Cut These 10 Things From Your Budget

hey everyone welcome back to the channel so in this video i'm gonna share 10 things that i stopped spending money on i cut these for my budget in 2021 and these are things that you can consider cutting from your budget as well now the whole point of saving money and budgeting it's not so that we can just squirrel all of our money away and go to the grave with all of our money and not spend it no it's important to spend money i like spending money on things but the reason why we do this is so that if we can save money in certain aspects of our life we can end up spending more on the things that we actually want to spend money on like maybe vacations or certain hobbies of yours and so this is why we focus so much on budgeting and being strategic with how i spend my money so let me share these 10 different things with you but as always i don't really try to repeat anything that i've mentioned in the past i've made a couple of videos like this but we always like to include fresh new ideas that you can use to cut from your budget all right so let's talk about the first one here which is cell phone insurance now on my previous phones i used to actually pay for some type of uh package like apple care or you can have warranties and cell phone insurance in case you drop your phone and it breaks and maybe the screen shatters phones are pretty expensive it's not just like this everyday item that we can buy it all the time you know it could be eight hundred dollars or a thousand dollars for a phone sometimes even more so many people like to have some type of cell phone insurance the re the way that i got around this is i just buy my cell phone with a credit card that covers uh the cost of damages to that phone so there's a number of credit cards that do this and there's probably some other different ways to find free cell phone insurance as well but the credit card that i use to buy most electronics actually covers uh any of those electronics if they break including my mac and some other different appliances like this camera for example if this breaks it's covered by my credit card there are a lot of options out there so you can explore that probably with just a quick google search of credit cards that cover phone damage and whatnot but if you do decide to take a route like this uh just be careful with credit cards i think a lot of people get them for the wrong reasons i just see it sort of as like an extra bonus that i can save money with these these cell phone insurance plans and i don't have to pay for it but still be careful with credit cards because you can end up getting in a big hole if you start using too many credit cards and you're getting them for the wrong reasons okay now the next one look it's april right now it's spring and so i have to include this uh something that i cut from my budget is vegetables no wait no i still eat vegetables it's more so just especially during the summer in the fall i really don't buy any vegetables because my family has a pretty big garden and they just grow everything and i can just get it from them or maybe steal it from my parents for free but if you have a yard i would suggest turning it into a garden my brother just bought a house and he put in a big garden in his yard he just turned it into a garden and so now he's going to have tons of vegetables tomatoes cucumbers whatever else you want to plant and it's not rocket science to have a garden you can end up saving hundreds or even thousands of dollars in vegetables especially if you're already going to like whole foods and you're spending like 12 on some tomatoes or something you might as well just grow it yourself i i like gardening i think it's kind of therapeutic in a way as well and it's going to save you a lot of money and so not only could you have all of this for the summer and the fall all these vegetables but you could save them you could can them you could freeze them and just have them all year round i know that's what my parents do and i kind of just siphoned some of them off from them but you know i don't have a yard here i'm in an apartment so i can't do that but i would consider doing that if you have a yard or some space where you can grow things or even on your porch on your balcony somewhere you can grow things in pots and save a little bit of money that way all right number eight is baggage fees now i calculated over the past couple of years that i've saved thousands of dollars in baggage fees by just traveling super light so when i travel i really only bring a backpack and maybe one other relatively small bag i don't check bags i don't think i've ever checked a bag in my life and checked bags can cost a lot of money unless you're flying southwest or the airline that you're flying with already covers the cost of that you might end up paying 50 or more to check a bag and it blows my mind to see how many people are rolling to the airport with two massive suitcases for like a three-day trip and they have 12 shirts and four pairs of pants for like a two day or three day trip it just doesn't really make a lot of sense to me um but you know people can do whatever they want it's their vacation of course i can't tell people how to live their life but for me i tend to travel very light and it saves me a lot of money especially if you're flying some of those budget airlines like spirit or frontier they usually get to your destination but they're going to upsell you and charge you on all kinds of things like if you want to pick your seat and if you want to check a bag and if you want to have any type of like other accommodations you're going to pay a lot of money i tend to not get those upsells because the way i see it is that you know when you're going somewhere i don't mind just kind of paying the least amount but i still get to that place um maybe that's just me being 22 and maybe in the future i'll start flying first class or something but probably not because i still see it just in general when it comes to flights and airlines i just go with the lowest cost possible and if i'm sitting in the middle seat for a couple of hours so be it i don't really care okay so this next one don't attack me please hear me out it's it's pets now i i love pets i'm gonna get a dog sometime soon and if you have a dog i know some dogs watching this right now hello i love you guys but what i want to say here is that just be mindful of what type of pet you're getting before you get one and i say this because it really makes me sad when i think about how many people will get a dog or they'll get a pet they'll realize afterwards oh you know our our budget's not balanced we're living paycheck to paycheck we can't afford to feed our pets we can't afford to take them to the vet they can't afford to take care of it because pets cost a lot of money and so if you have the budget for a pet please go get a pet i think there's a lot of studies that show that pets make people a lot happier so i'm all for it i think it's great but if you are living paycheck to paycheck or if you are on a lower budget and you don't have a lot of room there please just be mindful before you buy a pet or before you get a pet that you're able to actually afford it and look into the true cost of it because the cost of having a dog the cost of having a cat it can actually be quite a bit a lot more than what people might realize and also make sure that your pet aligns with whatever sort of income or how your budget is looking at the moment for example if you're making a thousand dollars a month and you want to get a horse that's going to cost a hell of a lot of money maybe you should just focus on a goldfish or a hermit crab or something that's going to cost a lot less whereas if you do have the budget and you know maybe you're making ten thousand dollars a month then yes then it'd be smart maybe to go ahead get a horse get dogs whatever else you might want because you know that you can afford it so i'm not saying don't get pets i'm just saying if you're getting a pet make sure that you can afford it because you don't want to send it off to a shelter or something i just feel like it happens way too often this is not a problem just in america it's all over the world people do this without you know thinking about the actual cost of it all right next one is storage units i actually didn't know this was really a thing i mean sure i knew that storage units existed when i drive down the highway and i see the big massive storage unit signs but i didn't realize how many people actually use them and this is maybe just minimalist nate talking here where i don't have a lot of belongings a lot of stuff but storage units can cost a lot of money i mean people pay 50 or 100 per month to just store all of their stuff and so if you could just get rid of this i mean you know you think a hundred dollars per month 12 months that's a thousand dollars that's 1200 per year times 20 years you know you're paying 20 or 30 000 to store all of your stuff you might be better off just selling it you can just auction it off you can sell it on craigslist you could just go to goodwill and give them tons of free stuff and you can give it to people who might need it and get rid of a lot of your stuff that you have and so this is what i like to do for example uh this apartment here you know when i move out i don't know i'm probably not going to renew the lease here so when i move out you know there's going to be some things that maybe i don't want anymore uh i'm not going to just throw it in a storage unit like that lamp or something or well that plant i don't i don't really know what i'm doing to plant but i'm not going to put that storage unit of course but there's certain things that you know maybe i don't want anymore i don't want to use for anymore instead of just throwing them in a storage unit or in a garage somewhere i'm probably just going to give them away or make sure that they go somewhere where it's not wasteful but yeah storage units i just don't really see the purpose in having uh them unless you absolutely need it because you're in between moving into different apartments or houses or something otherwise i think i would just liquidate all that stuff and save a lot of money by not having one all right so another one is nice sunglasses now some people would take the other side of this approach and they would say you know you should just get one nice pair of sunglasses like some ray-bans that can last for a very long time knowing me personally i just can't have nice things they just break and there was one time where i bought some sunglasses like some ray-bans for 150 i thought you know maybe this is smart because then i can just have them for a long time they're quality right they're built very nicely um and i think they lasted three weeks until i sat on them and i broke them and so ever since then i just realized you know what i can't really have a lot of nice things it's like why i don't wear white clothes because i would just get like mustard all over it i just can't have nice things i'm kind of clumsy with that uh and so realizing that yeah i don't spend a lot of money on expensive sunglasses and instead i'll just get some 10 or 15 ones that you know i'll probably end up breaking them after a month but i would break them either way if they were nice or if they were uh pretty poor quality i'm gonna break them either way so i might as well not spend 150 on some sunglasses so that's my approach to that and actually that goes with anything like shoes for example you know i'll get some shoes that are comfortable like fifty dollars or sixty dollars but i'm not gonna buy three hundred dollar shoes because i'm gonna scuff them i'm gonna like step in a pile of tar or something and that's going to be it so all right so another one is seasonal decorations now look i'm i'm 22. so maybe you know you're not going to cut this out from your budget i don't know there's different stages in life but being 22 i don't really feel like i need to have tons of seasonal decorations it would cause a lot of clutter so this is also once again minimalist nate talking here um i don't really have the need for it i have a couple of little tiny seasonal things like a little baby christmas tree that i put up in december maybe some halloween stuff but overall you know nothing really crazy um there's people who might have like a hundred different you know santa claus and snowmen and stuff in their yard like big inflatable things that's totally fine um but i don't really see the need for it in my budget at least being 22 maybe when i'm you know 35 or something but i don't really see the need for it now it creates a lot of clutter so you've probably heard about this next one but i want to go a little bit more in depth and elaborate on this point so the thing that i don't buy is new cars new vehicles and so more so what i want to talk about is understanding the depreciation curves when thinking about buying a vehicle now if you watch my videos two years ago you'll know i didn't own any vehicles because i didn't think i needed them because i didn't i would just walk around the city things have changed a lot and now i feel the need for one but if you're gonna buy a vehicle make sure that you're buying it at the right spot in the depreciation curve you've probably heard this a lot from people they say as soon as you buy a brand new vehicle as soon as you drive it off the lot it depreciates like crazy you're going to lose a couple thousand dollars instantly as soon as you drive away from that car dealership that's very very true so try not to buy new cars overall you're not going to get a very good deal on that it's better to buy it in a nice spot in the depreciation curve like after three or four years of being used maybe if somebody leased it for a couple of years and then you can buy it uh at the best possible price that tends to be where the best price is sometimes you can buy them even older uh i just bought a truck and the truck is about six or seven years old already but it's going to retain its value very very well and that's because for a couple of reasons one because it's a truck and it has a lot of utility purposes and it's a good brand and it's just a good quality overall so be mindful as well not only about you know the age of a car and buying one new versus buying one use but also be mindful about the make of it and the the possible depreciation in the future for example i have friends who might buy a maserati and they might pay a hundred thousand dollars for this really nice maserati three years later the thing's worth forty thousand dollars because those cars depreciate very quickly compared to maybe something like a prius or certain types of hondas or certain types of vehicles that are known to retain their value very well like a truck which is another example that i wanted to use here um also maybe i'll make a video on this but the reason why i bought it is because i'm turning into a camper i'm gonna do a ton of road trips and maybe maybe even live in it for a little while i don't really know if i'm how long i'm living it but either way i'm turning into a camper it's going to be pretty fun it's going to save me a lot of money as well but i'll maybe make another video about that later if you guys want to see anything about that i also don't pay for labor costs whether this is paying somebody to mow your lawn or paying somebody to clean your apartment or paying for somebody to cook food for you i don't i don't know what position you're in right now but overall paying for labor costs whatever it is you know you're moving from one house to another um there's just a lot of things you can do yourself that i don't think you have to pay for uh overall if you're just a little bit handy with things and we have this beautiful thing called the internet so you know if you don't know how to fix something right you don't know how to change the oil on your car you can do a quick little youtube search you can watch how to change oil on your specific car something's going to come up and you can watch exactly how to do it you can do it yourself and you can save a lot of money from something like that or you know your drains are clogged you need to fix the drains should you call somebody that's going to cost you a lot of money you can probably figure out a way to fix it yourself i couldn't tell you how many times my dad fixed our dishwashers and washing machines and everything else that we had in our house because you know if he wasn't doing that we'd be paying thousands of dollars to have somebody else do that for us another one is delivery oh wow okay especially with food ubereats grubhub doordash i've been this has been a problem for me in the past especially last year when everything was quarantined and you know i'm sitting on my couch i don't want to go outside to go get food and so i would just call it on an app so easy but you end up paying like 30 for a burger you know you have your burger and then you have all of a sudden a delivery fee you have administration fee a service fee tax and then you maybe tip and then everything else on top of it suddenly you're paying like two to three times what the actual food cost was with some of these different delivery apps um so i would suggest just not having them on your phone and you're gonna save a lot of money and maybe just go walk get that food or just make it yourself and save even more money uh in the process all right everyone thanks for watching the video uh like i said let me know if you want to see the whole truck build out i'm gonna turn it into like a full camper with a bed probably put a fridge in there some other different appliances and just probably build it out over the next couple of weeks here and then do some big road trips so that's just a fun little thing i'm excited about if you guys want to see a video about that let me know because i don't know if it fits this channel but i will make it if people are interested so thanks for watching and i'll see everybody in next week's video

Channel: Nate O'Brien

Views: 247,907

Keywords: nate o'brien

Id: 6j2ytxSi2Ww

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021