The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new. Whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey or spicy turkey tacos, your go-to shrimp cocktail, or your first Cajun risotto, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace your traditions. Ralph's fresh for everyone.

We've locked in low prices to help you save big storewide. Look for the locked in low prices tags and enjoy extra savings throughout the store. Ralph's fresh for everyone. Today we get tactical. How about some tools and tactics and tips and techniques to save money on groceries and hotel stays?

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Josh Rasheeds. I'm your host. Today is Thursday, October the 2nd, 2014. And today we're going to talk about saving money on some very practical, very practical areas of finance. No mumbo-jumbo financial planning talk tonight or today. This is the morning.

No mumbo-jumbo. Just some good useful techniques that we can immediately implement. I appreciate your being here. Today's show is going to be an interview show with a man named Josh Elledge, who is the, let's see, what was his title? Chief Executive Angel at SavingsAngel.com. And Josh has an interesting story.

He is involved in the deals and couponing space. And there are a number of people in this space. If you pay much attention to the online world of basically saving money with coupons, deals and things like that, there are a number of websites in this space. And Josh was the first one that I was able to get on the show.

I was excited to talk to him. And I'm going to bring other people on in the future as well. Hopefully this will be a good break for you from yesterday's show, which was some pretty intense discussion into the academic side of retirement distribution and the 4% rule. By the way, I received one comment on that show yesterday from a listener.

And it just kind of made me realize that maybe I didn't do a good enough job setting up the show yesterday. If yesterday's show depressed you, don't let it depress you. And what I've learned is that if I get one or two comments or emails, there's probably at least a couple dozen more people that think that that just haven't sent it to me.

My purpose in yesterday's show on the 4% rule was not to kind of just take it away. I think it's a very, very useful concept, but rather to bring a little bit of background to it. So if yesterday's show was too technical for you or if you didn't quite understand, check out the comment and the reply that I made in the comments if you're interested to the listener.

I think it was Fabian made the comment. And you'll see my reply to him about how the 4% rule is an incredibly useful rule, but yet there are other associated challenges with it. If yesterday's show was too deep or you didn't quite get it, don't worry about it. I'm going to bring you, as time goes forward, many more shows to try to give you the strategies that you need to be able to implement it in your life.

But today, let's get out of the swamp of deep dive technical academic planning and let's talk about saving money. Today's show, in the first part of the show, we talk a little bit about Josh's experience and a little bit about his history. And then we talk about saving money, focusing on things like groceries, things like that, some of the tactics and tools that he's developed.

And then in the latter part of the show, we talk very specifically about some tools and techniques for saving money on hotel stays and on travel. So the content is fairly light. You should be able to grasp it without having to take detailed notes. I hope you enjoy it.

So Josh, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I appreciate you being with me today. Josh, thank you so much. So I've been looking forward to this. I know that we originally met at – let's see. It was podcast movement, I guess, and we talked a little bit. And I was intrigued by your story and what I've been wanting to bring to the show is some more tangible kind of quick tips type of information.

I tend to focus a lot on the big picture, and I really want my show to have a lot of variety between tips and very practical things, very big picture things, just to really be different and bring those tips. So what I'm hoping to do today is talk about some of the very practical tools and techniques that you've learned over the years of different ways to specifically reduce expenses.

But before we get there, tell us your story. What is Savings Angel and how on earth did you wind up doing this for a living? Yeah, because I went to school for groceries and always – as a little boy, I was just obsessed with how to cut my grocery bill in half.

Right. No, you're right. It's one of those things that I absolutely had no interest in whatsoever. And I've worked in internet development. I've worked as a journalist. I went to school for family therapy. But I, like a lot of other people, was working in marketing at the time, and I had an independent contractor position with another company.

And my income was starting to get unstable because a lot of what I was doing was based on commission. And if anyone's ever been in that position, it's really stressful. And you start to get really conservative on where your money is going. And I just remember having a talk with my wife and kind of getting worried about the future, the immediate future.

And we said, "Well, maybe we should pay more attention to how we're spending our money." And we've always been pretty good at that. But I started reading books on the subject. I read The Richest Man in Babylon, for example. And it just got me really interested in this concept of stewardship because, again, I believe in order to create wealth, you have to have three things.

I mean you have to be able to – you have to be willing to do what other people are not willing to do work-wise. I mean you have to get out there and hustle. You have to get out there and be ambitious and really drive your own success. And I believe you also need to – the second thing is you also need to have the philosophies of wealth.

There are certain things that rich people teach their kids and those that don't have that wealth just don't know. And so I feel like I had those two down but that third one was the stewardship. And stewardship is kind of what I really started getting really interested in. And so we did a spending plan.

We did our budget. And I got to this line item, Josh, and it was for just groceries and consumables. It was like Walmart and Meijer and just – and you'd ask me, "Well, what did you get for that? I mean you spent $700, $800. What do you have to show for that?" And I'd say, "I don't know.

Let's go look in my refrigerator, I guess." And I just felt like we were just shopping so irresponsibly. And so these other areas, we were doing all right. So that led to just studying all the experts I could. I became obsessed with this. I don't know why but I thought I've heard of people that are able to cut their grocery bill in half and save a lot of money.

I want to find out what they're doing. And there's two main ways that you can really save a lot of money. I'm talking about taking an $800 bill down to $300 a month. You can absolutely do it. So the number one way is you can go agrarian. I mean you can go and you can grow most of your food and that is a way.

It takes a lot of time and I've not ever had too much success with it. And I don't know that that's entirely realistic for the majority of Americans who are working as hard as we are. I mean that's one thing that we see over and over again is just Americans are becoming more and more stressed for time.

So the next way you can do this, so that's one way. And that will work for some people. Now the second way is that you can do this but you need to use coupons and you need to use manufacturer discounts. Now before you go, "I hate coupons." Look, I hate coupons too.

But here's how this works, okay? You don't want to use coupons just for the sake of using coupons because that's only going to save you a little bit of money. But what you want to do is you want to make sure that you are only using coupons for the products that you can get really good sales on.

So you're stacking discounts. And when you do that, well, I'll give you an example. Cheerios was on sale, buy one get one, at my local grocery chain and that made them $2 a box. Cereal is normally pretty expensive. Then on a Cheerios partner website that we had in our coupon database at our site, I found $2 coupons.

And so if the Cheerios are on sale for $2 and you apply a $2 coupon, well guess how much you're paying for your Cheerios? Sounds like about nothing. Yeah, nothing. So you get free Cheerios and you can get free groceries pretty much every week. And so the idea then is that once I found that, figured this out, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, this is huge." And it was a lot of work at first because it is.

And so I thought, "You know what? There's got to be a better way to do this." So we created a system that would tell you exactly what those matches were and that's what became Savings Angel. It turned into a membership-based website and we've done over $5 million in sales over the past seven years.

That's fantastic. Yeah. So I've read a number of these coupon sites and I know that you've got a lot of competition in your niche. And it does seem to be doable and I can see the value in hiring some of the research done. I think that seems like a major value add.

I don't know. How much is your membership site? I don't even know. It's $20. Right. So if you can pay someone $20 a month and that person can give you a list of here's where you need to go and here are your specific written instructions for this week and it can save you $200 a month, that's a good investment in my world.

Oh, yeah, and more like $400. And the reason there's a cost associated with this, I do have a large staff. We've had as many as over 50 employees at one time. So it's just -- it is a very laborious process. The information that you get is -- our target audience is the busiest of the busy families out there.

So if you're not busy and you want to take time and research blogs and do your own research, you can do that. And, again, that's another option if you're like, no way am I going to spend $20 to save $400. That's fine. There are a lot of people out there like that.

Do it yourself. And that's great and we certainly do a lot of free stuff as well for people. But if you really want to take it to the next level, then that's kind of what we focus on. Yeah. It's worth it. I remember probably the one that I spent the most time kind of reading was I read Brad Wilson, bradsdeals.com.

I read his book. Let's see what it's called. Do Less -- Spend Less, Do More. Have you read that book? I haven't, no. But I'm familiar with Brad's deals. He did a good job. I'm not so into like the consumer stuff that he does his deals on, so I don't spend much time on his site.

But in his book, he did a good job of really synthesizing information, especially I liked his information on how to buy cars and how to get kind of backdoor access to some of the car buying programs to be able to use the member discounts on various things. And I was just struck by -- this information is sitting here -- bought the book immediately just because I figured $20 for this, man, this can save me and my listeners thousands as time goes on.

And so I think that's a really great value-add service that you're providing for people. Here's my question. So my objection to -- or my challenge that I've seen with the coupon sites from my wife and I, and this is something that we actually struggle a little bit with, we need help with, because we work hard to spend wisely, but the problem is we don't eat much of the food that it seems that the coupons offer deals on.

And this is the major challenge that we have, is that we try not to eat anything that has ingredients that we can't pronounce, so that throws out most of the interior of the grocery store and you're left with pretty much the exterior. And I don't know how to save money on that stuff.

So is it -- so I have a perception that the couponing and kind of that is mainly appropriate for people who are purchasing processed foods and packaged foods and packaged items. And I know there's still some consumer goods, toilet paper, whatever the other consumer goods are, but I have this perception that that's who it's appropriate for.

Am I wrong? Well, right now if we were to do a search -- and there's a free coupon database at our site, for example, and if I were to do a search right now, I would tell you that there are well over 100 different coupons for organic products. So if that is -- if a product is -- let's say it is packaged, but it's an organic product.

Let's say it's a frozen dinner that you want for lunch or whatever. And, again, it's very kind of minimally processed. It's got more healthy and whole ingredients in that. There are tons of coupons for products like that and becoming more so, especially over the past two to three years.

We've seen a real interest in larger manufacturers scooping up these smaller organic food manufacturers, and so there's more available. Now, if you want products like healthy produce, that's -- and let me tell you, Josh, you know, when I first started with this, I was actually a little bit heavier.

And when I first started, I said, "Oh, my gosh, I can get Sara Lee pies for $0.30 this week." You know, it's like a $6 pie for $0.30. And so what are you going to do when it's like -- you're almost like a kid who has been given the car keys and you're like, "Yeah, you bet I'm going to get that Sara Lee pie." And as a result, my weight went up, and we got to a point where I said, "I'm going to -- we have to change this.

This is not going to work." I was a 5'9" man, and I was up to 230 pounds, which is -- that's obese. And so I started the couponing diet, and by following the couponing diet, what I did is I said, "You know, this doesn't make any sense. Just because I can buy this stuff doesn't mean that I should buy this stuff or I have to buy this stuff." And so what I did is I got very meticulous as far as what I was choosing to buy.

So rather than like say the 80% off stuff, I'd say, "Well, I don't need to buy that, but look, I can get all these bags of veggies for 50% off this week, and that's a great deal." And so we've really focused on eating a lot more produce, a lot more -- and let me tell you, so frozen produce, that's one of the -- I've gotten bags of frozen produce for as little as a nickel a piece and just loaded up my freezer.

I remember one time, it was just amazing. I mean you open up my freezer and I mean there were just like three shelves, nothing but frozen produce. And so I made a point to make sure that I was eating frozen -- or I was eating vegetables. I'd prepare my own vegetables every meal.

Yeah, and there's an argument to be made. I know some people say, "Well, I only eat fresh." Great, you can -- if you want to eat fresh and you can get locally produced organic produce, go for it. That's absolutely in my opinion the best. But if you think that just strolling your grocery store's produce section is the healthiest option, a lot of experts would disagree with that.

And they would say that if you're picking up a tomato and that tomato was picked on the other side of the planet and it was sprayed with ethylene gases and it was picked very, very early in its season, well, it didn't get its full spectrum of nutrients. And so then it's artificially ripened and it's put in the store and you buy it and it really just has nothing in it for you.

So you would be better to get something either canned or frozen because typically if I'm going to -- if I'm a grower, I'm going to wait until -- if I can, I'm going to wait until those produce items are fully ripe. I'm going to flash freeze them and keep them frozen, and those tend to be healthier.

I've done a lot of research on this. And so I actually -- and what's really nice too is that you have less problems with spoilage too, and that's a real issue, particularly with my advice, which is that when you get a great deal, that you should stock up. And if you stock up too much on produce, you can, again, run into a problem where you're ending up throwing away stuff, and that's not a good deal for anybody.

So, yeah, so you can absolutely take your additional savings that you get from your paper products, your cleaning supplies, a lot of your -- those type of products that you're not necessarily personally ingesting and eating, but you can use and you can save money. You can save so much money on toilet paper and those sorts of things and just apply those savings to the areas that you like.

Now, you can absolutely get coupons for fresh produce too. Every single week, there's at least one coupon that I know of every single week that is minimum -- it's 20% off a produce item, and that's on top of whatever the store happens to be discounting it at. Is that for all stores or is that for a specific chain of stores?

Pretty much every store now. That's through a company called Saving Star, and so you buy the product and then you submit a photo or you link your card to that -- to Saving Star, like your store card, and then the savings are pretty much automatic and you get your 20% back.

Interesting. Yeah, yeah. So there are lots of opportunities for savings, and like I said, there's lots of opportunities for free stuff too. So if you like free, like Walgreens and Rite Aid and CVS, I love the drugstores. They give away free groceries like every week. Really? Yeah. Is this a loss?

So why do the grocery stores and the coupons and the manufacturers' coupons and all these different people do this? Is this a loss leader to get you in the store? Yeah. Yeah, so, well, what you have is you have some collusion of discounts, of course, that we're taking advantage of that aren't available to everybody because they just don't know.

You might be buying your milk at Meijer or you might be buying your milk at Walmart this week, and little did you know that if you went to CVS -- I mean this week while we're recording this, Josh, milk is over $5 a gallon at Walmart. But at CVS this week, you can get it for $2.79, and some weeks I get it for $1.79.

Really? So why would I go to Walmart? And so it's not so much about – I don't want to train people to become these frugal misers. I don't really like that so much. I don't like that image, and that doesn't really fit for me. But I do like having knowledge of everything so that I can make conscious decisions.

And another objection, Josh, is that I'll hear commonly is people say, "Well, it's just not worth my time. I can't get excited about a $0.50 coupon." And the reality is that if you spend a little bit of time in research, just like before you'd buy a car, you would obviously do your research.

Hopefully before you go on vacation, you're going to do a little research so that you could have the best experience. We're talking about a $700, $800 line item on your budget. For heaven's sake, people, this is a big-ticket item. Do a little bit of research at home. Guess what?

You're going to end up saving $50 an hour or more for your time, and for most people, that's worth it. I'll give you the financial formula that I always use just for – in my own calculation is I use the financial independence formula. And so let's assume that by exercising – well, I mean what do you think?

Do I need to spend an extra hour or two hours a week to save a couple hundred bucks a month? Like how much time would you think I need to save to save – I need to invest in learning skills and changing my behavior in order to save $200 a month on my grocery bill?

Yeah, so at the very least, we kind of look at how much time do you have – are you willing to invest? I'd say the first 30 minutes are your most valuable. And so you will make the most money for that first 30 minutes. And that's where I could easily say you'd earn $60, $70 an hour because you're identifying where the major discounts are.

You're going to use the coupons that are associated with those discounts. You're going to save a lot of money on those items. But here's the thing. If you just discovered how to get Cheerios for free and you took a minute and a half, two minutes, three minutes maybe, and you printed off – you were able to – let's say you have three computers in the home.

And so you printed off two – let's see, six – a total of six coupons that gave you a total of $4 savings. Let's say you normally buy your Cheerios at $4 a box. So now you're buying $24 worth of Cheerios. You got them for free. You just saved $24 for let's say a total of five minutes, maybe 10 minutes.

So $24 for 10 minutes worth of work. So you're going to identify the stuff that you're most excited about and how we rank things at Savings Ingenuity. It's really hard to find this and we're one of the only sites that do this is we rank all of the deals in order of the best deal, absolute best deals to the worst deal.

So at the very least, even if you just cherry-picked all the best deals, like if you figured out, oh, well, here's the free stuff. I just want to go get the free stuff. Like CVS is giving away bags of Epsom salt for free. You know, just it's weird stuff that you do want to have in the house.

You may not necessarily need that week, but you want to have it for the future. You don't need six boxes of Cheerios right away, but over the next six months, you will. And so that is how this really starts to add up. Now, as you continue to go, then it's kind of the law of diminishing returns.

So I'd say the first hour is generally very, very good. Everything beyond that, I think you'd start to lose value. So the extreme couponers, for example, if you've ever seen that dumb TV show, the first – what you don't know is they're spending 20, 25 hours a week in order to do that.

And at the end of the 20, 25 hours, they get $600 or something like that. And I don't know. You start to look at the per hour rate, and it's not as great after a while. Well, where I was going actually, and I'm glad you took the time to explain that.

That's a good answer. I'll give you kind of how I think about it, which is completely a different way of framing the discussion. I use the financial independence formula of how much can I cut off my expenses by – so if I can substitute skill instead of spending money, that reduces the amount of money that I need in order to maintain my lifestyle.

So let's assume that I'm currently spending $600 a month on groceries. And if I can apply some level of skill and knowledge and ability to reduce that bill by $200 a month, then I take that and I multiply that $200 a month. For a monthly expense, I just multiply it times 300.

And just for the listening audience, that's a simple rule of thumb. It's not perfect, but it's a useful rule of thumb based upon the 4% rule that we've talked about many times on the show of how much capital would I need invested in order to provide a cash flow of $200 per month.

So I take $200 a month, and I just multiply it times 300, and that gives me $60,000. So if I want to be financially independent and I want to be independent into perpetuity, then I need $60,000 of capital invested to give me $200 of cash flow to then buy my groceries.

So now I look at my savings rate and I say, "How long does it take me to be able to effectively successfully save the $60,000?" And remember that needs to be net of tax, so let's say – and I don't know, but maybe I need to earn – depending on what state you're in, what your tax rate is, things like that – but maybe I need to earn $75,000, $80,000, or $90,000 pre-tax gross in order to pay my employment taxes, pay my income taxes, pay all of the costs in order to save the $60,000.

And so the question would be, "Is it easier and more effective for me to spend some time developing the skill to reduce my bill by $200, or is it easier and more effective for me just to simply save the extra $60,000?" For most people, I would dare say, and most people in middle-class Western societies, it's going to be a much better investment of time to learn how to substitute some skill to save the $200 and be able to get the same on less than it is to work to be able to accumulate the extra $60,000 to cover those expenses.

Wow. I love those numbers, Josh. I love that. I absolutely love that. And I'm going to steal that and use that, because that is huge. Steal it and use it all over, because this is the key that I see to financial independence, is people oftentimes – we look at savings on a very small scale, and we look at savings and we say, "Well, what does $200 matter?" But if you can substitute the skill where you never have to spend the $200, again, it means you don't have to save the extra $60,000.

And this is the key – I've done a lot of professional retirement planning, and this is the key that unfortunately in the traditional financial planner-client relationship is very difficult to accomplish. One of the reasons why I do my show is that if a client comes in and says, "I need to spend, let's say, $5,000 a month," well, using a simple rule of thumb, let's say $5,000 a month times $300, that means they need a portfolio of $1,500,000.

But if they can live on $4,000 per month, multiply that times $300, they need $1,200,000. That extra $300,000 that they need to save, for many people – for most people, they will never save $300,000. And for many people, that implies a huge amount of time and work, and that's maybe a decade of work to save and accumulate the $300,000 of capital.

So saving money is not just a matter of, "Oh, some other people should do it." Saving money and the ability to get the same lifestyle standard for less has a massive impact on your financial plan. I mean it's huge, but most people – because we're trained to think from the perspective of what's my hourly wage, instead of trained to think from a capitalist perspective of how much capital do I need to live on my capital, it's a rare person that thinks that way.

That's fabulous. I love that. So steal it and spread the message. That's the message. Back to – real quick on the frozen veggies. So I'm using you as my resource. I've got you on the podcast, so you have to give me all the answers here for my own system.

How do you get the deals on the frozen veggies? Is that the kind of thing like Cheerios where it comes on sale once every eight weeks and you do that, or was that a special one-off thing? Yes. How did that work? Because my wife and I, we don't buy stuff – basically, this is not a rule, but generally we don't eat stuff that comes in boxes and whatnot.

We don't usually eat crackers or Cheerios or that stuff. So the veggies is the most interesting thing to me. Yeah. So OK. So you've got like Birdseye would be an example of a manufacturer that produces this. So you can go up and down the frozen food section and there are commonly deals on Birdseye vegetables.

There's always coupons available and those coupons are usually like $0.60 I think is kind of a common denomination for Birdseye coupons. So what you'd want to do is you'd want to get – and again, I'm not talking necessarily about the coupons that come in your Sunday paper. That's one source of coupons.

But right now, Josh, if I do a search on our database – by the way, our database is free. Anyone can use that. I want people to save a lot of money. You could do a search and you'll find that there are over 5,000 different coupons that you can choose from right now.

So it doesn't matter what you buy. It doesn't matter what your product – what brands you love. Chances are there's a coupon for it and there's some coupons for some very obscure and cool products and healthy products and they're all available for you. So yeah, so for example, what I would do there is I would wait until you have a really, really good deal like a buy one, get one or a 50 percent off type savings.

And this one, again, either you kind of monitor this yourself and you know, oh, wow, yeah, no, that's a great sale. And so then you go grab the coupons and then you go use both of those discounts at the same time, as many coupons as you can get. And again, you can print two coupons for the most part, two coupons per computer.

And so again, there's no problem if you have extra computers in the home. There's absolutely no restriction to that, but you can't photocopy them and you can't do any – you can't like bring it into Photoshop and any of that stuff. Don't do that. Really quick, hasn't somebody invented a way to – like whether it's using VPN tunneling or some way to disguise the IP address so that you can break those codes?

Hasn't somebody figured that around that so you don't have to go with just separate computers? If there has, it's not really – it would be something that I would advocate against. Because they have become – going after coupon fraud has become a – manufacturers have become more and more aggressive.

Really? So yeah, I wouldn't play in that area. It's better to just play by the rules and Josh, you really – the discounts are so good and so plentiful that in my opinion, we talked about law of diminishing returns. It's not really worth it and it's certainly not worth the risk.

So yeah, all of that can get tracked to you. So if they suspect – yeah, because – I mean and they know exactly who printed it because you have to use a little coupon applet in order to print them. So they're tracking all of that and they know where it goes, where it's redeemed.

They know everything. So again, I would urge people not to mess around with that because I have heard plenty of stories of people who have gotten pulled into the little side room and gotten in trouble. Interesting. Yeah, so don't mess. Yeah, so but again, but there's no problem if you – your wife has got a computer.

The kid has got a computer. Print two coupons for each of those. You're not going to get in trouble for that. Bring those six coupons in. Go get your bags of veggies. Your final price ends up being maybe like $0.30, $0.40 a piece. Normally it was $1.80 or something like that.

So now you've – what's cool is you've got more veggies. If it's a great sale – I mean even just Josh, the act of – let's say you didn't bring coupons at all but you know that it's a great sale. It's a great deal and you just stock up on that.

That's how you want to – it's like shopping as a smart business owner. If let's say I own a construction company and the lumber yard says, "Hey, we've got these 2x4s and we're going to be blowing them out of here for 50% off. How many do you want?" Well, if I'm a smart business owner, I'm going to buy as many as I can afford because that's where the savings are.

I can pass that savings along to my customers. I can increase my profits. So even if you just really kind of buy low and sell high but certainly buy low and buy lots of at low, that would be a great first step even if you didn't want to incorporate the extra savings of coupons.

Especially for even – for low income or people just getting started on building their wealth. I think a lot about the changes that happen in somebody's financial life. What happens is people often want to aspire to living like a multimillionaire. But the challenge is, is that most people don't become multimillionaires because they don't learn different habits at different stages.

So if I were – and I often run these mental games in my head and I say, "Okay. If I were starting off with nothing, I had no money and I was just working a basic job that was just providing my needs, where would I spend my time?" I would never invest in stocks.

I would never focus on that because the rate of return that I could get by cutting expenses would be far higher than the rate of return that I could get on stocks. So the ability – if I have an extra $500 available in my budget, very likely I'm going to spend that focusing on stocking up.

So I'm going to stock up my pantry. When you get the dollar or the free Cheerios, I'm going to spend – it's no big deal to spend a thousand bucks one month and spend zero next month. What happens is you see when you study families who are kind of stuck in this cycle of poverty, often one of the reasons that they're stuck is that they're always buying exactly what they need and they can't seem to get any margin into their budget.

And when you can't get margin in your budget and you can't plan ahead, then you can't get advantage of the good deals and it's like you're always getting screwed. And so then – I mean when you look at people who are stuck in – payday loans is a good example.

The reason – there are many reasons, but one horrible effect of people who are stuck in the payday loan cycle is they can never get the margin built in. So I would invest in groceries and stock up on groceries and really try to build a depth of field there.

And what that does – my wife and I have done this for – we've worked at this for a while of always trying to maintain a deep pantry and just stock up when things are on sale. So when you see a good deal, it's no big deal to spend a thousand bucks if you've got it.

And the next month that allows you to have that extra money free if there are no deals. And I think this habit, building this habit is one of the cornerstone habits of wealth building. And the rich people do this as well. They just do it in bigger numbers. So I've had several clients that in – let's see.

What was it? I guess it was 2009, 2010. They bought a couple of boats because they could get a boat at 70 percent off. And so they just stocked up, and that's when they went ahead and bought the nice boat. Or that's when they're loading up on real estate, things like that.

So it becomes counterproductive. If your hourly rate is a thousand bucks an hour, saving $200 a month on grocery bill is going to be less impactful than if your hourly rate is $10 an hour. But you still need to apply the same technique to the bigger ticket items. Yeah.

Josh, you bring up two things that I'd love to share. Number one is that – and this is the most important tip that I ever share with people, and that is stop buying what you need. Because when you go into the grocery store with a list of needs, it's like going onto a used car lot and saying, "Well, Mr.

Used Car Salesman, here's what I need. I need a car with a sunroof. It's got to have fuzzy dice. It's got to have a spoiler." You're giving this list of demands, and then you say, "I'm not leaving your lot until you give it to me." Well, how much negotiating power do you have?

You have none. So that's exactly what we do when we have a list of things that, "Oh, what do we need?" And you start putting the shopping list together, and those are non-negotiable. You have to come back with those things. And so then at the grocery store, you're like what most people do is you're just looking for, "Okay, I guess which – are any of these on sale?

Okay, whew, oh, this one's on sale, and it's 10% off." Well, what you didn't realize, that is next week, that product is going to be 50% off, and there happens to be a dollar coupon that you can layer on top of that. And so you could get that product line for free, but you didn't do it because you needed it last week.

And so that's the whole point behind making sure that you're buying what you don't need and you're stocking up on those items so that when you are shopping, you can shop from your pantry first or shop from your freezer first. And then each week, you go into the store and you're like, "I don't need anything." Maybe some fresh produce and maybe some fresh dairy, but other than that, I have everything I need.

I'm only here for the absolute best deals, and that's where you spend all your money on. And so you basically have a food savings account. And it's the easiest savings account I know because the manufacturers and retailers are willing to subsidize that so heavily. Right, and it's the best inflation-protected savings account.

I read studies sometimes on food inflation. It's not taxed. The gain is not taxed. If you've got 100 cans of Campbell's soup in your pantry and the price of soup increases because of general food inflation, your increase on the value is not taxed like it is on an investment or on a gold coin or something like that.

Plus, just from the perspective of life changes, having a deep pantry I think insulates you because I've worked on commission for years. So with a fluctuating income, it was always nice to tell my wife, "Hey, this month let's pull back unless it's a really good deal or something like that.

Let's just wait because I know that there's a larger paycheck coming in next month or something like that. It gives you some time." And to escape, I don't know how to teach this. I think a lot of times I wish somebody would start, I don't know, a podcast or a video series or write a book that's focused on some of these very basic techniques to escape poverty.

But I see this a lot of times, unfortunately, in the poorest among us is something as simple as buying your candy for Halloween. If you go the day after Halloween or go in the day after Christmas and do that and set it aside for six months later or a year from now, you might save $10.

Use it at Christmas. Use it at Christmas and make Christmas cookies with it. Right, right. And that is a huge deal. If you're earning $10 an hour, saving that is a huge deal. But oftentimes it seems as though because of the pressure of poverty and because of the pressure of not having enough, it seems as though it's very challenging to get out of that cycle of buying now.

It's so key at the starting levels. My wife and I, we have bins. I built her a rack for all those Rubbermaid bins, and we try to stay ahead on clothes for our son. So you can get clothes for free if you plan ahead, but you have to be organized of how to store them, and that keeps you from running out and having to pay $30 for a pair of jeans.

You can get them for $0.50 for a four-year-old. Jeans perfect for a four-year-old with new tags, you can get them for $0.50 at a garage sale if you have a place to store them and are organized. Yeah, and Josh, some people may be listening to what we're talking about, and they say, "Well, I don't want to live like that because that sounds like someone who's living in poverty," and I can tell you that that's absolutely the opposite of reality.

You want to know who goes into the Halloween stores in October, early October, and buys all these stupid expensive stuff that's crazily overpriced? Working poor people and regular working class people. You want to know who goes in the day or two after? It's people who are really smart with their money and who tend to do very well.

The fastest-growing segment of couponers are people who are living in the suburbs, making six figures, and living a comfortable life, but they don't like leaving money on the table. Just like they believe in being smart with their money in terms of investments, they also believe in spending their money wisely.

It's not how much you make. It's how much you keep and what lifestyle you can give yourself with that savings. What you described about having all of those life hacks throughout the year, Josh, that's my program. My podcast is called 90 Days to Abundance, and that's exactly what I do.

This is what you talk about. Awesome. That's exactly what I talk about. Good. Yeah, so if you want to know exactly what to do and when, it's very, very topical. I publish a show which comes out two to three times a week, and I share with you the exact life hacks that you can employ so you can make sure you're getting all of the upgrades in life.

And again, it's not about being cheap. It's just about being empowered so that you can say, "Well, we wanted to take a vacation, and now, because we follow what Josh shared, we could stay in a five-star resort as opposed to a two-star resort." I'll show you how to do that.

And so I'll show you how to get more car for your money. I'll show you how to get everything more for your money. I mean that's what I've been focusing on for the past eight years. I'll just send people to your show now. It really weighs heavy on me because I want to help, you know, the – I guess you said the working poor.

That's a good thing. I want to help, but it seems I don't know how to help, and I see a real need for – even in the personal finance literature, it seems like nobody is talking about these things. Everyone is talking about how to use a tax-advantaged account. Fine.

That works great, but there's a very different situation among the working poor, and I feel like some of these techniques are a major, major contributing factor. Go ahead. Yeah, and you get – this is a passion point of mine because I teach financial wellness in the workplace, and I focus mainly on the consumer side.

And the reason I do – and I've worked with a lot of financial planners to help them get better participation rates for their companies, 401(k) plans, et cetera, because there's a frustration there that if everybody is not participating, then everybody doesn't get as good a deal. And so now what happens is let's say you go in and you're doing your – it's open enrollment and you're kind of doing your thing.

All right, everybody, we're going to do this, right? We're all going to invest in our future. What ends up happening is you have about 40 percent of the population that they sit down and all of a sudden they just immediately check out. They just – their eyes roll back in their head and their head rolls back and their – and here's why.

You ask them, you're like, "Aren't you interested in saving for your kid's college?" And they say, "You know, I am interested in saving for my kid's college, but as a matter of priorities, I have to pay for my kid's doctor bill before I can even think about saving for their college." And so I like focusing on things that can give people immediate wins.

And so if I can talk to you about where your money is currently going, for example, I know you love going to the movies, but would you like to go to the movies and spend a whole lot less? Would you like to spend less than $400, $500 a month eating out?

Oh, my gosh, Josh, that's one of the easiest ways to save money there is, number one, stop eating out so much. But number two, if you absolutely must, the day of paying full price at the restaurant is over. And so those are just the little tweaks that we need to make.

Your utility bill, there's so many different ways that you could save really big money on your utility bill if you're doing this right. And so once someone – let's say their money is stressed. Once we can get them a series of early wins, they are in such a better position so that they can start paying attention and they can start really looking at paying themselves.

By then truly investing in their future after we get a lot of these little areas of their life fixed. Right, right. I mean it's all integrated. I want to make two quick comments and then I want to completely shift our conversation to another area. And I'll let you respond to the comments though because you may have some thoughts before I shift it.

On the eating out thing, the most powerful words I found for that completely stole from Money Mustache. He uses eating out – I don't know if he coined this term or phrase but I just thought it was brilliant. He talks about paying people to cook for me and he reframes – he completely reframes the idea of eating out to simply I'm paying people to cook for me and I'm paying my servants to cook for me.

And I've stolen that because it's like, yes, once I'm rich, then I can afford to pay people to do my cooking for me. But if I'm poor, I'm not going to pay people to do my cooking for me. And when you reframe it like that because in our society, so many of us are so busy, so stressed, needing the convenience food.

But when you reframe it as am I rich enough to afford to pay someone to cook for me instead of viewing eating out as entertainment or as convenient, we can frame it more properly as I'm simply paying servants to do my cooking for me to avoid my having to do it.

So I like that concept. The other thing I just to say is that this can be applied – I guess it would be the concept of store housing can be applied in so many areas that make a difference. So one other little hack that my wife does is every year the day after Christmas – I've never done the Black Friday stuff the day after Thanksgiving because there's not a lot of value there for us.

But the day after Christmas, she and her mom always get up early and they go to the after Christmas sales and she will buy all of the birthday presents. I have a bunch of nieces and nephews that are all young, and so it's nice to be able to give a little trinket, a little toy, a little doodad to them.

So she will go and she'll buy all of the birthday presents for the coming year and has a birthday box. So we'll buy – we've got probably – I've got nine nieces and nephews that are young, and so she'll buy all the presents for all of them plus some extra ones for the invitations that we go to.

And that saves – she spends $40, $50, but that saves hundreds of dollars when you're talking about 15 to 20 birthday presents, maybe birthday parties throughout the year. It's hundreds of dollars, so you still have the present but it'll make a massive savings. So I think these – I mean a couple hundred bucks, that's real money, and that concept of store housing can be applied in every area.

Yeah, and it's amazing how many people don't plan for Christmas until – I guess it's Christmas. We better just hit up Target and see what we find and pay full price for that stuff. Yeah, and again, that's not how financially wise people do Christmas. Financially wise people do Christmas by – they'll take advantage of if there truly are some great offers during the Christmas holiday shopping season, and there really are.

But it's nice to not have to rely upon that, and by not having to rely upon that means that you have gifts ready to go and you've been making those purchases throughout the year when you've kept your eye on that. And so – because the average family puts it all on a credit card and then they pay interest on that, and that's ridiculous.

So you don't need to do that. Right. Absolutely. Let's switch gears because I know you are quite the guru of hotels, and I could use some help in this area because I always feel stressed by hotels because I don't have a clue – I don't stay in hotels frequently.

I generally prefer to stay with friends just so I can – I don't like hotels. But yet I find myself sometimes in a situation where I need to stay at hotels, and I don't know anything to do other than pull out Hotels.com on my phone and go to the cheapest place, and sometimes that's not such a great experience.

And I feel stressed a lot of times when traveling at paying for hotels because I feel like I'm getting completely ripped off every time, and I don't know anything to do. So I'm a total novice. Teach me what I need to do to be able to get better deals on my hotel stays.

Yeah. So there's a couple of ways that you can go. I actually really like your idea of staying with a friend if that's available to you. If that's an option, you should do that and say, "Look, instead of me paying $60 to stay at a hotel, let's go out to eat," and then you get to enjoy – because you're going to pay for dinner anyway.

Absolutely. Yeah. And that's really cool. I really like that. I'll give you one more real quick since we're on that. So you were out – we saw each other at FinCon a couple weeks ago. So I actually just – I didn't tell anybody while I was – I didn't want to say anything there because I didn't want any sympathy.

I wasn't doing it necessarily to save money. I was kind of experimenting. But I actually just took a two-week road trip, including being at FinCon, and I didn't stay in a hotel the entire time. I camped out in my car. And I was curious what that would be like, but I felt like I totally crushed the system.

I stayed in a Prius for two weeks, and I felt like I totally crushed the system even when we were there in Louisiana. I spent a total – it was a two-week road trip, 3,200 miles, and I spent a total of $600 on gas and food and whatnot. So I felt pretty happy about that.

So there's another hack for you if you want to go to the extreme radical side. That is extreme. And it's funny because in the content creation business, I'm almost tempted to do crazy things like that just for the stories. Right, right. And so Josh, where did you park, like in New Orleans?

So I – yeah, so it's a good story. I didn't do it for the – I didn't do it solely for the story. I did it partly because I was interested in seeing how it would work. And I had read some books on people living in their cars, and I like to do social experiments that make me feel uncomfortable.

So as an example, one time I wore a turban and a robe and dressed like a Muslim on a flight from Cairo to New York back to West Palm Beach because I was curious what it would be like to fly as a Muslim. So I wore this Egyptian – they're called a galabeya.

It's the long floor-length robe. And I wore a turban and I had a beard at the time, and I flew from Cairo to New York City and then from New York City to West Palm Beach. And it was a really fun experiment just to kind of see what it's like looking like a Muslim coming onto an airplane in New York City.

Very interesting. And I'm going through security where the security guys are kind of patting around my turban and whatnot to try to figure out. So just I like to do these fun social experiments. So I decided to do this with a car, and my rules were that if I was tired of it and I didn't want to do it and I wasn't having fun, I would immediately go and get a hotel room just because I was doing it for fun and I wasn't going to push it.

But I had so much fun. So here's what I did. When I got to New Orleans – I drove there. When I got to New Orleans, I found out there was no place to park, and the parking was super expensive. So I asked around, and I talked to one of the valets, and they mentioned that if you parked at Harrah's Casino, which was right by the hotel where we had FinCon, and if you played for at least 30 minutes, then they would give you 24 hours of free parking.

So I parked in the Harrah's parking garage, and I played Penny Slots every day for 30 minutes and listened to podcasts while I was doing it. It was the most mind-numbingly horrible thing ever. Oh, I know. But it saved me 40 bucks a day. Yeah. I would spend basically a buck on the Penny Slots, and that got me the parking savings.

And then I actually just parked the car in the Harrah's garage, and I worked out a kind of a quiet corner to park in. And then I had it worked out where – because it was really bright, but with the Prius, I was able to stretch the cover over the car, and it was super dark.

And the nice thing about the Prius is you can leave it on all night and run the air conditioning all night, and it just will run off the battery for about 15 minutes. It will turn the car on for two minutes, and it will – so it will run all night.

Oh, my gosh. And the only problem was how to shower. And so what I planned to do was to find a gym, but I couldn't find a gym in New Orleans that was in downtown that was convenient, and the parking was such a hassle. So what I wound up doing for a couple days was just swimming in the hotel pool and doing that.

And so I was able to smell good and be clean the whole time. So I don't think I'm ever going to do it again, really. I'd like to buy a small RV and stay in a small RV. I really don't think I'm ever going to do it again, but it was a fun adventure.

I've never done anything like that before. So there was my travel hack. Yeah, yeah. So if you don't want to do Josh's travel hack, here's what you can do. Pretty hardcore radical. Hey, it gives me fodder for my show. Yeah, and keep in mind that you don't -- you didn't need to do that.

So unless someone is saying, "Oh, that just seems like something I wouldn't want to do," you don't have to do it. I had the money. I easily was ready to go and spend it. But I just thought it would be a fun way to challenge myself. Right, exactly. And, again, some of those roughing it things, believe it or not, can be more fun than you think.

And so like camping, for example. I mean you could camp very inexpensive, very inexpensively. And, you know, once you have the tools, you're ready to go. And, you know, you could stay for free. You can camp for free. But anyway, let's talk about hotels. So hotels -- so here's my way.

Number one, if you have a friend or family member, and get on social media and find out. Because if you can take advantage of friends and family discounts, like, for example, I have an aunt who works at Marriott. And I've got a very good friend who works at Marriott.

And those Marriott discounts are really, really, really good. And so see if there are any of -- if you have friends or family that work at any of those hotel chains. Because chances are you can get a really good discount. Take advantage of that. If that's not available to you -- and I only do that sometimes, like if it happens to work out.

But aside from that, here's the process for getting the hotel. So number one is that you want to do some research. And you want to start by -- like I go to Priceline and I go to Hotwire. And I have friends who work in the industry, and they have affirmed, you know, confirmed that these are absolutely, you know, some of the lowest prices that you'll ever find for their properties is on one of those two websites.

Another one would be on a daily deal website. There are generally restrictions on some of the daily deals. So you do have to be careful with that. But that's an option, too. The advantage with the daily deal is, of course, you're going to know the property that you're staying at.

So you can kind of do some research on it and make sure that it fits. Now, if you're going to go with Hotwire and Priceline, what you want to do is you want to check out a website. And there's a couple of them. The one that I generally go to is a website called Better Bidding.

And what BetterBidding.com will do is it will help you identify what the hotels are. So in other words, you don't want to bid on a hotel that ends up having like a crazy resort fee, and they charge you for everything, and it ends up not being that great of an experience or a lot of negative reviews.

So if you can identify what the hotel is, then that will help you say, "Yeah, this looks like it could probably be pretty good." Then also on this website, and again, there's another one as well, if you Google "better bidding," you'll likely come across an article that will compare better bidding and then the other one that is out there.

But Better Bidding will also let you know what the – Is this like some kind of state secret that you can't say the name? I'm just curious. You don't have to. I don't know what it is. Oh, okay, okay. I forget. Yeah. It sounded like there was – no problem.

It sounded like this is a state secret that you can't say the name of like morebetterbidding.com. No, yeah, exactly. I don't know what it is. Got it. That's fine. Yeah, I just don't have it handy. That's cool. Just because that's – the one I mentioned is the one I typically go to.

So yeah, and then they'll also let you know what you should bid. And then what you want to do is if you're going to go price line, you want to get really good at knowing how to use their bidding system because when you – let's say you know what to bid.

You put a bid in and it doesn't get accepted. No problem. You need to know like how to – you can rebid immediately rather than having to wait. But you just have to make slight changes. Like you want to add in an area, for example, that you have no interest in staying in geographically.

But you put conditions on the hotel that you know is just not available in that area. So there are some things that you can do to kind of fool with the logic to make sure that you get what you want. And then you just raise your bidding price like $5 and eventually you'll get a really great price.

Now, if you don't want to mess with that, I typically don't like the extra steps. And so I generally just go to Hotwire. I can generally figure out what the hotel is and then I'm able to identify what the hotel is. It's got good reviews. I've checked it on a TripAdvisor.

It looks good. I bid it. Sure enough, I get the hotel. Yep, it was the one I thought it was going to be. Then that's the first step. You got the hotel and generally those prices are going to be anywhere as much as 50% or more off what you would normally pay.

And then what you need to do – and that's the first step as I mentioned. You call up the hotel and you have to make sure that you're part of the rewards program. This helps because what you want now is you want the upgrade. Josh, doing what I'm about to share with you, I have gotten $450 suites for $60.

So you call them up and you ask them. You say, "Look, I'm not sure what your occupancy rate is during that weekend. I just want to" – the first off when you call, you say, "I just want to make sure that my" – I just made a reservation online.

It was through Hotwire. But I want to make sure that my rewards number is attached to my reservation. They say, "Yeah, no problem." And then at that point, you ask them to say, "I don't know what your occupancy rate is during that weekend or during that night, but it's kind of a special event.

I'm going to have my kids there and we're celebrating a birthday. We're celebrating." Give them a reason, any reason. It doesn't matter what it is. But give them something and then just say, "It's a really important event and I don't know what" – again, you're using terms like occupancy rate.

So it kind of sounds like you might be a little bit of an insider and say like, "This is someone who has worked in the hospitality industry. I'm going to hook them up." You're trying all these – you're kind of layering all these little things in there to just kind of leverage getting the deal.

And then of course you also want to be really nice. You want to smile. I mean when you're talking on the phone and then just say, "I'm not sure if you have any available upgrades during that time." And then usually that's not when I get them, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

Now, why you want to be on the rewards program is it makes it more eligible. I've had times where they said, "Oh, well, you're part of our frequent thing, frequent stay club or whatever it is. Yeah, I'll hook you up." It's weird. Just they need like the smallest excuse to do that.

And usually being on the company's – or being on the hotel's rewards club, it might give you free Wi-Fi. At the very least, it will give you a free newspaper. Who knows? But you should definitely do that. It's almost always going to mean some sort of extra perk. And I've seen some really good perks if you're there.

It might help you get checked in faster. Who knows? Anyway, so then when you actually get to the hotel, now you do want to call the hotel and you want to find out like you did. You want to find out information like transportation options. You want to get the advice of the people on the ground.

You want to get the locals' information. You want to know what's going on. It is worth the time. I don't like vacationing. Look, I'm all for taking a vacation and being spontaneous. But I like being spontaneous with the things that I've already checked out or at least I know something about as opposed to just making my vacation decisions based on who's got a great billboard.

I don't do that. I use tools like TripAdvisor. So you go to the hotel and then you say the same thing. You say you smile. Maybe you've got your kids with you. You want to look like a happy family that's really happy to be there. Even if you're a business traveler, the same thing.

You're just like, "Oh, man, I'm so grateful to be here. I've been looking forward to being here. Hey, look, I've got a really important meeting. This is such a big deal for me." Give them any excuse. Any excuse will do. And you say, "I don't know what your occupancy rate is, but would you happen to have any available upgrades?" And then you say something to the effect of, "And I don't know if you have" – like I'll put my hands up.

I go, "I'm not sure if you have that kind of power to do that kind of thing," almost. And then it kind of puts them like, "Power? I'll show you power. I've got the power to do anything." So you almost kind of put them in a position where they want to prove themselves to you.

And again, we're not talking about manipulation, but it's about being cool and being fun with people. And if there is an upgrade to be had, then this is the way to do it. This is how you uncover it. And so then they work their magic. And sometimes it works.

Sometimes the hotel might have a policy where there's absolutely no upgrades unless you pay the difference. And if you got a great deal to begin with and they say, "Well, yeah, actually, I can hook you up. You can get the suite, and it's $12 more," and you kind of have to just run the numbers in your head and see if that's worth it for you.

But most of the time, they just give it to you for free. But like I said, I've stayed -- I won a -- or I did a daily deal one time with the Gaylord Palms here in Orlando. And that was -- we ended up getting a huge suite. Oh, my gosh.

And there was a business hotel. We do a lot of staycations. We intentionally moved somewhere where there was a lot to do and there was a lot of fun things to do. And so we've done a lot of staycations in central Florida. But, oh, my gosh, some of the upgrades we've got have just been ridiculous, especially if you're staying in the off season and especially if you're staying at a time when the occupancy rate is very low.

And you can really get some incredible deals. Yeah, and to reward Gaylord Palms for upgrading you, the Gaylord Palms is an amazing hotel. If you're in Orlando, make sure you go for lunch just so you can walk around. They've got this -- they've got four or five different Florida ecosystems type of decorations in the middle of the hotel.

And it's just an awesome place to go. It's worth a destination just to go and have lunch. It's a pretty cool place. Yeah, yeah, absolutely love it. So, Josh, that's generally how it works for me. And I've been doing this for years and years and years and years, and I've had some amazing experiences.

Now, the only place in the country that's different, has a different system, different rules, is Vegas. Now, in Vegas, it's really easy to get the upgrade. Not every hotel will do this, but it's the $20 trick. So when you hand them your credit card and your driver's license, you have a folded up $20 bill inside, and you say, "And if you have any available upgrades, I would just love that." And you make it -- you don't have to be, like, all sneaky about it.

Make it known, just like -- and just hand the $20 bill. And, again, I got a monstrous upgrade by doing that. It's funny because we make fun of that because, you know, it makes the movies and whatnot. It's like 18 -- when I was like 17 or 18 years old, I started doing that.

I started doing that occasionally, and I won't disclose any of the stories on the air, but it opened some great doors for me over the years. It's amazing how effective a $20 bill can be sometimes. Yes, yes, because they have the power to really change your vacation experience. It's -- you know, I've stayed in small rooms, and there's nothing wrong with a small room.

I mean, it's better than a Prius, but -- That is for sure. But staying in a suite, you know, like a two-bedroom suite, I mean, those are just -- with these huge living areas, look, it's really cool because that's -- I don't -- you know, I make okay money, but I don't really go out of my way to spend my money to live lavishly.

But it's really cool when you can have those experiences without having to spend a lavish -- you know, have a lavish budget. Do you have any tips for if you are -- if you haven't planned ahead? So let's say that you're on the road, you're on a road trip, and you're driving through a town, and you need something kind of last minute.

Do you know any good tricks for doing things last minute? Well, yes. Are you talking about a hotel? Right, yeah, hotel. Okay, so hotel, again, what I've -- there's a couple of apps. Again, I tend to, just based on a lot of experience, I tend to be very, very happy with Hotwire.

But there's another one if you're in like a major metropolitan area. Hotel Tonight is another app that does very well. That's -- that app is generally better for like a New York City, Los Angeles, you know, really big metro area. But if you're just on the road and you're just driving through middle America, I've been really happy with Hotwire.

So, again, with the app, you can generally do that. You can still look up this information ahead of time. Hopefully your copilot can do this while you're driving. And I've been very -- I've done that, you know, because -- especially when we've -- we've made the trip from Florida to Michigan several times.

I've got family that lives there, and that's where we're from. So I wasn't sure exactly how long we'd be able to make it. So that's worked out very, very well for us. We were like, okay, nope, I can't drive anymore. So rather than -- and sometimes it's nice to have that flexibility in that, you know, you don't know how far you're going to drive and how far you want to continue to drive.

And the apps have been very, very helpful. >> All right. >> But, again, I do try to use -- TripAdvisor is -- I love their reviews. I tend to find that those are pretty spot on. I seldom am surprised if -- and I generally -- and, Josh, you probably have this experience, too.

You're a cool person. You're generally very easy to get along with. And those type of people, people who are flexible, tend to have better experiences. Friendly people just have more luck in life. And so if you're easygoing and you like people and you're kind to people, especially people in the service and hospitality industry, you will almost always have better experiences than people who are not as affable.

>> Right. >> And so what I think about it is just simply viewing life as an adventure. And I actually enjoy -- I've got -- I always feel a little bit -- it's not cool in our society to, you know, necessarily to be so flexible and be willing to do these crazy experiences.

But I've always enjoyed -- I always feel a little bit -- not embarrassed about it, but a little bit embarrassed about it because I've got to defend myself somehow. But I enjoy variety and change. So, you know, I think one of the most interesting things to me about life is enjoying the extreme experiences.

>> Yeah. >> And going from -- and teaching yourself to be flexible. And if you as a person are flexible and you, you know, you don't always demand a certain level of this is how it's got to be, I'm never staying in a hotel with fewer than four stars, then you can enjoy a broader array of experiences.

So I enjoy traveling internationally, but I try not to -- I try not to necessarily book a lot of stuff in advance. >> Yeah. >> Because I find since I'm okay with very minimal basic accommodations, that leaves the room -- that leaves room open for, you know, serendipitous peak experiences.

>> Yeah. >> And all of a sudden I walk in and I can think of several examples. One time when my wife and I were in the Dominican Republic and we were there and I had booked the first few days and that was great. It was actually on our honeymoon.

I had booked the first few days, but I had left the entire trip open. We found just because we were flexible, we switched to another hotel, very nice hotel, all-inclusive resort, all the food, all the drinks, the pool, everything, and we paid 30 bucks a day for each of us for accommodation at a beachside resort, fancy pool, unlimited drinks including alcohol, unlimited food, all the meals.

And just because we were willing to be serendipitous. I didn't have to have everything booked in advance because we were willing that if we got -- you know, if we couldn't find something nice, we were willing to deal with something mediocre. And so just personal flexibility I think is a key travel tactic that's not expressed enough.

>> Yeah. You know, one other thing that I did want to mention is also vacation rentals. If you're going to stay in Walt Disney -- let's say you want to come to Orlando and you want to go to Walt Disney World, vacation rentals by far some of the greatest values that you can get.

>> Absolutely. >> Oh, my gosh. >> So use a website called VRBO, which I think is a great website that you can find a great -- like we stayed at a three-bedroom, two-bath condo for less, and I mean way less than had we stayed on property at Disney World when we came down here for spring break one year.

>> VRBO to help people remember is vacation rental by owner. So that should help you if you're in the car and you need to look it up later, VRBO, major competitor for Airbnb, which many people know more about. >> Well, and Airbnb isn't necessarily vacation rental, but Airbnb is fantastic as well.

So all of these things, like if you're going on vacation, some people like planning for vacation. I'm one of those people. I mean I really enjoy that. So these are all worth looking at. So Airbnb, VRBO, and it all depends on like -- look, if you're going with a bunch of people, then you might want to take a look at a vacation rental.

Airbnb is going to give you a lot of smaller-sized properties too, so that's worth looking at. And then, of course, just the regular hotels that we already talked about. >> Absolutely. Josh, this stuff is awesome. So you've been able to build a whole business around this stuff, huh? >> Yeah.

>> That's awesome. >> And we have -- I do a lot of media. I write a syndicated column. I am on 40 TV stations on a regular basis. So I'm constantly just teaching people because it's amazing. You and I kind of work in this. So we assume that everybody knows this, but the reality is most people don't.

Most people don't know about all the tools that are accessible to you to help you spend your money more wisely. So they rely on experts like you and I to just go out and do the teaching. And so I've really, really enjoyed that. And by virtue of being able to work with the media, I mean, that's how I've created a very successful business.

>> You -- I want to wrap up, but do you have a quick minute? You started a new site you were telling me about, right, about how to work with the media? >> Exactly. So if you're a small business owner or if you'd like to be able to generate your own publicity, I've paid a lot of money to public relations people.

And the return on investment is always questionable in my experience. PR is important, but the best PR I've ever done has been my own. And so, I mean, over the history of my company, SavingsAngel.com, we've generated over $8 million in free advertising. And so I created a free webinar that will teach you step by step exactly what I do.

It's at MillionsInFreeMedia.com. And I'm sure you can link that up. >> I'll do that. >> Yeah. So come to my free webinar. I'll teach you exactly what I do. I mean, my passion is -- obviously, I love helping people get more upgrades in life, but I also love working with other business owners and helping them get the attention that they need.

Because there are a lot of -- Josh, there are a lot of great businesses that die on the vine because they just didn't get enough customers or they didn't get enough exposure. And, you know, if I didn't get the media exposure that I got, there would absolutely be no Savings Angel.

I have no idea what I would be doing today. But so it's a skill that you can learn, and it's a skill that will pay you, and it will completely eliminate that whole, "Oh, where am I going to get my business from?" question. It just -- you will have a steady stream of customers for life once you get good at working with the media because it will get you placed all over the web, and you'll just never have to worry about that again.

So I teach people how to do that for free. >> I need help with that stuff myself, so I'll go over and -- >> Yeah, oh, my gosh. I haven't looked at your site yet. I'll go over and check that out. And then it's actually on my reading list.

Have you read Ryan Holiday's book on manipulating the media? >> Oh, no. >> He's the guy. He's the American apparel guy, and he wrote a couple books on, like, how he completely manipulated the media and basically lied his way all around the media. >> Oh, no, no. >> So it's on my reading list.

I figure that's pretty radical, so I'll check your course out, and I'm going to read his book to see what he did. >> Yeah, my approach is absolutely understanding what the media needs and being that person. So I absolutely love being of service. I used to be a journalist.

It's a hard, hard, stressful job. And so if you can be the expert that makes their job easier, then they will rely on you, and when they rely on you, you're set for life. >> I'm a lot more comfortable with that approach than I am. >> Yeah. >> The other approach.

I'm a lot more comfortable with that. I'm a lot more comfortable with that. I'm a lot more comfortable with that. I'm a lot more comfortable with that. I'm a lot more comfortable with that. I'm a lot more comfortable with that. I'm a lot more comfortable with that. I'm a lot more comfortable with that.

I'm a lot more comfortable with that. I'm a lot more comfortable with that. I'm a lot more comfortable with that. I'm a lot more comfortable with that. I'm a lot more comfortable with that. I'm a lot more comfortable with that. >> Maybe now you can save a couple hundred bucks per month.

At least that's my hope. If you have savings tips, by the way, maybe I'm not quite ready to bring this out. I'm going to do at some point kind of just a show that's like a tip show. I really want to have a lot of variety to the show and just a lot of tips because sometimes hearing a useful small tip can really make a big difference.

Hopefully you picked up a couple of nuggets in today's show. I'm going to bring other savings people. If you've got a favorite person who has ideas on how to save money on a specific area, shoot me a note. Shoot me an email, Joshua@RadicalPersonalFinance.com, and I would love to have them on the show.

Thank you so much for listening for today. Tomorrow I will be doing a listener Q&A show. I've received quite a number of questions that I can cover. I've received some good voicemail questions while I was away for the last couple of weeks, and we haven't done a Friday Q&A show.

I'm not sure if I'm going to tackle one or maybe I'll bring a few and just make it a long show. We're going to do some Q&A tomorrow. Just a reminder, if you've got a question that you would like to ask me, I would love to get that question from you.

I would prefer actually that you would leave it in a voicemail if you could. Go to the site, RadicalPersonalFinance.com, and you will see the leave feedback or leave a voicemail button right there. It will work right on your phone or on your computer. The easiest thing is probably on your smartphone.

Just pull it up, hit that button, you hit record, it uses the microphone right in your phone, and you can leave me the message. I'll be able to play that for the audience. Alternatively, email is also fine. I've got a few email questions queued up that I'm going to answer as well.

I would love to have more and more of those coming in from you guys. It really helps me to drive the content of the show. As we march towards--this is episode 74--as we march towards 100 episodes, I'm going to really go back through and look and do some analysis to see what types of shows you guys have enjoyed and benefited the most from, what types of shows I've gotten the most questions on, and that will help me to adjust the content going forward.

So far, it's been just simply primarily me doing what I'm interested in, but now I want to just really understand more of the types of things that you all are enjoying and bring you more of those. Until tomorrow, have an awesome day. Talk to you soon. And make sure you subscribe if you haven't done that yet.

The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new. Whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey or spicy turkey tacos, your go-to shrimp cocktail, or your first Cajun risotto, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace your traditions. Ralph's. Fresh for Everyone.

We've locked in low prices to help you save big store-wide. Look for the locked in low prices tags and enjoy extra savings throughout the store. Ralph's. Fresh for Everyone.