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That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. Today on Radical Personal Finance, we talk about how to decrease your expenses, how to build and use a price book to save you money in the short term and the long term, and perhaps most importantly, to train your frugal muscles for a lifetime of getting more for less.

Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua and I am your host and today we're going to be very, very practical, continuing our quest of helping you to save money by talking about price books.

I'm going to explain to you what a price book is, talk about the benefits of having one, how to build one and share with you some of the surprising results of my own work in this area. I've stated recently several times that one of my goals for 2018 is to cut our grocery budget, our family grocery budget substantially.

My personal target is to see if I can trim out about 2,000 bucks this year off of the money that we spend in groceries. A little hard to track sometimes because of course we have a pantry and I don't have it exactly perfectly figured out. But that's kind of the mental goal in my head.

I'm going to trim a couple thousand bucks out of our grocery budget and knock this thing out of the park. In order to do so, I have to go back to the fundamentals. I have to go back to the basics and pick up some of those things that I have let go.

I think frankly this is something that we find in many areas of our life. When we get out of shape, we have to go back to the fundamentals. When we start getting fat, let's say that you are fat and then you got skinny and then you get fat again, well, you got to go back to the fundamentals.

The same thing with saving money. I've frequently found that I have to go back to the fundamentals. One of those fundamentals for helping you to do a better job with your spending is the use of a price book. I'm going to be using the example of a price book today in the context of groceries because all of us buy groceries in some form or another.

That's probably the most practical way for us to use this information. But of course you can and should use this in other areas. So what is a price book? In essence, a price book is your own personal record of what things cost in different places at different times. That's the philosophical sounding dictionary definition.

But basically it's a notebook in which you write down what the stuff that you regularly buy or want to buy costs you at different times and in different places. So it would be as simple as having a notebook and if you're going to shop for green beans, you write down how much green beans cost at the different stores that you go to.

You write down if there's a sale on green beans and if there's not a sale and you calculate how much green beans cost per pound and that helps you to figure out where to buy your green beans. Because some stores will regularly have green beans priced more cheaply than other stores.

It will also help to guide you on when to buy your green beans. You may find that at the end of the harvest season where you live, there are dramatic sales on green beans and you can buy boxes and boxes of them at a 50 or 70% discount. If you can figure out how to either use them or to store them, that may be a really good way for you to get the valuable nutrition and food content of the green beans at a cheaper price.

Of course, there are some other products that you may buy regularly that you can use sales and coupons to know when to stock up. Maybe you buy coffee in a big can, a number 10 can at your local store or maybe you buy jars of peanut butter and they're having a sale at the store and you need to know, "Oh, should I buy a dozen jars of peanut butter or should I just buy one or two?" And if you'll start to do this over time, it'll allow you to always pay the lowest possible cost for the items that you want to use, but you have to have the data.

A price book is so valuable because it helps you to know which stores give you those best prices and when to stock up. One of the trends that you should observe in your own life and in others' lives is as you go from poverty to wealth and as you continue in that journey, you should take advantage of your wealth in order to buy larger amounts of product that you're going to use at lower prices.

If you study the poor people all around the world, you'll find that one of the things they do is frequently buy very small quantities of things because their cash flow is very limited. They can't afford to trot down to Costco and buy a giant box of 50 or 100 rolls of toilet paper.

They go down to the local store and they buy one little roll of toilet paper because they don't have $20 to spend on toilet paper. They have 30 cents to spend on toilet paper or 50 cents. By the way, Costco toilet paper costs 50 cents a roll – sorry, 53 cents a roll and that's one of the benefits of having a price book is to know that every time you put a roll of toilet paper on, how much that actually costs depending on where you are purchasing it.

So when you don't have a lot of money, you have to buy things in small quantities. But when you buy things in small quantities, you usually pay the highest possible price per unit, the highest possible price per roll of toilet paper because – and this isn't so common in the United States.

Although it does exist, but in many parts of the world, if you go into a barrio or a neighborhood, a ghetto of some kind where there are many, many poor people congregated together, you'll find that they do their shopping in the local corner store. Whatever they're called in your neck of the woods, whether it's a pouperie or a sorry-sorry store or a rabe du coin or a dollar general or whatever the local iteration of it is, you have a shopkeeper who takes and buys large packages and splits them up.

Very convenient and helpful for poor people but pricey when considered on the unit prices. So as your wealth grows, you should look at the things that you buy and you should be willing to purchase larger quantities of them as long as you're going to use them if you can get a better price.

But the price book is what tells you when you should stock up. Either when in the season – one of the strategies everybody can implement is just do your shopping off-season. Purchase your lawnmower if you need a lawnmower in the fall. Purchase your snowblower in the spring. Purchase your winter clothing in the spring when it's being rebated and discounted.

One of the best times to go shopping for your Christmas presents for next year is right after Christmas this year. The next best time to buy your candy for next year is right after Valentine's Day or right after Halloween this year. Look for the – to be out of time and look for when the best time to buy certain things is that you can stock up.

As long as you're dealing with products that aren't going to go bad, that's going to be helpful to you. And also stock up anytime you find a good buy, whether that's a good buy that you can manufacture, create, buy a discount that you find or coupons that you can apply, rebates that you've discovered or a good buy just simply in terms of a good sale and the price book tells you how to do that.

Now with regard to food, I think this is the best place for us all to start because most of us have a dizzying number of options available for where we can actually purchase our food and what kind of food we can buy. I live in a food oasis. I talk about food deserts which is the idea of living in a place where there aren't a lot of great options available for you to buy good food.

I live in a food oasis. It's almost embarrassing within a very reasonable – within ten minutes of my house in the car, much of it within five minutes. I've got bunches of grocery stores. There are Publix. There's a Winn-Dixie. These are regional southern grocery stores like Kroger. There's Aldi nearby.

Then there are tons of elite stores where I live. We've got Whole Foods, Fresh Market, Trader Joe's. I've got health food stores, independent nutrition supermarkets and health food stores where you can purchase all of the crunchy stuff. I've got a great ethnic market, big ethnic – a couple of big ethnic supermarkets that live where I live, one that's targeted towards Latinos.

Everything is in Spanish. All of the food is from Central and South America, all the Central and South American brands. One that's targeted towards – it has a lot of Hispanic food but a lot of Arab food, a lot of Indian food, a lot of food from the islands.

Obviously, if you need to buy live crabs or jellyfish tentacles or if you want to get a frozen goat head for your dinner tonight or purchase a package of cow's feet, that's the store you go to. I love taking my children there because we're usually the only white people in the store.

They love to look at all of the little animals and things that you can buy. I've got fruit and vegetable stands. We've got Walmart. I've got the big box stores, Costco and Sam's Club and BJ's and various green markets. The one place where we lack, what we don't have is we don't have access to a lot of local producers or a lot of local farms.

Where we live, the green markets are kind of hoity-toity posh affairs rather than places where you can actually go to get a deal. You pay through the teeth when you go to the green market because usually you're buying the fanciest, most artisan food. That's not a great place to save money.

That's a good place to go for the experience. We live in so many of these. I have an abundance of riches where I live in that regard, but it's hard to know what to buy where. It's hard to do this in your head. Let me walk you through the process of creating your own price book and then I'll tell you some of the examples of the results of me going back to this.

My wife and I first married. I used to have a price book at that time, but our food shopping was so simple that we just kind of gave it up and quit. But now, I'll go back to that fundamental. What you do in my recommendation way is start on paper.

What I prefer is a three-ring binder. The reason I prefer a three-ring binder is it makes it easy to change the order of the pages. I used a simple notebook paper. You're going to designate a page to each type of food that you buy. What I would do is if I'm trying to figure out where to buy green beans, I'll just write at the top of the page a very natural category listing.

For me, it would be beans, green. I'll alphabetize the pages based upon the product. I know that my beans are going to be on one page. I'll have beans, green. Of course, on that green bean, I won't put it out into string beans or all the different varieties. I'll just put basically things that are kind of like green beans.

Then I would have a page for dried beans, things like that. I would have a page for peanut butter and a page for eggs. The value of this three-ring binder is that you can infinitely sort and shuffle your pages and keep them alphabetized so it's quick and easy to find.

You can do this with a notebook, but it's harder because in a notebook, you're not going to know the exact categories as you create it. It's a little bit harder to create an ad hoc category. Recently, I was looking and thinking about getting an extra battery jump pack for my vehicle.

So I just created ad hoc a page for a battery jump pack in my vehicle. There was a rebate on one at Costco – excuse me, it was on sale at Costco. I wrote it down and then I came home and started researching other ones to see where the best price would be on that type of item.

That's the benefit of a three-ring binder. The disadvantage of a three-ring binder, which you should be very aware of, is that it's a bit more unwieldy than a small notebook. A three-ring binder, in order to use it, has to be opened up. Now, if you shop by yourself, this is relatively simple just to perch it on the cart and to use it.

But if you shop as I do with a bundle of young children, it's a little bit harder sometimes to keep that three-ring binder out and open where you need it. So you might need to either shop by yourself or use a notebook. But just have a simple three-ring binder.

And in that binder, write down the items of what you buy and start to track the place that you buy it and start to track what's going on with the sales. What I do is I write down the date that I am looking at so that I know what's going on at a certain time and I can track the dates.

Then I write down the store that I'm shopping at. You can just jot the name or come up with your own little abbreviation code for knowing which store you're in. Write the item and write the package size. So if it's an 18-ounce item and it's $5 or $1, then go ahead and just write that down so you're clear on what that is.

Then I make a note if there's a rebate or something on it right at the moment. I make a note of the standard price and the rebate amount. And then calculate the unit cost. The way you calculate the unit cost is you take the price of the item and divide it by the number of units that you want to calculate.

Sometimes that'll be per pound if you're dealing with something that is easily measured per pound. Sometimes it'll be per ounce if you're dealing with something that's most easily measured in per ounce. Sometimes it might be measured in the actual number of units. So each – for example, I was recently pricing out bagels.

And so I didn't use the ounce. I used the each and I calculated how much each bagel costs and – or some other thing that's appropriate. So just divide the price by the number so that you can get a unit price. And that unit price is important so that you can compare items across different quantities.

I know just a moment I'll – well, here would be an example of a comparison of one of my categories would be raisins. We enjoy eating raisins and of course, most people do. Raisins are not inexpensive. I find – in my opinion, they're pretty expensive. But I have different supplies that I go to with raisins and different types of raisins.

And I'd prefer to buy larger packages of things if that gets me a discount. So just two prices for you as of current prices. At Costco, they don't sell non-organic raisins anymore. They only sell organic raisins. And one of the things that you want to do in your price book is always note the exact type of thing that you're talking about.

Now, I don't think this should be separated by page. For example, if my page is dedicated to raisins, I'm not going to have a page for organic raisins and for conventional raisins. I'm just going to write down raisins. But write down the cost of organic and conventional on that page so you can choose to make whatever quality choice you think is appropriate.

But you can be aware of the prices. So at Costco, they sell organic raisins for $2.72 per pound. They come in packages of two 23-ounce bags for $2.72 per pound. If I go to my local restaurant supply store where I do a good amount of shopping, I can buy a 30-pound box of conventional raisins for $1.43 a pound.

So almost a – about probably what? 40 to 45 percent savings there from $2.72 to $1.43 per pound. But the difference is I'm going to go from two bags of raisins, which Costco in this case is actually what I consider a small amount, to a 30-pound box of raisins, which is going to require much different handling in terms of how you're actually going to deal with a 30-pound box.

But you only can get that price comparison if you'll split it out into a per pound cost. So make it intelligent and make the per pound cost or the per ounce cost a number that's useful for you. Now, as part of your kit, what I recommend is just attach a calculator, a permanently attached calculator to your binder or to your notebook or make that the standard thing that you keep in your pocket.

Of course, you could do the calculation on your phone or you can use the calculator on your phone or you can use a separate one. But I think it's a lot easier just to have a separate small calculator there. And I find it useful to shop with a calculator, period, just so that the amount of food that I buy doesn't exceed the budget.

It's much easier to do that with a calculator. As you put an item in your cart, you just quickly add the total to it. Now, for those of you who are nerds, this is where reverse Polish notation – I actually really love it. It's much better to use a calculator.

I always just use one of my financial planning calculators. But it's much easier to do – I think it's more intuitive to do this when you have reverse Polish notation on your calculator system when you're in the grocery store. So there's a hardcore nerd detail for you on the most convenient type of calculator.

If you don't want to deal with a three-ring binder, all is not lost. There are a couple of ways that you can do this or you can do these strategies in addition to your three-ring binder. One of the beautiful things about living in 2018 is that the cost of taking pictures has fallen to in essence zero where you can take pictures with your phone.

And so as you're in the store, whether you're buying something or not buying something, just use your phone and snap some pictures of the item and the price. Make sure that in the photo, you're able to get the actual item so that you can see the quantity, the size of the item or the number that's in it and the price.

Then when you get home, you can go ahead and enter the data there. I frequently find that especially if I'm shopping with my children as I frequently do, I frequently find that it's easier for me just to go ahead and snap pictures with my phone and then update my price book when I get home.

It's easy enough to sit at my desk and flip through the pictures and write down the exact numbers and a little easier than balancing a book or a notebook in on a cart. So feel free to try that out. In the long run, I think keeping the data in a spreadsheet is perfectly fine, especially if you're a spreadsheet nerd, but it's unnecessary.

And in the short term, I think it's better to do in a physical binder or a physical notebook because you don't need that much data to actually start to inform your decisions. You just need a little bit of data. And once you have the information on which stores have what prices, then the only time you're going to be adding more transactions is when you run across what might be a good deal.

So you run across something that's on sale or discounted, rebated, et cetera. You have a bunch of coupons. When you run that across, that's when you go and look in your price book and see, is this a good deal? So there are in essence two phases to using a price book.

There's the initial construction and during the initial construction, you'll start to make certain decisions about your usage pattern. Let me give you another example from my own. I was recently looking at dishwasher detergent. Now, what I've usually done is purchased dishwasher detergent at Costco. And so Costco sells a present, a Cascade Advanced Power Gel and it's 7.5 cents an ounce for dishwasher detergent.

But in constructing my price book, I was looking at Walmart. Walmart sells Cascade Complete for 8 cents an ounce. I don't know what the difference is between Cascade Advanced Power Gel and Cascade Complete. But in my mind, they're probably the same thing. It's hard for me to imagine there's that much additional technology in Advanced Power Gel versus Complete.

I think that's just a marketing name. But I was interested to see that Walmart, right next to the bottles of Cascade Complete, sells a bottle of Great Value brand dishwasher detergent. Same size bottle, same green bottle as the Cascade Complete. My guess would be it's made by Cascade and it's exactly the same stuff.

But the Great Value brand is 4 cents an ounce instead of 8 cents an ounce. That informs my decision because now I need to get a bottle of the Great Value brand, test it for efficacy, and see can I get the same results from my dishwasher with the same amount as the Cascade Complete for half the cost by choosing the Great Value brand.

If so, then that would become my standard item to be purchased. So if I'm writing these things down in my price book and I'm creating it for the first time, I'm going to create a page. It's called "Dishwasher Detergent." I'm going to look around at my options. I'm going to look for – at Costco.

I'm going to look at Walmart. I'm going to look at the grocery store. I'm going to look at some different brands and try to figure out what brands are available and what's their cost per ounce or if necessary, you would do cost per load. Something like laundry detergent, you would need to try to figure out cost per load.

But skip laundry detergent. It's way too complicated to try to figure out an answer there because there's no uniform standard mechanism for comparing how much laundry detergent you would use to get your clothes a certain level of clean. Stick with something simple while you're learning these skills. Once I've decided that if by way of example, Great Value brand is the standard, then that becomes the knowledge.

I buy Great Value brand. It's four cents per ounce. If while you're out shopping, you stumble across something, you just quickly compare it back to that. It's not cheaper.You don't need to continue collecting more data and continue writing things down. You would only make additional entries if you had to make a different brand choice or if something became cheaper and you find out that, wait a second, every three months, Costco puts their Cascade on sale and there's such a good rebate that it makes sense to go ahead and purchase it from there.

You would only add new information as you have new data that would become cheaper. So there's no problem with keeping this physically, especially in the beginning. And then in time, you could choose whether you wanted to keep it physically or digitally. I have looked for application solutions in time past.

I looked for digital apps and there are a few apps that advertise themselves as being useful for a price book. I did not find them to be functional for me. But if you're an app user, you can do that. One of the benefits if you did choose a solution that were digital, especially if it were digital and it were accessible from your mobile device, you would find that that's always with you.

And you want to make sure that your price book is with you when you're out shopping. Very few of us would forget our phone. Many of us would easily forget our physical price book at home. So consider an app. What I think is probably the best long-term solution is use a paper one for a while.

And then as you're standardized, go ahead and just set up a simple spreadsheet. And I anticipate in the future, once I work out the kinks over the coming months, I'll go ahead and just digitize my price book, set it into a spreadsheet. And my ideal spreadsheet design in this case is just to keep a very simple, probably one sheet, spreadsheet, and to use it in a digitized solution.

Of course, Google Docs would work easily and well here. But if you wanted a non-Google solution, something like Zoho should work well or perhaps Excel if synchronized through the Office 365 solution, some kind of digital solution that allows you to maintain your spreadsheet so it's right there on your phone.

That probably is the best solution long-term. So you don't always have an unwieldy book. But there's nothing wrong with a physical, physical book. One final suggestion for you is as you're tracking these unit prices, consider going ahead and just adding the information to your financial software, especially as you are learning and developing the skills.

Figure out how much a roll of toilet paper costs you so that you're aware of it, not just the unit price but figure out, okay, that's how much it costs or figure out how much a – running the dishwasher costs per load. Figure out how much a jar of peanut butter costs and figure out how long that takes you.

And that can be just well-tracked in the memo portion of your financial tracking software if that's what you use. But to start with, keep it simple. Let me give you a few examples of just some surprising – to me, surprising results that I've learned from my recent reintegration of my price book into my budget.

This will show you how this can affect your purchasing habits. And then I'll close the show with some tips on how to kind of turbocharge your results to help you save money and a quick discussion of if it's actually important and worth it. By comparing prices, you'll find surprises.

I recently was looking for asparagus and I was interested to see that asparagus sells for $5.99 per pound at one of the local grocery stores, $5.99 per pound. But at Costco, they're presently offering asparagus for $3.52 per pound in a frozen steamable bag, $3.52. So let's just call it $3.50 versus $6 a pound.

That's probably about a 45% savings by purchasing it frozen. Similarly, when pricing green beans, I found that I could buy in my local grocery store, I could buy green beans, fresh, conventional green beans in bulk for $1.69 per pound. But for $1.34 per pound, I could purchase organic frozen bags of green beans at my local Costco.

That's instructive because my understanding is frozen food is perfectly nutritious. In some cases, it's more nutritious because it's fresher. When a food processor freezes food, they harvest it and they do their best to harvest it at the height of freshness and then it's very quickly flash frozen, which should result in the maintenance of all of the nutrition.

If you leave the food, it may be fresh, but if you leave it and if it starts to break down over time, then that broken down food, it loses some of its nutritional quality if it's not preserved properly. It's also very helpful for me to maintain my freshness if I can purchase frozen food as compared to fresh food.

It also will help to cut down on spoilage and wastage. I hate wasting food. Unfortunately, if you buy large quantities of food that spoils, like large quantities of vegetables, frequently you'll find that something goes bad on you because you just didn't get around to it. You planned your menu, but then you wound up eating out more or going to friends' houses more than you anticipated.

Next time you turn around, your green beans are black and moldy and you can try to save them at some point, but at some point, you just have to toss them. That's annoying to me, but it's also costly. It also costs more. That's a major component in many of our budgets, thankfully.

Most of our budgets are significantly larger than the failure of some green bean storage, but it's an unnecessary waste. I don't like to waste valuable food. Buying something frozen, if you get it cheaper up front, maintains the same nutritional quantity, has less spoilage, and in this case, in the case of green beans, could actually be an organic product which can help to encourage the organic food industry, which I'd like to see more of, to encourage companies to move in that direction.

That's great. Now, on the flip side, here would be a counter example with a price book, which is pricing out sweet potatoes. At Costco, you can buy a 10-pound bag of sweet potatoes for $0.78 a pound, but at the same grocery store that I was shopping at, you could buy sweet potatoes for $0.49 a pound.

The only measurable difference between them was that the Costco sweet potatoes are larger, which could be a virtue if you were either using a recipe in which those were more valuable, you're eating stuffed sweet potatoes, something where you wanted them to have a stronger, bigger skin that you could take them out and then stuff them back in, or if you needed a big sweet potato, but in my case, I don't need a big sweet potato and they're the same product.

Instead of essentially $0.80 a pound at Costco, you can buy them for $0.50 a pound at the grocery store. Now, of course, I also priced in the 40-pound box at the restaurant supply store and that comes out to be cheaper than either of those. Let me give that as a good example.

Let's talk about eggs. One of the valuable things about a price book is starting to understand if you get a benefit from a bulk buy. I have frequently in the past purchased – my family in the past, we've eaten a lot of eggs. We've pulled back on our egg consumption recently, but we've eaten a lot of eggs.

At different times, I either buy the fancy and high-quality eggs or the cheaper eggs that are mass-produced. I'd love to have a source for better quality eggs. My preference would be that all of my eggs came from my chickens scratching around in my backyard, eating nothing but bugs and what they find out in the wild and a little bit of supplemental high-quality feed.

But until I can get back to that solution, then I got to figure out where do I get my eggs from and it's hard to find a local producer that gives any decent quality and so I'm restrained to purchasing eggs through the standard means. I frequently in the past purchased boxes of 15 or even 30 dozen eggs at the restaurant supply store because they were inexpensive.

That's fine as far as saving on a per egg cost, but it's extremely inconvenient to have 15 or 30 dozen eggs filling up your refrigerator. That's very inconvenient. I did the calculations and I found out that if I were to buy 30 dozen eggs at the restaurant supply store for 10 cents an egg, I could do that.

That was the cheapest price total. But I could also go down to Walmart and purchase the exact same generic conventional eggs at the same 10 cents per egg cost and I could buy them in packs of 18. Now I don't like the Walmart packaging because it's all styrofoam. I prefer a cardboard or a less package intensive use.

But in essence in terms of the cost, it's the same cost, 10 cents an egg. A lot more convenient for me to buy eggs 18 at a time and store a couple packages of those than to buy 15 or 30 dozen eggs at the restaurant supply store. By the way, if you're interested, this also gives you the data to compare perhaps a higher quality form of egg.

So I can no longer buy packages of the same inexpensive eggs at the local Costco but you can purchase – they have more of the higher quality ones. Their basic cage-free option, which whatever that means is one of those things where until I've actually been to the farm, I don't trust the labels.

But I'm sure that Costco is doing their best. A cage-free set of eggs at Costco comes out to 14 cents an egg. So you can calculate. Do I get additional benefits? Is this additional cost worthy of me supporting it, paying my money as a nutritional? Is there an additional nutritional value there?

Is there an additional ethical value there of encouraging cage-free egg production instead of standard egg production, which is pretty atrocious? You get that info from the data. You can also calculate then your daily cost of egg and it's a lot easier to do that if you know that each egg is 10 cents and your family uses a dozen a day.

There's $1.20 every time you make eggs. Good data to have. A couple of other interesting examples would be something like bagels. I recently had purchased some bagels as a special treat for my family down at one of the local discount food stores. It was a day-old bread store and I popped in there and I thought I was getting a good deal.

I got two packs for four bucks. They came out to be 40 cents each. But I also found however that it wasn't that good of a deal. At Costco, I could purchase them for 42 cents each and actually a bigger bagel. But I found the cheapest price there was actually Walmart at 31 cents a bagel for a cinnamon raisin bagel.

One more interesting example that was surprising to me was chips, tortilla chips. I hate buying chips, period, because they're just – in my mind, one of the most overpriced, non-valuable food items that we love in our culture. They're bad for you. They have almost no nutritional content. They taste great but they're crazy expensive.

But I do give in on tortilla chips, enjoy eating tortilla chips and the cost of tortilla chips is so much lower than some of the other ones that I think it's reasonable. The cheapest source that I had found for tortilla chips was the restaurant supply store where for $1.59, I could get a 12-ounce bag of tortilla chips.

It comes out to 13 cents an ounce. But when I did the math, I actually found that the Kirkland brand at Costco, their organic tortilla chips they sell comes out to 12 cents an ounce. Cheaper, very delicious chips and organic. That's what a price book tells you. If you start to integrate the use of a price book with nothing more than the cost of a little bit of time up front, you'll make smarter buying decisions.

This can substantially help you to cut your bills. Now here are some tips for you on how to actually do this and how to turbocharge your results. First, I recommend that you track everything as long as you're not the kind of person that gets overwhelmed by that. I don't get overwhelmed by data.

I enjoy it. I enjoy the minutiae. It's fun for me. I'm a nerd. It's fun. I enjoy knowing that an egg costs 10 cents. So if I'm going to make a breakfast of scrambled eggs and we're going to have 15 eggs, then there's $1.50 in eggs and 32 cents of cheese.

I think that's interesting. I think it's fun. A lot of people don't. So if you're the kind of person who is totally overwhelmed by all this data and all this minutiae, just start taking notes on a few things and just keep it very, very simple. But do go ahead and start tracking some things.

If my systems don't work for you, figure out some system, but write some things down and start to track them. So at least with your normal decisions, you can start to know where you get your best deal and do it on the stuff that you regularly consume. Many of us know, "Hey, there's a shirt.

Let me go ahead and pick up that shirt and buy it." We know what our price is for a shirt or a pair of shoes or something like that. But we often don't know it when it comes to jars of peanut butter. Another big benefit of maintaining a price book is you'll automatically start to delay your purchases a little bit.

It's very valuable for you in controlling your outflow to stop and to think before you spend money. Impulse buying destroys many people's budgets. One of the very good methodologies of controlling impulse buying is to give yourself a time delay. You can buy anything you want. Give yourself a rule like this.

You can buy yourself anything you want as long as you have the money for it and as long as you write it down on a list and leave it there on the list for an appropriate period of time. Maybe it's seven days. Maybe it's 30 days, something like that.

Different people have come up with different rules. Anything you want in excess of $20, et cetera. But the point is by writing something down on a list that you want to buy and not impulse buying it, you can have the enjoyment of knowing that you're probably going to be able to buy it but you can also give time for your emotions to die down so you don't have so much buyer's remorse.

Interestingly, the research psychologists related to money have found that this actually enhances people's enjoyment of the things that they do buy. Part of the fun of buying things is the anticipation of buying it, the waiting for it, and then the enjoying it when you have it. If you just buy everything all the time, things quickly – they lose some of their emotional enjoyment.

So one of the bits of data that I've seen in the money psychology perspective has been if you want to increase your enjoyment of things, put limits on yourself and give yourself time to wait. Put down a buy list so that you wait. Well, tracking the prices of things and putting it in your price book gives you in essence an automatic buy list where you're writing something down and doing your research in it.

So feel free to put anything in there. If you need a new air compressor for your shop, write it down and start looking around and shopping. It also gives you an idea of what your solutions are. That's really, really valuable. It's good for you to price different options and to know different things that are available to you.

Don't restrict it to just the new stores. Example, shirts. My preferred shirt – I don't enjoy wearing t-shirts. I prefer to wear a button-down shirt. In my mind, they're more comfortable. They're more comfortable because they just naturally look better. They make me feel better. They make me feel more confident and I prefer to have a pocket.

Years ago, I started buying Brooks Brothers button-down shirts. It's a superior shirt, good fabric quality and the most important thing is that the Brooks Brothers non-iron shirts are – they don't need – obviously, they don't need ironing but they're actually a good non-iron shirt. Now there are other ones that are excellent as well and I've purchased a number of different brands but the great thing about a Brooks Brothers non-iron shirt is that you know you can just count on that tag and it's a pretty good quality but they cost 80 bucks new.

I would consider doing that if I had a job where again I was wearing a suit every day. I would consider doing that but I would probably wait for the once a year sale and get it for 60 bucks new. But I'm also well aware that if I just go into the local thrift store as I did just recently and go into the local thrift store, I can go in and I can find regularly Brooks Brothers shirts for 5 bucks each on the sale day and they're perfectly fine.

It takes almost no time to go into the local thrift store and when you know a brand that you're looking for, I just go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom right through. You find the tag, find the tag, find the next size. If the next size fits me, I know it will fit me.

So brand, choice, 5 bucks, out the door, done. That $5 becomes the buy price for shirts, for me anyway. Then anytime it's cheaper than that, you stock up. Anytime it's more expensive, you don't. But by writing it down and knowing the difference, now I'm going to have extra incentive to go to the thrift store instead of just going to the Brooks Brothers store.

Let me point out one quick thing on that strategy for shirt buying. The only reason that works for me, the only reason that I can actually purchase things like that at the thrift store is because in the way that I wear the shirts, sleeve length doesn't matter. For men's shirts, the big thing is fit and that fit has to come down to neck size and sleeve length.

Those are the big things and I have unusual sizes. So I can almost never find an appropriate neck size and sleeve length in my actual size in a thrift store. But since I'm not currently wearing ties, the neck size is less important. Since I don't currently wear a suit coat every day, the sleeve length is less important and 99.5% of the time, I roll up the sleeves anyway.

So I can find the shirts with an appropriate body size at $5 each. I couldn't do that if I were in a professional environment wearing a suit every day where I needed neck size and sleeve length to be proper, which is another example of substitution to show that there are certain things that are valuable.

To me, the valuable thing is fabric quality, non-iron, having a decent reasonably attractive shirt that's comfortable. But by way of substitution, you can change out those neck size and sleeve length, which are crucial in a professional environment but not crucial in my current environment. I guess if I'm in a non-professional environment, what does that mean?

I don't know what that means to you. Back to tips. This type of shopping is time intensive up front, especially if you've never done it. It takes time to do this. That's not a bad thing. Remember, you're talking about saving money and my personal goal is to cut $2,000 off my grocery budget this year.

Now, $2,000 off my grocery budget, what does that actually mean? Well, first of all, I can't deduct my groceries. So I'd have to automatically add to my $2,000 grocery budget. I'd have to automatically add whatever I have to earn in pre-tax wages or profits in order to pay those groceries.

Let's say that I were at a 30% effective tax rate. Well, that means that I have to earn $2,600 in order to pay for that $2,000 of groceries. It's a lot of money. Now, pretend that I want to do that in retirement. Well, let's take 25 times $2,600. In order for me to support a habit of an extra $2,000 of expenditures in financial independence, I would need to have $65,000 in the bank.

The way I got there is just take your annual expenditure. In this case, because I went ahead and used the $2,600 number to account for income taxes, that would change, but – and multiply it times 25 and that gives me the amount of money that I would need in savings in order to support that on an annual basis.

That's $65,000. So is it worth me investing, say, 10 to 15 hours of time over the first couple of months to build this, to avoid my having to build a nest egg of $65,000 because I was sloppy with my spending? Absolutely, it's worth it. Then once I've invested that, say, 10 to 15 to 20 hours of time, I've looked around some different stores, I've looked for deals, and then I established my baseline in each category, there's no additional time required to maintain it or to look at it.

I just simply have my own data. I look. Is this a good deal? I move on. So it's only time-intensive up front, but over time it doesn't add additional time to your schedule. It's worth the money – sorry, worth the effort and it'll save you money. Group things in a way that makes sense to you.

Don't go with other people's categories. Make up your own and be willing to change them. In our household, we don't eat a lot of bread. So for me, bread is just one giant fill-all page. That includes bread, bagels, tortillas, all of the above because I'm not regularly shopping for different kinds of bread.

It's just an every now and then occasional purchase. But for you, maybe bread is very important and you're going to put on there where you get your French bread and where you get your Italian bread and where you get your harvest oat bread and then you're going to calculate how much it costs you to make bread and you're going to have a page for bread and a page for bagels and a page for tortillas and you're going to have all that data.

Use it for you. Another example for me, I put things like oats, rolled oats, steel-cut oats and granola all on the same page. The granola of course is obviously going to be more expensive because it's a value-added product but I put it on the same page so I can calculate the cost of making my own granola – rolled oats, raisins, a little bit of sugar, honey and you're basically done – versus purchasing the pre-manufactured solutions and running that.

So I don't mind grouping the bulk ingredients and the value-added retail product together because they form the same function. Group things in a way that makes sense to you. Recognize a danger of buying big packages. Sometimes big packages result in your using more. And so either account for that in your usage standard or make a different choice.

Example from my life would be cheese. I buy big blocks of cheese from restaurant supply store or different places because they're inexpensive. That's the cheapest way to get them. But recently, we had bought a tiny little block of cheese from Aldi and I was putting it on the eggs and I realized that I put about half as much – I shredded about half as much cheese onto our scrambled eggs with the small block as I do with the big block.

And I realized that just having that big block of cheese results in my being more liberal with the amount that I use. Well, that's not going to save you money. And if it's something that you don't necessarily need more of – I don't need more calories from cheese, I don't need to have tons of cheese on it – then sometimes choosing that smaller package will actually be a saving.

So recognize that sometimes having a big package will result in you using more. If you buy a 30-pound box of raisins or you buy a little 16-ounce container of raisins, you're probably going to be less liberal with a 30-pound box. Sorry, wrong way. You're going to use too many with a 30-pound box.

So package it up yourself. Factor in all of your costs to your price book. So for example, maybe you have to pay a warehouse club membership fee or there's a distance to drive. Remember, those things can be mitigated. A warehouse membership club fee can be particularly valuable if you're going to get substantial savings.

If you're going to drive a far away away, then make sure that you're doing that when you're actually driving there for other purposes. If you're just getting started, then just ignore some of those things until you get an idea. But after you've figured out what your baseline is or if you have certain products that are similar, figure out, "Was it more convenient for me just to buy this here?

Because I can do it in one place or it's close to my house. I don't have to make three stops or because I can avoid a membership fee." In the same way, factor in all of your savings. This is probably going to be done after the case. But stack in any kind of specific store discount that you may have or a specific buying strategy.

If you're shopping at Target and you have their Target credit card that gives you 5% back on all your purchases, then in that case, you may be able to look at the Target price and you need to factor in the fact that that's 5% cheaper with the use of that card.

If you were to go down to your Aldi, then you don't have an Aldi card, then maybe it's going to be 5% more. When you can start to stack things together using Target as an example, Target from time to time will have decent store discounts. Target will accept coupons, manufacturer's coupons, and they'll do some price matching and other competitor coupons.

If you can stack together a store discount with a coupon with the Target 5% credit card, now all of a sudden you start to have compelling benefits to using that particular store. Remember those things. Then what I would do is encourage you to put down in your price book the stacking that you did.

Recently I purchased some diapers at Target. I was able to use a manufacturer's coupon and a rebate and use a Target 5% discount credit card. Well, after the fact, I went and I calculated the whole cost of the transaction per diaper and then I figured out what the net cost per diaper was.

That allowed me to set a new baseline for that diaper. We used cloth diapers with the exception of one child at night. Cloth diapers don't do well for her at night. Now in this case, I'll go ahead and just tell you about that transaction because it demonstrates how the data gives you the solutions and how you need to calculate a few different options.

Buying the diapers at Target was not the cheapest place to get diapers. The cheapest place to get diapers would be the standard – would be the Costco, the Kirkland brand of diapers. The problem is that those are conventional diapers which have a lot more chemicals in them which we do our best to avoid for our children.

One of the benefits of cloth diapering is that it's much less – many fewer toxins exposed to little babies and sensitive parts of their skin. But there are multiple competing brands of diapers that advertise themselves as being this junk-free brand of disposable diaper. The two brands that are the most common are Honest Brand and Seventh Generation.

You can sit there in front of Target and – this is what I did. I went through all the math of the Honest Brand versus the Seventh Generation and figured out that on the whole, every single time, the Seventh Generation is cheaper. To my knowledge, I'm not aware of any inherent product characteristics that would make the Honest Brand superior such that I'd be willing to pay extra money.

I'm already paying extra money to have a less toxic diaper. But in this case, why not go with the less expensive, less toxic diaper instead of the more expensive, less toxic diaper? The next thing is to look – and the benefit of doing that at Target was when I was doing this math, they were offering the same rebate on all of the choices, which included Honest Brand and Seventh Generation.

The next thing is looking at the sizing and sometimes with diaper sizing, you can calculate the savings per size. And then – so if your child is on an in-between and you can stretch one size or the other, go with the one that has the – that's a smaller size.

If you can do it without – before the child outgrows it and save per cost. And then stack that onto the rebate and then stack that onto the store 5% card and you wind up with – I wound up with the least expensive option possible. So whenever possible, try to look for those multiple avenues.

Now, it still came out, again, more expensive than Costco for a size 6 with that transaction I paid 49 cents each, whereas the standard Kirkland size 6 would be 32 cents each. That's a big difference there. But that was the choice that we made. And so you can make whatever choice you need to do based upon your personal values that you have and the constraints that you put upon your expenditures.

Use those coupons. Use the price-matching policies. Many stores will always match a coupon price or an advertised price from somewhere else. So if you're paying attention in your price book and you notice that the grocery store has a cheaper price on the item and it's advertised but you don't want to go to the grocery store to just get that item, well, take that advertisement into your other store.

Take it into Walmart and ask them to match the price and that can work well. Don't forget the internet. One of the values of having this written down is that you can come home and then use the internet and sometimes the internet will save you money. Think through this.

Exactly the same things. Amazon, I don't use this but if some of you – because our diaper purchase is more occasional given that we use cloth diapers in our family. But if you're a regular user of disposable diapers, then look into the stacking up of Amazon and subscribe and save and the Amazon credit card, etc., and see what your unit price comes out to.

Stock up when it's the right time and the right price. And some things it's easier to do. Some things you have to do more work. Peanut butter is something that I found is important to stock up on. We like to have just the peanut butter that's just peanuts and salt and that's hard to find.

Most of the peanut butter has sugar in it. So we try to avoid the sugar. For years, it was just standard. I used a public store brand and that was just the easiest thing to do. But then publics discontinued their store brand, which has left us with the only solution being a Smucker's natural product line that they have for that particular type of peanut butter.

So of course I can buy giant tubs of it at the restaurant supply store. I can buy the Kirkland brand at Costco, which I don't care for. So I just knock that off. But still that calculates per unit cost. With a rebate, I recently found a deal on peanut butter that with the rebate, it's cheaper than the giant tubs of the junky stuff at the restaurant supply store.

In that case, clear the shelf. There have been times I've come home with 20 jars of peanut butter. Lasts a long time. Certainly not going to go bad in my usage schedule. So stock up. That's easy. Some things, of course, it's not so easy. But it may be worth in your best interest to think through a little bit.

Put some stuff in Ziploc bags. Use some Tupperwares. Use your freezer. In some cases, use a food saver, a vacuum sealer. Maybe for some people, it's worth it to do home canning. I think that unless you live in an agricultural area where you can have access to huge quantities of much discounted produce, I think canning is so labor-intensive.

I've done it and I've done it with meats. But I don't have a source of those vegetables. But maybe you do. In which case, you can do home canning and that will produce much better solutions for you. What I found with home canning is I can use that for meat.

I can go and purchase 40-pound boxes of chicken at 58 cents a pound at the restaurant supply store and by going ahead and canning it, then I can get the value of that price for a long period of time and in a way that I wouldn't ordinarily be able to use 40 pounds of chicken.

Then finally, don't forget to extend the life of things whenever possible. Just because you got it cheap doesn't mean you should waste it. So look for all those ways to use something less and to extend its life through better care and maintenance. And you can do this to many different things.

From time to time, just pick something that you're purchasing and do a web search and try to figure out how to extend the life of something. If you find yourself buying disposable razors, search "how to extend the life of your razors" and you'll find that with something like a razor, you can oil the blade so it doesn't rust or store it in oil.

I've done that. You can strop it on a towel, on a leather strop if you use that or just a pair of blue jeans or an old blue jeans. You can strop your razors and make them last longer. You can get 50% or 100% more lifespan out of your razors with just a little bit of use.

If you're buying shoes, how to extend the life of your shoes. Maybe it's time to get a pair of shoe trees or maybe it's time to change. When I was younger, I used to drag my feet and that resulted in the back of my shoes being worn down. Well, that's dumb.

Fix the problem of the habit, the bad habit, and that makes your shoes last longer. All those things result in your having a lower total cost of ownership like we discussed in last week's show where we talked about how to save money, buy it cheaper, make it last longer and use it less.

I close with this question. Is this important? Is this worth your time? The examples that I'm using from groceries, on the whole, each individual one is not that big a deal. Is it really going to matter in your budget that you can get Costco organic tortilla chips at 12 cents an ounce instead of 13 cents an ounce at the restaurant supply store?

Obviously, if the question is, does saving that extra one cent per ounce going to make you be broken in debt at the end of the year if you buy a bag of chips every few weeks? No, of course not. We're grand total. We're talking about a couple of dollars.

But I don't think that's the only way to look at it. Number one, we're dealing with a skill here. Once you've developed that skill, that skill can be applied to every other area of your life. Skills come with practice and all of these little transactions give you a chance to practice.

When I outline this, it sounds very complicated. I'm good at taking something simple and making it sound very complicated. But let me collapse this down to the simple. All it practically means is now I know that tortilla chips at Costco are cheap. I'm going to make that my standard tortilla chip that we buy when we need chips.

When they do put them on rebate, I'm going to grab a few extra bags because they'll last for probably a couple of months and that way I have some extra bags. That's it. It doesn't require any more time. I may be at Costco anyway. It doesn't require any more effort and it's perfectly fine to go ahead and buy another bag of the other chips from the store next to my house if that's what I need sometime just to make up for a recipe or to have a little snack.

So when we go through all the mechanics of this, it sounds very complicated but in actuality it's very simple and the knowledge is simple. But all these little things do matter because they demonstrate you developing skills. As you develop and practice those skills, they will translate over to bigger areas.

Many people when they buy a car, believe it or not, do actually just go to the car dealership and buy the car. They don't research it. They don't pit dealers against one another. They don't put competitors. They just go and buy the car. You don't believe me? Just start helping people with their money and you will find that that's exactly what happens.

I didn't know that people ever bought cars from buy here, pay here places. You see them on the side of the road but it was so – it was anathema to me to think that I would go to a buy here, pay here used car store to buy a car.

So I didn't know that anybody actually did it. Until a number of years ago, my parents took in a young lady who was in difficult circumstances and she lived with us for a while and they were helping her and I found out that she had bought one of their cars and it was a nightmare of a deal.

I forget detail of numbers but basically she wound up paying $5,000 for a $1,500 car. It was a measure of ignorance and naivety and just a tough situation. But many people actually do that. So who doesn't do that? Well, the type of person who knows to do research and there are different levels of this.

It is very much probably more important if you're going to buy a car this year and that's something that you need to do. It's more important if you've only got 20 hours to spend. It's more important for you to spend those 20 hours getting the best possible deal on your prospective car than it is for you to figure out how to save money on your tortilla chips because you can save thousands and thousands of dollars off the cost of your car with research and negotiation where you may only save $10 this year on the cost of your tortilla chips.

If you have to choose, focus on the tortilla chips. My observation has been that very few people only have enough time to save money on their car. Whether you're the type of person who knows that saving money is valuable and you look for little strategies on just about everything and that leads you to save money on your car or you may just tend to be the kind of person who just pays whatever is in front of you.

I was talking with my wife about this the other night. There are a couple of gas stations by my house that I do not understand how they pay it there in business because they charge $0.30 a gallon more than the gas station that I use which is about a mile and a half away.

I don't understand where they get their business from and I just look around and I think they don't offer anything in terms of the quality of the product. They don't offer anything in terms of the layout. It's not that I shop at the nasty dangerous gas station and these are nice.

So the same product, the cheap gas station has a better environment. The location, I don't see that they're offering anything in terms of location that's all that superior. It just doesn't make sense to me. But yet all the time I see people there putting gas in their car. I would understand if we were maybe in a tourist district or there were lots of travelers or this were one of those things where it was a matter of convenience just getting off the highway but none of those things apply.

It's a mystery of life to me how these gas stations stay in business. Just for me, it makes sense that I'm the kind of person who's going to look for a deal and since I'm constantly driving past the one that's cheaper and better and more convenient but it happens to be a mile away and it saves me 30 cents a gallon, I'll just use that one.

Back to the car. All these little saving strategies have many more opportunities for you to use than buying a car. What are you going to buy a car once every five years if you have multiple cars, once every 10 years if you have one car? A car these days should last you 10 to 20 years.

So you can only do that about one time. Whereas all these little things have lots of uses and it doesn't take any more time. Next reason it's important is just that there are lots more strategies for all these things and they're much less efficient markets than some of the big strategies.

I'm so thankful the new car marketplace has become much more efficient in the last few years. I've watched it carefully. With your ability to deal with things, with virtual bidding, with access to information, the new car market has become much more efficient. If you're going to buy a new car, it's relatively easy for you to get a decent deal and there aren't that many strategies for you to save.

But the vegetable marketplace and the fruit marketplace and the bread marketplace is pretty inefficient nearby you. You can use these strategies. There are tons of them. They're all over the place. The actual amount of investment of time is just tiny and it's good practice for you to be ready for those big things.

It's a good experience for you. It's a good experience for your children. The way that you train your children, especially as regards money, will drive them in the direction that they will pursue as young adults and as adults. That's your responsibility. So I just close with two little stories that perhaps you'll think are funny but they're real stories from my life here in the last week.

I guess I'll go ahead and – I'll tell the whole story because it's fun. Especially those of you who are tightwads and enjoy fun strategies, you'll enjoy the fun stories. Those of you who aren't, recognize this is fun for me. That's my point. Some of this stuff is fun.

I enjoy sitting down and working on my price book. If you don't, that's fine. My wife doesn't. So I do it. It's fun. She enjoys things that I don't enjoy. So she does some of those things. But for me, putting some of these things together is really fun and it's really important.

I'll share the story. So with regard to children's bicycles, my son – for those of you who don't know, with children, some of the ideas of teaching children to ride bikes has changed over the years. When most of us were growing up, we started off with a tricycle and then we got a bike with training wheels and then in time, we would take those training wheels off and that's the process that many of us went through.

I have the scar on my chin to demonstrate the challenge of that. The first night I rode a bike without training wheels and fell and crashed my chin open. But that's changed. Now there's a popularity of something that's called a strider bike. That's a leading brand name. But in essence, it's a pedal-less bike that you give to little children and they learn to ride it around.

It's fun for them because they enjoy taking those bikes around and they can get the enjoyment of riding without having to deal with the pedals. They just put their feet up and down. And there's a very natural and easy progression. So for our eldest son's first bicycle, we were actually given for his birthday, given one of those bicycles by a friend who their child had outgrown it and they didn't need it anymore.

So they gifted it to us, which was a very great gift. Of course, they asked – they have such a stupid stigma in the United States of America of not wanting to give things that are used. So our friends asked in advance, "Hey, we have a used bicycle. Would it be OK to give that because we don't need it anymore and we thought it would be a good present?" Of course, I'd love to destroy that stigma.

I hate to see us constantly buying new things and filling up the landfill and the dump with just stuff that is perfectly good. So we said yes. We got a free bicycle up front. And the great thing about the strider bikes is that the kids can learn to ride them.

And we found a really great solution for entertainment that at a local BMX track – we can go to the local BMX track and they've built a whole side track for the strider bikes that you could take your two and your three and your four-year-old and have them enjoy doing these things while some of the older kids on their pedal bikes are out on the big track.

And so a little frugal entertainment for the children. You might have that nearby. Look to see if you have a BMX track with a strider bike. This has blown up in the last couple of years in popularity and we enjoy that. The kids really love it and we enjoy that.

So my son has gotten to the point where he was able to outgrow – he was in a place where he was ready to move up. Now comparable buying strategy for one for my daughter. We didn't have a second one and we waited around to see if one would show up for free and one didn't show – hasn't shown up for free.

But she was at the point where she needed one as well. So in that case, we had been given a number of years ago a bunch of gift cards for – a bunch of gift cards for Toys R Us. And the problem was that we never used them because Toys R Us is just this – mostly this insanely expensive store with toys that your kids use for a month and they get rid of and we have no problem at all finding giant streams of toys that just invade our lives.

It's one of the blessings and the curses of living in the West. You work harder to keep toys out of your house than living in your house. I so desperately wish I could ship them all up and get them to somewhere else where the toys are not in such abundant supply.

I feel embarrassed even uttering the words about it. But that's the reality of it. We find constant streams of toys flowing in from friends as hand-me-downs from friends and from family members. We find toys constantly when we're out trash picking and dumpster diving. They're just all over the place.

So it seems pointless to spend money down at Toys R Us, which might be why they're going bankrupt. It seems pointless to us to spend money. And finally, we had a need for something. We were very excited that we could use these Toys R Us gift cards that were, I think, a baby shower gift a number of years ago.

And so they put Strider bikes on rebate. We were able to go and buy it and I think it cost me a dollar or two out of pocket to make it up, which was great. So now we have two Strider bikes. But going on with the frugal strategies going forward and recognize something.

I'm describing these for fun. I think most people who know me in person wouldn't necessarily know me as being a weirdo tightwad. I don't think that's the case, although I don't mind a little bit of that. But I think there are – I'm uncomfortable with being too radical or too extreme in some of those cases.

But we were waiting for a bike, waiting to see what would show up. So after Christmas, some friends of ours had gotten their son, who's older than our oldest son, a new bicycle. And so he had his previous one. And so they were looking for a way to get rid of it and so we happily volunteered and very kindly, they offered a chance to – they said, "Hey, you want it." We offered to pay for it.

It was a very nice bike. But they were just happy to have it go to a good home instead of just randomly tossing it down to Goodwill and they were just very happy to have it go to a good home. So we were able to get another free bicycle for my son.

But it – and we're skipping the training wheels. I've been teaching him how to ride that, which my anecdotal experience thus far is I prefer the modern method of the strider bike. It has worked well so far with one experience so far. But it didn't have a kickstand. So he wanted a kickstand.

So we went down and we were out shopping and we went down to Walmart and we priced out the kickstands. And so in that chance, I showed him, "Look, here's the kickstand. You can buy it at Walmart. Here's what it is. It's $6.29. So let's not buy it. Let's wait.

We don't have to have it right now. There's nothing pressing about needing a kickstand. Let's just ride it down and see what else we can come up with and give it time." So we rode it down, rode down, kickstand, Walmart, $6.29. Now my intention was to come home and check online and see is there something cheaper on Amazon, maybe check the local bicycle stores or anything else, any other good ideas.

But as we were on our way home, we went through our regular kind of neighborhood drive and lo and behold, there by the side of the road were some bikes being thrown away. So I got out and I picked which one was the least rusty and I grabbed that, brought it home and took the kickstand off of it and took it off, cleaned up some of the rust, tossed the rest of the bike out.

And then with my son, I helped show him, we bolted it on his bike. I had to cut the kickstand and modify it a little bit to make it work. But at the end of the day, we were able to develop a perfectly functional kickstand for his bike. And he had the lesson of deferring gratification, which was my point in this story.

He had the lesson of deferring gratification to say, "We have the money. If he needed the money, he's got the money in his spending money. I have the money. I can buy a $6.29 kickstand. But what a waste to buy something new when I can just recycle something that's used and get a little bit more life out of that product and just stop seeing so much waste happen.

And I can teach my son delayed gratification. I can teach him to think carefully, not to impulse buy, and just to take time." To me, those are really valuable parenting lessons. Those are the kind of lessons that as a parent, you really – you wish they happened every day but they don't.

You got to look for them. You got to look for them. But when you can find them, they're valuable. Now here would be just one more fun story from a parenting perspective. While ago for a birthday of my oldest son, I bought him a Nerf gun, little dart guns.

I paid full retail price for it. I bought a brand new full retail price at – I think it was Target. He had wanted a gun like that. One of his cousins had one and I wanted to make sure I got him one. I think it's important for children to have toy guns when they're growing up.

This is my opinion. It's very important from the perspective of gun safety. Some of you would be horrified at how unfun I am as a father with Nerf gun. The whole point of – for many people, Nerf gun is to shoot it at people. But I don't allow my children to shoot guns at people or to – and I force on them firearm safety rules.

So I teach – you gun nerds will – may chuckle. But I teach them – they always have to be pointing the gun in a safe direction. I teach them about muzzling their legs so they're not muzzling their leg with a gun. I'm a nut. You know that. But I think it's really valuable for children to have toy guns so they can learn all of those rules of gun safety.

Well, there's not even the tiniest danger of a paintball bullet or an airsoft pellet. We're not even talking about real full velocity weapons. We're just talking about Nerf guns. It's allowed to shoot at anything except people and animals. So that's the – and breakable stuff of course. So bought him a gun for his birthday.

He loved it, super happy with it and he's enjoyed it. Well, he decided that his handgun wasn't so great and he wanted to have a long gun. So of course we started to go out and start pricing those things. Well, they're 20 bucks for this piece of junk, piece of plastic that you buy at the store.

So one of the great benefits of the way that I have been teaching our children to handle money is that they have their money. I'm not going to buy him that. But he has his own spending money and so – if he wants to save for it. But thankfully he doesn't have enough money to buy it at this point.

I think it's a total waste but I think as parents, you got to let your kids waste money sometimes, right? So we'll see. But the point is that we can work with him and I can say, "Hey, well, you keep saving and when you have enough money, then that would be the solution." But immediately that needs to go down on the price list.

And now he doesn't have a concept of what $20 actually represents. But I do. I think that's an egregious amount of money to pay for a gun that's not going to be used and you have other ones that already do the job. But I've also got the lesson for him of looking and looking for it.

And so we can use that and say, "Well, here's what the cost is. Let's look at some different options." We go different places and I'm teaching him to get the prices, have it in his head and then we're looking at all of the options. And so just last night, looking in a local dumpster, found a perfectly serviceable gun for now.

And now he got the joy of saying, "Hey, I can have this one for free." Now it's not perfect. We're still waiting on one that shoots darts. This one doesn't shoot darts. But it's part of it and it's a really important and valuable lesson for him to learn to delay gratification.

Yes, you'd like to have that but let's look for alternatives. Let's look for something that's free. Let's look for something that can be repurposed. Let's wait. Let's shop the used market. Those things are everywhere. It will show up on the trash pile. There's no reason for him to waste his $20 on a new one.

Remember to write it down, put it in the price book and start comparing things while waiting to see where you find the best option. Maybe the best option will come from a store. Maybe it will come from a yard sale. Maybe it will come from the thrift store. Maybe it will come from a trash heap.

Doesn't matter. It's the principle in the skill development. Let me ask you a question. That's what I'm teaching my children. Did your parents teach you that? Or did you have to learn it as an adult? Or do you need to learn it as an adult? I don't honestly think that you being able to buy tortilla chips for $0.12 an ounce instead of $0.13 an ounce is going to make you wealthy.

I do honestly think that if you'll implement a price book and start using it, you could save probably a thousand or a couple thousand or for some of you multiple thousands of dollars off of your grocery budget this year and everything else that you buy. I do think that over the coming decades if you'll implement those skills, it'll save you tens of thousands of dollars.

I do think that that simple habit and practice of shopping carefully for groceries will develop in you a character to look for deals on other things. I do think that that will lead to much increased wealth. As the things that you buy change from $0.12 tortilla chips to $120,000 sailing boats, your life will change and you'll be able to afford those sailing boats because you saved on tortilla chips.

It's not the $4 or the $10 a year you saved on tortilla chips. It's how you saved on it and how you built those skills. Do you know what I notice about Costco? There are very few broken down beat up cars in the driveway or in the parking lot.

At least at my Costco, I usually park next to a Lexus on one side and a Mercedes Benz on the other. Now causation correlation, how does that all work? I don't know. But I know there aren't a lot of people in there. Is that because they sell a lot of organic fancy stuff?

Maybe. Is that because it's hard to get out of there for less than a hundred bucks because of the unit sizes? Maybe. But you can get some great deals there. But the rich people are there shopping. The habits you put in now are the same habits that will help you get deals on multimillion dollar deals years from now.

Do not despise the day of small beginnings. Don't despise the day of small beginnings. You need that – by the way, that's an allusion to the book of Zechariah. You need those skills developed in time. Here's my final thing. I don't think that getting tortilla chips for 12 cents an ounce instead of 13 ounces is going to make you rich this year.

But I do think that your kids understand tortilla chips and that by modeling the practice of deal shopping and unit prices, et cetera, you can accomplish a world of parenting good that is not possible in other ways. Whether that's showing the relevance of mathematics, giving them fun prices, fun things to do, or just showing them how to save money and how to – the value of a dollar, those are lessons that they will take with them.

Your children – I can point to example after example after example. Your children can emerge from your household as careful, diligent stewards of the resources that they have with tens of thousands and in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars under their stewardship that they've earned, saved and invested.

Or they can turn out like the kind of children who just walk into a local convenience store, pop a bag of chips on the counter and swipe their credit card. It's your job as a parent to make sure that that doesn't happen. That's it for today's show. I hope this content has been useful for you.

A little philosophical there at the end. I hope you like my stories. It's always – man, those of you who are parents will know you share parenting stuff in public, you risk the wrath of the internet coming down upon you. But I share them. For those of you who will enjoy the stories, just what they are, just fun parenting stories as related to money.

Thank you for listening to today's show. I appreciate your being here. If you'd like to support the show, please come on by radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. You can voluntarily support the show. I've suppressed a lot of the ads out here recently and that's for a few reasons but ads will come back in the future I think but for right now I've been working on some other things just trying to finish up some products to sell to you and some really good stuff has been the hardest thing I've done in my business thus far and I've failed miserably.

But I've also had some success. I'm still working hard at that and failure is a good chance to keep on pressing forward. That's what I'm doing. But in the meantime, I would be grateful to you if you gain value from this, if you'd like to send me some money, come on to radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron.

You can do it right there, radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. That's it for today. I'll be back with you very soon. God bless you all. This show is part of the Radical Life Media network of podcasts and resources. Find out more at radicallifemedia.com. Hey there treasure hunters and bargain seekers. Are you on the lookout for a local thrift store that has it all?

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