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Exclusions apply. See website for details. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets, and I'm your host. Thank you for being here. Today is Friday, December 26, 2014. And today, I bring to you an interview with Jeff from the sustainablelifeblog.com. Jeff is a really neat guy.

He's a listener to the show. And we first met at FinCon. He offered to come on the show, and I offered to bring him on. And I'm thrilled he accepted. I like to bring you interviews like today. If you are looking for a show with 23 specific, in-depth, top tips on here's what you should do or not do, you'll want to skip today's show.

It's a little bit more of just a conversation. But the reason why I like to bring it is one of the major benefits that I get from listening to financial radio is encouragement and perspective. And I like to hear real people. And this is one of the real benefits I see in podcasting, is we can vary the content between specific, in-depth, hardcore, hard-hitting experts, and also relatively normal people.

Jeff is a listener to the show, and he and his wife are on the same process. And what I think you'll find really valuable is towards the latter half of the interview, we get into some of the hiccups that have happened in Jeff and his wife's financial plan, specifically the loss of a child.

And I think that you'll appreciate that perspective. Because it's very easy in, and I'm guilty of this myself, it's very easy in financial discussions to try to sound brilliant at everything. You know, I want you to think I'm brilliant every day. So I try to sound smart. And a lot of times that's just not the facts.

Sometimes life is tough. Sometimes things happen that are not in our control. Sometimes everything's not all perfect and rosy, such that we're all financially independent in two and a half years by working 10 hours a week and surfing 50 hours a week. It's not quite always that way. And I really enjoy listening to just conversations like the one today.

Jeff has some benefits and some things that he's learned from integrating sustainability and financial planning, and I hope you enjoy and benefit from that. But also just enjoy this conversation between two people with similar interests. And I hope that it encourages you on your path toward your financial goals and dreams.

If you'd like to get in touch with me, you can reach me at joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. Thank you so much for listening. Here's the interview. So Jeff, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I appreciate you being with me today. Thanks for having me on today, Josh. So you're a listener to the show, and I know you reached out to me and then we had a chance to meet there at FinCon.

Which was fun. And you're involved with finance, with your own personal finances, and kind of basically tying the connection between finance and a lot of, basically, green improvements and green living. I mean, your blog is called the Sustainable Life Blog. So share with us a little bit about your story and how it all came together where you started to connect your personal finance journey and your interest in sustainability.

Sure. It kind of started, I guess, when I got to college. I went to the University of Colorado, which is fairly well known as one of the more liberal universities in the country. And I had grown up in your traditional suburban environment where you needed a car to get basically anywhere you wanted to go, and you were kind of forced into this commuting lifestyle.

And when I got to university, I didn't have a car. I sold it when I got to university and put it aside to pay tuition a couple years later. And at first I was really unsure of how I was going to live, basically. And, you know, Boulder had a great bus system and public transit, good bike trails.

And it took me about six months to realize that I didn't need a car to live and I didn't want a car. And I wanted to kind of build my life around the fact that I wouldn't need one going forward, basically by choosing a spot to live that would be close to wherever I ended up getting a job.

So that was kind of early on, and that really stuck with me. And then I got--my wife and I bought a house in 2012 that was built in the mid-1920s and just was very old and not updated. And we--I'll never forget this-- we went in there to look at this house, and it's in a good neighborhood within walking distance to downtown where I live in Cheyenne, and I can bike to work and bike to the grocery store and bike to most of the other places I need to go, which was high on my list as well.

And we walked in there, and it was probably 40 to 50 degrees outside, and the woman that we bought it from kept the inside temperature somewhere in the 80s. It was ridiculously hot in there. - Wow. - And she was 92 years old, so she had to be living on a fixed income.

And I found out after we ended up buying this place that there was absolutely no insulation in the house at all. So I don't know how much our heating bills were. I didn't ask, and I kind of regret doing that, but I know that my wife and I have had a couple months where our heating bill has gotten above $100, and that was after spending a lot of money to replace our windows, get new insulation, and do some technology upgrades that I think help us save quite a bit of money, like replacing most of our lights with LEDs and getting a NAST programmable thermostat.

- Mm-hmm. Why was she selling and moving? - She moved around pretty well for 92 years old, but she--I mean, it's a 2,000-square-foot house, and she just couldn't take care of it all herself. We found out later from the neighbors that she had been wanting to move to an old folks' home, and since her dad built this house, her children didn't want her to move to the old folks' home, but I guess at 92, she finally got her wish and was able to move in there.

- Hmm, good for her. So you've been renovating the house. Has it saved you money? Is it an affordable way to live? Or has it been costing you more than it saved you? - Oh, I think it's been saving us a ton of money. We--I mentioned getting insulation in the place, and that was one of the first things we did, so we called up our local utility, and I asked about, you know, a lot of the utilities are looking to lower their expenses, capital construction costs, and lower residents' energy demand so they don't have to build new power plants as soon as they would have normally, so they--almost every local utility that I've ever dealt with has been interested in helping you reduce your demand for heat and electricity, so we called them, and they sent somebody out to do a free energy audit, and after the guy completed his audit, he gave us a bunch of tips of things we could do ourselves, like change out the light bulbs for LEDs, and he recommended that we insulate, obviously, the attic and all the walls, and told us that the utility was willing to kick up-- they ended up paying for about 75% of the total cost, and I think they offered us, like, 700-- the first $750 of what it would cost to insulate the walls, and then the first, like, $1,000 or so for what it would cost to insulate the attic, and so we--the guy who did the insulation would have charged us about $3,500 for what he did for us, and we ended up paying $1,200 or $1,300 after all the utility rebates kicked in, and it saved us a ton of money in heating expenses.

- Do you have any ability to figure out, like, did you go through one winter with it-- go through one winter without it being insulated where you could track your number? Were you able to figure out how much it saved you? - No, unfortunately not. I could only estimate, but I think that had we not insulated it, our heating bills probably in the winter would have been $200 to $250 depending on how cold it was that month--per month, and now with the insulation, we've kind of-- I think our highest bill has been about $115.

- Hmm. Do you have more improvements planned? - Yeah, we do. We have a pretty well-lit-- with natural light upstairs, and there is 23 windows on the first floor of our house, and I think we replaced 16 of them at one point, so we're gonna do the other eight windows probably next summer, and that should be it for the major energy-saving upgrades at the moment, and then I'm thinking about doing a radiant heating system like Mr.

Money Mustache mentioned on his blog, but I've got to do a little bit more research into how that will work in our application. - Can you switch to wood heat? Can you put in, like, a rocket mass heater or something like that and renovate the house and maybe put, like, a glass house on the south?

Have you looked into some of those design ideas? - I've thought about that. I was kind of hoping to save the south side of our house for a little greenhouse and use-- and I saved all the old windows when they took them out, and I was gonna try and build a little greenhouse with a couple of salvaged 2x4s and all the old windows that I saved when they replaced ours.

- Yeah, I mean, it seems-- I always look at-- I'm not an expert. I'm just a total layperson, but I look at the heating versus cooling problem, and it seems so easy to solve the heating problem cheaply and easily to me, whenever having lived up there, but, like, the technology seems so simple.

I look at--I don't know if you're familiar. I had him on the show, this guy named Stephen Harris. He has all these little, like, solar heaters that he designed. He sells a book on it, and you basically just build these things and stick them in a window, and they're basically a black box, and they work like a solar heater.

Insulation seems so easy. There's so many technologies with wood heat, and it just--it's easy to grow-- easy here. Listen to me. It's not that complicated to set up a wood lot in the back of your property and, you know, coppice your trees, and you can grow-- I mean, there's some amazing things you see, and I look at cooling, and it's exactly the opposite to me.

It seems so difficult compared to the heating, and so I always get a little jealous of you guys trying to solve your energy efficiency problems up north. - Yeah, we most certainly don't have the cooling problem here that I'm sure you have down in Florida. - Yeah. Are you trying to do all the work yourself, or what are you learning as you go through this process?

- Um, the insulation, they didn't want us to do ourselves because the utility had a deal worked out with the guy in town. I've done--I did some of the windows myself, and some of them I--we hired out, and then I mentioned the radiant floor heat. If that gets done, I will do that myself, and my wife and I have just learned an incredible amount in the process.

I--in addition to the radiant heat and the insulation, when we moved in, we found the original wiring, which is called knob and tube wiring, and it was--it was before kind of the big revolution in electrical wiring that happened in the late '50s. - Mm-hmm. - And so this was basically a series of single wires that you just ran, and when you needed to turn a corner, you'd put a little porcelain knob on it and then wrap the wire around the knob and go whatever direction you need to go, and those were all not grounded, and they obviously were not up to any current code, but since they were existing, they were fine, and I replaced all those.

That took me about a month and a half of work in the attic, and when I talked to an electrician, he said that he's done similar jobs to what I did, and he's charged about $12,000 or $15,000 to do what I did. - Why do you blog? - I blog because I want to show people or teach people that saving money and doing right by the environment are not-- are not--they're not difficult to do, and usually they kind of complement each other.

- Is one of those a bigger deal to you than the other, saving versus the environment? Is there--like, is one of those a bigger draw for you? - I would say that when I started, the environment was probably a bigger draw for me, but now that I've learned more about finance and realized that it kind of is at the core of everything you do, you know, once you turn, like, 14 and start earning your own money, it frees you up to--it either traps you into, you know, making certain choices that you wouldn't make if you didn't, you know, have a lot of debt and need to pay it off and need the money, or it can free you up in terms of, you know, you don't need a lot of money, so you can spend your time doing whatever you want as opposed to what, you know, your debt is forcing you to do.

So I've kind of gotten more interested in the finance side over the last five years, where I probably started out a little bit more interested in the environmental side. - Have you had any--like, have your opinions shifted over time as you've learned more about and tried to actually apply some of your ideas as far as any--have you changed your viewpoints on anything?

- Some of the things I have, I still think that it's a lot easier than a lot of people make it out to be, and I know a lot of--you know, like Mr. Money Mustache says, "Well, it's simple to save a lot of money. "Just, you know, sell your car and ride your bike everywhere." And when you suggest that to people, they're like--they start making excuses, basically.

They're like, "Well, I can't ride a bike. "I live too far from work." It's like, "Well, then why don't you move?" "Well, I don't want to move. You know, I like my house." I mean, those are--nobody is forcing them to drive a long way to their office, and no one is forcing them to live where they do.

Those are both choices they make, but, you know, the choice of where you live versus where you work is one that you make, and that affects other options that you have. Like, you know, if you live 35 miles away from your office, I will agree that biking is a little bit difficult.

- I've never--I would agree. I was thinking about--I'm going to go back to the blog, and I'm interested because your blog seems very personal, but it seems like it's almost a record of essentially kind of some of the things that you've done. Has it been beneficial for you to go through the process of sitting down and writing out your thoughts?

Have you noticed clearer thinking or anything like that over the years? - Oh, absolutely. I--you know, I started my website in 2009, and all told, I had about $55,000 worth of debt, which is why I started it, to keep myself accountable. But I found out that if I can kind of, you know, do a little research and sit down and write, you know, say--I wrote about getting our energy audit, and I kind of sat down, and I thought to myself, "Well, what do I think this guy's going to come in here and do?" And, you know, I listed off the obvious ones, like he was going to check the attic for insulation, and he was going to look at the lights and suggest sealing, you know, small gaps in the old windows if there were any and things like that.

But after I kind of sat down with that for a while, I was thinking mostly in terms of the saving energy and kind of going green side of that thing. But, I mean, the--you could call them investments, I guess. The investments that we made in our house in terms of buying new windows and adding insulation, basically, to our house will continue to save us money for years and years and years.

I mean, we are probably saving somewhere between $400 and $600 per year, I guess, just in heating costs alone, and that's natural gas prices at fairly low levels-- Right. --compared to recent years. Do you make any money on your blog? I make a little bit, mostly enough, to kind of keep the lights on, so to speak.

And I do--I travel to FinCon with the earnings from the blog, but I used to make--in 2011, I did pretty well, but there's been a lot of changes since then, and I haven't been doing as well. And that doesn't really bother me all that much, as long as it'll cover its expenses.

It's a nice hobby, and it's a nice outlet. Yeah, and I would think--I mean, I never-- I feel like a bit of a hypocrite, because I often suggest that-- like, I love people to start financial blogs, and the reason, I think, is because it gives you an incentive to sit down and to make a plan and think, and it gives you a small community of people.

I get so nervous with all of the-- I mean, it's great that people can make money, and I'm trying to make money on my show, turning it into a business. But even if you never make a dime, it forces you to sit down and go through that process of writing out what you believe, and I see that as a transformative process.

I do it personally, you know, just in my journal, but I think it can be an extra motivation for many people to sit down and just share the lessons with other people. I totally agree with you, and I think that a lot of people-- you know, not just a lot of people who don't have blogs, but a lot of people don't really take the time to do this in their own life.

So, you know, they all of a sudden wake up one day, and they're not sure if they enjoy doing something or if they've just been doing it for the last 10 years out of habit. And I think that's something that, you know, people can easily get stuck into. I spoke with Craig Mathias last week, or maybe it was the week before, about this, and we kind of got off to talking about how even though you're-- like, if you don't sit down and say, you know, write down a list, like, for me, I have a list of my favorite things, and I like to go for walks, and I like to spend time with my family, and I like to play fetch with the dog, and I like to ride my bike.

Like, those things are really important to me. You know, and I have other hobbies as well that I enjoy, but as long as I'm doing, you know, those five things a couple times a week or five or six times a week, that makes me happy. But a lot of people, you know, they don't get time to reflect like that, and so they're not sure if, you know, they go play horseshoes every Friday night with their friends, if they actually like playing horseshoes, or if they just kind of do it because that's what they've always done on Friday nights.

You know what I mean? Right. Right. It forces you to actually consider what you actually believe and what you actually like. There's something called--there's a word called "dialectic," and how I understand the word, there are different applications of it, but I think of it, from my personal definition, as kind of arguing with yourself and forcing yourself to say, "Do I believe this that I believe?" And it's funny because you can do that in writing.

I do it with my show sometimes. I'll share something on the show, then I'll go back and listen to it, and I say, "Hmm, do I believe that what I believe?" And so far, usually, I mean, I'm pretty careful about what I say to make sure I say what I believe, but writing is useful because then you can look at it in black and white.

It's better than audio for most people, I think. And you can say, "Ah, now I'm clear." The entire process of financial planning is just about getting clarity on goals, and once you get clarity on goals, you figure out, "What do I do to get there?" And then, "What's all the stuff that could happen to derail me, and how do I plan for that?" And it's so clear, but as a society, we don't often engage in that dialectic, that argument, self-argument with yourself to see if you really believe what you believe.

You know, I totally agree. I think that a lot of people kind of run into financial problems because they don't ever sit down and do this. You know, people go out and spend a lot of money on clothes or fancy dinners out, new cars or whatever, and they just buy that because that's what people expect them to have or that's what they think they should have, but they've never really sat down and thought to themselves, "You know, I want to become a sports radio announcer," or, "I want to live in Bali for a year," or whatever.

They've never sat down and actually kind of said that to themselves and let that big dream out into the open, and so they just keep floating by and don't really ever even give themselves a chance to accomplish it because they don't put it onto paper, like you said. I noticed that you have had some challenges.

I know you had a baby that was born premature, and you had some mix-ups with your wife's income. I know it sounds like, at least just from reading your writing, that you've had some personal challenges in your finances that you've had to work your way through. Do you feel like sometimes people make it sound too easy with finance, especially on the Internet?

You know, sometimes I do. I mean, you mentioned--I'll give listeners a little bit of a back story. My wife was pregnant about this time last year, and we were expecting twins. In December, we found out one of those twins had a whole multitude of defects that were caused by chromosomal abnormalities, and he wasn't going to make it, which was jarring and very unfortunate, to say the least.

I learned a lot about the specific condition that our son had, and it's called trisomy 13. If anyone was curious, it's when you have a break on the 13th chromosome, and development just starts to get all weird, and things--you know, the heart doesn't form right, and the intestines and stomach grow outside of the body cavity.

So the doctors told us that he wasn't going to make it, but that the pregnancy should be fine and that our daughter would be fine. And then we had a baby shower for our daughter when my wife was six months pregnant in February. And before the baby shower started, we were setting stuff up and kind of waiting-- a couple people were here, and we were kind of waiting for everyone else to turn up.

And my wife's like, "My side kind of hurts, and I feel kind of tired." I was like, "Well, you know, just don't do anything. I'll take care of it. Sit down, relax, just enjoy the night." And not having had a pregnant wife before, I didn't really think anything of it.

And after everybody left, she's like, "My side really starts to hurt." And her sister, who had just had a kid who was probably a little over a year old at the time, said, "Well, where do you feel it?" And my wife starts pointing at her side and her lower back, and my sister's like, "Well, that's kind of where the contraction pains are." So we started timing them, and they started getting quicker.

And to make a long story short, we ended up going to the-- I called the doctor, and the doctor was like, "You need to come to the hospital now." And we went to the hospital, kind of sat there while they monitored my wife for a couple hours, and then the baby came out, and the Flight for Life team was there waiting, and they set her all up with a bunch of tubes and put her in one of those little teeny boxes on a stretcher, and they took me and the baby down to a bigger hospital with better facilities that could care for her.

And so she lived there in the hospital for three months, and my wife is a schoolteacher, so she took off the rest of that school year at work and stayed-- basically went to the hospital every day for three months, and then I drove down there. I worked four days a week and drove down on the weekends, and that was kind of our life from February to May.

That was challenging, and we had good insurance, thankfully, because that care-- I added up all the bills one day just kind of for fun, and it was well over three-quarters of a million bucks. So that was--I mean, everything worked out fine. I think that I didn't know enough about the process to be worried about it, so I just kind of took it all in stride.

And, you know, that's kind of my personality type, too, so I'm not sure if it was more one or the other or a little bit of both, but everything turned out fine. You know, our daughter is--she's healthy. She's small for her age, but that's to be expected. So there was that, and then we--my wife went back to work this fall and teaching 66% of the time or two-thirds, however you want to put it.

And the first month they paid her what would have been a full paycheck, and since she wasn't working full-time, she shouldn't have got that, so she went and corrected it with her school district. And then the next month they paid her only one-third of a check when she was supposed to be getting like two-thirds of what we were used to.

So we still have yet to figure out exactly how much she's going to get paid during this time of working two-thirds time. So that has been one of the things that's caused like kind of a cash crunch that you mentioned. And the other thing is I switched jobs in June to--I went from a government position to a private firm because I was more interested in the equity options that I was offered, and I thought it had a higher potential for upside than where I was at.

So I had to put everybody on my insurance because that's where everyone was, and my insurance costs went from like $100 a month for the entire family to over $1,000. Yeah, and it--like all of--you know, my wife and I have been--you know, we knew she wanted to stay home at least part-time with the kids, and so we have plenty of savings and we haven't been operating at a negative cash flow.

But we were in quite a bit of a cash crunch for--well, we're not quite out of it yet. So once this January rolls around and we switch insurances and they fix my wife's pay, we should exit it. But it's been a kind of challenging road in one sense, but in the other sense, it's taught us that, you know, we don't need to go out and spend a whole bunch of money to be happy.

I'm glad you shared those details because it's actually--especially in the world of finance, one of my concerns that I have with those of us who are producing financial content is in the same way that if I post something on Facebook, it's probably going to be something fun, something impressive that I'm doing.

You know, look at me on the beach, you know, with my--look at--laughing at all you suckers up in the rest of the country where it's all cold and here I am. I'm having such a great life on the beach on Wednesday morning. You know, we put forth this persona.

Oftentimes we want to believe--we want people to believe that we are admirable. We want people to believe that we're worthy of admiration. And when it comes to finance, we tend to do the same thing and we tend to often write about, you know, everything that's going well and we tend to talk about things that are going well and we tend to make things sound easy.

Oh, just, you know, I have a tendency to do this. Live on 20% of your income. It's so easy. It's wonderful. It's great. It's no big deal at all. And, you know, just, you know, fix the system. That's not reality. And I think I'm guilty of it and I want to do a better job of sharing what's real and also talking with people about what's real because the reality of life is that sometimes there are struggles.

The reality of finance is that finances get tight. And they don't only get tight because you are somehow, you know, have a character weakness. Sometimes they get tight because you have a premature baby and you can't work. And sometimes, you know, they get tight because you get sick. Sometimes they get tight because you get laid off from work.

And so I appreciate your sharing those things on your blog. And I think that we who are involved in personal finance need to do a better job of sharing the realities of life where our good ideas are shared within the context of reality. Right. I mean, you know, we've been--even though we've been operating on a way smaller monthly budget than we did 12 months ago, it doesn't really feel that bad because of, you know, we talked about energy a bit at the beginning.

All that stuff that we did significantly lowered the amount of cash we need every month to pay our bills. I mean, even through all this, you know, we still have--we have a 15-year mortgage because that was something that my wife and I talked about. We bought a reasonable house and we took out a 15-year mortgage.

And I told her, I was like, "Look, you know, you're not pregnant yet, but you're probably going to be pregnant in the future." And even if we buy this house on a 15-year mortgage and do absolutely nothing, this house is most likely going to be paid off by the time our first child gets into high school.

And, you know, there was that and, you know, I mentioned the windows and the insulation. Like, we're not getting $300 heating bills, electricity bills kind of sprung on us one month because Mother Nature decided that it wasn't going to get above, you know, 3 degrees in Wyoming for a week and a half one month.

We're not really at the whims of those things anymore. And I'll tell you that even though we have a lot less cash now than we did a year ago, I feel more financially comfortable because we have three to four months of emergency fund depending on things. And I didn't, five years ago when I started this journey, I didn't have an emergency fund.

I had a whole pile of debt and a 1985 Saab that caught on fire while I was riding it at one time. I'm not dependent on so many outside factors anymore. Like, if my car broke down, it wouldn't matter. And I honestly would probably not figure it out for a month because I ride my bike to work or I walk.

You know, we don't, all of these changes that we've been making over the past four or five years allowed us to skate through this fairly rough time relatively unscathed. That's a really important reminder. You know, the things that you do to plan appropriately, the reason that you save money, so that you have a little bit of a cushion and the reason that you learn frugality, skills of frugality, it gives you more resilience in life.

You know, I can think of in my family, just some simple things like lowering expenses is a very useful thing to do because it can result in so many long-term savings. I noticed that you have a post on your site about reusable baby wipes. My wife and I do that.

We've made, you know, same thing. Had a flannel blanket, chopped it up and used them for reusable baby wipes. And it was so interesting. We talk about like, man, how expensive would it be to have to go buy diapers and wipes all the time? But the fact is that we can have more peace because we don't have to come up with that expense.

There have been times in the past where, you know, my income would fluctuate and I would have one month where I made a lot of money and another month where I made no money. And having the ability to have plenty of food in the pantry so that we could say, well, we're not going to go grocery shopping for the next few weeks.

We weren't broke, but it gives you more resilience and allows you to not spend money because you have other backups. And that makes for a much more peaceful life, which leads to better health, a better marriage, more personal, greater personal mental health, and it has an overflow effect in many ways.

I agree. One thing that I did not mention earlier, but when my wife was living down by the hospital, and I was staying with my parents, and I was up at our house in Wyoming, I kind of developed this nice little routine where I would go down to Denver, where the hospital was, on Thursday nights, and I would stay with my parents and my wife, and we would go to the hospital Thursday night, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for most of the day.

And then I would leave two or three in the afternoon on Sunday, and I would come back home. I would go to the grocery store, and I would make one meal in the crock pot for me to eat all week because I don't care if I'm eating the same thing for ten meals in a row.

And then I would make one or two meals that I took and put in the freezer for when everybody finally did come home. We would have another buffer like that. Like you mentioned, we had a whole bunch of dinners already in the freezer, and all we had to do was take them out and thaw them, and they would be ready to cook.

Yeah, absolutely. Little things like that make a big difference in the quality of life. They really do. Anything else that you would like to cover, you'd like to mention, that you'd like to share with the audience while we're on today? Yeah, I wanted to get into more. I know we talked about all the stuff you can do to kind of go green and save money, and I think that it's something that a lot of people overlook because they get a pill from Con Ed or whoever your utility is, and then they just write it.

They write their check, or they set up the auto withdrawal, and then they kind of go on. But there are a lot of things that you can do, structural changes, not behavioral changes like remembering to turn off the light every time you leave the room. But structural changes in terms of efficiency upgrades with your insulation.

Right now, LED light bulbs, I think, are two for $8 at Home Depot, and you can go and pick up a whole bunch of those. Say you want to get five or ten of those, and you can put those light bulbs in the most highly used lights in your house.

I mean, don't go putting them in a closet or whatever because you're only going to turn on a closet light two to three times a day for a minute or two at a time. But in your bathroom or your kitchen where the lights are on 20, 30 minutes or more each time you turn them on, and you're turning them on five or six times a day, that adds up to five or ten bucks a month off of your energy bill, and it requires no behavior changes whatsoever.

And same thing with the insulation. You've got to make a couple phone calls, check and see what kind of insulation you have, if you have any, and then honestly have them. I think we had our attic built up to like R60 or R80, and that, again, like I mentioned, has probably saved us $500 or $600 per year just in gas costs.

It paid for itself in 13 or 14 months, I would guess. And same with the windows. We replaced the original windows that were one pane leaded glass with newer high-efficiency windows, and we got a tax break for that just like we did for the insulation. And we didn't -- once again, that required a one-time effort and no behavioral changes.

And, you know, we've done a whole bunch of things that have -- I mean, we were probably looking at $200 to $250 at the worst in heating and electricity bills during the winter, and because of these actions we've taken one time, we're not looking at heating bills that big.

We're not going to be surprised by heating bills that big, and we can take this money that we've, you know, saved and put it somewhere else far more useful. And I think these things are things like that people overlook because they think, oh, I want to lower my electricity bill.

Everybody says that I should, you know, turn the heat down to 60 degrees or whatever in the winter and, you know, make all these behavioral changes so I remember to shut off my lights and all of these other things. But you don't need to get into those behavioral changes until after you've taken care of the bigger structural-type issues, and usually the structural-type issues are the ones that are going to save you the most money anyway.

It's an interesting concept that I think we could apply in a lot more -- in a lot of areas, just the idea of a structural cost, because whether it's the choice to buy -- an example that comes to mind, I choose to buy a four-bedroom house instead of a two-bedroom house if I don't need or have a use for the extra rooms.

Well, I'm going to be heating and cooling those rooms. I'm going to be insuring those rooms. I'm going to be paying taxes on those rooms. And cleaning them. And cleaning them. I've just structurally increased my lifestyle cost by a certain amount, and that's never going to change. And so if it can fit in my lifestyle, going from a four-bedroom house to a two- or three-bedroom house, if that can fit my lifestyle, my needs, my kids, whatever those needs are, then that can reduce forever an ongoing expense, or something as simple as -- I remember when I needed to get another car, and I knew I wanted a minivan, and I'm shopping around to try to figure out how can I spend -- what price, and it basically came out that there were -- the four that I was willing to consider were the Honda, the Toyota, the Kia, and the Hyundai.

And the Kia and the Hyundai are the same one. They're basically the same vehicle. So I looked at it, and I looked at the insurance costs, and the insurance costs on the Hyundai were the lowest of all of them. And so there's a lower structural cost of the Hyundai and the Kia, instead of getting the higher insurance costs for the other ones.

And little things like that make a big difference. And then also with cars, the repair costs, the choice to buy a car that's highly rated for reliability versus a car that's not well rated for reliability. There's a very simple structural cost. I almost one time -- I'm so glad I didn't -- but at one time, I thought I needed to get a fancy car to impress people, so that they would think I was a great financial advisor, and I was this close to buying a Mercedes sedan that I had found a good deal on.

And I'm so glad I didn't, because something as simple as buying a Mercedes would have structurally meant that from now on, I've got to get the fancy tires, and I've got to get the expensive oil change, and I've got to get everything. Everything just structurally becomes higher because of one little choice of what car brand.

And I don't think about this enough, I think, even in my own life. So I commend it to the audience as a topic of consideration. I totally agree. I mean, I talked about people -- how easy it was to ride their bike. And where not only the size of the house, like you mentioned, is part of your structural cost, but where you live.

There's a lot of great houses near my town where I could probably be in town driving in 15 or 20 minutes, which is, to a lot of people, a reasonable commute. I could go out a little bit north or a little bit east of town and buy 40 acres and build this property with a nice barn and an outbuilding for all my tools and all that.

But choosing to do that means that now I don't have a choice whether or not I can bike, because I've basically forced myself into driving. I've got to pay more for gas, I've got to pay more for car insurance. There's going to be more wear and tear on my vehicle than there would be if I bought a house in town that I could walk to most places instead of drive.

And in my mind, these structural costs are the biggest drivers of people's financial issues. Right. Absolutely. Everybody just says making ends meet is tough, and I'm kind of generalizing here, but making ends meet is tough because I have all these bills to pay. Well, these bills are the structural part of your finances that usually take a little bit of thinking and a little bit of investment, and then you can greatly reduce their costs without a whole lot of action on your part.

When I was in school and we talked about a lot of environmental issues like remediation or cleanup or something, to give an example, say there's an oil spill, they always say that it's going to cost as much to clean up the first 90% of the oil spill as it is to clean up the last 10%.

Interesting. And that's true in your finances as well. You're going to put as much effort into reducing your energy bill by the first 25% or the first 50% as you will the next 25%. And same with your cell phone bill or your cable TV if you still have that.

Usually you can lower your cable TV by switching companies or calling and whining and asking for a discount. And you could knock $20 or $30 a month off that. That's a couple hundred bucks a year. Or you could -- I mean, that's easy savings. Or you could do nothing and let things continue and not really focus on those and try and watch less TV or whatever.

But the thing is, these structural costs typically to get a significant reduction in most or all of them only requires a small amount of upfront work. And it's not something like to save money on groceries you're going to need to eat cardboard for a week and a half or whatever.

You can easily reduce your structural costs without making behavior changes, which in terms of finances and in health, I'm currently trying to change what I eat. And I'm finding it to be very difficult, far more difficult than other changes that I've made in my life. Because you're -- I mean, you eat two to three meals every day, so you have to make a conscious choice every day to say, "Oh, I don't want to eat that because it's not going to make me feel good and it's not good for me long term." Versus things like going -- like if I wanted to get more exercise, then I could simply start walking to work instead of taking time out and going to the gym or whatever.

And to me, those changes are far easier across the board, no matter if you're talking about saving money on your cell phone bill or your car insurance or your energy. Those structural changes will yield a lot better and bigger results in a lot less time than behavioral changes will.

Excellent point. Anything else on your list? No, I think that about covers it, Joshua. I'd encourage you to keep doing what you're doing and keep writing about it, keep sharing about it, and keep making changes. I think it's awesome, and I hope that you and your wife enjoy the valley because it makes the mountaintop feel a lot better, right?

Right. And I appreciate your sharing, because to me, I see a massive connection between sustainability and finance. And there are so many things -- people often focus on the divisive arguments with regard to sustainability, when there's so many simple things that just make sense and there's no division to them.

So why spend all this time arguing about stuff that doesn't matter? Why not just do stuff that has a multitude of benefits and effects all in one place? At least that's my philosophy. Thank you for coming on today. I appreciate you making the time to do so and sharing your ideas with us.

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