Frugal Coffee Chat: Frugal Q & A with Larry

many of you have asked frugality questions directed at myself so I'm going to answer those questions in this [Music] video hi I'm Larry from under the median and normally hope would be joining me over here but she broke her arm about 2 weeks ago and she's unable to do videos as soon as she's able to do them again she'll be back here sitting with me in the studio Terry wanted to know I would like to ask how to balance refurbishing the home with savings and vacations well one of the things that we do in terms of vacations and savings versus refurbishing is that we have separate categories for each of those so if we want to do something to improve our home we put that in a separate category and we gradually save up to meet that goal vacations and savings are in two other categories so we definitely would keep all of those separate in order to meet those goals another question is now that your boys are pretty much grown what do your family do for outings and day trips what do vacations look like well we only have two out of the four boys living in home now and the older two boys by April will both be married one of them got married in September the other one is going to get married in April so they're going to be pretty much on their own and they won't do long vacations with us unless they want to the other two boys we take them along with us when we do long Vacations or day trips but if they're working and they're busy they also stay home and don't get to participate once again as they've gotten older the choice has pretty much been up to them whether they want to accompany hope and I on these kind of trips Amy asks all of your advice is for families what do you recommend for singles regarding budget and food shopping well I would apply the very same principles that we use in our family budgeting to being single it would be a lot less on the amounts and you'd be able to save probably the same amount of money maybe even just a little bit more because you're not dividing the money that you have coming into your household in four different directions so once again the same rules apply you would just apply it to your specific needs Larry I am so thrilled that you and hope are on the same page with frugality what does one do when the spouse will have no part in the process often mocks the journey and worse yet puts family in potential danger because of Reckless spending and not preparing for the future well I am so sorry that that's happening to this person and that is a very difficult situation to be in but I don't see that as being a financial problem this is a relation problem and that that might be dealt with with some marriage counseling or something along those lines to work those things out Carrie wants to know it seems hope does most of the budgeting and deciding where money can be spent do you ever feel like you don't have a say in the budget how would you recommend a dominant person allow a little control of the money to their spouse well for one uh hope and I work out the goals together we work together on all the aspects of the budget so I don't feel like she's doing everything in regards to making choices what hope does is once we get our goals set in place she does the nuts and bolts of figuring out all the specific amounts that go into each category how much money we can allgate to everything and how to make it work according to how much money that we're bringing in and I just simply work with Hope on this I mean she's really good at doing these things and I don't feel left out at all uh I get a say in things that I'm interested in for instance I needed $300 a year for a repair fund and maintenance fund for my electric bicycle and hope and I worked out in our budget a way to free up that money so that I could use that on my bike to keep it running while I was riding it another thing that we do in regards to working the budget we like to keep a good sense of humor about it and have some fun doing that another viewer asks what are your best tips and advice for someone trying to save a down payment sometimes it's so hard to be Focus for such a long time that is a really good question it can be hard to stay focused on something that you're not seeing a return like an immediate return on I would say keep that goal at the top of your list and do some regular reviewing on it track it make sure you're meeting that goal talk about it post it up on your refrigerator what that goal is keep it in the top of your mind so that that goal becomes very important and not just forgotten while we were saving up to buy a house that's what we did in order to save over a two-year period and do quite a bit of sacrificing where we were saving money and we weren't seeing an immediate return on it make sure that you discuss it with members of your family and keep them in the loop keep them informed as to how well you're doing and when you reach a milestone celebrate it just have a little celebration and be glad that you met maybe 50% of that goal as you go it goes without saying that you should maximize your savings by reducing your expenses if you feel like you're really stuck in that area hope wrote a really good ebook and it's called 10 ways to radically reduce your expenses it's free and we'll leave a link below in this video so you can get right to that resource from Lucy now that that you're retired Larry and I assume you have only your pension to live on how have you guys tightened your belts even more well for one Lucy we have multiple sources of income and we worked on that way before I retired so that I could retire comfortably and we could continue living the very same way that we are hope has the business that is basically this video channel and a lot of other things that go with that that do bring in a nice supplementary income hope did the math before I retired to make sure that we could live on my pension and on the Social Security payments if we had to but it would be really tight but we don't have to do that because of the amount of work that we put into this channel just on the videos alone with doing two videos a week we put in at least 30 hours so it does take a lot of time and effort to have this supplemental income but we find that it's very worth it and remember we have two teenage boys still living at home so we're kind of unusual in the way that we fit the retired group another factor in this too is that hope is seven years younger than I am so she's not ready to go and draw Social Security yet so we do have to have the supplemental income in order to make it with me being retired in terms of your financial Journey if there was one thing you could have done differently what would that have been well I think the main thing that we both would agree on is that we wish we had saved for a retirement funds early we wish we had been putting money away toward retirement much younger I was about 45 years old when we really got serious about that process the other thing that I wish we had done when we were much younger like when we were first married we spent a lot of our extra money on antiques and collectibles and things that we enjoyed having in the house and I wish we had stepped that back a little and put that money towards savings instead of spending it if you're enjoying this video make sure that you hit the like button and if you're not subscribed Please Subscribe and that way you'll get more videos on this channel that are very similar to this one if you have any comments that you would like to say about this topic we would love to see your comments also listed below so feel free to comment on this video here's the next question I'm at the airport waiting for a flight do you have any tips on reducing flight costs seems like we are at the mercy of the airlines sometimes I'm forced to fly and not drive I save money by not buying food at the airport and using a carry-on well it sounds like you're doing a pretty good job of saving some money if you're buying food before you get on the airplane and you only have a carry on so you're not paying extra for baggage but I'm going to tell you something and this will be a big surprise I have never flown commercially I have no experience in this area at all anytime that I've gone somewhere distance-wise I've always gotten into my car and driven there so I have never flown now one thing in doing a little bit of research on this topic that we've found out is that it's cheaper if you're not flying right on the holidays if you can move your flights back or up a few days that you'll get some better rates and the other way to get better rates is to buy your tickets early the more advanced ticket sales that you're able to do on obtaining the seat on your plane the better chance you have at getting a little less price on it that would be our recommendation Julie asks with your Frugal budget how do you prepare for medical expense setback like you and hope have recently experienced well we do have a budget category for medical expenses if we go over that category then we have to dig into our emergency fund and we have a fully funded six Monon emergency fund to draw from if we need to Virginia asks I'd like to say you're doing a great job pinch hitting for hope you are definitely a great team and we miss her but you and your sons are making her proud well thank you very much Virginia I just had to read that question it's not really a question it's really a comment but we really appreciate the positive feedback and we've gotten so much support from our video friends on this channel for Hope being down and me filling in for her so we so appreciate that and we're going to keep the channel going no matter what Terry asks both you and hope have had some health challenges this year that is so true has your house served you well or not and how so are there any changes planned if money were Limitless what would you change on a budget what would you change well the first thing that we would do if we didn't have any limitations on our budget is we would remodel our upstairs kitchen and our downstairs kitchen this house was built in 1958 the upstairs kitchen is that old it's all 1958 design it's an old electric stove and an old oven that's built into the wall the downstairs kitchen was made later and they didn't put really very good cabinets into it so we would want to completely makeover those two rooms the other room that needs a good makeover would be our bathroom upstairs that needs some help as well and we would add in addition to that a room onto the back that would be a three Season room off of the back door here we do have a a patio it's just a cement slab underneath of that we would love to build around that a structure that we could sit out on the back porch in a screened end room on three seasons so that would be really good on a budget though we would just simply paint those rooms and do a lot less to them and that's what we're probably going to end up doing when we improve the upstairs bathroom and the downstairs kitchen and the probably upstairs kitchen will do some work on that too but we'll just do a little bit less uh it all depends on how much money we can throw into them and we do all of them at once we'll take one project at a time and get the money for it and then work on that particular room we probably won't make a three- seasoned room in the back though if we don't have a lot of Limitless money to work with Adriana asks what is the best save money Frugal tip well hoping I have two different answers for this because we both kind of talk these over my best tip that I have found to save money and really be frugal is to work with hope when we work together we're on the same page and we're going the same direction then we can accomplish so much more than if we happen to get a part on that so hope is really good to work with anyway I really enjoy working with her and by working together we can devise ways to save money between the two of us so I would say that's very important what hope would say is important in terms of saving money is that make sure you know that saving money is a small amount of money that you put in every week towards your savings give it time to build up make sure that you're taking time at it and don't get impatient by the fact that it takes a long time really to save money if you're on especially if you're on a limited budget she would say there's no such thing as overnight wealth and that is so true a lot of people want instant results when they save money but it's really a process and it does take a lot of time Karen asks do you and hope socialize only with other Frugal Friends I find it hard to decline invitations to do things that will blow my budget I feel like it's antisocial well the truth is Hope and I hang out with all kinds of people and we do hang out with people that aren't maybe necessarily Frugal and they understand hope and I they understand how we handle money and we try to do things together with those families that don't cost us a lot of money we might just have them come over for an evening or we go over to their house and do something very simple we just don't do expensive things with people that aren't Frugal so we can stay on our budget and still maintain those friendships Katherine says I retired a couple years ago and have managed the change how is retirement for you what are the joys and challenges well I think it roll rolled along really good for the first year that we were retired we had already set the amounts that we needed to save we figured out how much money we had to make on the business to make it work we had it all down pretty good until I got injured and hope got injured and that certainly has changed the Dynamics of things but we're still rolling right along with it and we're still accomplishing the same goals that we had we're just having to slow down on some of those while we heal from our injuries the business that hope started a few years before we retired is really a full-time business it is 40 hours a week and hope is back even in the condition that she's in to running parts of that business to keep it going Shelly asks I've heard you mention that hope does all the budgeting and planning have you ever asked her for something and she tells you no well the truth is that has happened that I've asked for something and we just didn't have the money in our budget in order to make it float but if there's any possibility to make something float hope tries to work really hard at making at work and I try not to ask for something that I know for sure is going to be very difficult on the amount of money that we have allocated for all the categories that we do because we got an awful lot of it already C categorized and spent now if I want some money personally for something that I want to do one thing that I can do is make the money by buying something used fixing it up and selling it and making some money in other words just making some money on the side in order to afford my hobby I've done this many many times in the past KNX Runner asks have you considered adding fixed solar panels to your roof to power portable generators yes I have thought about it actually I thought about not putting them on the roof as much as putting a unit in the backyard it would be nice to have something in the backyard that's permanent that I could just run the wires into the basement and charge up those generators but right now we're not going to do that that's too expensive and I can't really afford the expenditure of buying all the solar equipment and putting that in the other thing is we're not sure how long we're going to stay in this house and if I do a lot of permanent changes like that that it may not be worth it if we only stay here let's say four more years I don't think it would be worth putting in a lot of permanent things like solar panels especially on the roof so I'm okay with setting out the small solar panels out in the backyard and charging the power stations as they need to be charged one thing that I will make sure that I do though I'll make sure I really have them out of the way in the basement so that hope doesn't trip over them because that's what hope tripped over when she fell and broke her left arm she tripped over a stack of solar panels that I had up against the wall they weren't lit up very well she didn't see them she caught her foot on them and went right down on the floor so one thing I am making sure is those aren't going to be in the way anymore Jasma asked what advice can Larry give to help me teach my 19-year-old daughter she doesn't listen to my suggestions in regards to finances she blows her money any suggestions would be great thank you well by the time our boys were 16 they had to fund a lot of different things to meet their own needs they had to get some kind of a job whether it was mowing a lawn or working at a store John got a job at Office Depot by the time he was 16 and he used that income in order to buy clothes and buy things that he wanted now things that we will supply for them we will supply money for their medical needs and for their schooling and as long as they're in school and this goes to even in their 20s if they're in college and they're going full-time to school they don't have to pay us rent but otherwise once they get out of school and they're making money on a full-time job then we charge them rent so that they have a good idea of what things cost when they really do get on their own we also make them pay for their own car insurance when they're 16 and when they've gotten their driver's license now Philip may not get his driver's license when he turns 16 because we won't be ready to go through all the steps it's going to take to get him the schooling to learn how to drive but once he gets that driver's license then we'll EXP expect him to add that amount in so that we're not paying for his car insurance if he gets a car of his own he'll have to pay for it except for the first $2,000 we do give $22,000 for the first car that our kids buy and they'll have to keep up the expenses on that car so at the age of 16 we began teaching them the responsibilities of being an adult by the time they're 19 they know these very well so I would recommend giving your daughter some more financial responsibility so she doesn't just blow her money on things that she doesn't really need give her some responsibility in that area to teach her what money is really for now Philip has a job he's actually only 15 and we've addressed some of these issues with him if you'd like to have him on in a future video and have him talk about this from his perspective we would love to bring him on maybe in a couple weeks or so do you drink coffee and what is your favorite for being Frugal well this is my coffee cup and yes I drink coffee all the time we have recently switched to Aldi Aldi have some really good nice Brands one of them is a a midnight Brew it's real dark and I love dark coffees they're real nice and Rich they have a lot of flavor to them and they're only I think they're less than $5 a package so they're not terribly expensive so we buy the cheapest coffee that we can we look to see when coffee's on sale and we go that Direction with it so we do buy coffee we do put some money in our budget in order to afford coffee because we love our coffee that is one of the things that hoping I really enjoy is drinking coffee when did you start retirement and what were all the steps you took in order to retire I know you have said in past videos you started later than you wanted to I in the same boat with my retirement heavy on my mind well retirement is really a big step and you do have to be prepared for it you have to have money in place in order to keep your expenses going course you've got Social Security coming in if you have a pension on top of that that really helps I happen to have a pension because I used to work for our city and I also have social security so with those two that really does help but we went to our Personnel Department while I was still working working and this was a couple years before I retired and we went over different plans with them to see what that would do to help us afford retirement we also took this question to our financial planner John Creekmore now we've mentioned John Creekmore many times on our videos and we really appreciate the input that he's given us on what we could do what we could afford and how we could do it and he set us up with some accounts that we could invest money into so we would have money that way to help supplement our income in our retirement we determined the minimum money requirements that we would need in order for me to retire and we planned it accordingly as it is I retired when I turned 65 and I was ready I mean I knew I was ready to quit working and to be home and basically I'm not retired being home because hope and I do a lot of work on this YouTube channel and on her business and I help her a little bit really she does the line's share of that but I take care of a lot of the household chores so I got of take care of making sure laundry is done dishes are done uh the vacuuming is done while hope is working on the business I try to take care of a lot of the household things for her once again I've mentioned that our situation is really not average because we have two teenagers still at home and there is seven years difference between hope and I so even though I was 65 when I retired Hope was only 58 so she's got a few more years left yet before she can collect Social Security do you ever gift hope with a money's worth gift like a birthday gift or a visa versa actually my husband gives me his gifts from his workplace and we are a couple of 36 years greetings from Israel well that's that's great to hear and it sounds like you got a good plan set up where he gives you some money based on his income from what he does for his work hope and I are not big gift givers uh I don't really uh appreciate a lot of gifts and hope doesn't either so for gifts most of the time and I would say post pretty close to 100% of the time I'll go to a thrift store and buy her something fun one of the fun things that I've bought for Hope are some lamps that are up in the living room and I try to find her something really fun that she's going to enjoy and appreciate but I don't spend a lot of money doing it one year hope went in with the boys to buy me an old 1950s shortwave radio it was a Zenith long distance radio and it was really fun gift I really enjoyed it so we just don't have to spend a lot of money on each other to enjoy the things that we give to each other I think our best investment is the time that we spend together and we try to make sure we have time together with each other and I think that's probably more important for us than gifts I would would like to know if Larry was ever daunted by the responsibility of having to be the bread winner especially as his salary was under the national median I would like to know what kept Him going and staying the course what mindset did he adopt or Implement thank you well to be honest I really wasn't daunted by the idea of being the bread winner of this family of being the only one that brought a paycheck home to support our household it was just something that I did it was just part of the whole plan of how we operated so I didn't really mind doing that it wasn't like an overwhelming thing and I don't think I was daunted because I had good secure jobs I knew that I was going to have a job to go to the next day and the next day after that so if it had been a situation where there was a possibility of getting laid off or the job wasn't too secure then that would have made it a lot more daunting certainly uh the way that I stayed focused was I just had to do it I mean there wasn't a choice I had to work and bring the money home so I just simply fell into that mold and did it I've enjoyed all the jobs that I've ever had since we've been married I've loved the people that I've worked with and really they've all been a very good experience so I would call it a overall a very good experience for me to be the one that actually brought the money into the home hope brought so much other things by her talents into the home but I always felt like in a way she was working harder than I was and actually she was in many ways because she homeschooled the kids she made sure we had all kinds of fun things to eat uh for our meals she did so many things to keep the house going while I just worked so I think we both worked equally as hard maybe hope worked just a little bit harder than me what type of kitchen refrigerator do you prefer a side by side a freezer on top top or refrigerator on top of the freezer uh well for one I prefer any refrigerator that'll keep the food cold and that's basically what we have we have two really old refrigerators one of them we brought from the old house and I don't remember when we bought it I think we bought it in the early 90s or maybe even the late 80s I I just can't remember when we bought this refrigerator but we've had it so long and we had to replace our first refrigerator was like a 1959 refrigerator and we left that behind at our first house and replaced it with the one that we now have in the basement the one upstairs is also an old refrigerator it came with this house and I have no idea how old it is but I'm guessing it to be probably 30 years old both units have the freezer on top and the refrigerator down in the bottom and that's a pretty good system because with the freezer on top some of that cold air uh wakes it makes its way down and so I like like that Arrangement the best uh better than a side by side side by sides are so big they're huge but you know what if you use a side by side and that's a good fit for you then that's fine so basically all I want in the refrigerator is something that'll keep food cold and it works are power strips an electrical loss or savings well power strips are definitely a savings item because you can shut those off and shut off a lot of that phantom power that a device will use especially if it uses a remote control uh if you have anything that uses a remote control and you plug it into a power strip you'll save money by shutting off the power to the power strip and keeping that power from being on that Appliance all the time with phantom power you can use like five to seven Watts all the time while it's not even turned on so I would say a power strip definitely saves you some money if you use it correctly what did advice do you give to a widow about buying in bulk well the first thing that I would do if I were not married is I would try to find someone to split the item with if I bought 50 pounds of something I would try to I would probably find somebody else that was single that could split that and then we could buy in bulk and save the amount of money and not have quite as much storage in our home the other thing I think I mentioned this before is i' make sure you buy things that have long storage time so if you want to buy quite a bit in bulk if you buy a 50 lb bag of beans for instance beans keep a long time and you can do some research and see how long they keep another thing that keeps a long time is white rice white rice will keep about the longest of any kind of rice so find out how long the item keeps and how how quickly do you use it we actually go through a 50 lb bag of oatmeal pretty fast because cuz we're all eating it every day so that's what I would do do a little math on it and and uh kind of consider how are you using the product to determine whether you buy that product in bulk Jette says did you get an allowance as a kid and do you give your children allowances thank you yes I got an allowance as a kid I think I started out with a nickel a week and I would go to a penny candy store and buy five pieces of Penny Candy with my allowance and then from there on it went up to I think eventually $2 a week uh until I found I got my first job when I was 15 I was 15 when I actually started working and then my parents did away with the allowance because I was making money and we do that with our kids we basically stop their allowance at the age of 16 so they can start making some money and learning the value of money it costs money to do everything that we do in in life pretty much and our kids we wanted them to know what it was to have that money and spend it and use it and how far does it go what can you do with it I think it's a great lesson for them to learn those lessons early in life so yes our kids got an allowance up to the age of 16 and then from that point on they made money somehow and that's what we did for them have you and hope always had joint bank accounts or separate and do you have any kind of credit card to earn cash or points well we have always put our bank accounts together so we are on our bank accounts together uh with everything we don't even have a credit card we have debit cards so our cards are based on money that we actually have in the bank in order to use them we're using the money that we have and that way we're not tempted to go into debt we just don't want to go into debt so that's why we don't have credit cards now if people out there have credit cards and you're saving money and you're using those for the Max and you're paying them off every month that's fine no problem with that we don't have a problem with that I just hate the idea of writing a check to the credit card company every month and paying them I'd rather that it automatically come right out of my bank and the last question that this person asked was when did your boys have their own accounts well we got bank accounts for them when they were very young I think they were like N9 and 10 years old when we first opened an account that way if somebody gave them some money as a gift they could put a portion of that money in savings and that's what they did when I was a child I had to put a certain amount of my money in savings uh if relatives gave me money I only got to keep a little bit of it to spend the bulk of it went into a savings account therefore when I got my first job I needed a car and I was able to buy a car out of the money that I had saved from my parents having done that so I really appreciated the fact that they made me save money when my friends were buying stereos and and and bicycling equipment and athletic equipment all kinds of stuff brand new and from money given to them I couldn't do that and I was grateful that I could go out and spend I think I spent about $2,000 on my first car and that was really nice to be able to do that with money that I already had in the bank Ginger asks what happened to hope I hope she is recovering well let me go over that real briefly we've mentioned this on some of the past videos and this is a terrible terrible accident that hope got into hope and I were actually editing a program we were editing a Monday night's program two weeks ago it's a little bit over two weeks now and we were finished editing it she was coming out out of the basement editing room to go and pick up her hard drive that we have to put the program on for her to upload it and she didn't see a solar panel that was leaning up against a wall her leg got caught in that and she went straight down she wasn't even able to catch herself she went down hard on her left side and she felt something snap in her arm and she broke her left arm which she's a left-handed person she broke it in three places at the top of her arm just below the shoulder so she's doing a lot better now than she was the first few days that she came home from the hospital and and I'm so grateful but she's got a long way to go this is going to take months for her to get well we hope that she's back on the channel maybe in two to three weeks probably before 3 weeks she'll be back on sitting next to me but she hasn't even been down the basement yet since the accident and I want her to take her time in getting better Tiffany asks how do you save for Big Ticket items while also paying off debt well we do that the same way we would save for small ticket items we create a budget for that item we allocate a fixed amount of money every month to go into that category and over time we save up for it it's that simple if we have debt we would consider that separate and we would probably put more effort into paying off that debt than we would to be saving up for a project it all depends on what the savings is for if it's for car upkeep we would definitely put that as an important thing to save for because you have to drive a car right so uh we would definitely uh allocate a certain amount of money in our budget toward those things track them and make sure that we had the money going into them Jennifer asks when trying to save and pay off debt how do you determine which one to prioritize well the one with the highest rate the highest rate of interest would be the most important one that's how we would prioritize those you want to pay the one off that's the most painful so that's what we would do get rid of that one first and then go to your lesser amounts we did an in-depth video about saving money in our last coffee chat and if you're interested in taking a look at that video we have a link for it right over there

Channel: Under the Median

Views: 23,756

Keywords: money saving hacks, how to save money in home budget, frugal living, frugal lifestyle, growing my savings, budgeting, frugal living tips, how to cut housing expenses and save money, how to cut expenses and save money, how to save money faster, how to save more money each month, money saving tips, how to save money, under the median, frugality, frugal tips, live on less, frugal friend, cost-cutting strategies, money-saving hacks, cutting expenses

Id: vZyfs6-0_JY

Length: 36min 18sec (2178 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024