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Andrew
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Apply it out of network ATMs, bank ranking and number of ATMs according to U.S. news and World Report 2023 Chime checking account required on this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast how to Lower every bill in 60 days what's up everybody and welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host Andrew, founder of MasterMoney Co and today on the Personal Finance Podcast we're gonna be talking through how to lower every Bill in your in 60 days. If you guys have any questions, make sure you join that Master Money newsletter by going to MasterMoney co/newsletter. And don't forget to follow us on Spotify Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or whatever podcast player you love, listening to this podcast on it. If you want to help out the show, consider leaving a five star rating and review on Apple Podcast, Spotify or your favorite podcast player. Now today we have an action packed episode because I am going to go through the framework that to lower every single bill in your life within the next 60 days. Now, in this framework, my goal is to go through eight different weeks where each week you are doing some very specific activities so that you can lower your costs over time. Now this is gonna be a very important component to this list, is that once you start to lower costs in some of these areas, I want you to utilize what we call the CIA method. Because the number one thing that happens for most people is, is that when they cut back on something, when they cut back costs on a subscription or when they cut back costs on their insurance, they usually do not identify where those dollars need to go. And so what happens is that money goes into your checking account, it just gets commingled with everything else and then you just waste it on something else. I don't want you to waste these dollars. We don't cut back money in order to just waste them on other things and consume other things. Instead, we want to do is direct those dollars towards things that we actually value. That is why we spend our money, is so that we can put it towards things that we actually value. So we're going to cut back on things that we don't value, take those extra dollars and put them towards things that we do value. Now, maybe you value something like your retirement accounts and you haven't really been saving for retirement. You want to get more money in your retirement accounts, or maybe you want to save up for your emergency fund, or maybe you want to save for that family vacation this summer. You're saving for a wedding. It doesn't matter what it is, but when we cut back, we need to make sure that we are identifying where those dollars are going to go. And so here's how the CIA method works for those who are new to this show is you cut back, meaning you cut a specific item. Let's say you cut back on your Netflix subscription, you get 20 bucks. Okay, let's say you have 20 bucks back in your pocket. Then you identify where you want that $20 to go and then you automate it towards whatever that goal is. So let's say you save $20, you want to put an extra $20 into your brokerage account. Okay, so you're going to cut back that $20 you're going to identify, okay, this needs to go to my brokerage account and then you're going to automatically transfer that money every single month, that $20 into your taxable brokerage account. That is exactly how this works. It is just a very simple system that allows you to redirect dollars towards your actual values. It's very easy. So we're going to go through how to lower every single bill in your life. We're going to go through every area of your life in the next 60 days. And the structure is an eight week structure where we're going to go through everything from your, your subscriptions, your utilities, your insurances, your auto payments, your rent, your transportation costs, to family and kid bills and everything else in between. There's a ton of stuff in this episode and if you want us to create this framework in a free guide, let us know when. We'll send that over. All right, so without further ado, let's get into it. All right, so week one is going to be the initial audit. Now this is a very important week because this is going to help us develop a plan to cut back as much as we possibly can. Because once we start to cut back on specific items where we spend too much, we can take those dollars and put them towards our financial freedom and start to build wealth for ourselves and our families. And so this is going to be a huge, huge win for a lot of you out there. So we have a couple of goals when it comes to week one. One, we want to see what is everything we are paying for currently. What is every single dollar that is leaving our hands, our hard earned dollars are leaving our hands and going out somewhere else. We need to know where we are putting those dollars. Two is we are going to cancel what we don't use. If there are things out there that is just low hanging fruit, we know we don't use it. We've needed to cancel it for the last couple of months, we need to cancel that. And then three, we need to set the stage for negotiation. Some of this stuff we're going to be negotiating to get lower rates. And I'm excited for you because those are where you can save the most. You can save hundreds of dollars per month just by learning how to negotiate some of this stuff. Okay, so here's the steps that we're going to start with. Okay, is number one, I want you to download the last three to six months of bank and credit card statements. Now if you pay insurances every six months, for example, I want you to go back all the way six months, or if you pay specific bills every six months, then you need to go six months. If you pay things monthly or quarterly, then you can go back three months, and you should be okay. Now, if you really want to nail this, I'd go back six months just to be safe. Okay? And what I want you to do is do a couple of different things. You can either get three different color highlighters, or you can just get out a pen and make a note on these things. We're actually printing these out. You don't have to print them out. You know, you can do this on your phone and kind of write with your phone. If you have an iPad or with an Apple pencil or something like that, you can write with that or a tablet, whatever else. And I want you to look through your recurring charges. Okay? And I want you to highlight in three different ways. One is cut now, meaning this needs to get out of my life. I don't use it enough. It doesn't bring me any value. I need to cut this back now. Two, and this is a second color. Typically, I take three colors, highlighters, and I will. Each one is a different color. Number two is negotiate. This is a bill that I want to go to this actual provider and start negotiating this bill. I need to have this bill. Maybe it's insurance, maybe it's my rent. It doesn't matter what it is. But I need to go back and I want to negotiate this bill. Cable, cell phone service, those are big ones also that most people need to negotiate. So even if you are looking at this to and saying to yourself, well, I don't know if I can negotiate this. You can negotiate anything, anything in this life. So what I want you to do is highlight the ones that you think you can negotiate if you want to keep them. Okay. And then number three is to keep as is. So keeping as is would be something that you really cannot control. Maybe it's your mortgage payment, something like that. Okay, so currently we have those three categories that we are thinking through. So go through your bank statements, whether it's digital, whether it's physical. For some reason, I like physical. I do everything in my life digital, and I literally never print anything out. But when I do exercises like this, for some reason, I like it on paper. So for me specifically, I would print it out and start to highlight. For some of you, you may hate paper even more than I currently do. And so you just don't want to print it out. You want to do it on your phone. Or wherever else next is. We're going to get some quick wins in week one, okay? Because as we look at this, we marked everything cut, negotiate, keep as is. But if you see dead subscriptions that jump out at you immediately, things like unused apps or forgotten trials or old magazine subscriptions, any of that kind of stuff that you can just do, boom, really quick wins to get removed. I want you to go in there right now and I want you to start removing some of those items. So there's a bunch of great examples out there, but let's just say you have an old magazine subscription and you keep getting these magazines in, and when the magazine comes in, you just literally throw it in the trash. You don't even read through it anymore. That's the case. Figure out how to go cancel that magazine subscription really quickly. Okay? We're going to get into a deeper dive on subscriptions later, but these are just the quick wins that you can recognize right now. And then lastly, I want you to get set up with some sort of spending tracker to help you through this process. You can do it with Empower has a free version. You can do this with Monarch Money. You can do this with ynab. You can do this even with a spreadsheet where you're just doing tracking and you're doing it the free version, ynab, Monarch Money are paid versions. Really good paid versions, though. And then the other ones are free versions. Okay? And so this is what I want you to do, is kind of get set up with a spinning tracker so that you can monitor this every single week as we go through the next seven weeks after this first week. So right now, week one, if you're starting this process, I want you to follow those steps. Here we go again. Here's the steps one more time. Print out three to six months of bank and credit card statements. Highlight recurring charges. Okay? Mark these cut. Now negotiate or keep as is. Cancel any dead subscriptions immediately and then set up a spending tracker of some sort. That's a plenty of stuff to get done on the first week. There's five steps there. You can do one each day. You could do it all at once. But it's up to you. You need to go through and start to do that now. Let's go to week two next. All right, so in week two, we're going to look at Internet, we're going to look at cable, and we are going to look at streaming services. Okay? So Internet, cable, streaming services, and phones. So these are going to be the four areas that we're going to look at first. So first I want you to look at your Internet provider. Your Internet provider is likely associated possibly with your cable tv. If you have cable. If you don't, if you cut the cord, then it's separate. But I want you to look at your Internet and say, okay, do I need this speed? For a lot of us, we're going to want higher speeds. It is a great luxury to have when your computer lags or your phone lags or your TV lags when you're streaming. There is nothing worse than that. It is the most frustrating thing in the world. But a lot of houses right now, we have way more speed than we even need. If it's just you and a roommate, or if there are not very many people in your household, you, you may have way too high of speeds that you don't even need. So I would go to my Internet provider and I would call them up and say, hey, this is where I currently am. Do you have any current deals going on right now? And they're gonna start to talk through this situation with you and you may be able to get this number reduced. You could probably save 10, 15, 20 bucks just by calling them up. Now this is per month. And what I want you to do is when you think about this. Cause we're gonna add all these up at the end. But what I want you to do is start to add up the total number that you are saving throughout this process. Okay, let's say, for example, that you go out and you save $20 on your Internet. Then you go to your cable TV provider. Maybe they're separate, maybe they're the same. And you save 10, 15, $20 on your cable TV and then you save another $10 on streaming services. I'm doing this for easy math. So 20, 20, 10, okay? You just save $50. That means you saved $600 so far this year to just by doing those three exercises. Okay? $600 in one year. And as time goes on and as we go through all this, if you save hundreds of dollars, that is a multimillion dollar decision that you are making just by cutting these back. If you look at the difference, if you invested those dollars instead, really powerful stuff that we're doing here, Even though it sounds like it's small things, we're actually doing all of it at once to make a big impact on our finances. When you just cut back one daily latte every single week, or you just cut back on going out to eat once a month, it's not going to Make a big difference. But when you do all of this at the same time with a proven system like we're talking about here, this is the system I go through once every single year. Then you'll be able to reduce the amount that you're spending. Okay, next we have streaming services are a big one. And cable, both those two things. So if you have YouTube TV like I do, for example, or if you have Sling tv, there's a bunch of them out there that are streaming services and cable. Go look at those. I've told this story a number of different times now, but about a couple of months ago, called up my cable company. They raised my rates to $240 per month. It was cable and Internet bundled together. I dropped it all the way down to $110per month just by calling them up and negotiating that. It's over $100 per month, over $1,200 per year just by having this call in this negotiation. So you can call them up and say, hey, I feel like I'm paying way too much. Do you have any deals going on? Same thing with the Internet provider. They're going to talk through some of those deals. They'll help you reduce your rate. And you say, that is not good enough. If you. If you can't help me, I am going to have to cancel this. And you continue to do that until they literally do not lower it anymore. This is not something where you're going to be happy, go lucky, and fun. You're going to be very respectful, very nice, but you have to continue to say that until they lower it all the way down to the number. I had to say it four times with my cable provider before they got it all the way down to as low as we possibly could get. And so that is something you definitely want to do. If you have a landline right now in 2025, do you need that landline? If not, go ahead and cancel it. Now. Sometimes you bundle your landline in and they say it saves you more money. I doubt it, but sometimes that is the case. And then cell phone plans. This is a big one for a lot of you out there. Go take a look at your cell phone plan, whether you're with T Mobile or Verizon or whoever else, and look at your cell phone plan and say to yourself, is this the best plan for me? Mint Mobile, for example, is a great option that is going to reduce the cost of your plan, especially if you own your phone already, if you're not making payments on your phone or whatever. Else if you own your phone outright, then being able to go to a service like Mint Mobile can be a fantastic option if you are trying to reduce the cost of your cell phone service. Most people out there can save 50 bucks a month just by changing cell phone services if they are paying too much. So this is something I think a lot of folks out there need to consider if they are overspending on their phone plan. So a couple of things that you can do here. Again, we're going to review all this, but you can run a speed test and are you paying for way more Internet than you need to use? Check who else offers service in your area. Ask for their pricing compared to what you are spending on all this stuff. Review streaming overlaps. So are you paying for YouTube TV and you have some sort of cable TV subscription as well? Well, that's going to be an overlap. You need to look into that. Here's a couple of extra things that you could do. One is see if you can bundle Internet and cable together. That may help you. You can also bundle Internet, cable and cell phone service sometimes and that may help reduce your cost. Drop any premium channels that you don't watch. If you're like me, the only cable I watch is sports. So the only thing that I will watch on TV is live sports. Specifically. I watch a lot of the NFL, a lot of the NBA, a lot of golf, a lot of those types of things. And when those sports are not in season, I literally don't watch cable hardly at all. Which is why I like streaming services like some of the ones that I currently utilize. YouTube, TV, those types of things. The reason why I do that is cause I can just not pay for them the months that I'm not using them. And so it saves you money just by turning it on and off when you need to. So if you have that flexibility, it is nice to have in a number of different areas. But stay polite, let them answer and ask for loyalty retention. Loyalty departments if you've been with some of these companies for a long time, but making sure you negotiate on all these different things is going to be really, really important. Now we are developing what is called Master Money Academy. In Master Money Academy, we're going to actually have lessons on exactly how to do this. And when we talk through that, it's going to be our community where we are going to teach you how to build wealth. In this community. It's going to be a bunch of people who want to be wealth builders or who are wealth builders who are going to be Building wealth together. And in this community, we're going to be talking through scripts and everything you need to be saying to each of these providers. Really excited about that. And it's going to be something that is going to be really, really cool. So if you want to sign up for the wait list for the Master Money Academy, by the way, we have that coming up here soon. We're going to have a page coming up for Master Money Academy. We will link that up down below. If you want to be on that wait list, we're going to actually test it out with a beta group. And so we're working through that now so that you guys can have that available coming up. So that is week two. It's Internet, cable, streaming phones. Those are the big ones that I want you to think through. And week two is going to be one where you're going to work through each and every single one of those so that you can actually get this done. Now let's go to week three. All right, so week three is going to be utilities and home services. So this list can get long depending on what you do. But there are going to be a number of different things that I want you to think through as you start to review some of these bills. Number one is electricity. Now electricity is one of those bills. There's not much you can do except for focusing on some efficiency things. And when it comes to some of that stuff, when it comes to electricity, I would think through getting an energy audit, meaning you can call up your specific company, they will come and do an energy audit and say, hey, this is the kind of stuff that's sucking out a ton of energy. Maybe it's your AC unit, maybe it is the types of light bulbs you have, if you have old light bulbs, or maybe it is, you know, some specific appliances that you have. You want to know kind of where the major usage is coming from. And any vampire devices is what a lot of them call that is thinking through that. You can also set up like making sure you have smart thermostats, setting up those thermostats in a way that becomes more efficient. I am the type of guy who likes to have their house freezing cold. I am always hot. I run really, really hot. And so my house is always freezing cold. I don't know about you. This may be hot or cold to you. I keep my house Normally like around 72 during the day, which is not freezing cold. But some people think it is. Like when my parents come to my house or my in laws come to my house. Anytime they come, they say my house is absolutely freezing. They're from the baby boomer generation, and so they always think our house is freezing. And then I sleep at night at 69, and that's how I keep my house. That is something that I truly, truly value. I'm not changing that. That is not something I'm ever going to change. And so that is one of those things where I'm not willing to change. Some of you may not be either, but if you are willing to be making some shifts there and they're making adjustments to thermostats, lighting, that type of stuff can help you looking into gas heating and oil. So I'm from Florida. I have not had a ton of experience with heating. We barely ever turn our heat on. But that could be another big thing. I do have gas at my house. We do have gas lines for our stove, things like. And my gas bill is so low that I don't think there's much else I can do on that. I think it's 30 bucks a month, something like that. Next is water and sewer. Water bills are one of those things that I feel like sometimes they just make up how much you used. But in all seriousness, water bills, there's not a ton you can do, but you can again request some sort of audit to figure out if you are spending too much on water. It should not be a crazy amount. So if you are spending too much on water, you need to look into that Trash collection. This is one that if you are not working with either a city company and or if you're not working with a specific municipality, then you can start to shop around for trash collection companies. So my first house that I bought was not within a city or county limits that had a trash company. So we had to use private companies. And when we did that, I would shop around the trash companies every single year to see if I could reduce that bill. And so usually I would save 20, $30 by shopping around the trash company because then after the first year, they always want to start to raise your rates. New trash companies come in and they want to acquire new customers at a lower rate. And so this is the game that I would play all the time. And this is just all going to add up as time goes on. If you do all of this at once, then you can add this up over time. Home security, if you have a home security system, you know, those can get really expensive. Those rates can raise up over time. Making sure you're shopping those is really, really important. We have a home security system that came with building our house. And they change those rates all the time. And I always have to call them up and try to make sure that they are not getting too high. Pest control is another big one. So if you have a pest control company that comes to your house and or they spray the lawn, whatever else, those companies also will raise your rates over time. So just making sure you're shopping around for companies that are good now, a lot of times, here's one big note I will make is when you're shopping around on some of these companies, specifically as we talk through some of these, you can switch companies and get a way worse product. So if you have a company that you are working with currently that is doing a fantastic job and you never have to worry about it, that is a great thing. Because the next one's lawn care. If you have a lawn care company out there that works through all of the, you know, that mows your lawn, that trims your hedges, whatever else, then you can shop those around too. But for example, my first lawn care company would miss spots all the time. They wouldn't show up certain weeks, all these different things would happen. My current lawn care company is cheaper now, and I have literally never had to call them up for anything. They literally just handle it every time. Everything's perfect whenever they handle their situation. And they are fantastic when it comes to price for the value provided. And so that is something to think through too. If you have a company who you really never have to worry about and they do an amazing job, sometimes it's not worth switching because of the stress or the amount of time that you have to spend managing that company. And so that is one that I would think through as you start to go through. So pest control, lawn care, and house cleaning, if you have house cleaners, just shopping that around is worth it too. You could save 50, 100, 150, 200 bucks. And really over time, that can really add up. But again, if you have really good house cleaners that you trust to be in your home, that is not something always to change. But just review the past 12 months on these Note 4 seasonal spikes or anything like that, and think through some of these big utility and home services bills, because all of those really, really will matter. So, so the ones that you can control again are trash collection, home security, pest control, lawn care, house cleaning, anything else that you have at your house, maybe any, you know, regular maintenance that comes to your house or whatever else. Those are big, big deals. Like, for example, our AC unit we run like I just told you 69 at night all the time. We run it really hard on our AC units. And so, you know, I get a service to come out every single year to make sure they do maintenance. It's actually every six months. So things like that, those are things that you definitely want to continue to note and review on some of those seasonal spikes. Even the companies, like if you have a water softener that deliver the salt for your water softener, if you do that or if you go out and buy it, you can kind of review those types of things as well. Anything you could think of, just review the past 12 months and make sure that you are making those adjustments. Also, some of these companies, if you switch to autopay, they will actually reduce your bill by five or ten bucks worth at least looking into. And so for most of them, you should be on autopay anyway if you're automating your finances. But if you're not, just look through all those and then again, keep asking for those energy audits every year. Many utility companies will offer it just so they can see what's going on. And you can call up some of these companies and say, hey, I want to review my plan. Are there any rate plans or efficiency programs that I'm missing out on? And sometimes they can help you lower your bill. So talk to them. You could talk through this with the power companies and the utility companies. They can help you try to become more efficient. And so a lot of them will offer that service. And it is something that I think is pretty useful at times. I've also done it at times and they didn't help me at all. So it just depends on where you are located and some of the stuff that goes on there. But again, let's think about this for a second. So we just went through the first three weeks. Let's just say, for example, that you saved yourself 100 or 200 bucks every single month. Now, let's just look at where that would land if you did that. Okay. If you started from zero and you saved an additional $200 per month over the course of 30 years, at the average S&P 500 rate, that is $412,568. If you invested those dollars instead that you saved over 30 years, let's look at it over 40 years, because it's going to be a lot bigger of a number. $1 million just in the first two weeks. If you saved $200 every single month, that is $1.1 million that you just saved. If you invested it instead. If you did the CIA method and you identified and you move that $200 somewhere else, that it means it's $40,000 per year and free cash flow that you would have that you could live on an additional $40,000. Because every $1 million invested, 4% drawdown means $40,000 that you can actually live on. It's actually a little more than that. 45. So this is something I think a lot of people need to really take seriously. Just, just those couple of steps are going to make a big, big difference. Now we're going to get into week four, which is where you can make huge leaps and bounds on insurances. All right? If you've ever looked at your bank account and thought, where did all my money go? I've been there. For me, it was random impulse purchases eating out way too often, engulfing more than my budget would like to admit. Monarch Money finally gave me a clear picture of it all. 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We want to look at homeowners and renters insurance. This is a spot that I think for a lot of people they can probably save a lot in shopping around. If you are someone who is like bundling together your Insurance with, let's say, for example, you're with State Farm. Okay, okay. And you have your homeowner's insurance there, you've got or your renter's insurance there, but you've also got it like packaged together with your auto insurance. And they're all just kind of thrown in. You just know the person, you've been with them forever and you never shopped it around. That is a mistake, my friends. You need to shop around your policies. So a couple of things that you need to do if you want to save money is I would find an insurance provider in your local area who can go to different companies. So for example, my specific insurance person, he is a longtime friend of mine, but he goes out and he can actually shop my policy to a bunch of different companies when it comes to homeowners, when it comes to auto insurance, all those different things. Whereas if you go to a specific agent somewhere like State Farm or Allstate, they got to utilize only the State Farm options that you have. But if you go to someone who can go to a bunch of different companies out there and making sure they're reputable companies, obviously, but they can shop your policy around. In fact, for example, my homeowner's policy is usually a different company every year because he's shopping it around to find the lowest rate for. For the maximum of what I actually need at my house. And so he does that all the time, every single year, and it switches every single year. I can't keep track half the time on who has my policy currently, but it is a great way to save money. Secondarily, auto insurance is the same thing, your auto policy. I want you to look at a couple of different things. First, making sure you're not overinsured on your auto policy. So you could do this in a number of different ways, but you could talk to your agent about your auto policy and what you're insured. You, you can double check by running your policy through something like ChatGPT and saying, hey, this is my income, this is my situation, this is my vehicle. And give it all the information it needs and it will spit back to you and let you know, hey, you're probably overinsured here or you might be underinsured. For a lot of folks out there, especially if you're building wealth or you have a lot of wealth, you could be underinsured on your auto policy. Cause if you get in an accident and they sue you, the last thing you want is to be under insured. And then you're Paying money out of pocket for any reason whatsoever because they figure out you have some wealth or you're building wealth, those types of things. So you could be under or overinsured. But just making sure you audit this once a year is worth the time and energy, health, dental and vision insurance. So for some of you out there, there's not a ton that you can do. If you are getting that stuff through your employer, it is what it is. But you can't audit this to see a Am I overpaying for my health insurance in terms of the policy that I chose? Should I go with a high deductible health plan and get an HSA paired with that? Should I instead change that up? I spent way too much on health care last year and maybe I should just get a standard health plan. Thinking through that kind of stuff is so somewhere you can save a lot. And then looking at your life insurance policy, if you're young and you bought a life insurance policy that you think you're spending way too much every single month on, let's say, for example, it's not a term policy because term insurance is the lowest you can get on life insurance. That's what we have here. My wife and I both have recently, we were just reviewing our insurance policies and we are going to increase our term policy actually. But if you're out there looking and you're like, I have a whole life or something else, go and review that. Because you may be spending way too much per month on any other life insurance policy that's out there. This is where you could save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars just by looking at your life insurance policies if they're outside of term policy. And this is going to be a spot I would highly encourage most of you to take a second look at and gather that info. Now, to audit this, you gather your policy info and you look at your renewal dates and then you compare online quotes. So you can even do this with a bunch of different places. Like our favorite place, for example, on your life insurance policy is obviously policygenius. They are fantastic. That's where I got my policy from. And they are really, really good. And then check on your coverage levels. You know too much. Is it redundant? Is there a ton of overlap here? Can you bundle these policies together if you like your provider and save some money there? That is another thing that you can do if you want to. Now, if you have a big emergency fund, you can raise your deductibles if you have a really large emergency savings and you are happy with that. And you can drop optional coverage that you don't need anymore if you do not want to have that coverage is another way to get kind of shop around on some of these policies. But aggressively shopping your insurance is something you really should do yearly. It saves you hundreds of dollars. And let's say for example, that you just saved another 200 bucks. Let's see where we are on that. If you saved another $200 on insurance, so you saved on the first couple of things, you saved 200 bucks a month. Now you're saving another 200 on insurance, you'd be at $2.2 million over the course of four years just by saving $400 so far with the first couple of steps that we took there. And so that is a big, big deal. Now we're going to get into week five, which is debt and loans. So if you are in debt, and this may not be everybody, but then you're going to utilize week five for your debt and loans. If you're not in debt, then you can move to week six, which is next, and move that up to week five. But if you're in debt, maybe you have credit card interest, maybe you have personal loans, maybe you have student loans, all these different things. We are going to do a big audit here. This is another place that you could save hundreds of dollars just by looking at some of this stuff and making sure that we make adjustments here. Let's look at credit card interest first. Now for those of you who are in credit card debt, and maybe you don't know this, but you should know this tough love here, but you should know this is that your interest rate on credit cards is really, really high. In fact, it is so high that it is detrimental to your ability to build wealth long term if you have a credit card debt. So this is a pants on fire emergency that you need to take care of you immediately. Now a couple of things that you can look at for credit card debt or if you have personal loans with interest, that's really high, or if you have student loans with interest, that is really high, all of these you can look at a couple of different things. One is you can call up your credit card company and you can say, I would like to request a lower interest rate. If they will not do that, then you move on to step two is you can consider a 0% balance transfer if you can pay it off in the promo period. How these work is let's say you have $10,000 worth of credit card debt, okay? And if you transfer it over to a 0% interest rate credit card, then you have 12 to 18 months, for example, to pay that $10,000 off. If you think you can pay off that $10,000 into 12 to 18 months, this is worth it to do it because you have to be disciplined enough to pay it off. But if you can move it over there, that is a great place to start. Okay. Same thing with personal loans. If you can refinance those personal loans at lower rates, you would definitely want to do that. A lot of folks out there are getting personal loans now for various different reasons. And if you get a personal loan, making sure you refi out of that current personal loan to a lower rate is really important. And then for student loans is to explore some income driven repayment and refinance options. If you are with a federal student loan and you want to refinance it, you just got to double check and think about that, because you will not be eligible for any income driven repayment plan stuff that comes up later on in the line. Um, so if you refinance to a private institution, then that could be something that does not make you eligible for certain things. You gotta be cautious with student loans on refinancing and understand what you're getting into. But they are definitely worth at least having conversations. Trying to get your interest rate lowered. These debt payments, getting your interest rate even lowered 1%, 2%, 3% is a big deal because it will save you a ton in interest over time. Now for negotiation, when you're calling up these companies saying, hey, I've been offered a lower APR elsewhere, can you lower my rate to keep my account open with you guys? I really don't want to have to go through the hassle of moving it over there. But if I can't get my rate lowered, I will. So can you guys just lower my rate for me and you just talk through that with them? That's kind of part of the negotiation script. If you have any other debt out there that you want to start to negotiate, then definitely go through and start negotiating these. All debt falls into these parameters. But trying to either refinance, negotiate the interest rate and or finding ways to just make your payments less painful is going to be the big thing there. That'll save you hundreds of dollars alone if you have that. All right, on week six, now we are on six weeks in. You got to stay disciplined, continue to follow through with this plan. We are going to go through the next big thing, which is transportation. So we already talked about car insurance in the insurance section. But we want to look at a couple of different things. We want to look at our car payment, we want to look at fuel, we want to look at, you know, any roadside assistance that you have, parking permits, tolls and vehicle maintenance. Okay? These are all the areas that we want to start to review. Your car payment is first. A lot of you listening right now are driving around in that beautiful brand new car or maybe that slightly used car that you purchased and you've got yourself a nice car note on that car. Nothing wrong with the car note, as long as it fits within the correct parameters that you can afford. Okay? And for most Americans out there, they're driving around in a car that they can't afford. If Your payment is 7, 8, $900 per month, $1,000 per month, $2,000 per month because you got two vehicles, then you're likely overpaying for your vehicle. Okay? You should not be spending more than 12% on all of these different things. When it comes to fuel, maintenance, your car payment, all that different stuff, it should not be above 12% is the max. I'm talking for payments and anything else associated with your car. Usually your payment should be 7% or less of your income and then the other 5% should go to gas and maintenance. That's what usually should happen. If you are above that, then you are most likely overspending on transportation and you need to take a second look at this. And so here's a couple of things that you could do. You know, we already talked about car insurance. That's a place that you can get multi car discounts. There's a lot of things you can do there. But secondarily look at your payment and say to yourself, what is my interest rate? If you signed up and have been paying a car payment at an 8, 9, 10% interest rate over the course of the last couple of years, because interest rates rose in 21 and 22 and 23, then it's time to look at those and try to refinance them. Now I have found that when you refinance auto loans, one of the best places to do this is credit unions. Your local credit union typically has some fantastic interest rates when it comes to auto loans. And so if you are in an area where you have a local credit union, go talk to them, see what the interest rate is. If you can lower your interest rate a couple percentage points worth it, the closing costs usually aren't that much. Sometimes they'll cover closing costs for you because those credit unions run promos Ask them to cover the closing costs for you, if they will, and then try to refinance into those credit unions to try to lower that interest rate. Okay, That's a big one for sure. Secondarily, though, is looking at your car payment and saying to yourself, I just bought this car. It's not underwater yet. Do I need this actual vehicle? Some of you who have way, way, way overspent, and it is causing you stress and anxiety, and you feel that pain in your chest. Your chest feels tight just thinking about your car payment every single month. You might be in a situation where we need to look at different options. There's nothing wrong with doing this. There is nothing wrong with downgrading your vehicle until you get to a point in time where then you can afford that beautiful vehicle once again. And so this is another thing just to think through. It's hard to do. I understand how hard this psychology is to even get this done. Most people will never do it. But are you most people, or are you going to be someone who is an outlier, who is going to build wealth? But making decisions like this when it gets hard is what separates true wealth voters from people who are just never gonna do it. People who are never gonna be able to build wealth are those who just continue on with their car payments for the next six years or whatever else you signed up for. And so this is a time where you could find the fork in the road and make a difference to your bottom line. But when you're shopping rates a, making sure you refi, making sure you look at insurance, making sure you find routes that are the best for you can be great. Now also, if you have a commute where you are going through toll roads, and let's say, for example, you're spending $100 a month on tolls, not uncommon for folks who have to go through toll roads. Are there other routes? Maybe it's five minutes longer, but are there other routes that you could take where you could save that 100 bucks? If it's five to 10 minutes, it might be worth it. If it's not five to 10 minutes, then it's probably not worth it. But you got to look at those and say, is there a route that you can save on saving money on tolls, those types of things? So that's just some ways to save on auto loans for gas. I mean, I'm not big on, like, trying to find the cheapest gas station in town. It doesn't save you enough money, in my opinion. $5 per fill is not just not worth it. But if you want to do that, you definitely can. You can use tools like Gas Buddy, for example, and you can find the cheapest gas that way. But I'm just not an optimizer for gas because I honestly don't even look at the price of gas. When I pull into a station, I just go. So for me that's not a huge deal. And then if you have roadside assistance, just shopping that around, if you have aaa, a lot of times your insurance actually provides roadside assistance. And, and so, you know, if you're with the big carriers, like a State Farm Allstate, those types, a lot of times they will offer you roadside assistance. So making sure that you look at that. If you're carrying AAA and your insurance also gives you roadside, you're double dipping there. You don't need both. So just take a look at that if you are doing that. All right, next we're going to look at housing, subscriptions and lifestyle. All right, so first we're going to look at subscriptions and lifestyle. And I'm also going to look at housing. If you rent, okay, because you can also negotiate your rent. And we have an entire episode on how to negotiate your rent. If you want to check that one out later on too. But I'll go through it some here. So first let's look at lifestyle stuff. So this is week seven that we are on. We're going to look at music streaming, we're going to look at books and audiobooks. We're going to look at hobby clubs. We're going to look at meal kits, grocery delivery, online courses, gaming, cloud storage, premium apps, and Uber eats. All right, so for all of these subscriptions, look through your lifestyle subscriptions and list all of the digital subscriptions that you have. I want you to list them all out, okay? Every single one. You have those bank statements audited, pull them out and cancel the ones that you don't use on a weekly basis. Okay? If you have a bunch of subscriptions, you're like, oh, well, sometimes I use that. If it's not on a weekly basis, you don't really use it. Okay, then check for duplicate services. Some people have. I've done this before. For example, when we first signed up for Disney because our firstborn was able to start watching Disney, that kind of thing. I think I signed up and my wife both signed up for separate accounts. We didn't even realize it. We both just signed up for it. And so we had duplicates for like two months. And then I realized it after I was Reviewing and auditing, and then ended up canceling it. But if you did something like that or you have duplicate subscriptions, a lot more people have duplicate subscriptions than they realize. Making sure you're canceling those is really important. But list them all out. Cancel anything you don't use every week and then go from there. Also, you can downgrade. You can switch to ad supported versions if you have every subscription out there. Let's say, for example, you have literally everything. You have HBO, you have Netflix, you have Amazon prime, you have Paramount. Plus you have Peacock, you have all of it, YouTube TV, YouTube TV Premium. Just go through it all and like, say, you know, if I downgrade it to the ad version, how much can I save? Maybe you could save 50 bucks a month. It depends on what you can actually save. It may be worth it. And. Or if there are memberships you don't use, maybe you have some of them open for specific shows, pause them when you're not using them. It's very easy. Also, a lot of these services, if you go to cancel them, they'll offer you a discount for a couple of months, which I know people who do this. They optimize and they try to, like, this is not worth my time half the time. But you can go in there and you can say to yourself, okay, I'm going to cancel Netflix, and Netflix will offer you two months free to keep going. That kind of stuff. There's stuff like that all the time that happens if you want to really hack the system. Secondarily, though, and this is the big one, is if you are someone who rents, you can negotiate your rent. And you want to do this like 60 to 90 days out before you actually have your lease come up. But I want you to keep this in the back of your head. And the reason why I'm sticking this into the same areas as the other one is not everybody rents. And secondarily, you need time for this to work out well. So check your end lease date and look for local listings to compare rent prices in your area. Okay, I have a whole episode deep diving into this, by the way. Research rental vacancy rates, and if there's higher vacancy rates, that means you have more negotiating power, Meaning that, let's say, for example, you're an apartment building, and if there's a bunch of vacancies in your apartment building, you have more negotiating power than you think, because they don't want to lose you because they're already struggling to get new tenants into their apartment building. And so making sure that you look at that is a big, big step. Then check for rent increases and look for local tenant laws. You need to really, if you really want to do well on this, because you could save yourself hundreds of dollars a month. If you really want to do well on this, just understand kind of some of your local tenant laws in your area and then start negotiating 60 to 90 days before your lease is up. Because this is going to be where you can really have time to work through this with your landlord and point out your reliability so you can point out your on time payments. No issues, good tenant, you're not calling them all day and night. Then you can ask for a discount if you prepay for a couple months and you can offer to sign a longer lease in exchange for a lower rate. Sometimes landlords will do this. Now hard thing with negotiating your rent is if you are talking to someone who is just a manager and they don't have any power on the cost or what they are going to charge for your specific unit, then you need to make sure that you try to negotiate with a person going up to bat. If you're negotiating with an individual landlord who actually owns the property. And sometimes landlords will say they are the manager even though they're actually the owner. A little trick for you there, but sometimes they will say they are the manager. But you can start to negotiate with the right person and making sure you're talking to the right person. And then ask if you can downgrade units in the same building. Also, if your building has a bunch of different types of unit, maybe you are at the top floor and those are more premium than ones that are lower down in the building. Maybe you can negotiate that way too and save yourselves a couple hundred bucks. And when we talk about that in an episode on how to negotiate your rent, I have a bunch of scripts and stuff that we go through as well. Also, if they won't lower your rent, you can ask for extra stuff. Maybe it's free parking, maybe it's free storage, maybe it's a reduced pet fee, maybe it's utilities included. But try to throw in extra things because there's always extra things they can throw in to see if you can at least save money on that area. Utilities included is a big one because you can at least reduce that cost specifically and you're not spending so much on utilities. So all of these are things that you can do when it comes to rent and your housing. And then again your mortgage is one where you can refi. So looking at your mortgage rate, if you're paying 8, 9% right now. It's probably in your best interest to look at refinancing rates. I'm assuming in the next couple of months are going to drop. But the Fed is still waiting on what's going to happen with a lot of economic things currently. So we will continue to wait for that. But again, you can refinance your mortgage if it makes sense. You just got to weigh out the closing costs and if those make sense for how much you'd be saving. All right, the last one is week eight where we're going to look at family, kids, rare bills and a final sweep. All right, so for week eight, we're going to be looking at child care, we're going to look at school fees, we're going to look at tutoring, extracurriculars, storage units, pet insurance, and a bunch of miscellaneous other things as well. So first you need to review all your after school activities. This could be basketball leagues, this could be. I'll just name off some stuff my kids are in. Ninja jiu jitsu, basketball leagues, soccer leagues, baseball, T ball. The list just literally never ends. And when you're looking at all these extracurriculars, make sure you actually know what you're spending on this stuff. I added it up one time and I wanted to faint because if you look at how much the extracurriculars for your kids cost, it can get really, really expensive. And over time, if you add that up over, you know, a specific month, it is something that can be a big, big deal. I've talked to parents, for example, that I know who spend six to $7,000 per year just on their kids extracurriculars. And as they get older, it gets more expensive. So if you are someone, for example, when I was a kid, I played AAU basketball from age 12 all the way up to my senior year and finishing high school, that was really expensive. I remember like every single weekend we'd be gone or traveling across the country, we would be, you know, going to different tournaments, we would be staying in hotels. That's a really expensive thing. And now it's getting even more expensive. Nowadays if you play travel, baseball or cheerleading or gymnastics or basketball or whatever you are currently doing, that can get really, really expensive. So add up these numbers guys, if your kids aren't going pro. Because if your kids aren't going to get a scholarship or going to pro, you got to really make sure and take a second look at this. Now obviously this is hard to downgrade sometimes, but just looking at some of These extracurricular activities can be really important. Secondarily is childcare. Childcare is one. We did an entire episode on this. But child care is one to also look at in school. Fees are another one. Childcare for most folks out there who have kids, I know this is a burden for you. I know childcare is tough. It is expensive. It is thousands of dollars per month possible for some of you to have one to two to three kids in childcare because they aren't of age to go to elementary school yet. And it is really weighing, I think, on the average American, specifically millennials, where they have this student loan debt, they have housing at all time highs, they have childcare they have to pay for. And it just keeps on mounting more and more and more. It is a tough thing to have to deal with, but it is one of those things that we can look at and maybe find a way to save a little bit on. Now if your kids are at a place that you love and they're at a place where you know they are safe and you can rest, relax, there is no amount of money in the world that is worth saving to move them, in my opinion. But if they are somewhere where you're not really happy with in the first place, if you can find somewhere else that may be able to be better for them, then it's worth the spend and. Or it's worth cost cutting. If it is expensive. Where you currently are just thinking through that tutoring is another big one for people. Look at your tutoring costs and say to yourself, are they really progressing here if they're not thinking about that, any other extra stuff. So let's look at like storage units. If you have a storage unit, you have a bunch of junk in there and you don't ever open that storage unit and it's just been sitting here for three years, then it might be time to get rid of the stuff and get rid of the storage unit. That could save you hundreds of dollars per month sometimes. I cannot believe how expensive storage units are now. They're like the same price as what rent used to be when you used to rent an apartment. Pet insurance is another one. Are you using pet insurance? Look at some of that extra stuff and then miscellaneous annual passes. Maybe you have theme parks or zoos or all that different stuff that you're paying for. Look into those annual passes and review all those activities. Then lastly is do a final sweep and check for bills or auto renewal traps, making sure you know, okay, what is actually renewing every year? Some of these are on yearly things because sometimes you could save money. For example, maybe you have Walmart plus or Amazon prime or any of that kind of stuff and you can save a lot more if you do this yearly. And so if you have a bunch of those kind of subscriptions or if you have anything where you have to pay a lot more on a yearly basis, just do one final sweep through your bills and then you've completed the eight week 60 day program. And listen, I hope you got a ton of value out of this episode if you did. Thank you so much for being here. I truly appreciate each and every single one of you. Our goal is to bring you as much value as we possibly can and so we truly appreciate you investing in yourself by listening to this podcast. That's exactly what you're doing when you listen to this show. Listen, thanks again for being here. I hope you share it with a family member, co worker or friend and we will see you on the next episode.