Shh! Listen! Money Matters. You're listening to the Never Boring Listen Money Matters podcast.
A show about personal finance for people who don't want to give up their daily Starbucks habit. And now, here are your hosts, Matt and Andrew. Hey everybody, welcome to the Listen Money Matters podcast. My name is Matt and I'm here with Andrew.
Andrew, how are you today? I'm good, man. How are you? I'm good.
I'm drinking whiskey. You know, getting all loosey-goosey. Trying to loosen up here. So today, we're going to talk about a big, big topic.
I think it's like the biggest topic ever, and that is how to save money. That's a big one. It's big, right? Yeah, that's pretty big.
I'm excited because I am not good with saving money. Never have been. You are the expert in saving money. You're the one that helped me to start my savings, which I finally did and now I have money and I'm not as scared anymore.
So I want to ask you. Let's take a scenario, if you will. I'll use myself as an example. I'm a guy.
I have a job, normal job. Maybe I make $40,000, $50,000 a year. I don't even know if that's high or low, but that's what I was making at one point. And I have a house, so I have a mortgage.
I have a car payment. I have a cell phone bill. I have bills just to keep the house up and running. You could say I have a family.
Maybe I have a wife. Maybe I have kids. Maybe I don't. Maybe just kind of work that in there.
How do I save money if I'm this person? How do I start? Because I know a lot of people say, well, and I have friends that I can cite who will say, I can't save money. Everything I make goes to paying bills, doing, just living.
Everything I make. So I can't save money. That's what they say. I can't do it.
So, I mean, I think that's complete bullshit. I mean, like absolute full of shit. And that's the excuse. And it's great to have excuses so you don't have to change.
Okay. But that said, and I agree, okay, but how do you convince somebody that what they're saying themselves is bullshit? How do you convince them? What are they doing wrong?
What are your suggestions for somebody like that? So, I mean, if you came to me or someone came to me and they're like, you know, I can't save any money. You know, I make $40,000, $50,000 a year and it all goes toward kids and house and all that stuff. Yeah, I'd be like, all right, you know, let's get into the details.
How much do you spend on your house? How much do you spend on your car? How much do you spend on this? And, you know, once we start listing it out and, you know, we peel back like the layers of the onion, we're going to find like things that you don't really need to spend your money on.
I mean, do you spend $200 a month on coffee? You know, if you have no money and you're backed against the wall and, you know, the house payment is due and you're not going to make it, well, you know, maybe you can't buy coffee. Maybe you're not allowed to buy coffee because you haven't been smart enough. You know, maybe you got to make a coffee at home with your French press.
Right. And now, you know, and in the last, well, why would I save money? What's the point of saving money? Because, you know, and I know there's things like, for instance, myself, right?
What I decided to do and what you've helped me with was that we took a look at my finances. We saw where I was spending money and we cut some of those things. So one of the things that I was able to cut was my cell phone bill. So I have an iPhone and I have AT&T and I was spending $100 a month on my AT&T bill.
So what I was able to do was hook up with my mom. Wait, no. Let me rephrase that. I was able to team up with my mom and my dad and my brother.
We all had AT&T. We were all paying our own separate bills. We decided, you know what, let's just all get together. We'll pay one bill.
We'll cut the, and the reason I didn't want to do that in the first place was because at the time I bought the, I was getting mine for the iPhone. So I had the plan, the unlimited data plan and everyone else, and they were cutting everybody else back, you know, who weren't grandfathered in. So I didn't want to lose that. The truth is, I don't really use my phone that much.
I'm mostly in Wi-Fi areas. Nowadays, you're pretty much in Wi-Fi wherever the hell you go, right? So I decided to cut it. So I was able to save $30.
I'm now paying, instead of $100, I'm paying $70. So I was able to save $30 a month. And I, and, but I acted as though I was still paying $100. And I took that $30 and I made an automatic withdrawal into a savings account.
$30 a month. Which is sounds like nothing, right? I mean, that's kind of like nothing. 360 a year.
I mean, that's something. Yeah, it's money. And it's like, And it was just like one of those things. Like I just kind of automatically put it away and that was it.
And so that was just one little thing that I changed that I was able to put that money away. Now, has it, like, and it's still sitting there. It's still collecting. It's still growing.
And now I feel better because I have this little like cushion now to work with. But it was just that one little change, right? So, I mean, what else can people do as far as like, because you say like not like to make coffee at home, right? Which I also did because I was spending money on coffee.
And they, you know, make lunches at home and those, you know, little frugal tips or whatever. But I know some people just don't like doing that. And that's cool. Like, I actually have a post about this.
Like, it's called Plug Your Spending Leaks. And it's just things that we waste money on. And it's not about, you know, being a miser and having less. It's just about less waste.
Like, and I know we're going to go into depth on, you know, bank fees in another podcast. That's like a huge waste of money. You know, there was a point in my life. I was like $200 something dollars a year that went towards fees.
And it's, you know, $2 at this ATM, you know, $3 at that one. Like stupid stuff. And imagine, like, you know, if you had someone just gave you like $200 right now, you know, that'd be awesome. You could have a killer dinner.
You could fix that thing on your car, your house. And that's just like a little, like, easy change, you know, not paying bank fees. Right. And I think we, you know, if we look at other things, like there are ways to save on your energy bill without using, without having to use less electricity.
You know, and those are easy ways to save money. Yeah, but I think what people will do, and I know this is something I would do, is that let's say I would save on my energy bill or I would cut something. I would, you know, like I was spending $10 a day eating lunch when I worked. Okay.
When I worked for a company. Because I hated bringing my own lunch. I would have, make up an excuse that it gets soggy or something. It just never didn't taste the same as it, you know, made fresh or whatever.
But it wasn't like I took that extra $50 I was saving a week and put that into a savings account. That's not what I did with it. I just had, you know, I just, you know, had an extra $50 that I would just end up spending on something else. Don't buy $10 for the coffee that day or whatever.
And I would justify that by saying, oh, I have $10 today. I didn't spend it on lunch. So yeah, you know what, I will go to the bar tonight. Or, you know, or I will, you know, buy this one thing because guess what?
I saved $50 this week. People, and myself, I'm like, I'm putting myself in this category. I would not, like, I could not put that money into a savings account. Look, I mean, that's cool.
I understand. It's classic, like, short-term thinking. Yeah. And I'm sure if, you know, you're listening to this podcast, you know, down the line, I'll be a broken record.
But the reason that this happens is because you don't know where your overall spending goes. Like, that was the last $50 to your name and then you were on the streets and broke. You know, you wouldn't spend it. Like, I mean, hopefully you wouldn't do that to yourself.
And, like, the overarching, like, term, like, this technical term is budgeting. And you know, people are like, oh, well, shit, I'm not an accountant. You know, tell me, no. Yeah, and it's like, I have no sharpened pencils or, you know, nice graded paper.
You don't need any of that stuff. We have Starting a reality, yes. Yeah. Because when I started looking at it, I'm like, you know what, I don't need to spend $100 a month on or a hundred dollars a week on groceries.
Like, what am I buying? Like, I'm not like, I should stop buying gold shavings for my scrambled eggs. Like, I don't need that, you know, not that I was doing that, but, like you just start like, okay, well, I'm going to try to spend $50 on groceries this week rather than a hundred. Now I know that's not realistic for some people.
I'm single, but, um, like you can make these little, you start to make these like conscious decisions once you see it. Right. And that's exactly what I was doing. But, and use mint again, that's huge.
And that's for people like me, right, who don't want to write shit down. I don't want to write anything down. I want to keep a spreadsheet. God forbid.
No way. I do not want to keep a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets suck. I hate them.
Right. My friend does that. My friend has a budget and he like, he now he gets, he gets a kick out of like, when I get home from work, I can't wait to write things in my little budget. I can't wait to like plug in the numbers.
And he like, and he was never like this. He was the guy that, you know, we used to spend our paychecks on cap guns when we were kids. Like he, now he's like into it. So he would, he'll go onto his Wells Fargo account and see like all the things he spent and he'll plug in these numbers into his, his spreadsheet that he built.
And that's great. That's like the way he wants to do it. And that's if you want to works. It does work.
It works for him. And he knows the end of the month. I have X amount of dollars to spend now. I don't want to do that though.
No, God, no. And, and he doesn't save that money left over. He just knows, Hey, I got an extra $400 this month to spend. Now I'm going to go, let's go blow it on a Greek tapas.
You know, let's go, let's go do some crazy restaurant wine thing. Um, but no, like I, and I use mint because what mint does is it, it takes that entering the numbers out. It's gone. It just automatically says, and this is now this doesn't work if you use only cash.
I mean, you can work that way. Um, but I find it easier when you're using like debit cards and credit cards and those things to pay for stuff. Um, and yeah, you see like, you see your categories and that was huge. That was helpful, right?
So once, let's say you, you create this like 50,000 foot overview of how do you say it? Like thousand foot overview of the thing. Sure. Fine.
Some overview sounds good. Right. You have some overview of all your expenses and spending habits. What do you do next?
Like what's the first step to saving? Like, and not monthly, like continually saving. Right, right. So, uh, you know, like you're going to categorize, you're going to budget, you know, you're going to try and cut some expenses down.
And, uh, I mean, like there, there's two ways to do it. One, it's like the trust yourself method to do the right thing. And the other is I'm not going to do the right thing. So I have to trick myself.
Okay. You know, so if you're gonna do the right thing, you know, you can leave it in that account. You can put it in savings, you know, maybe investments in the future or something. Um, if you don't trust yourself, you should definitely set up some kind of automated withdrawal at the beginning of every month or like directly after each paycheck and siphon off like some of your cash to a separate account that, uh, like a savings account.
That's not accessible by a card. You can't access it, you know, by swiping your debit card, you know? And, um, I mean, that's, that's how you start building a cash card. So, and that's what I did.
So like what I did was I, well, first of all, I want to say that I'm not allowed to have an ING account. Um, I burned that bridge and now they won't let me have one. So I had to go with something else. Why can't you have an ING account?
Because I used to have an ING account way back in the day, right? When like ING like first came out and it was like online savings account. And I'm like, oh, I'm a nerd. So yeah, sure.
I had no money, but no business having one. But yeah, sure. Uh, and then they came out with orange checking or electric checking or whatever the hell it was. So I was like, cool.
I hate my local bank. So yeah, of course I'm going to be internet nerd and go with the checking. But of course I'm the guy who overdrafts 40 times a year and I just started racking up fees like crazy. Instead of blaming myself, who was the only person to blame, I called up ING and screamed at them.
I may have mentioned some things about his mom. I may have said some things I wasn't very proud of and they put a little black label on my name and social security number. And now I've been trying for the past, like three years to get an account with them and they just say, uh, well, they don't say I'm blacklisted, but that's really, they're like, Oh no, you're not allowed to have an account with us where we're now. And I'm like, well, it's been like six years since that happened.
Yeah, no. I'm like, okay. So I ended up having to go to ally, right. Which is just another online savings account.
And I'm fine with them. I'm not, I mean, they're okay. Um, it's a bank. It's a bank.
Yeah. Um, and what I did was, um, I made it that they take out $50 every two weeks. And that was, it's low. It's not a lot of money, right?
So, um, I would get my paycheck or at the time I was getting my paycheck every other week. So like every other Friday, twice a month, um, bi-weekly. Uh, and they would, and so they would automatically take out $50 come Monday. So it would take like, I would have it take out on Friday and then it would, you know, actually leave my account on Monday and it wasn't a big enough amount.
It wasn't a huge amount, right? So I was taking, I was saving a hundred dollars a month and in five months I had 500 bucks. That's pretty good. Yeah, it's not bad.
And I just, I, I just, I decided myself, I'm like, all right, I'm never going to touch this. This is going to be my like emergency savings account. Like it just, it's just going to continually, I'm just going to continually blindly put a hundred dollars into it a month. Now I have, I have increased that over the, over the year when things got a little bit better.
So like I was, if I made more money, I'd say, okay, well I'm just going to bump it up to $75 now every two weeks. And then because it starts to grow faster and when you see it grow like that alone, like once you get over, I think like the $500 mark, you're like, oh shit, I'm on, I'm on to something here. Like this shit's real because you start to see positive numbers in your mint account and you're, and you start to feel like good and you don't want to, you don't want to touch it because it'll diminish. And that's kind of where the situation that I'm in now is now that, you know, when I first started the mint account, it was depressing and I hated it and I didn't want to look at it and I was really like depressed.
But then once I started that savings account and within six months it started to look better. Like it just, everything looked better. And like, that's how I started. And now I feel pretty good.
But I, but again, I'm the person who took that step to do that. There are people, and I had the money to do it, really. You know what I mean? Right.
But there are people, and I can name names, like friends of mine who say, I can't afford to do that. I can't even afford $50 every two weeks. I can't afford a hundred dollars a month. That's bullshit.
I know, like I know, and I try to tell them, but they don't want to hear it from me because I'm the, I'm the guy that's like nationally known as the guy that's bad with money or I'm not nationally, but like within my group of friends, like I'm the guy that you don't want to talk to about that. But like, that's why. Sounds like they're in denial. So how do you get, how do you, how do you like mentally get over that hump?
Like, how do you think somebody could mentally get over that hump? Of not being able to save because you spend everything or? Yeah. I mean, you have to look.
You have to peel back the layers and just see, like, I mean, this guy, you're your buddy who spends everything that he makes. I mean, I don't doubt that he spends everything that he makes, but you know, what I'd be really curious to hear or to see is like, if you challenge him, is he willing to, you know, open the books Just cut back on one... And I agree, you can cut back on just one thing, like one thing a month. And what you do with that one thing is you just say, I'm going to still spend it, so it's going to still act like I don't have it.
Like once, let's say it's the horseback riding lessons, as a terrible example. And he was doing it every Saturday, so it was an expense. And let's just call it $50 a weekend. Okay?
Instead of taking that $50 a weekend and putting it towards a hobby that literally has no value. I know it's fun, but it was like one of the many things that he did. You took that $50 a week and put it into an online savings account, something that automatically withdraws from your account weekly or biweekly or however you want to set it up. But I think the key is, and this was the key for me, was to have something automatically come out of your account.
Like have something automatically come out of your checking account and deposit it into something automated. I want to go back to the horse thing real quick. And you know, maybe there's like something in his lineage and his great granddad was like a horse something, breeder. I don't know, whatever.
And he has to go, that's fine. You know, like, dude, if you got to go horseback riding, get on the horse. If something you're passionate about, then yeah, I think you should do it. You know, but there are ways.
First of all, like you have to. Okay, so there's two things. One, you know, there's tons of services like Groupon or Living Social, and you could you could save bulk purchases. You know, like when I go out to eat, like sometimes we use restaurant.com because I'm going to go to this place and it's gonna cost me $150, but I can get a $150 coupon for $75.
Like I'd be an idiot not to do it. And you have to think like, well, it's annoying. I have to go on to Groupon and you know, find this thing. I have to go to restaurant.com and find that the gift card.
But yeah, dude. So how much? You have to think like how much is your time worth? Right.
You know, so you maybe make, you know, $20 an hour or whatever number you make, you know, if it takes you five minutes to save $20, that's like a great use of your time. Right. It might even be, I mean, I didn't do the math, but it might be on par with like working. You know what I mean?
Like if you could save $20 by spending less than an hour, you saved yourself an hour worth of having to go to the job that you might hate. Okay. I'm gonna make another argument. I'm gonna be a devil's advocate.
Okay. Absolutely. Against saving. Okay.
So I used to have this mindset. I'm not kidding. Okay. My mindset was I'm young and I could die at any moment in time.
I could literally walk out my front door and be hit by a bus. So why would I want to put money away that I'll never touch? Or like, why would I want to save for retirement when I'm living currently right now? And instead of putting that $100 a month away, I could use that $100 a month to have a really good time doing something now.
And you know that that might be the golden question is if the money you spend is directly correlated to the happiness that you have. Okay. And they've actually done a ton of studies on this, you know, and you can go and talk about the studies, but long and the short of it is that it isn't. It isn't directly correlated.
And I think if you were honest, uh, you would agree. You could go to that bar that costs you, you know, $20 a drink with the same group of friends or you can go, that you would go to a bar with, uh, or you can take that same group of friends and go to the bar and it costs you $5 a drink. And the things that you talk about and the people you see and hang out with, it's not more fun to spend more money on drinks because it's the people you're with and it's the time that you're having. And I think, uh, the only thing that they showed actually gives you happiness correlated to the money you spend is donating to charity.
People who don't even have money to spend when they give to charity, that gives them like lasting happiness or giving gifts to friends, like during Christmas or whatever. That makes people happy, not, you know, expensive drinks. We like them, but it's a fleeting happiness. Right.
I... Giving money to charity... I don't mean to sound like such an asshole, but I don't like giving my money away because I don't have much of it to give away. Me neither.
And I always say like, oh, I'm going to be really charitable when I have a lot of money. But you know what the question, you know what I think about? Is that when is that, when does that day happen? You know, when is that day when I, when I have a lot of money?
Because it, it never ends. Because I could be, I could be probably making $400,000 a year, like basically rich. And you're going to be trying to make $500,000. You're going to be trying to like save to the...
It's always like that. But I think it is, uh, when you reach that point of like FU money and it's, it's different for every person. But when you have the breathing room and the freedom to kind of like, you know, I'm taking those horseback lessons because my, my great granddad was a horse breeder or something. And it's really important to me.
And that's cool because you have that breathing room. You have that breathing room and the extra money, you know, you may donate to charity because you're a really charitable person. It makes you feel good. Or you know, if you're making $400,000 a year, you're probably donating to charity because you're saving a shitload of cash on taxes, which is, you know, a selfish reason, but you're still helping other people.
Yeah. So what I'm going to say on that is that, um, saving your money, right? Putting away, let's say, even if it's a hundred dollars a month, $50 a month, whatever. Once you have accumulated, I'm so glad I said that word correctly.
Once you have this money, it becomes this, like this cushion, right? This, this thing that you know exists and you know it's yours and you know, you're not going to lose it unless you do something idiotic, but it's there, right? So it's almost like you lose the stress a little bit. Like it, like, even if it's $500 because you know that when, if push comes to shove or you're in dire straits or something happens, you know, you have this like this, this access.
This great transformation happens. It's like when you're spending everything you have and you know that you're screwing yourself, it's like this self-loathing that keeps you doing the same thing and you can't get out and you don't know how to get out and it's too hard. You don't know. And it's just, you perpetuate the cycle.
But the crazy thing that happens is once you start saving and your cash hoard could be this little tiny, you know, bit of cash, like the $500 you saved or it could be a thousand, $10,000. It's like you get this feeling of with great power comes great responsibility because when you saved a thousand dollars in your head, you know that you can go tomorrow to the Apple store and buy a MacBook air all in cash because you have it and you could do it and you would love it. You'd be great. But like, wait a minute, it took me a year or whatever to save this $1,000.
What if I made it to $2,000 then I could buy a MacBook Pro or you know, when you get to $10,000, you're like, I could buy that RV or I can get, you know, the pool that my kids want in my backyard or whatever. And what happens is you, you still buy things that you want and that you need, but you, you start to appreciate like the, the freedom that you have. You, you loosen the belt a little bit, you know, you're not so stressed. Right.
Maybe your hair grows back. Like, you know, maybe, maybe you would people go bald because they're stressed, man. Like, maybe that's my problem. Maybe that's why I'm bald is because all my life I've been bad with money.
That's what it is. That's what it is. Maybe, maybe if you had $10,000 in your bank account, you'd have like a, you'd be in a bigger hair band or something. So can we call that the Spider-Man syndrome somehow?
Is that a thing? It could be a thing. Yeah. Because with great power comes great responsibility.
Why the Spider-Man syndrome? Because with great power comes great responsibility. That's why. Because it's in that movie, Spider-Man.
Why are you saving money? Because you're effing Spider-Man. Because you're Spider-Man. Because with great power comes great responsibility.
Exactly. No. All right. So here's what I want to do.
I want to wrap it up. Right. But I want to wrap it up by putting, putting an action plan together. Right.
So let's, whoever you are out there listening. Okay. Listeners, subscribers, whatever. This is Andrew's like step-by-step way to start saving money.
Because really, I think the hardest part is just starting it. Like just getting started, putting that first $50 in Maybe an hour or two to do it. Yeah, it's still a little time consuming, but totally worth it because that's a year. It saves you hours of work in the future.
Yeah, that $50 goes into the savings account. So now that we've now that we've budgeted it, I'm sorry, now that we've set up Mint, we've created a little budget. We know where our spending leaks are. We try to cut back things.
I'm going to count that as three. We're going to try to cut back and see where we can just shave off a couple of dollars, right? And we're going to accumulate all those dollars. OK, and then what are we going to do with those dollars?
Once we've let's say it's only a hundred dollars a month, we were able to cut back on because it's not killing yourself. I mean, that's not going nuts. That's not a big change. OK, especially if you're taking little bits from all these different pieces of your life.
OK, what do you do with that money now? Like, what do you do with it? You look towards your most expensive debt and you give it all to that debt. Oh, so now we're getting to it.
We're not talking about savings. We're not talking about. I mean, I mean, look, if you have been so lucky to be living by the seat of your pants and you're not saving and you're not underwater, you take that hundred dollars and just stick it in an account and we'll do a whole separate thing on putting that money to work. But you're either putting that money aside to work for you, to earn money for you, which is really not that difficult.
Which is saving, right? Saving is saving, you know, saving slash investing and investing has a scary word mentality, but it's really, really not that difficult. And we'll talk about in the future. So you're either doing that end of things or you're paying down that debt because probably one of the most expensive things, you know, in your monthly life, if you do have debt, is that debt because it's like paying those.
I mean, it is bank fees. You're paying for nothing. You know, you're paying hundreds of dollars or whatever, and you are getting nothing in return. You know, a hundred dollars.
If you make twenty dollars an hour, that's five hours that you didn't have to work. You could have just taken a day off. You could work four days a week instead of five days a week, you know, if you didn't have debt. And so and so you say if you do have this extra money and you are in debt, you should put the money towards that because the more money you put towards your debt, once that debt is paid off.
Now, even if it's a hundred dollars, if you might have skyrocketing debt, like huge amounts of debt and people go, well, I'm putting a hundred dollars a month towards it isn't gonna make a dent. Right. And I do want to go on a whole thing about credit card debt. But but if we're talking about just, you know, saving money and putting that money towards that, get that paid off because once you get that paid off and I know this from firsthand experience, once you get that debt paid off, you have no idea how much money you are going to have extra a month.
Like it's crazy. All of a sudden you're like, how the hell am I have all this extra money? Like what? Where does that come from?
Oh, that's right. I'm not paying a $75 minimum balance fee. And then it just keeps it never ends. You know, like I'm not paying that bill anymore.
I forgot. That's a $100 bill a month. You take your canceled cable, you know, your your television. You take from that hundred dollars, you shave seven ninety nine.
You get yourself Netflix. You'll be entertained for the rest of your life. Most of you never watch. And that, you know, ninety three dollars or ninety two dollars you put in every month against your debt.
And at the end of the year, that's a lot of money. Yeah. And that's also a lot of money that you didn't pay to the bank for no reason. That's a tough mindset to get into.
I will admit it was a hard thing for me to grasp. You've got to start somewhere. You do have to start somewhere. So let's say if you don't have a credit, if you don't have any debt, all right, or at least it's manageable and you just have this extra hundred dollars, do we start how do we start a savings account?
Do we now do you do you prefer somebody start an online savings account or like at a local bank or with a bank that they already have a checking account with? I mean, they're all going to be equal because they're going to pay you nothing point nothing percent interest. OK, so it doesn't matter these days, you know, putting your money in any of these accounts, you're getting nothing. You're getting pennies like so you're just putting in an account for in a holding pattern.
And then you listen to our future episode on investing or go to the blog and read about it. And, you know, because sitting in a bank, it's as good as under your mattress. Really? Literally.
Yeah. Except for the fact that someone can't steal it when they break into your house. Right. But plus you're accumulating.
I'm using that word a lot tonight. Plus, you're you're you're gaining all that money and it is going you're saving it. You're not using it for look, look, don't get me wrong. I don't mean to downplay the saving.
It is like crucial and you should be doing it. You just put it into whatever account you have. You know, if you trust yourself, leave it in the checking account. If you don't open a savings account with your buddy at the local branch or online through ING, just don't curse them out on the phone.
You know? Yeah, don't do that. You know, so if you could pull it out of your checking account, put it there. But like you're you're using you're going to have a little bit of money that you're going to keep as like your nest egg.
You know, when you break your leg and can't go to work as a dancer or something fun. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you need to have a little bit of that there and investing is anything on top.
All right. So I so and this is in my shoes. Like I just I have a savings account. I have some money in there.
I'll tell you how much I have in there. I have fifteen hundred dollars in there. Nice, man. Yeah, that was from starting in January.
Dude, that's awesome. Yeah. I'm pretty proud of myself. But so I put that money in there.
It's sitting there is collecting dick interest, meaning nothing. But it's OK. It's there. I know it's there.
And I'm personally afraid of investing. So when we get to that episode, hopefully I'll be able to break my investing. I'm not gonna say cherry. Yep.
I just said I just because I was going to say I was like walking in New York on my lunch break and I think Bank of America, they're actually advertising dick interest. So, I mean, if that's something you want, I mean, go to Bank of America. Get a dick interest savings account. It is no fees.
If you're listening to Bank of America, you can also sponsor this podcast. Yeah. By the way, Bank of America does not have dick interest. They have very good.
They have very good fees, right? Very good interest rate. Anyway, no. So, all right.
So basically, let's to wrap this all up. OK, fucking get your shit together. No, I mean, I'm sorry to be brazen, but like get your shit together, dude. Put your put all your finances on a piece of paper.
Even if you want to get started right. Start a Mint account. It's free. Like get all your shit hooked up.
10 minutes of your time. Look at what you're spending your money on. That was huge for me. Like, look at where your money is going because even if you don't take any action, you look, you subconsciously take action on things.
It's crazy how weird it works, but it does. OK. And once you do that, start figuring out ways to shave off like some of your expenses. Like, again, you don't need cable.
I mean, you might, but you could shave off your cell phone bill. You can check your insurance, your car insurance, your homeowner's insurance, like anything, but just shave off. Get that. Get extra money somehow.
There's a there's a way, right? There's a way. I don't give a shit if you're spending you're telling me that you're you every single month. I can't do it because every single dollar, you know, no bullshit.
You there's a way to do it. Right. And then once you do it and you can take the Andrew approach, which is pay it towards debt, which I agree with. Or if you don't have debt, put it in a savings account, which Andrew says is is not a waste because it isn't.
No, it's not. It's not the smartest, but we'll go into that. Or put it into an investment account. And I want to talk about investments account at another time because it's a whole nother topic.
But you can do what I do. I just put it in an ally account. I get point nine percent interest, which means I made five cents a month or some nominal nominal nominal. Anyway, some small fee.
And it doesn't matter because the money is just sitting there. It's just this little comfortly pillow thing that I know, like, man, if I get stuck somewhere or I can't make my mortgage payment this month or something crazy happens, I know, well, at least I got this fifteen hundred dollars that will just save my