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Podcast Notes: The Side Hustle Show - Episode 660: How to Stop Spending Money
Episode Overview In this episode of The Side Hustle Show, host Nick Loper discusses how to break the cycle of unintentional spending. Joined by Jen Smith, co-host of the Frugal Friends podcast and co-author of "Buy What You Love Without Going Broke," they share practical strategies to save money and improve personal finance management.
Key Topics
- Importance of tracking and understanding past expenses.
- Creating a sustainable spending plan.
- Tips on negotiating and managing buying habits.
- The psychology around spending, impulse buys, and financial habits.
- The concept of no-spend challenges as a tool for better financial awareness.
Key Takeaways
- Understanding Spending Habits
- Track Your Expenses:
- Review the past 90 days of spending to identify patterns and habits.
- Use budgeting tools (e.g., Monarch, YNAB) to categorize and visualize spending.
- Create a Spending Plan:
- Develop a budget that accommodates both fixed expenses and discretionary spending.
- Flexibility in budgeting can lead to better adherence and less guilt associated with spending.
- Strategies for Cutting Costs
- Zero-Based Budgeting:
- Allocate every dollar a "job," ensuring all income is accounted for. This helps prioritize savings or investments.
- Impulse Control:
- Introduce a waiting period before making non-essential purchases. This can reduce impulse buys and promote thoughtful spending.
- Psychological Insights
- Dopamine and Spending:
- Recognize that spending can trigger dopamine responses, leading to habitual overspending.
- No-Spend Challenges:
- Undertake a 30-day challenge to raise awareness of your spending habits and retrain your brain regarding purchases.
- Negotiation Tactics
- Silence as a Negotiation Tool:
- Use silence strategically during negotiations to prompt concessions.
- Comparison Shopping:
- Leverage browser extensions (e.g., Benny, CNET Shopping) to find better deals and secondhand alternatives.
- Building Support Systems
- Accountability Partners:
- Engage others in your financial goals to reinforce commitment and motivation.
- Common Goals:
- Align financial strategies with family or partner goals for better collaboration and success.
- Lifestyle Considerations
- Balance Lifestyle Inflation:
- As income increases, allow for some lifestyle upgrades while ensuring it aligns with financial goals.
- Celebrate Small Wins:
- Acknowledge achievements to foster motivation and encourage continued progress.
Conclusion The episode emphasizes that stopping unnecessary spending is the simplest way to improve financial health, often more feasible than generating additional income. By taking control of expenses and fostering better habits, listeners can achieve their financial goals with intentionality.
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Additional Resources
- Frugal Friends Podcast: Listen for more tips on living frugally.
- Buy What You Love Without Going Broke: Check out Jen Smith's book for deeper insights on managing your spending.
- Side Hustle Nation: Visit [Side Hustle Nation](https://www.sidehustlenation.com) for more content on entrepreneurship and money-making strategies.
Sponsors
- Gusto: Payroll and HR management software.
- Mint Mobile: Affordable wireless plans.
- Indeed: Hiring solutions with job credits.
Final Thoughts Understanding spending habits and actively managing finances can lead to substantial savings and personal growth. This episode offers compelling insights and actionable strategies for listeners looking to enhance their financial well-being.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Let's be real. Nobody starts a business for the joy of calculating tax withholdings. That's where our partner Gusto comes in to take the stress out of payroll, benefits, and HR, so you can focus on why you started your business in the first place. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use. So that means you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. I'm talking about automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workers' comp, 401k, you name it.
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1:15It goes straight to your bottom line. Hey, and you didn't even have to come up with a new business idea. Today, we're talking tactical and creative money saving hacks with a longtime listener, a serial side hustler. She's the co-host of the Frugal Friends podcast and co-author of the new book, buy what you love without going broke. Jen Smith, welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Nick, thanks so much for having me. This is for sure a full circle moment for me. Well, it's been a long time coming. Appreciate you joining me today. I think we both are in agreement that it's important to take a holistic view of personal finance, thinking of yourself as the CEO or the CFO of your own life and really taking charge of your personal profitability, which of course includes the revenue side, which we've got hundreds and hundreds of episodes about.
1:59increasing your income, but it also includes the expense side, which we typically don't talk a lot about. And with that, I want to tee it up to you for suggestion number one on how to spend less money, start saving more, or maybe a foundation that you need to lay on this mission to get the spending in check. Yeah, I love side hustling, but you're right. When you focus on the expense side, that's the lowest barrier to entry. And you can start seeing more margin between your income and expenses faster when you stop spending money than if you're just focused on side hustles. So what we tell everyone to do is, yes, first, track every expense, but not just your current expenses and your future expenses.
2:47First, you want to start with your past expenses too. So first, look back at your last 90 days of spending and figure out what are the patterns what are the habits what am I already spending on so that way you're better prepared as you go through life and you're spending money you have a little bit more knowledge and a little bit more preparation on the things you're more prone to spend on the situations where you're more prone to impulse spend or to overspend. So we look back before we look forward. But that first tip is the same, is that you have to know what you're doing. You have to track your expenses.
3:29For this, are you just pulling up the past three months of credit card statements and trying to figure out where to really go? We're trying to categorize this spending into different buckets? Yeah, you can really easily do it with whatever you're using for your credit card or your debit car, wherever your transactions are, or if you're using a budgeting app like YNAB, Monarch, Copilot, any of those, they do it automatically for you. And it's really easy to sort by the dates that you made. So maybe you went on vacation, you want to see maybe what you're more prone to overspending on on vacation.
4:04You can sort by category. So maybe you're not going to the same place over and over, but you're doing takeout over and over just at different places. Or maybe you do sort alphabetically so that you can see your expenses at each place. Like maybe I'm grocery shopping on Sunday, but I'm always heading back to the grocery store Wednesday or Thursday because I just didn't make enough of a list or I didn't stick to the list enough. So I'm always heading back for that one thing and getting more while I'm there. Yeah, this is something that Brennan and I did a few months ago. So we used Monarch, which there's some level of irony in it being a paid tool to help you spend less.
4:46I use Monarch too. Yeah, I pay for it as well. You know, they probably have some like new customer discount. Well, I'll look that up. I'll link it up in the show notes for you. But what we did, because we kind of had this sense of, well, here's our, you know, bare bones budget or like kind of the big ticket mortgage and utilities and food. we kind of had a general sense of what it costs to sustain our lifestyle. But then like every month when the credit card statement would come and be like, oh, that seems a little bit high. What did we buy? It was like, oh, well, we had plane tickets or we had a car repair or we had, you know, something else broke.
5:22It's like every month it's like, well, it wasn't a one-off thing. It's like a very consistent thing. So we use Monarch to look at the last 12 months and be like, well, what do we, what do we actually spend? And it was kind of our hunches became true and the outflow was quite a bit higher than we had mentally envisioned in our heads. Yeah, it's always more nerve-wracking before you actually look. That's why so many people just don't want to look back. We just want to start freshly, go forward, looking at expenses. But you will be more effective faster if you're trying to lower your spending by knowing where you're starting from.
5:59And it's always scarier not knowing than when you actually look into it. Okay. Now, let's say you've got this itemized list of spending. What do you do next? Because this is kind of still a backwards look, and now we've got to apply it going forward. Are you looking for those impulse buys, trying to categorize things as impulse purchase? Well, that was a one-off thing. I don't need to make that again. Or what happens next? So once you look back, then you can start looking forward. So then you would start to make a budget. But I would say everybody's budgeting style is different. And everybody thrives with a different level of either being very strict or being very loose.
6:44Like for me, I hated the strict budget. But I thought that's what I had to do to be in control of my spending. And what I found was when I gave myself more flexibility in the categories, like created fewer categories, it actually gave me more freedom to not spend on things and to spend without guilt. And it made it more sustainable for me. So, but the next point is to make a spending plan for the future. You can call it spending plan, budget, whatever makes you feel good. Spending plan sounds better than budget for sure. Right? So the beautiful thing about language is that there's so many synonyms for the same thing, right?
7:24So if one word gives you that gross feeling like budget sometimes can, you can call it something else. Yeah. So it feels very restrictive. Yeah. Right. Right. So making some kind of spending plan for what I want to do. And we recommend a zero-based budget, but not just to have every dollar tied up into whatever's most efficient, but so that you know that you have enough to put towards your financial goals and whatever you're planning to do. So if you need a little extra capital to start a side hustle, or you're trying to pay off a debt before you can, so you can work less, you have more time for your side hustle, you want to make sure those things are covered first.
8:09And on the timeline, you want to cover them. And then with the rest, that's where we figure out our discretionary purchases. Obviously paying bills, you know, first and foremost, but that's kind of what you want to do. And you can make a budget or spending plan that you will stick to better because you already know what you're spending on other things. You're not just taking a shot in the dark on what you're spending on takeout or coffee or whatever. You actually know how much you've been spending over the past three months. So maybe you spend the same or maybe you shave it a little bit, but you're not going to cut it by 90 % because it's an arbitrary thing that you think, quote unquote, you're supposed to be spending that much.
8:54Okay. Maybe akin to New Year's resolutions, I'm going to lose 50 pounds. It's like, well, why don't we start by losing five? Baby steps here. My understanding of zero-based budgeting is maybe a cousin to like the profit first methodology in business accounting, where it's like, I'm going to allocate whatever percentage of the income, like straight to the bottom line first. And maybe in a personal sense, that's like straight to savings or that's straight to 401k contributions, like kind of out of sight, out of mind. And what my mother-in-law would always do, and maybe this is similar, you could tell me if like I'm getting zero-based budgeting wrong, but she would like, from her paycheck, direct deposit just what was needed for her monthly expenses.
9:38I got to pay the mortgage. I got to buy groceries. I got to do utilities. And everything else was out of sight, out of mind, into savings, into investments. And it was a really effective system for her. Is that what I'm understanding? Yeah, that can be it. And I think it's not so much where the money goes that zero-based budgeting is, but it's having a job for every dollar. So that dollar's job could just be a miscellaneous fund, and you have a larger miscellaneous fund because you don't want to have a coffee budget, a takeout budget, a grocery budget, a non-food grocery budget, which I have seen people have two checkouts at the grocery store because they want to categorize food and non-food differently.
10:23Like, if that's you and you love that, do you. That's not me. So I would rather have bigger categories and more flexibility within them. And it can still be zero-based. Yeah. Okay. I like that call to make sure every dollar has a job, putting it to work. When I first started working and get the direct deposit, it's like, okay, whatever. They say allocate 10 % to 401k or up to whatever the company match was. And then everything else just went into checking. and I probably could have accelerated my saving or investment journey. It was a natural saver to begin with, but didn't do a great job of investing that in compounding assets.
11:04It just sat there in a lot of cases. Yeah. When you are intentional about what you do with your money, when you get it, it works better. And when you take care of the bigger things, you don't have to stress so much about the smaller things. And so that's like the 80-20 rule in saving money. So when we look at the Bureau of Labor statistics on what Americans spend on most, the biggest things are housing, transportation, and food. Those make up about 60 percent, those three things, 60 percent of our monthly budget. So if we can focus on those three things first, mainly housing and transportation, where we make decisions about that maybe every 5, 10, 15 years.
11:52But if we focus on those really intentionally, then the$6 latte or the$20 takeout makes a lot less of an impact. So for me, that was when I got my last car. I didn't pay cash for it. I got a loan for it. And that's okay with me. I'm not against car loan debt. But what saved me$4 ,000 in one sitting was that after hours of negotiating for one car, which was virtually identical to another one, on the website, they were the same price. But I was sitting there waiting to get this one car that after all the fees, and I have no idea how it inflated to$4 ,000 more than the other car. And I had this feeling like this sunk cost feeling.
12:45I'd already spent so much time negotiated. I've negotiated down a lot. I've invested a lot into the salesperson that I've never met before and will never see again in my life. So I was sitting there and I was about to buy the car to just bite the bullet until I realized, is this worth$4 ,000? Like what I'm sitting here for and worrying more about myself versus the time and the other people around me. And I was like, no. So I got up, left, and went and got the other car. And in that one moment, which was very uncomfortable, and I did not like it, it saved me$4 ,000. So it's making decisions like that that are what's going to help us really, really cut our spending.
13:34Yeah, that makes sense. it's not so much the coffees here or there. I mean, maybe it adds up to a lot and there's, oh, but if you save that$4 latte and you compound it over, you know, it's like, well, but if it brings you joy in life, you know, come on. But no, totally like on the housing, on the transportation, if you find some creative ways to stretch your food budget a little farther, like these are the big, big levers that you can pull to make a bigger impact. more money-saving hacks with Jen in just a moment, including my favorite non-confrontational negotiation tactic and four questions to ask before you make a purchase right after this.
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16:41And it's just called silence. It's just sitting there awkwardly for what feels like an uncomfortable amount of time. And I've seen this over and over again. We were kind of taught this when I was painting houses. Like once you name your price and you present the estimate, just sit there, wait for a reaction. Like don't talk yourself out of a deal. You know, I remember going in and taking my car in for like an admissions test. And there was a place nearby in California where they had some, you know, advertised deal on the window. I was like, you know, take it in and they say, well, because yours is an SUV, it's going to cost more.
17:12And I was like, well, first of all, you know, calling my two wheel drive, a four cylinder Ford Escape and SUV is being very generous, but, but putting that aside, the river is sitting there for what was probably just 10 or 15 seconds, but like in the moment it felt super awkward. And the guy was like, okay, fine. We'll just honor that price. I was like, oh, I didn't have to do anything for that. The other one was we were legitimately off the grid, up in the mountains. turns out like on Friday, our landlord had sent a note, hey, we're gonna have to raise your rate to to this, you know, maybe it was a$300 increase or something didn't get the email because we were not checking email, come back on Monday night, and we see like three future messages, hey, just making sure you saw this.
17:49And then last one was like, well, how about if we meet in the middle? It's like, hey, I just saved 1000 bucks by not responding to this. It works online, too, if you're not in a hurry, like if you have something in your shopping cart on some site, just leave it, leave it for a day, leave it for a couple of days. Because a lot of e-commerce stores have like the abandoned cart sequence. So you might see a follow-up email where it's like, hey, did you forget something? How about 10 % off if you check out now? And so that's my underrated negotiation tactic of just waiting, silence. Yeah. Oh my gosh, definitely.
18:20Anytime I want to buy clothes on Poshmark, I just like it. I don't put it in the cart. I just like it. And then like nine times out of 10, I get a special offer on the piece. Oh, nice. Yeah. It's always, you just show a little bit of interest, but don't give them anything else. Like you can walk away. I'm glad you mentioned Poshmark because this is something we're trying to normalize with our kids and that's buying secondhand, buying used. We have a store near us called Value Village, which is actually like a for-profit thrift store. I guess it's kind of a unique business where I think the owners are actually very, very wealthy because if people donate stuff for free and then they sell it, it's like, well, that's a great business.
18:59But, you know, we find like Nerf guns and football jerseys and sporting equipment. Like it's really like they like it from like the treasure hunt aspect. And I like it because it's kind of setting that mindset. Well, not everything that you buy has to be brand new. Yeah, I try to buy as much as possible secondhand, not just because it saves money, but also because we have so much stuff on our planet that we have. I think the estimate is we have enough clothing already made to clothe the next six generations of people. And so if we can stop that flow, we not only are saving money, we are, and these things are more negotiable than something that you would buy in Target or Walmart, right?
19:46But we're also cutting down on like landfill waste clutter in our earth. Yeah. So it's just like there's no reason to just not think secondhand first. It doesn't mean everything you buy has to be secondhand. But if we would just shift the mindset to being like, before I buy anything, I use these four questions. How can I get it for free? So like a buy nothing group or free on Facebook marketplace or from a friend either trading or borrowing. If I can't get it for free? How can I get it for low cost? And so that's where secondhand comes in. How can I get it on Poshmark, eBay, ThredUp? Can I buy it from Facebook Marketplace, Thrift Store?
20:32If I can't get that, and I don't spend a ton of time searching for these, depending on how fast I need something, I'm not searching for years, right? I'm just, I'm looking, I'm trying to get creative before I just first go out and buy it new. If I can't get it low cost, I ask, how can I get a deal on it? How soon is the next sales cycle coming up? Because they always come back around. And then if I really need it and I can't wait for a sale, how can I buy full price and not feel guilty about it? So is there a way I can buy locally or sustainably? Something like that. So those are the four questions that I ask before I buy something in order to save money.
21:17Yeah, I know that's a good filter to put a new purchase decision through. And I will add another layer of filtering, which I just call the waiting period. Maybe it's 24 hours, maybe it's 30 days. And this is something that I used to do quite a bit more. So I just put a 30-day waiting period on it. And you'll find in a lot of cases that, you know, obviously you can't do this with food and other essentials, but it's like for, you know, something else where it's like, oh, that's nice to have. You probably find that you lived a perfectly happy existence for the 30 days in between. And you're like, you just set a calendar reminder.
21:53Hey, buy the thing. And you might find like, yeah, I don't really need it anymore or I don't really want it anymore. And if you find that you still do want it, then by all means, like, okay, go for it. Knock yourself out. Yeah. There's so much money to be made in fintech with frictionless payment and getting us to impulse buy. All an advertiser needs to do is show up in your social media feed. You have a pattern, right? You're just scrolling. They just need to interrupt that pattern. It's literally called a pattern interrupt. They just need to interrupt it for 30 seconds to get your attention.
22:26If they can get you to make a purchase in 30 seconds, then they've got you. Any more than 30 seconds then we check back in with ourselves and we're asking ourselves that question. Right, right. Do I really need this in my life? Right. And it's not necessarily out to scam anybody. It's just like, hey, this is a novelty product. Most of the time our episodes are on that pattern interrupt side where it's like, how do I get people to buy my stuff? They just know that's how your brains work. I know if you're in any kind of marketing with a side business, you are uniquely equipped to avoid impulse spending even more.
22:57I find that the longer I run a business, the better I get at resisting marketing. at least for things that I don't need. Like I truly love marketing for introducing me to things that really do improve my life. But I also know when it's something that they're trying to create a problem or create a solution that I didn't need or have before. Like it's they are creating it. So I buy something. Yeah, I've had enough sales training that you start to recognize it when other people are using that stuff on you. And it's not necessarily a turnoff, but you just like, Okay, I see. I see what you're doing here.
23:34Yeah, it makes sense for us because we're in it, but there's so many people who don't know what's going on. And it's really not their fault. That's why we love talking about it on Frugal Friends, is so that everybody can know what we already know as business owners. The next money-saving hack that I want to introduce is what I call the substitution game. This is where you're finding better, faster, cheaper, lower-cost alternatives to the stuff you're already spending money on. This is kind of borrowed from Rosemary Groner from Busy Budgeter years ago. I was like, well, you're targeting people who don't have any money.
24:09Are you targeting like people who are like trying to be really frugal with their spending? Like that didn't seem like a great audience. And she was like, well, it's a great audience because if you can show them, hey, you're already spending money on this. Have you considered this better, cheaper alternative? It's, you know, a natural affiliate recommendation to make that switch. I was like, oh, OK, you know. So one example would be like Mint Mobile in our house. like, oh, say money on your cell phone bill, but looking at the things that you're already spending money, like if it's been a while since you've shopped for car insurance, like you keep paying the same rate, but your cars have depreciated since you last, you know, renegotiated that.
24:43So like different things that you can kind of look at and try and get the same service for lower cost. Yeah, I did that recently with insurance. And actually our insurance is coming up again. So it is time to do it again. But it's things that you're already buying and need. I think it's always good to rethink if you actually need it. And I do this a lot with our streaming services to say, okay, is this actually something I need? Because sometimes when you take a break and you come back in, then you get a new subscriber discount. So sometimes just canceling for six months can save you even more money again if you can't negotiate it down.
25:28I saw this recently in relation to Costco. It's kind of like letting those memberships lapse, because maybe it's two months before we go back, or it might be before it's the zoo or the science center with the kids. It's like, well, it doesn't need to be on auto renew, because we're not going to go on that day. It's like, okay, maybe that equates to 10%, 20 % savings. And then to your point, oftentimes, because we've done Factor, we've done HelloFresh and stuff like this too, for like meal planning, make it easy. You know, when you cancel, all of a sudden they're like, you know, it's easier to reacquire a customer that they used to have to get somebody completely cold.
26:07So they're like, hey, come back, you know, have a half off your next order. And so you see that quite often where it's like, okay, just let it lapse. It's easy to just check the auto renew, but maybe there's some benefit in taking a pause. The psychology around the streaming services is really interesting because they're all kind of between that, you know, eight to$20 range, where it's like intentionally designed to be a very, very small sliver of your budget. And so it's like, well, it's almost more friction to cancel it than it is to just let it ride. But you're like, well, you know, did we watch?
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26:39How much Netflix did we watch last month? Or how much Disney Plus did we really use? There's some interesting psychology around why people don't cancel that. It's too small to even make a dent. Yeah, I think. And we also, we believe that any change we have to make is permanent. And truly, nothing is permanent. So my co-host Jill, before they owned a home, they lived in an RV for a couple years. And they never intended for that to be a permanent lifestyle. They were not RV YouTubers who built a brand around being digital nomads, right? They literally did it to save money on their living expenses for two years.
27:24And that's how we ended up meeting them, because they just took advantage of living in an RV to take a road trip down to Florida. So, so many of the things we think of, or maybe it's not having a car, a second car, or a car at all. Maybe you skip out for six months or nine months and just take an e-bike, or you're a one-family car. Nothing that you do to save money has to be permanent, but if it's worth the money you will save for however long you do it, that could make a big dent in your future goals. Yeah, we have strongly considered becoming a one-car household in this interim period where the kids are pre-driver's license age because it's like the insurance carrying cost sits at the driveway most of the time not getting used.
28:14And sometimes, well, now we got to jumpstart the battery and stuff. But you kind of have to do that math. Well, how much would you spend on Uber or Lyft like on those very few occasions where you really did need two cars? Like, and does that outweigh the cost? So there's kind of questioning, to your point, some of the bigger ticket items in your life. Yeah, definitely. So I think my next recommendation, and it's one that I've been talking about for years and have been delighted to be talking more about in 2025 because it is a hot topic, is no spend challenges. so I know like stopping spending money is extreme right so I don't I don't necessarily recommend it but it is it's a gateway drug to saving sustainably so if you're interested in it it's not bad but I love talking about no spend challenges which is you know extreme but it's extreme for a short amount of time yeah and it's not extreme just for the sake of being extreme But so like when we were talking at the top of the episode about looking at what you spent in the past and making a plan for what you will spend in a future spending plan or budget, there is this real time period between that.
29:33And that's where a no spend challenge can really help you get a handle on your expenses. It goes beyond the subscriptions and the automations and all that and gives you a really big insight into what are my spending habits? What am I spending on without thinking? What am I taking for granted that I have to spend on to meet a need when I could really get creative and meet that need for free or lower cost? So I like to recommend doing at least one 30-day no-spend challenge. Maybe you're starting out getting a hold of your expenses. Maybe you're kind of recommitting yourself. Doing 30 days is enough.
30:18Like, yes, there are books written about people doing no-spend challenges for a year, no-buy, low-buy years. That's fine if you want to write a book about your experience. Okay. But if you want to just get a handle on your spending and start to retrain some of your dopamine receptors to go towards other dopamine producing habits versus automatically going to scrolling the Amazon app or going to Target or any of these shopping induced dopamine receptor things, 30 days really is enough. So I read while we were writing By What You Love Without Going Broke, I was reading Dopamine Nation by Ann Lemke.
31:00And she worked with people with all kinds of addictions. And the first thing she would do is put them on a quote unquote dopamine fast. And they're not really fasting dopamine. You need dopamine. But the thing is, is that you can, if you abstain from what is creating these dopamine inducing actions, these quote unquote addictions, if you abstain for four weeks, one month, 30 days, whatever, the first two weeks are very hard. The first week actually is the easiest. The second week is the hardest. But after two weeks, you start to see a difference in where you're getting your dopamine hits and how you're getting them.
31:46And after four weeks, you can truly see a change to where if I'm stressed, I can go towards something that will actually treat the root cause of the stress instead of stress shopping, which is just a habit. So that's what I love about the no spend challenge is for that right there to start paying attention to spending habits and starting to change them versus just how much money you'll save of not spending for four weeks. Yeah, we had some friends recently go through this. We did not participate for full disclosure. They were allowed to buy, you know, produce and stuff. But otherwise, it was like trying to eat out of the pantry, eat out of the freezer.
32:28and it's interesting that you mentioned week two is the hardest because this really aligns with the new year's resolution data that like what is it january 12th is quit day it's like that's you know the first week like motivation is really strong okay i got this and then week two it starts to wait a little bit and then by the end of week two it's like yeah forget it i'm just going back to my old habits and it's like that's uh it's really interesting here and my guess is because I've done like 24, 36 hour fasts, but not much longer than that. And it makes you kind of notice what it makes you notice what you're missing, makes you really grateful that you're not doing that most of the time.
33:09But it's kind of trying to figure out those little emotional points where, oh, I normally would have bought this, or I normally would have eaten this, or normally would have spent that. And I think that's a, that's really interesting, a little bit extreme, but maybe it kickstarts and builds some awareness around where your money's going. Yeah. So we talk about finding the radical middle because everybody loves to live in extremes because they're really easy to market and talk about. They go viral. But where true sustainability lies is in the radical middle. And we can find our radical middle by visiting extremes and learning about them, but we don't want to live in them.
33:48And that's kind of what a no spend challenge is, right? Like it's extreme. It helps you realize, okay, what's the thing that I can't stop thinking about wanting to spend on? Because you're right. I've done 24-hour fasts too. And I think about food way more than I would if I was not like on a fast. And so people, when they think about cutting out costs, they think about the most important things to them and like, oh, but I don't want to give up this. And usually that's the last thing you should give up. And a no spend challenge can help you figure out, okay, what are the things that I am constantly thinking about that I really truly miss?
34:27And then you check back with that transaction inventory and you're like, oh, I didn't even think about this, yet I'm always spending on it. So I can just draw a line in the sand now and say, I'm not going to spend on this anymore. So I really love it for that aspect. More money-saving hacks with Jen in just a moment, including cash versus credit cards, some helpful browser extensions, and how to take control and stop playing defense with willpower all day long right after this. A lot of side hustlers suffer from what-if-itis. What What if it doesn't work? What if I don't have the skills? What if I pick the wrong path?
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36:56Limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. What do you think about this one? Because I have been very pro credit card rewards. We have banked thousands of dollars worth of cash back and free flights around the world. Like it has been, you know, almost a part of our identity to, you know, take advantage of these credit card bonuses. but there's some pretty compelling data that says people spend more and consistently more and significantly more when they're using credit cards instead of cash.
37:37If you have a spending plan, you can use credit cards really responsibly and take advantage of all the benefits that they have to offer. I love credit cards for the safety they afford you when you're making transactions, for all of the flight and hotel benefits. I love them. but you have to be working on a plan because sometimes ben i've done this before when you're consumed about getting to those like like minimum spends to get the bonus or whatever you can just throw something else on the credit card because you're like oh i'll make it up with the points i get which really isn't and then your points just sit there like in perpetuity because you have so many and you can't you know can't take off time for work to travel for six months with all your points.
38:25So being very intentional with a spending plan can help you really get the most out of credit card usage and put into perspective, okay, what is enough? Like, what vacations am I trying to take? How many points do I need to get there? And do I have to hoard points just because I can? Yeah. Yeah, you can't you can't take them with you and they get getting devalued year after year. So use them, use them up. And we do think cash is important for the kids, especially a younger one to like, see that physical transaction, the money leaving his hands. For me, it's almost the opposite. Where it's like, it feels like it feels like it's free because I know it's not going to hit the account.
39:10It's like I'm not going to see it on my statement. It's just like, oh, here's 20 bucks. Sure. But it's, you know, it's there's some interesting psychology around cash versus cards. Yeah, I definitely think it's wise when you're starting out and if you believe you do have a real problem with overspending, just lock the credit cards for a few months and just use cash. It's not a long-term solution, but it is a good short-term exercise. On the shopping side, going back to getting the best deal, I like the site Cashback Monitor. I like Rakuten. Do you have any other tools, tips for deal finding or cashback here?
39:53Yeah, I've been into CNET shopping lately. It's one of those price trackers so you can see if something is less expensive on another site. I use Benny, B-E-N-I. So that is a site that helps. Well, it's a browser extension. And so if I see somebody wearing a cute Lululemon sweatshirt, I can look it up on the Lululemon website. And then the Benny browser extension, I click that and I can find the sweatshirt on secondhand sites like Poshmark, ThredUp, eBay, RealReal, all of those resale sites. It will look at that particular new item and find it all over the Internet secondhand. And so I actually love that.
40:47It saves me way more than like any rebate app because I'm saving 50 % on things that are even new with tags. Okay, cool. Benny, that's a new one to me. Well, we can link that up in the show notes. Gem, it does a similar thing with if you're more into like vintage and higher end stuff, it's similar to Benny, but for more like vintage clothing. That's G-E-M. Gem Search, I think. I'm not 100 % sure. I am not super fashion forward, so I just use Benny. Got it. Cool. Nor am I. So just buy clothes from, and then just, well, that fit well. So buy another pair of those or buy another one of those in a different color or something.
41:32I will go to stores and try on jeans. And if I find the brand and size I like, then I will then go and buy them online secondhand. And I'll just keep buying the ones that I know fit me. Yeah, that's exactly. It's hard to find something that fits. I will say I have transitioned to spending more upfront for hopefully better quality stuff than rather wearing out the pair of Old Navy shorts in six months or something. So, you know, it's like the buy it for life or, you know, these brands that hopefully a little more durable or longer lasting. So sometimes it's what do they call it? It's like a, you know, Pennywise, Pound Foolish or something like, you know, single ply.
42:18You end up using more. It's kind of like there's certain ones where you're just, yeah, it looks cheaper on the surface because it's not going to last. Yeah, that's one of the problems with having a frugal living podcast is that people will come up to Jill and I and brag about how cheap they got their clothing or how cheap they got something. And then I'm like, yeah, but did you need it? And is it going to last? Like, I think those things, I obviously do not say them out loud, but that is always what I think. It's always people bragging about what they got, what they could consume, instead of like bragging about, I didn't consume this, or I didn't buy anything on Amazon for, you know, six months or stuff like that.
43:05That is what I would love to hear our listeners brag about. And anybody, I would love to hear that from anybody. Yeah. Yeah. And you got to value your time too. I had some friends who were very proficient Facebook marketplace, Craigslist choppers, but sometimes it'd be, you know, driving two hours each way to go pick up this thing. It's like, well, how much did you really save there? You know, I don't know. It's like, you know, spent a lot of time negotiating this deal and I hope it was a big enough transaction. And for big transactions, it makes sense. But for little stuff, it's like sometimes it is just better, faster, easier just to click the Amazon button and have it show up at your door.
43:41Yeah, it is a balance. Frugality for us isn't just about stewarding your money well, but it's being a good steward of all of your resources. And that includes time, your physical space. So not like cluttering up your space with a bunch of free stuff or cheap stuff from Craigslist. It's about your mental energy and natural resources too. So it's about stewarding all these limited resources well. That makes sense. One limited resource is attention. You like that transition? The hack that I want to share is to either not sign up for marketing emails from different stores or brands in the first place, or you can unsubscribe from them if it is becoming a problem.
44:27But what I tend to do from the stores that I actually shop from, like REI and some of these other ones, even like pizza, like Papa Murphy's and stuff like goes into this special folder that I don't really see. But when it's time to order, when I'm in the market for something, I can go through and see if they sent me any deals recently. It's like out of sight, out of mind, but I'm still in control rather than like, oh, there's a sale going on or, oh, it's like, well, I don't need to see that because I wasn't going to buy it. That's the game that they want to play. It's like how to create more purchase activity.
45:01But it's like, I want to do that on my own terms. And so I just have a bunch of filters set up in Gmail to throw those into like a marketing deals or something folder. Yeah. And if you don't know how to do that in Gmail, you can use unroll.me and it sends you a daily roll up of all your marketing emails. And you can unsubscribe from within, or you can choose to look at the email or not look at the email. It has all of them in just in one list and it has an app. I've been using that for easily 10 years. And yeah, I get to be in control. I get to save when I want to and unsubscribe when I'm done.
45:43Yeah, absolutely. I look at my wife's inbox and it's like thousands and thousands of messages. It's like, can I help clean this up for you? But she generally does okay with the impulse buys, But it's like it's somewhat exhausting to be playing defense with willpower all day long. And we've seen this with food or with, you know, the bombardment of different marketing messages. And so you kind of have to build these little guardrails around yourself. Yeah, you definitely have to remove the temptation. It's so much easier to not have it in front of you than it is to decide to make a good decision.
46:21Like we always say work with your brain, not against it. Your brain wants to take the path of least resistance. So let it, but you have to put up the guardrails so that path doesn't like derail you from your financial goals. So we use atomic habits. James Clear's like habit triggers, the cues. And so like, is it the person I'm with or is it the place that I'm heading to or coming from? Is it the time of day? So we look at these cues and we're like, okay, can I change anything about these to remove the temptation? And that works so much better than trying to rely on yourself to make the good decision every time.
47:07Because by 3 p.m., you're sober. You're just done. that's and and no amount like you don't need to be stronger like i think we can feel guilty for our lack of you know quote-unquote self-discipline or discernment or whatever but our body's literally designed to to do this for our brain so work with your brain not against it yeah remove the temptation and some of the things it might be ordering delivery like a grocery delivery, it saves you from making impulse buys in the store. Like we've started doing a lot of target pickup, which for me, it's like, it's only a few things. Like, let me just go in.
47:48It's gonna be faster than sitting here waiting on somebody to bring out this stuff. Like it feels silly. Like I'll just go pick it up. But the mentality is like, we'll probably save money by not going into the store and saying, oh, what else is in here that we need that jumps into the cart? Absolutely. I was thinking, I'm like, why do I do this? And I think part of it is like, if I'm going to target for one thing, I'm already there. So it would be an inefficient use of my time to not walk around to see if there's anything else I need, because then I would have to go back and I don't want to go back.
48:20So then I look around and then that's where I end up impulse buying something instead of if I had just walked in to get the one thing and walked out. So part of it, I think, is an efficiency thing for me. And so, yeah, I've been doing Walmart grocery pickup for years since I had my first son, and he was just impossible to go grocery shopping with. All right. The next one on my list is to get an accountability partner. I think if you're trying to cut back spending and all your friends don't know about this, or they're going to think you're all of a sudden this wet blanket who doesn't want to do anything anymore, I think it's helpful to have somebody else in your corner who's on the same journey, who's rooting for you.
49:05I remember years ago, Tiffany, the budget nista, she said this was like day one of her 30 day live richer challenge. Day one, get yourself an accountability partner. And from the business and growth and marketing standpoint, I was like, well, this is fantastic. You just doubled the size of your audience, you know, on day one. This is great. But from the personal like stick with it-ness factor, you got to have somebody else who um who can support you and say no no no we're in this together i remember even on the the health and fitness side like we would come home uh from from work early in our careers and be like well we said we were going to go uh go for a run but you know it would be easier if you know if one person's like no i don't really want to go like no no no we're going to back each other up we're going to go do this yeah you have to it takes a village And we've gotten so far away from that ideology, it's hard to find a village now.
49:58If you want to succeed in anything, financially, business, health, you do have to surround yourself with people who have the same goals. so they don't necessarily have to be on the same path but they at least have to be genuinely supportive of the path that you're on and i had to stop hanging out or talking to some people when i was paying off debt and i hang out with them now it's not like i cut them off totally from my life because they were toxic or something they just weren't good for me in that period of time. And so being really honoring your season and whatever you're trying to accomplish and really making a point to create community around you to support that is truly going to make or break.
50:51I don't think, I know I would not have paid off my student loans if I hadn't had my husband there when we were working together on it. I was not interested in it. Do you have any recommendations for maybe one partner in a relationship is the spender and the other is the saver? How do you kind of bridge that gap and get buy-in from a spouse or partner? First, I think the spender and saver personality types are a myth. I think everybody spends and everybody would save if they had enough incentive. If you were going to die tomorrow, unless you made$5 ,000, like you'd find a way to make that money, right?
51:36So everybody can do it. Right. Theoretically, but not everybody has the same values and wants the same things. So it might look like, and people don't think that they are sometimes capable or deserve the things that they truly want in life. Like we think we deserve small things and so we'll go after small things. And those are the things that are typically marketed to us. But big things like retiring in your 50s or even in your 60s or starting like going full time in a business or stuff like that. Sometimes we don't think that we can get that because that would take so much of our time and so much effort.
52:22So we sacrifice these bigger things that we actually want to just take the smaller things. And when we recognize what our partner actually wants in life and we start to have those big higher level conversations, that's when we can start to honor what this person would actually save for. What would give my partner incentive to save? What is the thing that they really do want in life and would save for? Because that was what happened with me. I didn't want to pay off our debt, but I did want to eventually foster. And that involves a lot of time, a lot of time investment. And it's easier to invest that time if work is optional for me.
53:09And if I have a$700 debt payment every month, work is not optional for me. Yeah. So that became the catalyst for why I wanted to pay off the debt. Him just being a good idea or something I'm quote unquote supposed to do or something that my spouse wanted me to do was not enough for me. I had to connect it to what I really wanted. And so you have to find the thing that your partner really wants enough to stop spending on the small things to focus on the big things. Yeah, getting on the same page in alignment with that big picture goal. What do you envision for our life? Having that, and the goalposts may move, but having some sort of destination in mind rather than just saving for the sake of saving, I think that can be really important.
53:58or maybe that's something that we found helpful early on in our journey and recognizing it's a team sport. Like we got to have some buy-in here. But having that big picture why it's important on the saving side, it's important on the side hustle side too, because it's like the going is going to get tough. You're going to want to quit. So it's like, what's that driving motivation behind it? And it's kind of, it's the different side of the same coin. It's like, well, yeah, everybody says they want to side hustle to make extra money. But why? Like, what does that afford you? Like, going three or four layers deep.
54:30And if you have a spouse or partner in the picture, like, then that can that can be really be important, too. Yeah. Anything else on your list? I think we've done pretty good here. Yeah, I would say the last thing for me is to celebrate small wins. I think that we, at least for me, and I think this might be for a lot of personal finance nerds, We are so quick to move the goalpost. We hit one goal and then we just move it back and we're already on to the next without recognizing what we've done and celebrating that. So really taking time after we achieve a goal, like what did I struggle through so that I don't forget that?
55:15And then what was really easy for me that I thought wasn't going to be easy? and and so all of these things reflecting on the journey so that the next time you're trying to accomplish something and you're not sure if you can do it you can actually look back at what you did the last time and be encouraged it can and these successes and pushing through setbacks they all compound on themselves so the goals that you reach can be bigger and bigger that's right I keep leveling up. That's the name of the game. And I do want to add a point here that like as your income increases, as your side hustle starts to grow, as you level up in your career, like some level of lifestyle creep, lifestyle inflation is recommended.
56:05That's kind of the point, right? Like you reward yourself, you know, make things easier on yourself. Enjoy the fruits of your labor. Tim Ferriss has this line about, well, how can I waste money to improve my quality of life? And I think that waste line is really important because it allows you to acknowledge that it's not necessary. Like, yes, it's an upgrade. Yes, it seems frivolous based on my years of frugal habits. So I'm going to acknowledge that it's a waste, but it's worth it because it's going to make life better or easier in some way. Yeah. Lifestyle inflation is not bad as long as it's proportionate to your income inflation and it aligns with what you truly value and what your goals are.
56:49Very good, Jen. This has been awesome. Congrats on the book launch. Again, buy what you love without going broke. Buy what you love book.com. Make sure to grab a copy. Make sure to check out the Frugal Friends podcast. Now you've got other side hustles, other projects, self-publishing, print-on-demand? What are you working on this year? Oh, this year is all about YouTube. We are definitely diving more into video. It's that one thing that I think will make other things easier or unnecessary in the future. Ooh, I like that line. Yeah, we are starting a couple different YouTube segments for the podcast, and I'm even starting to post more on my personal YouTube channel.
57:33Well, it's called Modern Frugality, so it's not like personal, personal, but there are just some things where I'm like, I'm going to post more on YouTube. I'm going to get over my fear of not feeling camera ready, not feeling camera worthy, and just try it. Very good. Modern Frugality, we'll link that up as well, along with Frugal friends and the book buy what you love without going broke. What's that one thing that will make things easier or unnecessary? I love that line. Now we've been talking about saving money in this episode. But as you know, there's only so much you can cut. But your earning power on the other side is limitless, which is why we've got over 650 episodes dedicated to that topic.
58:15If you're not sure where to start, I want to invite you to grab your personalized side hustle show playlist, all you got to do is go to hustle.show, answer a few short multiple choice questions, and it'll recommend eight to 10 episodes to start with based on your answers. Again, that's at hustle.show. Big thanks to Jen for sharing her insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen.
58:50And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.
From the publisher
It’s easy to get caught up in the habit of spending without thinking.
But the good news is, it’s totally possible to break the cycle.
In this episode, we’re going to share simple, practical ways to stop spending money and start saving.
These strategies come from real experience and expert advice, so you know they actually work.
Full Show Notes: How To Stop Spending Money
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