Where did our journey begin? I'm going to go back and kind of talk through what my wife and I have done over the last four years or so, and that was changes in spending habits. And that's where the small changes part of this comes in. Small changes to our spending made a big impact over the course of a couple of years. So I just want to go through our experiences. If there's something that looks like it might apply to you, great. If not, that's okay too. But as always, we just share what we've done and what we've learned, and if there's a grain of truth in anything, great. So we're going to start off with how we started, small specifics of what we did, and it'll cover real numbers, our timeline, actual dollar results, and savings from some of these different areas of spending that we decided to make a change in. Then we'll look at being practical. You know, how do you do that and not impact a lot? So we'll talk about that, go through some steps on how you can start if this is something that looks like it would be good for you or your family, and then we're going to take a look at the expense tracker that we've used for over six years. I put it together maybe seven years ago, and my wife and I both use it, and it's very helpful to track your spending. It's not a budget tracker. I don't, I've never budgeted. It just basically tracks your income, your expenses, and then shows you what you have left over and account balances. So I want to give you a quick peek at that, and then we'll talk through some of my final thoughts and comments.

            All right, so starting small. What we figured out several years ago was that there were some little things we could tweak in our spending habits. And they were very small. They weren't thousands of dollars. They were $20, $50, $100, and $200 changes each month that would add up over time. So what we did was we just started slow. We made a list of all the expenses that we have. And I'm not talking like your electric bill or your water bill or your mortgage payment. I'm basically talking about subscriptions and, you know, $9 coffees at Starbucks, and just a lot of the little spending that adds up over time. We just sat down and looked at that and it was like, "Do we really want that or need that?" So I'm just going to go through a few of the things that we actually did change over the last few years. One of those is going out for expensive coffee. It doesn't have to be Starbucks, but we just figured by the time you spend $12 to $15 for two cups of coffee, we just didn't get that. Not like we never, you know, completely stopped, but we just cut way, way back. And we figured what we were doing before that probably saved us a couple of hundred bucks a month, you know, $150 to $200 a month just on coffee. And then cell phones was something else. We looked at our kids who have, you know, the newest iPhones. And, of course, by "kids," I mean they're in their mid-30s, but they buy the newest phone. And we just decided we're not going to do that, you know, it's a choice. So we get phones that I think the last new phones we bought a year ago were maybe $100 to $125 for each phone. They've got all the features that we need. And so we just were like, "No, we don't need to spend that much money on a cell phone." Subscription services can be sneaky. You sign up for something and then you think you canceled it, or you got a trial, but you actually got a full membership. So, you know, six months later, you look at your checking account bill, and there's, you know, $19 for something you thought was a trial subscription. You've been paying for it every month. So we just sat down and went through and looked at different things. It's like, "Why do we have that? Why are we paying for this? We don't use that anymore." So we went through and just did a quick scrub, and we canceled almost everything because we just didn't use it. We got it set up and forgot about it. So that ended up being at least $150 a month, might have been a little bit more.

            Next, we have car insurance. I had been with a big company for a lot of years, probably 15 to 20 years, and I thought I was getting the best deal. So I don't know, maybe three years ago, I just got a quote from another company, and it was ridiculously cheaper for better coverage. My deductible went down, and we just got a better rate. I think we saved like $150 to $175 a month just by shopping around for car insurance. So that was something that kind of surprised me. I thought we had the best deal, and we didn't. So it was another thing I'm glad we looked at. And again, every one of these we have done, and I'm showing you the savings a month that we got out of these different small ideas. For cable TV and Internet, we just found out, figured out we're watching less and less TV, if any at all, and most of it is, you know, we're on a laptop, or we're casting to the TV and watching something off the laptop, and it wasn't any kind of cable TV. And so the price on that's been going up for the last two or three years. And so we decided we don't need TV service. We don't need cable TV. We have internet provided by another service. But we got rid of the TV and the DVR and the recorder and the controller, and all of it gone. That was $200 a month, and that was probably eight months ago or more. Don't miss it at all. Don't miss it; anything we want to watch is usually on the laptop. Groceries are another area that we looked at as well. We have a big chain of supermarkets where we live, and they're everywhere. You know, every other corner has one, and that's where we had always gone. And for some reason, we decided to shop at a different national chain. You know, same thing; they're everywhere. But it kind of, I guess, we got in the habit of just going to the same place, and we did a sample shopping at another grocery store, and we were getting the same exact item, same brand, same size, same everything. By the time we got done, we'd saved on one trip probably $30 to $40 for one week for the same things. We couldn't believe the price difference. So, you know, over the course of a month, that ended up being $175 plus a month on groceries that we were buying. The same things as before; we just shopped around and got it that much cheaper. So you're kind of seeing a trend here. You know, $150 to $200 a month for each of these things, and it adds up. It added up for us very significantly. Homeowners or renters insurance, again, we just shopped around a couple of years ago, and we got much better coverage, like replacement cost for our house and better coverage for the materials in the house. And it was $110 a month cheaper. So it's better coverage, more coverage, and the price is less. So I don't know how you, you know, beat that. Banks and brokerages, as everybody knows, you can go to any bank, any brokerage; they're going to offer you free checking or cheap checking, or this brokerage will offer you this service or a cheaper margin rate or whatever. But it's still good just to look around and shop, and I can't give any definitive number on how much we saved, but you're getting lower fees and more services depending on where you go. So, to me, it's worth looking around to shop for those. And then cell phones, not just the cell phones, but the plans. We had been with a national carrier for, I think, like 22 years, and I was happy with the service, but the prices kept kind of going up, and they started charging little extras and add-ons. So we just went to another carrier and said, "What can you do?" And, you know, in half an hour, we were out the door with a plan that saved us $75 a month, and we had unlimited everything. The old service went up to a certain point, and then they'd slow down your transfer rate or your internet speed on your phone. And this company didn't; it was full speed the whole time, and $75 a month less. So again, just a quick check, and there you go. So, as I said earlier, these are actual changes that we've made over the past three to four years, with the approximate savings per month that we realized from those changes. Again, just sharing what we did. Maybe some of these can work for you. Maybe you've already done some of these things. Maybe you've looked at it and it's not for you, but I'm just here to stimulate thought. Think about, maybe there's something I haven't thought about—that's the whole idea behind the channel is just sharing different ideas.

            Moving on to our actual numbers and our timeline. I saw a quote someplace that said you need to try to dodge the Keeping Up with the Joneses trap. And I know I, in particular, fell into this where you're buying a new car. It's not for you; it's to impress your neighbors or family or friends. You're going out to eat at the fancy restaurants and picking up the check here and there, and, you know, to me, it's just part of appearances and trying to make people think you're just, you know, rich, which I was not. So that's kind of where we're going with this: just staying out of the Keeping Up with the Joneses trap, doing your own thing, and being happy, not trying to impress anybody else. So starting off, we call them the easy smalls, and that's the two lists we just went through. Phones, insurance, you know, expensive coffee, subscriptions, cell phone service plans, groceries—all that falls into the first category down there at the bottom of the reverse stair step. As I was putting this together, I thought, you know, with investing—and this channel is a lot about investing and different types and doing tests—it's like we always talk about the snowball effect. You know, you get started, and you start investing small, a little bit, and it grows and grows and grows. And I was thinking, as I was looking at this, this is like the opposite. It's a snowball uphill because you're paying off debt or you're getting rid of expenses. So it's almost like the opposite of investing, where you know, things are growing; you're paying off debt, so you actually are improving your financial situation. But it's, you know, the snowball rolls downhill with investment. And if you're trying to cut expenses and reduce debt, it's kind of pushing the snowball uphill. I just thought that was kind of interesting. So anyway, we started with the easy smalls, and everything that I showed you on the first two groups we did; it was more than four things. I think it ended up being 12 or 13 different items that we either cut back, got a cheaper price, or stopped doing. So when those are all knocked out, you got money because you're not spending it on all these other things. We took that extra every month and dumped it on a credit card. Once that credit card, or cards—there were two—once those were paid off, then what do you have left? Well, car payments. All right, so we took the money and, you know, credit cards are paid off. Now we're paying off the cars. The cars get paid off. See, once you've got all these small, you know, insurance, subscriptions, phones, coffee, groceries, you cut back and you're saving money or eliminating expenses, and you've paid off your credit cards and you've paid off your cars, well, then what? Well, now you're starting to get a pile of money every month into the month; you might have a lot more money in your checking or savings than you used to have, and over a month or two, if you're into investing, that's just more money you can put away for the future and invest it however you choose. So again, it's kind of pushing the snowball uphill versus investing, where the snowball hopefully is rolling downhill and getting bigger. But, you know, in this case, our debt was dramatically reduced. What we spent money on for stuff that was really a lot of it was silly or we were paying too much, but it ended up for us where we've got, you know, an abundant amount of money every month for additional investments, if that's what we want to do. Adding all the numbers up, it ended up being about $2,200 a month extra. After all, this was done with all the credit cards and car payments and extra things—the little things we spent money on—$2,200 plus a month. And that's pretty substantial. I mean, it's a lot of money. And, you know, having hundreds of dollars a month that we spent on the little things, you know, the easy smalls that I've mentioned, just kind of blows your mind. Blew my mind completely.

            All right, so moving on to being practical. Our goal isn't to live like hermits. We could never go out to eat, and we can't do anything, and we have to stay here and we can't do vacations. And it was not like that. And it is not like that at all. The goal was just to decide, you know, where's our money going every month, and is that really what we want to spend our money on? You know, is that subscription that we haven't looked at or used for three years and we paid $19 a month every month that we haven't even used? Why are we doing that? So it's just stuff like that, kind of common sense, just taking a look at where you spend your money. And it wasn't to just be super frugal and not do anything and not take vacations and not go out to dinners; that wasn't the point. And we don't do that. So just to reiterate that there's nothing that we either lowered what we spent or got rid of completely that impacted us at all as far as what we do on a day-to-day basis; nothing changed. We actually felt better because if we wanted to go out to dinner more, well, it wasn't too bad because we just cut out $600 of spending on stuff we hadn't used or touched, or we lowered an insurance bill, or we lowered our cable TV bill, or got rid of the cable TV, and so it kind of it's liberating when you've got that extra money that you're not blowing on stuff that for us, it was blowing it on stuff we didn't use or didn't need, or we were overpaying. So that's kind of the approach and attitude we used with this whole process.

And if we wanted to spend $1,500 each on the newest iPhone right now, we can absolutely do it. You know, it's not like that. We could go out to eat eight days a week if we wanted to. So it doesn't limit us. It really just expanded the possibilities of stuff that we could do, or we didn't even think we could do, because we thought that money wasn't there, and now it is. So it's, I guess the biggest word I'd use is liberating for that.

And our true experiences after we made these changes to our spending habits were just basically less debt, which always feels better, getting rid of all your credit cards, getting rid of all your car payments, and then, you know, having a cash flow that's just over the top every month, and we still do exactly what we want, what's most important to us. And that's different for everybody. Everybody's got their own priorities, but for us, we got rid of the stuff we didn't want to spend money on, and that gives us money that we can either invest or go out to eat more, or take an extra vacation a year, whatever we choose to do, whatever you choose to do.

You know that's the most important thing. So I just want to take a minute and go through what we did and the process, and if it works for you, or if it's something you're interested in doing. I'm just sharing how we did this. So we just sat down and made a list of a bunch of the stuff I just went through earlier. You know, what do we spend on car insurance? What are we spending on homeowners insurance? How much is our HOA bill?

Subscriptions, phones, phone plans, internet, TV, cable, groceries; we sat down and made a list of all the stuff that is really discretionary spending. We can choose how much we want to spend on that; it's not your electric bill or your mortgage or your rent; it's spending that you have a choice on whether you want to make or not every month. So we made that list out, and it was probably 15 to 18 items, you know, clothing, just everything you spend money on on a regular basis. And then we totaled up what those were in a given month. So, on average, for a month, what will we spend on X, Y, and Z? And then we looked at the total cost of what was on that page. And it was like, you know, is that worth that much money for this item and for that item, for doing this? And the majority of the time it was no; it was usually a surprise. I didn't know we were spending $200 a month on subscriptions, you know, magazines, or, you know, online magazines, or financial journals, or, you know, a movie channel that we forgot about; we just didn't even realize that that was coming out every month. And then, if you really do, you know, you make your list and you look at it and review it. And if it's stuff that's important to you, well, then, of course, you know that's what you choose to spend your money on; at least now you know how much is going to that particular item or those items, how much and why you're doing it. And that's your priorities. And that's the most important thing. The purpose of this episode is not to tell people not to do things. You know, I don't tell anybody. I don't tell you what to buy, what to sell, any of that stuff. That's not why I'm here; I just share experiences that we've had over the years. So you look at that list, and if you want to keep everything on that list, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it, but my suggestion is just to make a list and think about it if you haven't done that before, and maybe you can save some money every month and do something else with your money. And so if you come down to where there's a significant amount of savings on things that you think you really don't need to do, or you don't want to, you know, I'm going to cut this bill in half. I'm not going to spend $200; I'm going to spend $100 or nothing, whatever you come up with out of your list. We set up a separate checking account, and so what we do is deposit. We knew how much we were saving. I mean, it was pretty exact because we cut subscriptions, we lowered our internet bill, TV bill, our homeowner's insurance, groceries, so we knew how much we were saving a month by the things we had eliminated or reduced. And I think it was around $500 to $600 a month when we first started. And so we just deposited $500 into a separate account and forgot about it. Just left it. And then after a few months, there was $1,000 to $2,000, and then you're like, Okay, did we miss any of the stuff that we cut out? It's like, No, I wasn't watching that channel; I wasn't using that service; I didn't have that gym membership; whatever it was, you don't miss it because you never used it or used it once, and you're still paying for it. So once that money starts piling up in another account, maybe go back and reevaluate your list and say, you know, I really think we should get this service back. I really miss it; I use it. The whole point is not to be over the top, restricted on your life and what you do. It's just to make common sense choices on what you do with your money. And again, if you have things you want to cut out, you put it in a separate account, and it's growing. And you do a reevaluation in a month or two, and it's like, everything's good. Well, now you've got a bunch of money that you can either pay off debt or you can, you know, if you want to invest more, whatever you choose to do, it's pretty liberating to have an extra whatever the amount. If it's $100 a month you save, that's $100. If it's $1,000, it's like, fantastic. So that's just kind of the process we went through. We went through these exact steps over the course of two or three years. And so I'm just sharing it worked for us. It made a huge difference in our cash flow over, you know, the time, over four years. And so it really is just, if you want to, you just start it. It's sitting down and making a list and going down, you know, these six steps, and, you know, it might make a difference.

So I wasn't going to put this slide in, but back, I don't know, three weeks ago, when I first started the channel, four weeks ago, I was using this performance tracker up in the upper right corner. And I was just using it to track, you know, how I was doing in my investments each week. And that was part of the episodes once a week. And I started getting immediate questions in the comments from viewers. It's like, Well, where is that? How can we get that? I want that, and I didn't have any way, technology-wise, to distribute it, get it out there, or do whatever. So it took me a while to get it, but it's, you know, I put it out about two weeks ago, and it's pretty crazy. I think there are over 200 viewers that have their own performance tracker now, and they're doing their own tracking and simulations. And so I thought, well, I've got this Expense Tracker that I've been using. And so I decided I'll put that out there as well. And if it's something people can use, great. If not, that's fine. So starting at the top, just a quick overview. You've got income sources. You can go in and change those to any, you know, whatever your job is, or your income sources, you can type in; you can customize that to whatever you want. I just put in sample bills that you could have every month. You can change all of those out to anything you want, and then account balances: checking, savings, other accounts, investment accounts; you can type whatever you want in there. And then at the top, the green and red rows do all the totaling for you. So the white rows, or the white columns, like say, for September, you put in that check $4,500 and another source of income, $2,800; it totals up that income for you all the way across. And we use this a lot for forecasting expenses that are not every month. There are some stuff that comes due every three months or every six months, or once a year. And so we forecast out as far as we can so we don't get surprised with a $200 HOA bill or a doctor's visit that we know is going to be a couple hundred bucks and it's in three months. So we just kind of use it to forecast a little bit so we don't get surprised, you know, down the road. So again, all the totals are made for you. You just enter the amounts in the white columns, and everything's there. We use it. I'm in here probably at least a couple of times a day. My wife is in here. She'll go in and update or change different expenses. And it's not like it's a big chore. It just helps us kind of keep an eye on where our money's at, how much is coming in, and how much is going out. Do we have enough allocated for different expenses coming up in a month or two? So it's just, it's very useful for us. So I just wanted to share that, and it's out there; there's a link in my description for this video, and then on my channel homepage is also a link to this Income and Expense Tracker. If you want it, great. If not, that's okay too.

All right, so final thoughts, and I really like this quote: It's not how much you earn; it's how much you spend. And if you think about that for a minute, I think a lot of times—I know I did—you've got car payments and credit card bills and rent and a home, you know, a mortgage and all this stuff. It's like, well, I got to get more money; I got to earn more money. And if you go through and look at your list that we talked about and the list that we made, it's like, well, maybe I don't have to earn more; I just need to spend less. So it's just a different perspective that I really like and that we really appreciate. It's not how much you earn; it's how much you spend. And another big kind of eye-opening thing is all the stuff that I've talked about the last little bit applies to any age group and any income bracket. So it doesn't matter if you're in your 30s or in your 70s; there are things that you could, if you wanted to, cut back a little bit here on this expense, a little bit here; at least take a look at insurance or your phone bill, groceries, just little things. It's not tied to being young or being old or in between. So it's really age doesn't matter, and income doesn't matter. You make $30,000 a year; you still would like to save some money someplace. You're a millionaire; there still might be some areas that you could save a little bit of money. So that's the point of kind of what I'm trying to say here: small changes can make a big impact, no matter what your age and no matter what your income is. And then we implemented changes over time. We didn't do all this in like a week or two weeks. It was a period of probably a year or two; we'd knock out one thing, then we get, you know, live for a while, and then we look at something else and say, Hey, have we looked at this? And so it was this kind of a process over time. It wasn't, you know, we had to sit down and knock out 18 things. We’ve got to do something with this. It wasn't like that. It was just gradual over time, and we just used, you know, basically, common financial sense that worked for us. If we really used it and wanted it, you know, it wasn't an issue. We kept it. If it was something that didn't make sense, we got rid of it or got a better price on it. And bottom line, everyone has their own priorities, their own goals, what they want to do. And nobody knows what your goals are. Nobody knows what your priorities are. You do. And so what I'm doing, and what we're doing, is sharing what we've learned, what we implemented, because I've gone through everything, and everything on this, the lists that I've shown earlier, we did; we went through, we did the research, we got quotes, we made phone calls, we got on the internet, and we did all of those things that were listed, and the results that we got are there. So this is a real world. We saved money every month, and it was very significant, and that really is the goal of this channel: just to provide information or experiences or lessons learned, and if it helps somebody, that's fantastic. If you already knew that, well, maybe it reinforces something. So that's it for today. Again, I want to thank everybody for watching; just some fantastic comments. I think everybody's trying to make me cry sometimes with some of these comments, but I really appreciate it. I learned a lot from almost every single person commenting. And again, if you can hit our polls that are on the channel, it helps me get a better understanding of where you're standing on or understanding of financial products and investments and knowledge, and it helps me tailor these episodes to the majority of the group as best I can.