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S-U-I-T-E H-O-P dot com. It's more than just a ticket. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a 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 today we tackle one of those seemingly mundane topics that I think makes a big difference in our daily lives.

And it's simply this. How do you track when you're out shopping? How do you track the cost of the merchandise that you're accumulating in your shopping cart, or shopping basket, or shopping bag, as the case may be? This is one area where online shopping just beats the pants off of in-person shopping.

Because in online shopping, as you click "add to cart" on your online grocery store, you can see that total add up. And then when you're done, you can open that cart up and you can delete, you can save for later, you can adjust the quantities, and that makes it really easy to stick within your budget.

After all, if you have $367 in your checking account and you're shopping in that online cart and you see that your tax and shipping is going to bring you to $374, then of course you have to change and reduce the quantities. But this is a little bit harder in person.

Because in person it's hard to keep track of all the different things that you are adding into your cart. Now depending on where you're shopping, this may or may not change your, it may be easier in some circumstances than it is in others. I find it really tough to keep track of things when I'm shopping in two particular places.

A store where I'm accumulating lots of items, or a store where I'm accumulating items of hugely varying values. So the grocery store is the biggest challenge for me, where you're kind of putting usually dozens and dozens of items in a cart. And it's just hard to keep track of it.

Is it going to be a $282 shopping cart, or is it going to be a $350 shopping cart? That makes a big difference. Especially if you are seeking to stick to a certain amount of money in your budget. One recommendation that I often give, and that I personally practice, is I never spend digital money when I can spend cash.

Which means I usually have an amount of, I always have an amount of money in my wallet, and I want to make sure that I don't wind up at the front register embarrassing myself by not having enough money in my wallet, and then feeling the pressure of all the people behind me trying to figure out what to do.

What do I put back? How do I adjust if I don't have enough money? Or I wind up overspending, which is unfortunate. So I think this perhaps is one of those areas where, with the proliferation of digital spending, where most people swipe a credit card or a debit card when checking out, I think they worry less about it.

But my observation is they shouldn't worry less about it. You really shouldn't. Because, yes, you might have the money in your checking account, but that's how you wind up overspending. So I want to give you a couple of very simple suggestions to put in practice that will help you to make sure that you keep track of your expenditures as you add them up, so that you can take a moment and think before you're actually at the checkout register, and consider if you've chosen the right things for you.

And those suggestions are, one, very tactile, and two, is going to be an app. So first, if you don't want to spend any money, and you just want to have a very simple foolproof system, what I recommend to you is, while you're shopping, just carry a small index card, a small piece of paper, doesn't matter, a back of an envelope from your junk mail, and write down a running total of the cart.

I'm pretty good at mental math, better than, I would guess, the majority of people at mental math. But it's tough to keep math straight in your head when you have a big basket full of stuff. And so I find that I need to write it down. So often when I'm out shopping, I'll carry just a very simple sheet of paper, and just write down a simple round number price of everything that I'm putting into a cart.

Most of the time, just the number is sufficient. So let's say that you're out shopping, and you're getting eggs, and they're three bucks, you write down three bucks, and then you're getting a carton of milk, and that's $3.50, I decided to write down four bucks. And I just always round up to the next dollar for a nice round number, and then I keep a running total.

So three plus four is seven, and I just write down the price and keep a running total there. That works very well, it's very simple and very quick, and it really helps to get a good understanding of what's in your shopping basket. Of course, you can do this at any store, but it's most helpful at stores where you have a lot of things, where you can't remember the particular prices.

It's easy if you have three items, you know one was 30 bucks, one was 40, and one was 50, that's easy to do. But when you have 100 items, that's a little bit harder. So I will just simply often carry a sheet of paper and a pencil, and just do some quick, very round number math problems to keep that running total.

Then when I can see it's getting close to my budget, $100, $200, whatever my budget is, then I can make decisions. The other solution was recommended to me some months ago by a listener, and I have found this to be a phenomenal solution, and it's an app. The app is called Solver, S-O-U-L-V-E-R, but it is one of the most useful apps that I have found, especially related to money and related to finance.

I think most financial apps are wildly oversold with regard to their actual value, but this app is very useful. I'll describe it to you verbally, and then you can check it out for yourself and describe to you how I use it. Verbally speaking, it's a spreadsheet app that collects and collates the data that you enter into the sheet in a very less structured way.

So there are no columns, it just has a couple of very simple functions, and you can enter text or you can enter numerals. And then the app will discard the text, but it will use the numerals. And in the text, it actually puts into it, it can do some simple mathematical functions as you're entering the data in.

So I've come to the point where I use this on most shopping trips. And if you, I recommend you try it out. I've not reached out to the, I have no connection with the app maker, you just have to buy it in the store, it's a couple bucks, something like that.

Again, it's called Solver, S-O-U-L-V-E-R, look it up in your app store. But I'll tell you how I use it and how it's so useful. I use it when I'm out shopping. And so I have here on my screen in front of me, I have the total from a recent shopping trip that I did at Costco.

And as I was out shopping, I was putting in the name of an item and the price. And so my first line here was I bought a carton of coffee and $7.99. So I just entered 7.99 coffee. And then I bought some bear spray and so my next one is 39.99 bear spray.

And then over in the right hand column, I have the right hand column set to give me a running total. And as I'm actually putting in the data, it will accumulate that running total. But the beautiful thing about it is it's also extremely easy to put in multiple quantities.

So one of my categories here is chips. I bought some tortilla chips. So those were $4.59, but I bought two bags. So I just wrote chips 4.59 times two, and it automatically over in the right hand column, it automatically created the total for me of $9.18 and added that to my total.

And so a Costco trip for me is a good place where this is so useful because I have very small purchases on here, a pineapple for $2.99. And I have very large purchases on here. In my case, I bought a mattress for $199.99 and I bought dog food. And so I can look at that and I can do all kinds of things with that information.

I can know that when I'm getting up to checkout, my total was $477.80. Now that doesn't include tax, but I just mentally round up to tax. And so I was able to stay under a $500 checkout based upon having this data here. I recommend this app to you. It is the most useful app I have found for being in a store.

And it really usefully brings in the value of a phone and it makes this semi-smart spreadsheet really work for you. So give it a shot. You'll have to buy the app to try it. Again, it's called Solver, S-O-U-L-V-E-R. You have to buy it to try it, but in my opinion, it has been well worth the money for, again, whatever it is in the app store, $2 or $3, something like that.

Give it a try and give it a try on your next shopping list, because here is why this is so important. Personal finance, good personal finance is a cumulation of many, many small things. There is almost never one big thing. That's why these topics that I share with you are so diverse, but it's an accumulation of many, many small things.

And it's also an accumulation of habits and practices. At the end of the day, you have to control your expenses. There's no way around it. And that control of expenses for most of us begins with some simple things that we learn when we're young. Our parents, hopefully, will teach us how to control our desires and how to plan ahead for our expenses and how to get a good value on our money so we don't waste our money on some stupid cheap thing.

But then it continues and we learn how to adjust and prioritize our expenses. And there's good daily practice in the grocery store or in the clothing store that will help you to keep track of your money and help you to be moderate with your expenses. And then that simply continues up as your scale grows, as you are engaging in much larger financial transactions.

Frugality doesn't become less important. It just happens on a different scale where instead of worrying about saving $1.99 by buying three cartons of coffee when it's on sale, then you're saving tens of thousands of dollars by buying significantly discounted assets when they're on sale. So these practices and habits need to be built steadily and you've got to be in control.

And unfortunately, most of us get in a real bind when we're facing pressure. I had an unusual experience recently where I made a decision, a financial decision, under pressure. And I was checking out somewhere, I made an offer and I went ahead and bought it. And in hindsight, it was a mistake.

And I've tried and tried to be very insulated about that, but I still succumb to the pressure. And many of us do, whether it's the pressure at the car dealer, the pressure at the grocery store. And so one of the most valuable habits you can practice is planning logically, planning ahead, and then making sure that you're not subject to that pressure, that panicked moment.

And an app like Solver or a simple piece of paper can help you to avoid that when you're at the grocery store, because you can pull aside when you're not in line, you can look at your cart, you can know how much money is going in that total cart, you can know it pretty confidently.

And then you can decide before you're facing the pressure if you want to put something back, or if you want to go ahead and check out. So I hope these two suggestions are useful for you. And kudos to the to the developers of Solver for coming up with a really useful app.

And thank you to my listener, I don't remember who you are at this point who recommended it to me. It has been a very useful in my life.