To bring you the help you need, social workers hone the quality of caring into a career and prove their proficiency through licensing. This message brought to you by ASWB, supporting social work standards. And what's up everyone, welcome back to The Daily P-Fab. This is episode 140 for Saturday, January 5th, 2019 at 7.24 p.m.
here on the East Coast and it is time for your weekly financial checkup because I started off the new year with a great recommendation for a New Year's resolution to help you save money. And so I wanted to check in and see how many of you actually have done that. And the great news that I can report to you is I did send out the link to several of my family and friends and several of them have taken that advice and had texted me screenshots of their Digit home screen, a bunch of them saved, someone saved as much as 50 bucks, some others were in the $30 range, I'm in the $25 range, is what Digit pulled out of my checking account and put into savings for me automatically. And again, that's all based off of an algorithm, based on your spending habits, what upcoming bills you have, and it's just a fantastic thing.
So if you haven't done Digit, and again, you don't have to do Digit, it could just be as simple as you earning some extra bucks and actually putting it into an envelope or putting it into a safe or putting it into a savings account in your bank, whatever you choose to do as long as you're doing something to help you meet your New Year's resolution of trying to save money. And I do have another cute little money-saving tip for you tonight. Well, it's actually, I don't know if it's a money, yeah, I guess it kind of is a money-saving tip. So it entails gift cards.
And so if you're like me, and I probably venture to think there's probably a lot of people that fall into this category, you get a lot of gift cards for the holidays or for birthdays or, you know, for doing things throughout the year for people, they'll reward you with a gift card, which is very nice and very considerate and very sweet. I usually take them and put them into a drawer, and I usually use the ones that are relevant for me, which tend to be the Amazon types of gift cards, because I can buy, you know, all my photography gear, I can buy all my podcasting gear, I can buy stuff for work through Amazon, I just use Amazon for everything, but every now and then you'll get that random gift card and you're kind of thinking and wondering to yourself, what was this person thinking giving me this gift card? I've never been to the store in my life, and I'm never going to go in that store in my life. And I'll admit, in the past, I've regifted and given those gift cards away to people.
And, you know, I don't feel bad about it. I mean, everyone does it, I'm sure, but I do have a, you know, drawer full of some old gift cards that I'm probably never going to use. So I found this website, it's called cardpool.com, C-A-R-D-P-O-O-L, cardpool.com, and it allows you to enter, when you scratch off the back of the gift card, it allows you to enter the card number and the PIN, and you tell it what store it is. So let's just say if it's Best Buy, and you know it's a $50 card, you enter in the card number and the PIN, and you get as much as 92% back by selling that gift card to this website, and they do it in the form of a check.
And so I did it just now, tonight, I had a $40 gift card to a store that I'm never going to go to, and I don't even remember where I got the gift card from, but anyways, it was a $40 gift card, I entered it in, they offered me $32 for it, and I clicked yes and accepted it, so I have a $32 check coming. And again, this is, I know some people are going to be like, well, you just lost $8, that's a horrible deal, but the point is, is that $40 gift card wasn't doing anything for me sitting in the drawer, and if I did go use it, I'm just going to go buy $40 worth of crap I don't need. I don't need more stuff, right? We don't need more stuff as a whole, as a society, as a community.
We don't need more stuff, we need money. We need money, because if you're looking at your bank accounts, and if you're looking at your paycheck, and if you're looking at what's not left over when you get paid, you know, you probably fall into that bigger category of people that are like, man, what am I doing wrong in life? I have a bachelor's degree, or I have a master's degree, and I still live paycheck to paycheck, and I just can't make ends meet, and it's because we're making the wrong choices and the wrong decisions, and you've heard me talk about this in several episodes, 2018 was the year I became debt-free by following the Dave Ramsey principles, and literally, that took me taking every spare penny I had and sending it towards credit card debt in order to get out of that and put that behind me, and so now, you know, I don't have those bills anymore every month, and so now, for the first time in my life at almost 48 years of age, I get that benefit of, I don't live paycheck to paycheck anymore, there's actually sunlight in my bank account whenever I get paid, and I pay my bills, you know, and now, instead of allowing that money to just sit in my checking account and say, oh, I have $600 free dollars I can go buy stuff with, you know, I smartly move that over into several different savings account buckets, so that I'm saving for Christmas vacation, you know, new car, whatever it may be, that's just what you have to do, you have to be that disciplined with money to get out of your current state that you're in financially, because I know a lot of people that live that way, and it's, you know, it's kind of heartbreaking, and, you know, the excuses that they come up with as to why they can't fix it, you know, that's just what they are, they're excuses, because you can fix it, no matter what the amount is, you can fix it, it's just going to take work, and it's going to take a lot of work, and it's not easy, and it's very hard, and you have to be very disciplined with your money, and like I said, you literally card debt, or whatever your student loan debt is, or whatever the debt is that you're trying to pay off and get out from underneath, that's what you have to do, and so that's why this gift card website just makes all the sense in the world, why sit on a gift card if you're not going to use it, why give that free gift card away when you could turn it into money, and who cares if you lose a few bucks on the deal, you're making a few bucks that you didn't have when you woke up that morning, and then you just apply that money right towards your debt, and over time, it will come down, and you'll see the true benefit of doing this, I mean, it's what we have to do, it's really what you have to do, if saving money is a goal for yourself, you have to work towards it, if trying to get out of debt is a goal for yourself, which it should be for everyone that's in debt, then you've got to take action, stop giving your money to other people, meaning stop wasting it on dumb stuff, you know, I know people that recently went to a Penguin game, and you know, they had talked to me a little bit about some financial advice, and what did I do to get out of debt, and you know, I gave it to them, and you know, I kind of bust their chops, you know, from time to time, and they had said to me, you know, don't worry, the tickets were free to go to the game, and it's like, okay, that's cool, but, you know, was your $20 parking free? No.
Were those $13, you know, Mike's Hard Lemonade drinks that they sell at the arena free? No, they're not, so, you know, the free tickets turns into an $80 a night, which again, you know, I get it, it's nice to go, it's nice to reward yourself, we all think we deserve it, but again, if you're living a debt life, you don't have that luxury to be able to do that stuff, you've got to be spending that money to get yourself out of debt, and again, that reminds me, let's pretend that we live in a world where there's no government shutdown right now, so I don't want to talk about that, but let's just talk about tax return time. Right on average, everyone's going to get between $1,000 to $3,000 tax return, everyone always right off the bat says, this is beach money, this is Disney money, this is vacation money, and very, very, very few people ever say, this is to help me get a jumpstart on getting if you don't go on vacation, I go on vacation on average once every five years, but I know people that are swimming in debt up to their eyeballs, you better believe that that family of five goes to Disney every single year, right, and again, that's just making more debt, and you're never going to get out of that unless you finally stop what you're doing and put a plan together to get yourself out of debt, so again, listen, here's the thing, I'm not a financial guru, I didn't go to school for this, I'm someone that has been in debt from age 16 until age 47, and the light switch finally went off in my head, and you know, I worked at it, I worked at it for several years to get to where I am, and it's paying off, and it's a great feeling, because like I mentioned a couple podcasts ago, you know, I'm about to pay an absorbent amount of money on car repairs, I don't have to charge it, I get to dip into my emergency fund and pay cash to have those repairs done, because that's what an emergency fund's for, you put money into that so you don't have to use credit cards and create debt, and end up spending more money on interest and, you know, on all that other stuff that goes along with credit cards, so it's just working for me, again, there's no big trick to this, you know, no degree needed to get out of debt, it's just you've got to make smarter decisions with your money and where it goes and who you pay, so anyways, that's your financial checkup for the week, if you have not started doing something to save money for your future or putting money aside to help get yourself out of debt, I urge all of you to take action immediately, because it is that serious of a thing, you know, especially, you know, just watch the news, watch what's happening in the stock market, watch what's happening with this government shutdown, watch how they're talking about how everyone's tax returns are probably going to be a little bit delayed because of this government thing, and then, you know, you always hear, excuse me, a couple times a year they talk about social security and how, you know, someday that may go away or that may be less, and, you know, everyone that has an IRA or a 401k, it's doing horribly right now because of the stock market, and oh my God, you could just keep going on and on and on with this, so stop giving your money away that you have for stuff you don't need, you know, you don't need to go to the beach every year, you can put that money aside and get a jump start on paying down what you have to or putting money aside for your future, it really, truly is that important of a thing. So, I've rambled enough, it is now 7.35 p.m.
here on the East Coast, those of you that took the advice and jumped on digit, congratulations on your first week's worth of savings for 2019, and I, again, look forward to keep monitoring my own digit account and hearing from anyone else that's doing something towards financial goals for 2019, 412-701-4323 is the show, call-in number, paulfalibolidopodcast.com, thanks for listening. To bring you the help you need, social workers hone the quality of caring into a career and prove their proficiency through licensing. This message brought to you by ASWB, supporting social work standards.