15 Ways to Hack Your Brain to Save More Money

Transcript:

On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we're gonna talk about 15 ways you can hack your brain to save more money.

What's up everybody, and welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host Andrew, founder of Master money.co. And today on the Personal Finance Podcast, we are gonna be talking about how to hack your brain to. Save more money. If you guys have any questions, make sure to hit us up on Instagram, TikTok at Master Money Co.

And follow us on Spotify, apple Podcast or whatever podcast player you love to listen to this podcast on it. If you want to help out this show, leave a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And today we are gonna be talking about how to hack your brain to save more money. Really excited about this episode.

I think there is a bunch of action packed items that you can use in order to save more money and be able to invest more of your dollars as well. And as we all know, as wealth builders, we want to make sure that we are investing as much money as possible so that we can have the. Ultimate goal, which is freedom with our time.

Freedom with our energy, and the freedom to spend more time with the people that we want to spend time with. So today I'm gonna be diving into these 15 ways to hack your brain, and there's a lot of psychology behind a lot of these. And on a future episode, we are gonna be doing some episodes on psychology and money and investing in all those different things.

'cause I think it's really, really important for you to understand this stuff as you go through your finance journey. So, Without further ado, we are gonna dive right into it. So let's get into the 15 ways to hack your brain to save more money. Number one is I want you to think about every single purchase that you are going to go out and purchase.

And I want you to think about that purchase in hours worked instead of how much it costs. So early on when I was on my personal finance journey, I did exactly this where I actually went out and I calculated my. Salary, which was $30,000 a year. When I first graduated college, and this was not that long ago, I think it was like 10 or 12 years ago, I had a salary of $30,000 per year.

And when I had this salary, I realized I need to calculate my hourly rate so that when I make purchasing decisions, I can figure out if this is a purchase that actually brings me value, or is this a purchase that does not bring me value whatsoever. So here is what I did. I did. My calculation and I figured, you know, the amount of hours that I was actually in the office, it came out to something like $14 per hour is what I was making very early on in my corporate career.

And so at this entry level job, I was making that $14 an hour. I did not like what I was doing very much, so I did not wanna waste. Any of that money. And at first when I first graduated college, I was wasting money. So this is when I tried to get my money together, try to figure out my financial situation.

I started doing this and the way that you can do this is you can look at every purchase and say my original example, if I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna spend 60 bucks to go out to dinner with friends, for example, is that worth. Four hours of working time at my day job in order to do that. Or maybe it's something really, really simple.

Like you just go to the store and maybe you want to grab some extra groceries, you wanna grab some of those Coke Zeros or something else along those lines. Is that worth an hour or two of your time in order to add those extra things into your life? This is a really cool way to hack your brain to actually think through all of your spending decisions, because this is really, really important once it gets to larger spending decisions, because there can be some big decisions that you're making.

Maybe it's a big home remodel. For example, how many hours of your life is that home remodel going to take from you? In order for you to be able to do that, and or you could think of some other big decisions. Maybe it's a boat or a car, or a golf cart, or some other discretionary spending of things that you want.

How many hours of your life is it going to take away from you in order for you to. Earn that money back. This is really important to understand. You need to know your hourly rate. Even if you are on salary, you need to know your hourly rate so that you can have this in the back of your head when you make purchasing decisions.

It's a great hack for most people to spend less money on stupid things that they don't value. This really is the core principle that allows you to spend your money on things that you value. 'cause that is what money is there to do. You're there to spend money on your values and cut out everything else that does not bring you value.

That is the most powerful thing that you can do with your money and why we talk about it so much. Number two is to wait before you make any big purchase whatsoever. So this is one of my favorite things that I love to do, and anytime I don't do this, I can sometimes look back and say, Hey, I kind of regret spending money on this thing because I just bought it in the spur of the moment.

So this is a framework that I started to build out, and I call it weight to value. And what that means is that before you make a purchase, see if it actually brings you value. So waiting is going to allow you to say, Hey, is this thing actually something that I want? Or did the cooling off period make me think, eh, I really don't want this thing, I just want it in the moment.

It was marketed really well towards me, and that's why I was almost going to buy this thing. So, Here's what you do. If the item is under a hundred dollars, wait at least 24 hours before you purchase it. And this is really good for online shopping specifically. It's not as good for under a hundred dollars purchases for things if you're in the store, for example.

'cause then you gotta leave, get in your car, go back home, and then go back to the store the next day if you want to go buy it. But this is really good for online services. And then for the bigger items, it's good for everything. So 24 hours. If it's under a hundred dollars. So say for example, you want to go out and you want to get a new speaker for your backyard for some of the summer grill outs or whatever else you're doing, then you're gonna think through this process and say, Hey, this speaker is $79.

Let me wait 24 hours, see if I actually need it. I still got that old speaker at home. Maybe that thing will do just fine. And then, If you wait 24 hours and if you still want that thing, then fine get more power to you. If it brings you value, then you can go and grab that speaker. Now, that's just for under a hundred dollars.

If it's a hundred dollars to $200, I like to wait 48 hours for that because it allows for an additional cooling off period and anything above $200, I like to wait seven days. Why seven days? Because what I've noticed over time is if there's something I really want and if it's a higher priced. Item. A lot of times that cooling off period does not happen for a longer period of time.

So sometimes I'm still in the honeymoon phase of wanting that item for the first 48 hours and then 72 hours come across and I still want that item 'cause I'm thinking about it, I'm researching it, I'm looking at all these different things, but let it cool off a little bit and make sure that you actually want it.

If you still want it after seven days and it still fits your budget, then that's something that you can definitely go for and add to your budget. Number three is to create a once list. And if you've never heard of a once list, it is something that I talk about all the time on this podcast, and it is a list that you create literally of items that you want.

I'm gonna give you a step-by-step on exactly how to do this here. So this came about because I got a confession to make. Ya Boy was a big impulse purchase guy, which is why I created these two things, the Wait to value system and why I created a once list because your boy was on Amazon all the time and the buy now button was calling.

His name. So what I did was I created these two systems to allow that cooling off period. Really think through the process that's wait to value. And then I created a once list. And the way that a once list works is that you are going to put together a list of things that you want. So here's what you do.

Take out your phone and use your favorite notes app. I have my entire ecosystem in Google Docs and Google Sheets, all that different kind of stuff. If you use Notion, for example, you can use Notion, if you just wanna use the Notes app in your phone, you can do that. Or if you like exclusively shop at one store, maybe Amazon and they have wishlists, things like that, that you can use as well.

And then you take out your notes app and you have it available to you there. And then you create the list of items that you actually want to purchase before you purchase them. You put them on this list, and what I want you to do is when you put them on this list, then you're gonna do that. Wait. Seven day system.

Now, the way I want you to structure this list is in order of what you want most, two, what you want least, and what you're gonna find out here is, is, and it's very interesting how this happens, once you start to list out the items that you want, a lot of times, all of a sudden you put it at the top of the list when you're first thinking about it.

That this is the thing I want the most. Seven days later, when you actually have that waiting period, it's gonna fall down the list, a couple of spots, unless it's something that you truly, truly want. You're gonna see how your values actually line up by having this once list. Then when the time comes, if you have room in your budget in order to go out there and actually buy that item, more power to you.

Money is there to bring you value. You should be making it rain on things that you value. But if you don't have room in that budget line item, just keep it on the list and then save up for that specific thing and or send it over to your spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever you got, and say, Hey, Christmas is coming up in four months.

Why don't you just snag me Some of this stuff I. So that's another great use for this thing is when people want to need to buy you gifts for something, either your birthday, Christmas or whatever other holidays you celebrate, then you already have a list available for them and you can just say, Hey, here's the order of importance.

Here you go. It's like a baby registry, but for you, what better way to treat yourself than have a baby registry for yourself? But then keeping a list prioritized in order of importance is really, really important. Alright, number four is to invest the same amount as you spend. So this hack came from Nick Majuli and if you've ever read the book, just keep buying.

Uh, he talks about this in that book, and he talked about on this podcast as well when he came on this podcast, but this is a really cool way for you to reduce the amount of things that you just blow money on. And I love this system that Nick created. So when he buys a big ticket item, he actually invests the same amount of money.

As when he bought that big ticket item. So say for example, you wanna buy $500 concert tickets, for example. So this system would mean you buy the $500 concert tickets, no guilt whatsoever, but you also go out and you invest $500. So you match it, it's like a 4 0 1 K match, but it's for yourself. And so you match it and throw it into your investment account and put those dollars towards your future value.

And this is something that's going to allow you to train your brain to actually spend money on things that you value. 'cause it costs double what the actual cost is. So, This ensures one of two things. It ensures you really want the item. And number two, this also makes sure that when your lifestyle creeps up, you're also investing more money.

So this is also a hack to combat against lifestyle creep, which is what I love because most people don't even realize that lifestyle creep is happening. And so making sure that you actually are conscious about this because you have to pay double for it, is really, really powerful. And also your future self is gonna thank you.

'cause your big bank role is gonna be building up over that timeframe. So this is a really, really cool hack and I have. Ride it on a couple really big ticket items and I love it so far. So I'm gonna keep doing it and I'll let you guys know how it goes over time, but I've been doing this for the last couple of months and I think it's a really cool way to make sure that you actually value this stuff.

And real quick before we dive into number five, if you guys want to know a bunch more money hacks, make sure you are signed up for the Master Money Newsletter. 'cause the Master Money Newsletter, we are adding a bunch of money hacks. Inside of that newsletter every single week and giving you a bunch of different tips and advice, you can master your money in less than five minutes per week.

It's linked up down in the show notes below so that you can check it out. And in the last month alone, the Master Money Newsletter has grown a couple hundred percent. So really, really excited for the future of the Master Money Newsletter. People are loving it and they're giving feedback to me on what they want to hear, and we're gonna be creating content in that newsletter based on what you want to see in here.

So really, really excited about that. Number five is the gradual spend cut. So the gradual spend cut is something when I first tried to get my money together and I was trying to figure out, Hey, how can I reduce the amount of spending so that I can increase the amount that I'm investing? I. And so what that means is that you are reducing your monthly expenses and increasing the amount that you have in the gap.

'cause the gap is the difference between your income and your expenses. And the more that you have within that gap, the wealthier you can become over time. So I wanted to increase my gap, and so what I did is I reduced. All of my expenses at once. This was one of the most painful things I did with my money, and I really regret doing it this way.

So I'm gonna show you exactly how I fixed it later on. But this is a really difficult thing to do because if you reduce every single expense across the board, a lot of times people think it's too hard and they just end up quitting. So instead, what I did is I created what is called the gradual spend cut.

And the way that the gradual spend cut works is when you wanna reduce your expenses. What you do is you pick one to two categories to reduce your expenses, and now you wanna make sure that these two categories are not correlated. So for example, if you wanna reduce your spending and eating out, you don't wanna be reducing your spending in groceries as well.

You wanna keep your grocery bill the same, but you wanna reduce your spending in one or the other because all encompassing around food is gonna be much more difficult than it would be with just one specific item. So you really only wanna pick one to two items that you need to cut. First and do that gradually.

Now, what do I mean by gradually? Why is it called the gradual spending cut? The way that this works is let's keep that same example. Say you wanna spend less on eating out, and right now you spend 600 bucks a month on eating out. You feel guilty about it. It's only you. You're only one single person, and you're spending $600 on eating out.

Now, if it brings you value, more power to you, I would love. For someone who actually gets value out of eating out to be spending that amount of money on eating out. But if it does not bring you value and you wanna reduce it, here's exactly how you wanna do it. So say for example, you wanna go from $600 a month down to $200 a month, you wanna spend 50 bucks a week on eating out because you wanna take those extra dollars and put them into your Roth I R a, for example.

So when you do this, Instead of reducing your spending all at once and cutting it from 600 to 200 in month one, unless you have the willpower to do that, here's how we say to do it, reduce your spending gradually over four to six months. So how this would look over the course of six months is in month one, you're gonna reduce your spending to $550 in eating out month two.

Reduce your spending down to $450 for eating out month three. Maybe your mom comes into town or your friend comes into town, you're gonna spend a little more that month till you go back up to $525 per month. That's okay. A lot of times regressions happens and. You gotta forgive yourself and you gotta move on.

Then in month four, you bump it back down to $425 per month. Then in month 5, 325, and then in month two, it is much easier to go from 3 25 down to 200. See this gradual reduction. Allows you to not have to just rip the bandaid off. Instead, you can reduce your spending gradually over time, and it does not hurt as bad.

When I did this, it was the most stressful thing ever because I was doing it across a bunch of different categories, and then I was reducing it down across the board, and I felt miserable. Honestly. I felt completely miserable. When I did this, it was hard to get my wife on board. She felt miserable. So if you're doing this in a relationship, it's even harder.

And so you gotta make sure that you are doing this gradually, one or two items at a time. So look at the things that are gonna make the biggest impact right off the bat. And another thing that you can do is you can also get rid of the subscriptions really quickly that you don't use anymore. So that's one of the two things that you can do is first in month one, just get rid of the subscriptions you don't want anymore, and then gradually reduce either one item or two items in your budget that are really, really making a big impact, and then move on to the next one.

Over time, over time, your expenses will go down. They will be reduced, and you will have more money to invest over that timeframe. Now if you're really, really serious, say for example, you just found out about financial independence and you wanna get rid of it all at once and you don't care how bad it hurts.

More power to you, but for most people, I don't want you quitting when you reduce your spending, and this is the best way to be able to do that. Number six is to hack your motivation. So you gotta find ways that's going to help you stay motivated by building out the proper habits and systems. Now, habits are for suckers.

Systems are for winners. And what I mean by that is you gotta have the systems in place where you can keep this thing. Automated so you don't even have to worry about it. There's a great book on this called Atomic Habits by James Clear. If you haven't read that book, it's a fantastic way to learn how to really optimize your life if you want to build out more habits in your life.

But I'm gonna give you five tips to unlock your motivation when it comes to your money habits, so that you can actually think through this and say, Hey, I want to stay motivated over time, but I also wanna have the systems in place to make sure that I am actually pursuing my financial goals. So the first one is set goals that are actually achievable.

A lot of people set goals that are either too high and or way too low, and they can either achieve it way too easily or it's too high. So make sure that you are setting goals that are a little bit scary, but they're also achievable. Then break down these big goals into small chunks. So if you've ever heard our goal setting episodes, we talk about these usually at the beginning of the year, we'll have another one coming up in the new year.

Again, when we have these goal setting episodes, your financial goals are really, really important to understand exactly how to do this. So we talk about having a five year goal, a three year goal, and then breaking those down into small chunks. So what do I need to do every year? What do I need to do every quarter?

What do I need to do every month? What do I need to do every week? And what do I need to do every day in order to achieve those big goals? So we have you break it down into daily actions, which is very, very important if you wanna achieve those goals. Number three is to control your frustration. Everybody makes mistakes when it comes to your money.

I have never had a perfect month within my budget and through all those failures, For years and years and years still became a millionaire within in less than a decade. And so to be able to do this, you really need to make sure that you control your frustrations. 'cause you're gonna make mistakes.

You're gonna spend too much money on Amazon 'cause that buy button is calling your name. But at the same time, it does not matter because you just roll with the punches, you move on to the next step. Why nab? The budgeting system that I originally used to get myself out of having a $0 net worth. They have something called rolling with the punches, meaning if you make a mistake in your budget, you just roll with the punches.

You roll money over from another category, and this is the same way I want you to think about your money. You're never gonna have a perfect month if you make a mistake. Do not give up. You gotta keep pushing and pushing on. The next one is to create simple rules, so, The reason why we have so many simple rules, and we just had an episode on 15 personal finance rules that will keep you wealthy.

So listen to that episode if you don't have any simple rules whatsoever. But we create really simple rules around our finances in order to make sure that we can still continue to build wealth over time. And these rules will allow you to be more disciplined when it comes to your financial goals. And then the last thing is to future cast.

So talk about all the things that you want to do with your money. Think through that and think about your future. Studies have shown that people who actually think about their future more often. Are going to actually become much better with their money than those who just think about the here and the now.

So you wanna make sure that you are future casting. What do I wanna do with my life? What do I wanna do in the future? Where do I wanna travel? How do I want to spend my money and spend my time? I want you to be thinking about that at least once a day because it's gonna allow you to hack your motivation and keep you motivated over time.

Now, number seven. This is a big one, is to automate everything. If you want to hack your brain in order to make sure that you are continually progressing over time, one of the coolest ways to do this is to automate your money. Have you ever looked at your 4 0 1 K account, for example, and maybe you just set it and forget it, so you set up your 4 0 1 K and it's contributing money every single month.

You don't even think about it anymore. It just puts money into your account and you check your 4 0 1 K like once. Every year or once every other year, for example, have you ever logged into that account and all of a sudden you open it up and you're like, holy cow, I have way more money in this account than I ever thought I would have.

That's the power of automation, and that's the power of progression without you having to rely on your willpower. That's what automation does for you, especially when it comes to your money. You need to automate everything. My friends, you need to automate. Everything when it comes to your finances. So lemme give you a couple examples, one of which is your savings.

So say for example, you want to start saving more money in your emergency fund, maybe you wanna save up for a down payment on a house and you're getting married soon, so you wanna save up a couple extra bucks in your wedding fund. So let's say you have those three and you want to have three different savings goals and you wanna set this up, but you wanna save for these automatically so you don't have to rely on your willpower.

'cause sometimes you like to buy a couple of extra things that you really don't need. So let's think about this for a second. You can set these up in something like Ally Bank, for example, who has savings buckets, meaning that you can actually budget out your money inside of that savings account, so you have these savings buckets available to you and you can automate this process.

It's a beautiful thing. So what you do is you set up through three savings buckets for each of these categories, and every single month when you get paid, boom, you can transfer that money over automatically. You set this up automatically at the beginning of the month, and you never have to touch it again unless you want to increase that amount, and then what you do.

As you go out there, every time you get paid, it's gonna automatically go into each of those buckets. So it's one savings account, but it's actually budgeted out for you and it's gonna automatically go into there, and then all of a sudden, over time, this is just gonna build up for you and you don't even have to think about it.

Another thing that you can do this with is something like your Roth I r a, or your retirement account. You can do this in your taxable brokerage accounts. You can do this for your 5 29 plan for your kids. You can do this for your kids' brokerage accounts if you have kids. You can do this for literally anything in the personal finance system because of how technology has advanced.

So if you have never thought about this before, you really should be automating everything. We are gonna be putting together some sort of either course or a masterclass on how to automate your entire financial system. If you're interested in that, please let me know and we'll build it faster than we are right now.

Number eight, if you struggle with cards, One way to hack your brain to save more money is to start paying in cash. So if you've gotten into credit card debt before, or you are just struggling with credit card debt, you cannot figure out how to handle credit cards responsibly, then pay in cash. My friend who caress about credit card points if you're in debt, 'cause that debt is absolutely destroying your wealth building ability.

Instead, what I want you to do is to get out the old cash envelope system. And what you're gonna do with this is just paying in cash actually psychologically. Means that you're actually thinking about the impact of your decision. So they've done a bunch of studies on this, and when you actually pay in cash, you're much less likely to overspend because you see the cash leaving your hand.

It's a physical thing that is in your hands and it is leaving your hands, and you can really see how much you're spending. So you walk into the grocery store, 300 bucks, you don't wanna spend more than 300 bucks. Maybe you wanna spend two 50, but you spend that 300, it's gonna hurt if you're not walking away with that $50 bill.

Inside of your wallet, when you leave the grocery store, you're gonna feel that impact. Whereas if you just swipe it on a card, a lot of times you're like, eh, I'm just gonna forget about it. I don't need that money anyway. And when you swipe it on the card, it's just those little digital dollars. And so it's not as big of a deal for a lot of people.

So if you struggle with this, consider paying with cash at least for a little bit. I know if it's kind of pain in the butt to go to the bank and get cash now, but if you've struggled with it, it's definitely something that you want to consider over time. Alright, number nine is to use extra savings tools.

So I really like to use extra savings tools 'cause it just gives you a little extra boost when it comes to saving and investing more dollars. So one that I just recently heard about was Rob Berger. If you've never heard of Rob Berger, he had a major impact on me very early on in my financial journey.

And he had a podcast called Doll Roller. And so I used to listen to Doll Roller every single day at my corporate job. And now Rob has a YouTube channel. I'm trying to get him on the podcast. Hopefully he's gonna come on soon. He has a YouTube channel about investing in a bunch of other things. But I heard him talk about this, and what he does is he actually spends all his money on his credit cards and he gets cash back and he takes that cash back and he actually invests the money.

And so over the course of just like a couple of years, he said he had 20 something thousand dollars. He. In that account because all he is doing is just paying his bills. Like he just puts his bills on there. It's not like he's spending extra dollars. He just puts all his bills that he can on that credit card and then takes those extra cash back dollars and then invests those dollars in over time.

Those are just growing and compounding over time for him, and I think this is a really cool way for some people who struggle to get enough money inside of their accounts, but they still have bills to pay. Maybe you have your children's daycare, for example. If you have kids, you know how many bills you have.

And so you take all of those extra expenditures and you're gotta spend the money anyway. You get the cash back, and then you can invest those dollars into something like your brokerage account. So you can take the cash back, throw it into your Fidelity account, or your Vanguard account, or your Charles Schwab or in one account, and then let that money compound over time.

So that's the first hack. Number two is you can look at something like Acorns, for example, which is gonna round up your spending. Allo does the same exact thing, and between both of these, it's a really cool way to actually hack your way to invest more dollars as well. So the way that this works is that you spend your money and you link up Acorns or Allo to your account.

And what it does is it rounds up to the nearest dollar and the change that you had for that expenditure goes into your. Investment account. So say for example, that you spend 1250 on a couple of coffees. Well, what it does is it rounds up to $13 and that extra 50 cents boom just goes into your investment account.

This is a really cool way. It adds up over time to just invest a couple extra a hundred bucks every single year. Sometimes it grows to well over a thousand once it starts to compound. And it's a really cool way to just get your extra dollars into your investing over time. 'cause if you think about this, say for example, you utilize it and you invest an extra thousand dollars per year 'cause you're using acorns.

Well, if you are investing an extra thousand dollars per year over time, that is going to compound tremendously. I. Into a much greater amount of money. So let's just look at this up right now as I'm talking about this. So over the course of that timeframe, say for example, you did this for 30 years and you got a 10% rate of return, the s and p 500 at the time recording this is well over 11%.

That's why I said 10% rate of return. You do whatever rate of return you want, if you want it to be lower, and then you have a contribution of a hundred dollars per month. And so say you're, you're doing 1200 bucks a year inside of something like Acorns or Allo. That's gonna grow over the course of 30 years to $206,284, and all you had was rounded up change of $36,000.

So incredible amount of money over the long term. An extra $206,000 means that you got an extra, you know, eight, 900 bucks per month that you can spend in retirement. So really, really cool way to hack. Your way there maybe. I mean, you could think of that, for example, as your travel fund, if you're really interested in traveling, for example, in retirement, boom, that's an amazing way to be able to build that up.

'cause that's gonna give you an extra 10 grand per year to be able to travel in retirement. So really, really cool idea there. I think that is a very interesting way to actually add some additional investing to your life. So, If you're spending the money anyways, I do not want you spending money just to get cash back because that's absolutely insane.

But what I want you to do is just put your normal bills that you're already spending money on that you have to spend money on anyways, on credit cards and you can invest those dollars and or using these Roundup tools can really add up to a lot over time. And these are both strategies that I'm gonna test out as well and I'll keep you guys posted on exactly how it's going.

Number 10. Number 10 is understand that everything is being marketed to you. So one thing that you gotta think through and how to hack your brain with this is what I would do first is I would unsubscribe to any company that sends you emails that you are prone to just buying really quickly. So I have a problem with this, with, uh, Lululemon and with Nike, where your boy is just a sucker for those amazing shorts that those two companies make.

And so when it comes to those two companies, I have to end up unsubscribing taking the app on my, off my phone, all those different things in order to make sure that I don't just make some frivolous, crazy purchase that I'm gonna regret a couple weeks later. And I've done that before on those, and then I've sent it back.

And it's one of those things where I'm gonna either put put on my once list or do something else along those lines. But just make sure you get rid of all the promo emails that come to you, all the promo text messages that come to you. Now a lot of companies wanna send you text messages and it's really annoying.

And I always open all of those. It probably tells you a lot about text marketing. It probably works really well. But when it comes across via text message and or in a newsletter, just make sure you unsubscribe to some of those, especially if it causes you impulse purchase. 'cause they are marketing to you and they are really good at it.

Now they hire entire companies to market to you and they know exactly what they're doing. Number 11 is you can actually leverage discounts and cash back. You can actually stack them on top of each other. So I learned this from my friend Chris Hutchins at all the hacks. And what he taught me was how to triple stack your savings with cashback coupons and credit card deals.

So what you can do is you can first look at companies like Rakuten or Top Cashback Offer or any of their free cashback retailers out there. So if you go to cashback monitor.com, you can actually find and help figure out which companies offer the most cashback, which is actually pretty cool. So you have those available to you.

So you first, you look for those cashback coupons Next on top of these cashback deals. Then you look for browser extension. So you can look like Capital One has one. If you have a Capital One card, there's honey out there. And Honey is one that I use for a long time. I've saved a lot of money with honey because they find different promo codes for you to check out when you're checking out at each of these retailers.

Then lastly, a lot of credit cards offer store specific discounts as well. So this is how you get the triple stack savings. So one of which is, for example, I use the Chase Sapphire, that is one of my daily drivers, if you wanna check it out. We have it linked up down below in my favorite credit cards. But with the Chase Sapphire, a lot of times they will give you discounts through Chase, like 10% off of Dick's Sporting Goods, for example, or 10% off of going to Chick-fil-A.

And so what you can do is you can actually look for these and see if some of your credit cards offer these. A ton of them do. American Express is really good with these. Capital One has these, chase has these, city has some of these as well. And then you go through there and say, Hey, can you reduce the amount that you're spending on a triple cashback basis?

And a fourth one, this is actually a bonus tip, is you can also go to like eBay or gift card Granny and you can actually find gift cards at a discounted rate. It's not as big of a discount as it used to be. It used to be really big. Discount some of these gift cards. Now it's a little bit harder to find for the popular stores, but if there's like a, a store that offers gift cards out there that may be less desirable to some people than others, then you can go out there and find a discounted gift card for a quadruple savings.

So if you're really into saving money and getting really quick ways to do this, I don't think you should be clipping coupons whatsoever. I think that's a waste of your time. I think you should be focusing on earning more money. But this is a really quick way. Just look for promo codes and do some of this stuff where you can.

You know, save 20, 30, 40, 50 bucks in less than 2, 3, 4 minutes of work. So it's a, an interesting way to do that as well. Number 12 is to treat your main financial goals as a bill. So things like your emergency fund and your investment goals, they need to be thought of in your brain as a bill. So you need to pay yourself first.

Spend what is leftover. So say for example, you're just trying to build up your emergency fund, you need to treat that like a bill, like you do all of your other bills where you pay them on time, and then you spend what is leftover. So that's really important to make sure that you, that that's a great way to hack your brain into ensuring that you're actually taking care of that stuff.

Number 13 is before you buy anything, think about total cost of ownership and train your brain to think in total cost of ownership instead of monthly payments. People who think in monthly payments when they go out and buy a car or they go out and buy a house, those are people who do not understand the entire cost.

Of the item. What I want you to do is, instead of the monthly payment, I want you to think of total cost of ownership. So say for example, you're buying a brand spanking new Yukon Denali, and you're gonna have three kids in that car and you're gonna lug 'em around and have the mom mobile, the soccer mom mobile, and you think about this in this course, $60,000.

So you're thinking, Hey, well it's $60,000. I'm gonna pay like 700 bucks a month. If I put 20% down, I'm just making these numbers up. I don't know exactly what it would be. I'm gonna do public math, but it's somewhere in that range. You're gonna be paying 700 a month and you can afford that. It fits into your budget, da, da, da, da, da.

That is, Not how you think about making sure that you were making a wise financial decision. Instead, what you do is you run total cost of ownership. What is the depreciation on this car? How much money am I gonna be spending in gas in comparison to my last car? How much am I gonna be spending in repairs on this car over that timeframe?

How long am I actually gonna own this vehicle? How much am we paying an interest on the loan? All of these factors truly. Truly matter, and you have to actually add up the total cost where your $60,000 car is now costing you 85 $90,000 because you did not do total cost of ownership and understand what this truly costs.

And if you think about a $60,000 car and if it costs you $85,000, Is that worth your hourly rate to buy that vehicle, especially when it goes down in value over time. Whereas when you're gonna sell this thing, it's gonna be worth 10, 15, $20,000, 7, 8, 9, 10 years down the line. So you gotta think through this run.

Total cost of ownership for everything. I'm talking about cars, I'm talking about house. If you buy a boat, if you buy a golf cart like your boy, All of these things need to have total cost of ownership run and see if it's actually worth the value to you. So train your brain to think about that every time you buy something, especially if it has a motor in it or a roof over it.

Number 14, see if it's actually worth it. So there is something called anchoring bias, and if you've never heard of anchoring bias, It is something where you may see a price of something and then another price of the same exact item is presented to you at a lower price, and so you think it's a good deal because you are biased because of the initial purchase price.

Lemme give you an example of this. Say for example, you're considering buying a used car and you go out and you visit the car dealership. And the dealer walks you around showing you all the higher priced cars first, and you start worrying that you can't afford that car at all. This is a great dealership tactic that a lot of 'em use.

Next, the car dealer walks you towards the back of the lot where you see much more affordable cars in the back of the lot and after you've already seen all of these expensive options. So now these affordable, I'm pulling up air quotes. If you're watching on YouTube, these affordable cars seem like they're actually a great deal 'cause you saw all the expensive cars first.

Where in reality, what the dealer has done is set an anchor for you influencing your perception and the value based on the used car. Now, this is really important to understand because a lot of companies do this, and Amazon does this all the time when it comes to Amazon Prime Day. You've seen this before where they will have the same exact item and then all of a sudden they will slash the price and have a lower price there.

But really that was what the original price was, was the the lower price after the slash price. This is an anchoring bias where they're just trying to make you think that this is a deal because there's a slash price there. So you gotta be weary of this kind of stuff in these marketing tactics when it comes to spending money.

So think about that first. Think about that in the back of your head. Understand how anchoring bias works. I think it's a really, really powerful way to know when you're getting the wool pulled over your eyes. Number 15 is learn to earn. More so we've talked about all these different ways to save money, but a lot of times if you are in a situation where you are not earning enough money, one of the best things that you can do is just earn more money first.

So learning how to earn more money is the most powerful thing that you can do to build wealth over time. I think high incomes are where wealth is truly built, so you need to work on growing that income over time. If you do not grow your income, it is much harder to build wealth than people who are trying to get by on lower salary.

Sure. You can absolutely retire on a lower salary, and I truly believe that anybody in this world can build wealth, but it's a lot easier if you have a higher income and learn to earn more, because that gap just starts to grow over time. And as that gap actually grows, you can take all those dollars, invest those dollars, and become financially free so much faster.

Even the really frugal folks who have come on this podcast where you've seen people like Mr. Money Mustache, for example. They actually still had a pretty high salary, and so they were able to achieve financial independence in a very short timeframe because they were taking 70 or 80% of their salary and investing those dollars.

So income is really important, but also keeping that income is another factor. So making sure that you learn how to earn more money is going to really help you save more over time. So I want you to keep that. I want you to hack your brain and think about. Earning is really, really important. And think about that in the back of your head as you go through this process.

And then a bonus, obviously, remember that saving your money does nothing if you don't invest your dollars for you. So make sure you're getting those dollars to work for you. We have a ton of episodes talking about how to invest your money if you've never learned yet. We also have Index Fund Pro, which is our course, teaching you how to invest money.

Always linked up down the show notes below. So any of that stuff is always available to you and reach out to me with any questions. Listen, thank you guys so much for listening to this episode. I hope you learned a ton in this episode. And thank you for investing in yourself 'cause that's exactly what you are doing.

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