Unconventional Ways to Save Money | Kerry Taylor | TEDxChathamKent

[Music] but my perspective changed when I move from the city ah to an organic farm in rural British Columbia with reduced income no fancy stores to shop in and no access to big city services like garbage removal my relationship and lifestyle with money changed I learned that being a little unconventional can add up to a lot of savings what I'm going to share with you guys today is not a set of rules It's A New Perspective it's a new mentality and it's definitely challenging all the conventional consumerism we seem today there are no secrets to saving money we all build wealth $1 at a time so there's no shortcuts you have to do the work but by sharing ing the financial lessons I learned while living on a Frugal Farm I want to challenge you to see Building Wealth as so much more than balancing balancing a budget and this is how you do it what do you collect so collections scare me when I see like all these Collectibles grouped together like coins or stamps I can't help it add up the cost to all that stuff so I got a little snarky one day and I posted to Twitter I said ' don't collect the whole set heck don't collect I thought this was a great money-saving tip and the response I got was huge people started sending me pictures of all their collections so I got like pictures of baseball caps and um yarn people collect yarn one woman sent me a photograph of her discombobulated doll head collection I said that's really creepy and she defriended me immediately um but yeah yeah also you know train sets so I'm looking at all these photographs and I'm like wow it made me rethink what a collection was because none of these collections had limited editions a collection is just a stash of stuff and everyone seemed to have one so I thought huh am I a collector what is it I collect so I went searching around my house for the evidence I started in the basement I went up the stairs I went through the living room in the kitchen so far so good high five I go into the bedroom I open up my closet and there it was my wacky stack a denim I own 30 pairs of blue pants now I had many reasons why I collected so many pairs of jeans I mean there's different sizes different washes different lengths different cuts I mean I love my denim I could go on forever but on the farm I only needed a couple pair this collection was put together during my city girl days my eyes were opening and then I remembered the burn back in the 1920s the burn was home to the Charming Christensen family today the burn is home to this my Relic computer collection a bunch of junk from the 1990s I mean you can just hear those almond Towers connecting to the information super highway I won't make the sound but it's expensive junk right collections are expensive the cost could be the amount you paid to buy the stuff but the cost could also be the amount you pay to store it if you don't have a Charming family Barn then maybe you need to mortgage a bigger house or rent a larger apartment or maybe just maybe you rent a facility on the offsite called storage facility and you have 24 access hour access to your stuff but yeah collections are expensive so with my eyes opened I made the vow to myself that I was going to collect dollars and not stuff but why do we collect I mean it's not like I set out to spend money on 30 pairs of blue pants right well there's a lot of reasons why we buy stuff but I think a lot of it is this impulse buying impulse buying is The Misfortune of the saver it's really easy to spend money isn't it I mean stores are set up for Savers to fail and marketers are brilliant at getting us to spend the money we didn't know we wanted to spend walk into any store and you'll see you'll walk right in you'll see a AIG you know um display of products to purchase then there's the sales and then there's the loyalty points hey are you a collector and then you go to buy your thing at the checkout and then there's checkout displays so many enticing things to purchase it adds up to a lot this is where we impulsively spend our money clothing dining out shoes books and magazines I mean the list goes on and this is how much we're spending Canadians spend 3,720 bucks per year on stuff they want but don't need it's crazy it's a lot of money and that's just one person if you're married then you're spous and you are spending close to $8,000 on impulse purchasing yeah but my Challenge on the farm wasn't to spend less money because there were no stars in town my challenge was actually looking at my trash trash can my challenge was to produce less garbage and if you aim to produce more less garbage you will save a ton of money and this is especially true in Canada because can Canadians produce more garbage than anyone else we are trashtastic we really are in 2009 um stats Canada found that the average Canadians um created about 777 kg of garbage per person per year that's amazing and a big chunk of that tasty trash used to be good enough to eat that's right we Canadians are trashing and garbag our groceries it adds up to a lot food waste cost families up to $1,800 per year that's $417 per person it's like saying food is so plentiful let's just throw it away that's food for thought but by living on a farm I saw firsthand how much effort it took to produce F food it's backbreaking labor so by knowing better I decided to do better and I kept a food waste diary I shopped with a grocery list and I did meal planning so that I was ensured to use all my ingredients before they spoiled it's really simple stuff it's not rocket science yet we're not doing it and I don't understand why because I have better use for $1800 a year you probably do too another thing I I aimed to do was reduce the amount of disposables that went into the trash can because disposables are very costly expense so the first thing I got rid of was paper towel I invested money in cloths and they're about 28 cents a piece and I've been using them for years I've saved thousands you just put them in the hot water wash done but it's true I've saved thousands of dollars by not spending my money on disposable products by being a sustainable consumer I invest in quality not in trash sustainable consumer save money the next item I got rid of was disposable diapers my daughter wasn't even two weeks old and we were going through 10 of these things a day and I was like wow I did the math and I decid and I discovered I'd have 7,000 diaper changes in my future at first I cried and then I made the commitment to use cloth diapers and since she was born from her age of potty training I've saved over $2,000 by using cloth and there's the secondhand economy that hugely supports buying used cloth diapers so I sold my whole stash for 50% at Cost try doing that with your disposable diapers E Yeah so let's let's go past sorry let's go past hygiene and cleaning products for now let's look at these guys packaged food snack food beverages I mean it all adds up I don't understand what a coffee pot is it's basically something you buy and then throw out right it's disposable I could make you a cup of coffee using Ausable filter for 61% Less proof four cups a day that's over $600 a year and that's using the exact same coffee in this coffee pod thing but these things are littering their Earth they're not designed to be recycled very few of them are so it's a real shame and if you want to save even more money then just use a coffee press a French press right avoid buying that costly machine but yeah so snack foods package products disposable items it all adds up to cost why are we throwing our money in the trash well we all like clothes right I see some people here are dressed yeah well let's talk about the clothing on our backs the average household spends $3,350 a your own clothing way to go it's a lot of money I know the problem is we're not keeping it in our closets we're trying to get rid of it we're trying to donate it and this is what it's doing to the secondhand stores they get too much of it they're bursting at the seams with the amount of used clothing they're getting they can't sell it no one wants to buy it and the reason because it's disposable Duds we're blowing our cash on trashy clothing it's it's poor fabrication it's cheaply made it falls apart after a few washes it's a real shame it doesn't need to happen but I have a solution that'll build you a better wardrobe and save you thousands of dollars over your lifetime and that's to buy 80% of your clothing used and 20% new you'll save quite a bit this is how Farmers shop this is how my father-in-law shops this is what we did on the farm farmers are frugal people they hardly buy anything new so when my daughter was born I used this rule because I wasn't about to let her lengthening limbs bankr bankrupt me I hit up the thrift store and I was like Wow score these same pair of jeans cost like25 to $35 new I'm like well she doesn't care she's just glad they're pink I like the secondhand economy so much I shop there myself everything I'm wearing today is used okay my knickers and my knackers are new but you know my shoes my dress it's all bought used and it's okay because when I went to buy them in the store they still have the tags on them so people have consum ritis they buy a ton of stuff and never use it so heck I'm going to benefit from that why not go [Laughter] me so yeah clothing disposable stuff I'm going to get a little mean now sorry I've been really nice up until now but I'm going to get mean and I'm going to tell you it's not savings unless you save it it's not so let's play a little game okay ready you see you sell for 60% off you buy a pair of jeans for 100 bucks and then I cry CU I like new jeans too how much did you save oops how much did you save see I'm not that mean how much did you save well you saved nothing right you spent 40 bucks H don't delude yourself in thinking youve saving when when you've really spent money saving is not about spending less saving is about putting money aside see it's all perspective when it comes to saving money and we need that perspective because our savings rate is abysmal we used to saved between 10 and 15% between the 70s and the '90s these days we're saving 3.6% we can do better I know you can do better let's do better I have a trick that might help the trick in the game well it's a little bit of a game it's called how much does it really cost it's a fun game to play I play this game a lot when I write articles I like to know how much things cost so when I move back from the farm to the city I noticed everyone in Toronto was wearing the same coat I was like well what's up with that it must be some mighty fine coat I'm going to go check it out so I tried it on I'm like wow it's quite the code I looked at the the um tag on it it's $700 Cod I'm like wow that's a lot of money I don't understand it you know so I wrote an article and I said hey guys can you explain to me this $700 coat is it really worth it and the debate went crazy I mean the story went everywhere it was hundreds of comments people all over Canada commented on this coat people all over the world who are aware of it commented as well and the debate went across two sides the first side was we love our coats it's Canadian made it's made of amazing fabrication you spend the money you'll have it for a long time it's worth the price the other half of the debate was not worth it you're paying for a brand you can get a comparable coat for a heck of a lot less L money and I went huh reading through the comments made me think because not one person thought of looking at the cost of the coat in terms of the hours they needed to work to earn it and that's because the true measure of cost in life is the person hours work to buy something it's a lesson I Lear learned from my father-in-law the boss who runs the farm I lived on for him and his current he looked at how much cattle he needed to sell to buy something perspective is everything in Farmer current currency you could buy two puffy parkas for one calf or you could buy 88 you could buy one puffy Parker with 88 bales of hay now I don't know have you guys ever lifted a bail of hay it's really heavy work um by the way dog's not included in the price I'm keeping my dog but I know farmer Curren is a little bit you know unconventional it's a little bit different you know most of us earn cash for living so let's look at Cash let's say you make 60 Grand a year go you but you don't get to keep all of it the government takes a chunk so you bring home $48,000 go government you work 40 hours a week so your rate is 23 hours of work sorry $23 per hour of work see I stumble on it I can't believe how much little we earn for work it's so sad it's the government's fault right but it's like my goodness so how many hours do you have to work in order to earn a puffy parka right let's look at this any guesses I'll just tell you 30 hours of work seems like a lot for someone else that might be a little bit of work it depends right is a puffy Perka worth 30 hours of work that's up for you to decide it's it's your money I'm not going to tell you how to spend it but it's changing the perspective of how you see money but how you see your currency and it's about choosing where you're spending your money and where you're not so there you go hours worked now don't feel bad if you don't have a puffy Perka or if you don't have 88 bills of hay it's heavy right you don't want to carry it with you to the to the conference because it's really not about how much you make it's about how much you don't spend right some people earn a lot and blow it all some people earn modest amounts and save a lot it's about perspective it's about lifestyle choices there's a lot more to saving money than just balancing a budget and you don't need to move to a rural Farm to see the savings you know by changing your perspective by looking at how you spend your money and by choosing to invest your currency by buying items that aren't disposable because no one wants to throw out their cash then you too can see the savings so by embracing a few unconventional ways to save both your financial bottom lines and our environmental bottom lines will be so much wealthier thank [Applause] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 399,163

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Canada, Life, Behavorial economics, Benefit, Change, Decision making, Family, Finance, Goal-setting, Investment, Life Hack, Self improvement, Shopping

Id: aV2jIr51TUc

Length: 17min 46sec (1066 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2015