Unusual Small Habits Which Keep You from Saving Money

when it comes to making progress on your money goals it could be the small things that are keeping you [Music] stuck well it's mid-February are your New Year's resolutions still looking good or is the bloom off the rose are they no longer looking fresh new and exciting there may be some small habits that are keeping you from making the progress that you really want to make on your financial goals we'll talk about them and give you super easy hot to turn them into positive changes they are game changers in the money-saving game if you don't know us I'm Larry and I'm hope and we're from under the median where every week we bring you videos on practical frugality the first small habit is Mindless spending spending without intentionality how many times a week do you find yourself just scrolling through websites just sort of seeing what's there what's new what's on sale what's for sale oftentimes you find yourself doing this when you subscribed to email lists and they're sending you an an email several times a week letting you know what they have available to buy one way to change this habit is to Simply tell yourself I'm not going to these websites you could unsubscribe to the email newsletter list or you could give yourself a time limit you could tell yourself I'm not going to the website unless I have something very specific that I'm looking for it's akin to going to the grocery store with a written list and sticking to the list take that analogy and sort of apply it to those websites that you're scrolling on and I think that'll help often times we do what hope termed mindless spending when we're bored or retired or maybe we're just lonely we want a friend we want uh something special to come in the mail to kind of fill a gap but these aren't really good reasons for spending money you want to make sure that you're planning on what you're going to spend and how you're going to use that money another way to avoid this habit of mindless spending is to always be prepared to ask yourself a series of questions before you hit the big red buy button you need to ask yourself do I need this item do I need it now is this something that I could buy in the used Market is it something that I could borrow from friends or family it's something you're not even going to use that often and is this something that is really worth the money that I'm willing to spend on it can I get it less expensively else elere once you take the time to ask yourself that series of questions often times you'll find that the answer is nope I really don't need this one way to combat this habit is to allow yourself a 24 to 48 hour waiting period before you actually push the buy button that way you've had some time to really think about it look at the item look at what you already have in your house and say is this really going to benefit me do I really need it have I planned the purchase is it in my budget you know you can ask all those questions and that will probably weed out any desire to purchase that item another reason you may find yourself stuck in reaching your financial goals this is an unusual one and that is that you are ignoring your own inner discomfort there's something we call the little man how do I know because my little man tells me you can call it your conscience you can call it God you can call it whatever you want that is inside of you that is saying I'm just not really comfortable with this once you start ignoring those inner signals and you override them it becomes increasingly easy to spend the money without thinking about it that discomfort is often what we call a cant to likee a self-preservation thing it's like a fight or flight response it's something that's letting you know you need to stop and you need to think about this before you make this financial move we're getting ready to move on to the next small habit but if you're like in this video and you're enjoying the content hit the like button and if you haven't subscribed to our Channel and you're interested in budgeting and handling your money in a very healthy way hit the Subscribe button another little habit that might be costing you some money is not doing the math on what you're purchasing I remember when we bought our first house we had to take out a 15year loan and I sat down with my calculator and I multiplied out all of the monthly payments by 15 years first I multiplied them by 12 and then by 15 and I came up with an amount that just shocked me I couldn't believe how much we were going to end up paying for that house at the end of 15 years it's the same for a car you're going to go and buy a car you're going to talk the salesman down in price you're going to really work hard to get a good price but then a lot of people will take out a loan and end up paying not only that amount of money back but even more so if you do the math and very carefully calculate how much is this service or this item really costing me in the long run you might change your mind on making that purchase here's the other thing with that car loan cars are depreciating in value every single month cars rarely appreciate in value unless you've got something incredibly rare it is not appreciating in value it is depreciating in value so while you're paying it off it is worth less and less and less every single month here's another example and we always tell people do the math whatever you are paying for a monthly payment on on a service that you're getting let's say for instance Netflix yeah multiply that amount by 12 once you multiply it by 12 you can see more accurately the impact that that purchase is having on your yearly budget let's give you a couple of more examples the the average cable Bill let's say it's about $100 multiply that by 12 that's $1,200 every single year to have cable coming into your home isn't that amazing just to watch TV another service that we often don't think about is our phone service and a lot of people will pay over $100 a month for their plan on most of the major companies a great way to reduce that bill is to switch to mmobile and mmobile is our partner for this video let me ask you a question really how hard is it to switch your cell phone service it is not nearly as difficult as big Wireless would lead you to believe Larry and I have been with mitt mobile for well over a year it took us 15 minutes to switch from our previous cell phone service to Mt mobile we used an eim card which I think most phones have available today on them but if you don't have an esm capability no worries our sons didn't either when they switched to mmobile they had mmob mobile send them a free SIM card in the mail the point is Larry and I were able to switch to phone service with mmobile sitting in our living room sitting on the couch sipping coffee of course it was super easy and yes we did get to keep our old numbers but the best part is in addition to paying $15 a month for our service with mmobile we also get to take advantage of men's 5G Network which is the largest in the nation we get unlimited talk and text and we also get mobile hotspot every month which we absolutely love and we use every single month here's the deal guys big Wireless want you to believe that they are the only option but they are not more information on mmobile it's available scan that QR code which is right between us there on the screen you'll want to use our very special link it's right down there at the bottom of the screen it's mmo.it and it's also linked in our description of this video stop stop paying more than you have to for your cell phone bill every month M mobile check them out the fourth thing that you might be doing is not setting clear goals for your savings plans if you don't have an exact specific goal set your savings kind of goes up and down and it it kind of wanders around like somebody out wandering around somewhere without a map they don't really know where they're going but if you set a real clear definitive goal then you're going to have more motivation to stick to that goal and to maintain your savings you know what you call money that's sitting in your savings account without like something attached to it we call that spending money don't we let's just be honest if money is there and you're like I don't know I don't think there's any real reason to have that money there you are going to spend that money we call it the Big Green pile of cash syndrome and we too have fallen into it one of the ways to get away from that is to have as Larry said specific written goals we love quarterly goals every quarter we pick three or four areas of our budget that we were really honing in on and trying to save money in after you write those goals down every quarter you want to have three to five what we call action steps underneath of that goal these are the simple habits that you're going to adopt for the next three months that are going to help you reach that specific goal now in addition to quarterly goals we have monthly goals we also have weekly goals we call our big three and just in case you're wondering no none of this takes a great deal of time to set up I'd say less than 30 minutes a month to do the whole thing and it takes us about 10 minutes every week to look at each other and say what do you think our big three goals should be this week writing goals down printing them out putting them in front of you tracking your progress that my friend is the recipe for Success when it comes to getting unstuck specifically from your financial goals and feeling like you're just not making any progress another thing you can do too to kind of help you solidify that goal is attach a so that statement onto it I'm saving up money for our emergency fund so that I don't lose sleep and worry about something going wrong with my car or with my house or with anything the so that statement gives it a little bit more of a punch and kind of a like an exclamation mark uh it definitely gives it more purpose so that you'll tend to stay with that goal if you're one of those people who's feeling stuck and you're like I don't even know where to begin saving more money in my budget I wrote an ebook just for you it's 10 ways to radically reduce your expenses it's all the major ways that we saved money when we were saving for great big financial goals that ebook is free there'll be a link to it in the description of this video habit number five Larry may or may not have fallen into this one a time or two I haven't fallen into it too much since I've been retired uh vending machine spending you're you're at work you're taking a break you walk out into the break room there's three or four vending machines presenting you with all kinds of opportunities to spend money now vending machines aren't as cheap as they used to be I last time I worked a candy bar was about $145 and sodas were about a125 so they do cost more than they used to when I was much younger a vending machine purchase can cost you a lot of money over time so if you add up every week how much you spent on that vending machine you're going to be very surprised now multiply that by 52 and get the yearly amount that you spent in the vending machine and I think you'll be shock and how much you could have used that money for something else here's one thing you can do to kind of help you out with that go to the store and buy yourself something to snack on that you like let's say some corn chip tortillas or something or potato chips buy a bag of those and then put those in Ziploc bags one bag per day that you can munch on it'll be a lot cheaper and it will save you money in the long run of spending a huge amount in those vending machines it's like your own vending machine only without the quarters this will cost you substantially less small habit number six which may be keeping you stuck and that is ignoring small expenses this is one thing Larry and I have been surprised at over the years that when we began to add up all the little bitty things we were spending money on and just sort of going oh it's a dollar here it's $2 there it's no big deal doesn't seem like much it added up to a lot more money than we thought and it added up pretty quickly I tell you when I first realized that small amounts of money were really adding up on us and that's we would go to garage sales every week and we would spend anywhere from let's say 10 to maybe even $25 at a garage sale buying things that we were getting a good deal on I mean we were getting some nice things for a cheap price but when you add that kind of money up every month and then every year it's a a lot of money we finally just quit going to garage sales altogether we just said we're going to stop doing this because it's costing us too much money you know when we did that the year that we stopped going to garage sales was when we had a big Financial goal and we were like let's just try not going to garage sales and we allowed ourselves two garage sales that year and they were both subdivision sales and we made certain when we went that we had a specific amount of money we were willing to spend throughout the entire day once that money was gone it was gone the other thing about garage sales and I I would really challenge you to think about this the items that you're buying at garage sales are these really things that you need often times we would find ourselves buying something we had we just liked it we had no idea where it was going to go in the house we didn't have a plan we didn't have a purpose for it we were just buying it and part of that goes back to almost that same thing of the Mindless scrolling and buying things online you can do the same thing in person at garage sales you're just oh it's a Saturday we're a couple of hours it's like window shopping only you're spending quarters instead of a whole bunch of dollars but it really does add up yeah for Hope and I I think it was just kind of a fun outing and what we did was we changed that to just going for walks when we weren't headed for a garage sale and we saved a lot of money by not going to those we also once again just like shopping at the grocery store we had a list yeah now you're not going to may be able to fulfill that list at a garage sale but we knew speciic specific items that we were deliberately looking for most of the time you're not going to walk into a garage s and go look at everything on my list is that this garage sale that simply isn't going to happen but just having a list helped us remember the purpose of garage sailing is not to mindlessly spend money right another item that it's real easy to fall into that can cause you to spend money is accepting the status quo most Americans don't budget their money this tightly they don't plan most of it is just a lack of planning I think and they don't really uh look out over a long period into the future to see where their money is going to go where it's going to end up what they're going to end up purchasing the status quo is not a good thing to fall into because so many the in America especially they just spend money ruthlessly they're not really thinking about what they're doing if you get out of the status quo you'll be able to save more money I what is it Dave Ramsey says don't be average average is broke and that's true it's absolutely true just because things have been that way doesn't mean they need to stay that way there is almost something comforting and familiar with the status quoe but if you really want to save money you're going to have to walk away from this status quo and say I don't care what my past was my present and my future is going to be somebody who spends money mindfully has specific financial goals and knows where they're at on reaching those financial goals if you'll do that then it will be tremendously helpful for you to make forward progress now if you are ready to take this money-saving game to the next level we gave you our formula for saving money and we did it in a video that video is right over there

Channel: Under the Median

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Keywords: bad money habits, money habits to break, money habits, personal finance tips, personal finance advice, poor vs rich habits, money tips, habits that keep you poor, nischa, dont do this with your money, dave ramsey, dont do this with money, grow your money, money habits of millionaires, money habits of wealthy people, budgeting tips, Money habits for 2024, frugal, frugality, frugal living, frugal living hacks, frgal tips, under the median

Id: 3Kptgf1BBH0

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 27 2024