Monitor, which is a website that shows you the best cash and points back options for any purchase. And then last, buying gift cards for the retailer. Either at a discount online, there are sites where you can buy discounted gift cards, or at a minimum going to a place where you earn a lot of extra points.

If you have a grocery card or an office supply store card, and you can go buy gift cards for other merchants and get a lot more points per dollar on the grocery card purchase, and then using those. There are a bunch of apps. Camel Camel Camel is one of them.

There's another one, I think it's called Wistia, where you can track prices on Amazon and find out whether it's regularly cheaper and hold off. I love Library Extension for getting free eBooks. In episode 113, I covered all the hidden benefits of credit cards. Things like purchase protection. So definitely another way that you can make sure you save, especially if you buy something and it breaks, you can get your money back.

There's a lot of buy nothing groups on Facebook. You can look on all kinds of sites to buy things used. I do that a lot. A lot of stores do price matching. I probably should have mentioned that in stacking, but definitely look around for price matching. And then almost every credit card issuer has offers.

So always making sure you're looking at the Amex offers, the Chase offers, the Capital One offers, to see if there is some deal that could earn you money back. I know, for example, there was one on Chase a few weeks ago where you got 10% off Southwest. There's two components to this.

One is making sure you see them and activate them, and the other is making sure you use the right card when you're spending money at the merchant. I'm a big fan of the Card Pointers app because it auto enrolls you in all of these offers. You do still need to look at the offers to make sure you use the right card to get that offer, but Card Pointers Pro is awesome for that.

And you get 30% off as an AllTheHacks listener at allthehacks.com/cardpointers. In clothing, I don't have a lot. There are a lot of sales. So if what you're trying to buy isn't urgent, maybe just wait for a sale. So last category is gifts and donations. When it comes to gifts, one thing is just buying early.

So you're not scrambling last minute, paying extra for shipping or not being able to shop around. Another one is gifting experiences. It's kind of cool if you really love something and you wanna give someone a gift, can you combine those two so you're getting both an experience and a gift with someone you care about?

Another one is just being thoughtful. For me, I would rather get a $10 gift that was really thoughtful that someone spent a lot of time thinking about than a $500 gift that was just some random thing they found on the internet that they thought I would like or that I was gonna buy myself anyways.

So I give, I don't know what the right multiple is, but it's probably somewhere between a two to five X multiple for thoughtful gifts in terms of the value they have for me. And then last is probably a controversial one, which is just remove gifting. I am not someone, given what I said about thoughtful gifts, I'm not someone who likes gifting things that are on a list.

And I remember one Christmas in one of our families, people were like, what's on everybody's list? Can everyone share their lists so we can buy all the Christmas gifts? And I was like, I feel like what's going on in the background is everyone is just thinking, I wanna spend X dollars on each person.

Let's look at their list, let's buy them something on their list. And then we're all just passing money around each other. What if we all just said what we'd wanna spend on each other? We netted it out on a spreadsheet and we Venmoed each other. And people were like, that's a horrible idea.

And I was like, but it's kind of the same thing, except it's even worse. Because if I'm gonna go buy something, I'm gonna do all the things that I mentioned earlier to stack and save. And I know a lot of the people in our family aren't. So they're actually gonna end up spending more to get this thing than I would, which just inside drives me nuts.

So what we ended up doing ultimately was saying, look, if we're not together for the holidays, which we often alternate between my and Amy's family, no gifts. And if we are together, we started switching to say, maybe every sibling and parent picks one other person. And we even did it for just couples.

So there were four couples between three siblings and parents, each one got one other one and did one nice gift for that couple. Removed a lot of the money that we were all spending to just buy things for, in my opinion, the purpose of buying things. You could also set up gift caps to try to lower the cost.

There's a lot of stuff you could do. I have some controversial opinions on gifts, totally hear that, it might not be for you. And then last on donations, there are a lot of tax benefits of donations. It can be a lot of headache because you've got to keep and track all of your receipts.

One way we solve this is we do all of our donating to our Daffy account, which is a donor advised fund. If you want to learn more, I did a whole episode with Adam Nash who started the company in episode 50. The basic premise is you get an account and you can donate money, stocks, crypto.

And at the time of that donation, it's a tax deduction. However, you don't have to allocate that money right away. So we were able to, in one of our higher tax years, donate a lot of appreciated shares of stock to our Daffy account. And now we have a pool of funds that anytime we want to make a donation to, we can type in the name of the charity quickly.

Both of us have access to Daffy and we can send money to that charity. So actually when you look at our donations line item in our budget, it's almost zero every single year because we upfront loaded about 10 years of donations into our Daffy account because it was a really advantageous year to take that tax deduction.

We had some really highly appreciated stocks we wanted to sell. And so we're able to get a really big benefit that year. And now we can actually invest the money in our Daffy account. So it's been growing every year and hopefully it should give us money to donate to charity for at least 10 years, if not more.

If you wanna check it out, you can get a free $25 to donate to the charity of your choice at allthehacks.com/daffy. Or like I said, go back and listen to episode 50. (upbeat music) Okay, that was a lot. Thank you for sticking with me. Hopefully that was super helpful.

I would love to know what you guys think of this episode. If you have any feedback, questions, or other tips that should have been in here to save money, please send them to me. I'm gonna do another mailbag episode where I'd love to share all the tips that I missed.

So please send them my way. And if you're listening to this sometime in the future, go look for that next mailbag episode 'cause there's probably gonna be a lot of awesome ways to save from all of our listeners that I'd love you guys to hear as well. If you have any thoughts or experiences with any of the apps we shared, I'd love to hear them.

If you have questions, please shoot me an email, podcast@allthehacks.com. We check it every day. I love hearing from you guys, and I try to get back to everyone and bring up a lot of what I hear from you on the show. That's it for this week. Thank you so much for listening.

I will see you next week. (upbeat music) (crickets chirping)