Speaker 0 00:00:02 <inaudible>
Speaker 1 00:00:08 What's up, everyone. Welcome to the finance for physicians podcast. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. Join me as we dig into what it looks like for physicians to begin using their finances as a tool to live better lives. You can learn more about our
[email protected] let's. Jump into today's episode. What's up guys, hope you're somewhere warm. Listen to this. It's pretty cold and crazy where we are. It's been especially lately, very cold nicey a in my neck of the woods. So I've got Jeff today with me, Jeff. What's up, man.
Speaker 2 00:00:37 Hey Daniel, it's good to be back on the podcast. I think we have it a little, even better in the North than they do down in Texas. Uh, right. Really not used to winter there. Uh, fair enough. You know.
Speaker 1 00:00:47 Yeah, yeah. I guess we should be thankful we have power. So that's definitely something to be thankful for. It is called, but we have powers. So, so we're going to be talking about lifestyle creep. Uh, shout out to our buddy Tyler. He brought up the topic and thought it would be a good one to dig into. And I love the topic. It's always a fun one to talk about. We're going to be talking about, you know, how to avoid lifestyle creep, kind of talk through what it is and kind of strategies to potentially, you know, avoid having it happen. So maybe a good starting point would be to kind of talk about exactly what it is. Um, what's going on. Maybe, maybe kind of define what that looks like. So Jeff what's, um, uh, my favorite is to look at prior experiences. Cause I think everyone has suffered from lifestyle to some extent.
Speaker 1 00:01:32 So I like to look at like going from college to, you know, in the workforce and somewhere along the way, all of a sudden I got used to spending my full income. I was in college living on like ramen noodles and $700 a month or something really low. And somehow along the way, I just woke up and I was spending my full salary early on in my career and like what in the world happened? Uh, so that's kind of a classic definition in my experience of, of lifestyle creep. It just kind of snuck up on me and all of a sudden I had adjusted to this new, uh, income I have. Um, so Jeff, your thoughts on that? Have you had experiences with it? What's it look like man?
Speaker 2 00:02:11 $700 a month in college now that sounds like live large
Speaker 1 00:02:15 College. It was, but um, you know, I had to eat off, so that's a lot of pizza. Right, right. Pizza. And I had to take my girlfriends out on dates and you know, that, that kind of stuff adds up. Right.
Speaker 2 00:02:26 Oh, there you go. See, you were popular and had a girlfriend. Okay. Anyway, lucky guy. But so yeah, those, those transitions though are kind of tricky sometimes aren't they, where you go from living at one kind of income level, whether that's that college level or, or some other, you know, income pay stub, uh, area you're at. Um, and then, you know, you get your degree and all of a sudden you're making big bucks. Maybe you're going from that $700 a month lifestyle to all of a sudden, Oh, what about a, a minimum wage job like that? Or you get, you know, you get out of, out of school and you have a place that you want to be, you know, you want to be living and, you know, you start to take on more obligations like, uh, so you, maybe you get used to having a new apartment that you want to live at. You want to splurge a little bit more and, um, just kind of take some of the, the, what do you call it? You know, take some of the,
Speaker 1 00:03:18 Keep up with the Jones Jones
Speaker 2 00:03:20 Is, yeah. You want to, you want to keep up with the Joneses or just, you know, loosen up a little bit on the budget as you've been, you know, you've been tough on the rain loosen up and, and so you get used to that. Right. And so kind of this, those transitions where you take on new obligations that maybe you weren't thinking about beforehand and, and you get used to them, right.
Speaker 1 00:03:40 And it's like the collective of a ton of little decisions. That's the other thing I think people are like, how in the world did I start spending all this income? And I've seen it happen like a bajillion times, you know, in our planning business, we work with clients and get to see their finances and it happens over and over and over again, we see it almost like in little instances in almost every meeting, for example, somebody's got a say, you're in training and you got a pay raise and you know, maybe it was two or 3000 a year pay raise, which is maybe a few hundred dollars a month. And a lot of times we're the ones that remind them that they got a pay raise and they're like, Oh yeah, I didn't, I didn't even realize that. I never noticed it. So that's kind of a small little symptom of it happening. But I think what happens is there's just a million, little tiny decisions and maybe some medium decisions and that add up to kind of collectively cause your lifestyle to go up. And if you're not, it's just kind of the daily flow of things tends to gravitate you towards spending decision. That's kind of the natural, uh, for the average person, it's going to be like those little tiny decisions they're going to kind of lean towards five things or spend more.
Speaker 2 00:04:46 Yeah. And I think, you know, even looking back over the last couple of months for me, it was a, so we had Hulu, that was our big entertainment. I was hula. So a monthly subscription. And then all of a sudden Disney plus comes out, watch the mandolin. Everybody have, everybody was getting in. I mean, yeah. And so, you know, it had another $5 there now. Oh, college football's back. So now I want to go to live sports and, and you just keep adding to it. And, and then, you know, well now that the college football season's over and unfortunately my favorite team got destroyed. Like most teams do, you know, it was tied to look at, Oh, Oh, I, you know, I can cut back on this now, but I'm so used to having this in my life that, you know, it seems normal at this point that, that we've added that those are little things that add up.
Speaker 2 00:05:33 But I think the way you kind of one way to look at that as a concept of hedonic adaptation, right. Where we do enjoy, like we want to see kind of progress in our lives. We're adding these little pleasures, little fun things, but it's more painful when you start to take them away, right. Where you get used to it. And so when you take that away, it hurts. And, um, I don't know about you, but I try to avoid pain. I think that's probably normal that we want to avoid pain, but I think even, um, so I dunno, have you ever gotten into the, these studies of people that have a choice between a, a sure loss that's, you know, maybe $50, that's a share loss or a 50% chance of a hundred dollar loss and statistically speaking, those are, those are completely even, but the idea of losing more of the a hundred dollar loss, much more painful than a guaranteed $50
Speaker 1 00:06:28 Lost. Yeah. People definitely don't like paying, they like comfort. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:06:31 Uh, and so, I mean, that's probably good. Right. You know, when I'm, when I'm around the house with my kids, I want them to dislike pain because, you know, if they are learning something, it's a natural reaction, you know, the stove is hot. And so if they touch it, we want them to not like the pain, because it gets them away from things that are dangerous. But at the same time, as we add new things to our life, taking those away, the idea of getting rid of those is painful too. It's not, it's not a hot touch type pain, but it hurts more to get rid of something than it did to cost to add it to your life. If that makes sense from a, from an emotional standpoint.
Speaker 1 00:07:08 So, right. So it's much easier to add comfortable things than to take away comfortable things, uh, the pain you steer clear of typically. Um, I think the other thing was that a concept, the hedonic adaptation, um, is that when, once you get like the kind of quick hit, uh, comfortable thing, like you spend a little more on something or you get the Hulu or whatever, uh, then like the, um, some sort of chemical gets released, you know, the endorphins, I don't know what the chemical is, but there's a positive feeling, you know, and then that kind of goes away quickly in that, like, you don't actually feel it anymore. And it kind of blends in it, flattens out and blends in with kind of the normal, uh, quickly. And then you need kind of another hit. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:07:53 That plays into it too. Doesn't it? Because you do get that pleasure from adding something new right away. But as you get used to it, it doesn't have the same effect.
Speaker 1 00:08:01 Right. So it's definitely, it's very, um, it can be subconscious. It's a sneaky little thing that kind of happens to pretty much everyone is susceptible to some extent, why is it so dangerous or where is it? Is it, is it the most dangerous? I think number one is lack of awareness. I mean, in general, lack of awareness is problematic. Kind of leads you to a path of uncertainty and unknown, and you kind of gravitate towards the not spending all your money and not knowing why and that sort of thing, but, but is that bad? I mean, I think it is the awareness part because if somebody says, I want to spend all my money, you know, I want to live up to, I want to spend every bit of my take on pay. That's all good. Like do it, you know,
Speaker 2 00:08:45 I think back to your question, why is it so dangerous? I think it's even just in that idea of the word creep, right? That wasn't something that came about all of a sudden, like you didn't see it coming,
Speaker 1 00:08:56 But it's something that has kind of snuck up on you. And now all of a sudden you're stuck at this lifestyle that, that you didn't necessarily intentionally get to. And so that awareness that you talk about is huge. Yeah. The problems happen when you say, you know, I want to be doing XYZ, like saving for my kid's college or going on more vacations or whatever, save for retirement, or, um, that's pay off a debt, that kind of thing. So I want to do that, but I just don't know where all my money's going. There's not really any leftover at the end of the month. That's where the problem happens is when you have crept into lifestyle creep, crept into this position where there's a conflict, like you're not doing, you're not living out your values because if you look at it and you're like, well, uh, I'm doing exactly what I want to do. That's not a problem. Like, you know, maybe your lifestyle went up, but like, you're good with it. So the problem is when you're, you're, uh, in conflict with where you want to be, and usually it happens, I think it always happens because of that lack of awareness and just kind of rolling with the flow thing. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:10:03 Yeah. You know, even, I think it was a couple of months ago, we even talked about trading money to get happiness too. And so this is almost the opposite of that, right. We want to be intentional about what we spend money on. And so just being aware, um, makes a difference because if, if that lifestyle creeps up on you, you know, it, it's not living on purpose, it's not living because of your values. I mean, it's possible you could accidentally be spending on the things that you've heard, but yeah. I don't know if you see that. I don't think I see that it's usually, you know, the things that we once saw is something that we wanted all of a sudden turned into things that we feel like we need to have at this point.
Speaker 1 00:10:43 So yeah, it's the symptoms of the lifestyle creep are like, I don't know where all my money's going. I'm spending on all these little things. I just, I never, I don't feel like I live outside my means, but I am, or I don't have enough money to do whatever. I mean, that's, that's typically the symptoms of it is. And it's typically, you know, a bunch of little stuff, maybe a few big things sprinkled in, like I was saying, but it's, it's like you were saying, it's very, I don't think I've ever come across somebody that was like, I just coincidentally happened to get in this ideal position by not being, um, so who are the most prone people? I think, I think there are people that are more prone to this than others, but, you know, anybody is prone to it. So I was in, I was given an example of in college and, and transitioning into working.
Speaker 1 00:11:25 And that's kind of when I had it happen, probably the most in that situation, it was just new to me. I think that was my big risk factor, I guess, is I had never done money before really. Like, it was just, you know, I had never done more than just a few hundred a month. And so it was new to me. And so I was getting used to it. And that was kind of, kind of what, what I think, what triggered it. It's hard to tell that's the thing it's very difficult to self diagnose. Another big one I would say is busy. If you're really, really busy, maybe you're aware you're, you know, it's kind of something, but you just are so busy. What other kind of, uh, situations Jeff, can you think of that would be like potential, uh, for her higher potential for this kind of thing. Now
Speaker 2 00:12:06 I think one thing you mentioned is that it really is impactful and it happens to pretty much everybody. It's just kind of the scale that it happens. I think that makes a difference sometimes. Like so many of us go through different transitions in life. You know, you mentioned a very common one of going from, you know, living the college lifestyle to having your first job, um, a steady paycheck, maybe in a little bit freer living. And I think we see that in the people we work with really amplified because they tend to go from an average household income to a well above average income. And so you go from managing, you know, kind of the equivalent of a, of, uh, of the, the college lifestyle or living like a resident, you know, as we, we say, you know, um, to all of a sudden now having, you know, significantly more disposable income to spend. And so that's a, you know, who the people we talk to day in and day out physicians are, aren't a classic example of, of where this was a danger, but then like you said, busy too, which we were talking to physicians. And so people that are making an income change and are busy, those are two key factors there
Speaker 1 00:13:16 And buying a house and selling a house and getting the kids settled in school, like transition into practice is a good example of big time risk, a phase where you can kind of slip up on it. There's just a ton of stuff going on all over.
Speaker 2 00:13:29 Yeah. So any time that you are so busy that you, you know, there are things, you know, need to happen and you start to pay for those even, uh, even, especially when it's not intentional, you know, that's, that's an area of risk where, where that creep really comes into play.
Speaker 1 00:13:45 Yeah. I've seen it happen a lot of times. That's where some of the bigger decisions happen is that transition into practice. It's like, it's like, uh, I needed to sell my house and I needed to buy a house. The house is kind of a biggie. Uh, and so I just kind of rushed through that because there was this timing thing, but you don't really have to rush through it. Nobody's saying like, you are forced to, you may feel like you are, but you really can like rent a house. That's kind of a, uh, if you take a step back and you're like, okay, let's maybe we could spread this craziness out a little bit potentially. So just being aware of that kind of risky phase of life, I think, um, can potentially help. I also think people, uh, that are kinda, that tend to be spenders.
Speaker 1 00:14:26 We work with a lot of different types of people. And I think we work with people sometimes that are spinners that don't realize they're spenders, that's dangerous. There's also people that are spenders and realize there's vendors. So that's that we can work with that. That's, that's a much better position. And so if you, uh, are a spender and you know, you're a spender, um, you can kind of be kind of keep that in mind and know that that's kind of a higher risk factor for this type of type of thing. Yeah. Jeff, you got any suggestions for the people that are spenders that don't know their spenders,
Speaker 2 00:14:55 Man. Is there any hope for spenders that doesn't know they're a spender listen to someone else. Yeah. Yeah. I think number one, you know, being able to do things that are either guided, like by somebody else or another expert that you can work with, um, a shameless plug there. Right? I mean, we do that, but along with that comes, what can we automate to make sure that things happen without us thinking about it so that at least the high priorities are taken care of, but then how about those other decisions? How do we, how can we actually be more intentional or more aware of these decisions?
Speaker 1 00:15:30 Yeah. That's especially the day-to-day little stuff. Um, I think that's probably the hardest for a lot of people. I always advocate having some sort of a, it doesn't have to be like intense and I'm going to say the budget B word budget. Um, well now, I mean, you don't need to count every single penny and I'm not talking about like cash envelopes. I'm just talking about like some, like, sort of just, if it's maybe just a five minute kind of quick check temperature, check on what you're spending or how you're spending. I always advocate that kind of as a baby step towards awareness and it can kind of help it's it's I think a step in the right direction, if it's, especially, if you feel like you're kind of suffering from, uh, not, not being aware. I have a kind of a system that I, I use personally in a lot of our clients use where it's basically just essentially all you're doing is checking your cash balances once a month at the same time of the month.
Speaker 1 00:16:29 And that way you can kind of start to see trends, like if your cash is going down, um, it's a, it's an indication that you're obviously spending more than you're taking in, or if it's going up, you're spending less. But I think more importantly, it gets you in that routine of like a monthly temperature check. And when I do it with my own finances, it prompts me to, especially if it's not going the right direction, I'm going to be like, huh, I wonder what's happening. Maybe there's an issue here and start to peel back the layers, but there's a lot of ways to kind of check the temperature. Jeff, do you have any suggestions for kind of increasing that awareness?
Speaker 2 00:17:08 I was actually hoping. Could you tell us just real quick, how you do that system? Because I love it when I see you do that system, it's one of the quickest ways to do things, um, and have a, have a blood pressure check on your finances, because like you mentioned that budget where it is scary and I don't want to do a budget, but if I can do things once a month in a couple of minutes, I'm all for that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:17:30 I'll do it real quick. I'll pull it up while I'm talking. Yeah, I don't, I don't particularly enjoy budgeting. I definitely the part about budgeting that fries means like writing the same fixed expense down every month. I mean, that feels nutty to me. I'm like, why am I going to write something like gas? I'm like, it doesn't change. I'm not going to probably not going to do anything about that dramatically and, or, or even a mortgage payment is even more fixed or something like that. So it's just kind of a frustrating thing. It feels very in the weeds. And so it's oftentimes feels unnecessarily time consuming. So basically my system that I use is meant to be like as high level as possible kind of quick check. So what I do is once a month, I do it at the literally in the first of the month.
Speaker 1 00:18:16 So on the first of the month, I basically write down the prior month ending cash balance or essentially the cash balances as of the start of the month, which is the same as the ending balance as the prior month. So I'm, timestamping my cash balance of all my cash accounts as of that point in time at the very start of the month. And I've already been doing that for prior months. So now I have this running tally of exactly the cash balance I am starting every month with. And so what I can do is add in quickly, like how much money came into my accounts and then back into what had to have come out of my account. And so at that point, I now have the starting cash balance, how much came into my accounts, and then I back into how much came out and then I have the ending balance.
Speaker 1 00:19:05 So it's really only four numbers, but I know what that outflow number kind of tends to be. And it it's enough for me to kind of get an idea of how the month went. Uh, and it takes me five minutes. So it's, um, the temptation for me, I like to kind of dig in a little bit, like I don't like to get too much into the weeds, but I do kind of pick at things. So I, my temptation is to kind of make it a little more complicated, but what I would encourage, if you did want to try a system like that, once when you're in the building, the habit kind of phase of things resist the temptation to make it too complicated. You want to make it super easy while you're kind of developing the habit of whatever it is, uh, until you get the habit going, especially because if you make it too complicated, you know, you spend an hour or two, one month, you're gonna be like, ah, I don't want to, or I don't have the time for it this month.
Speaker 1 00:19:54 The other big thing about it, we could go on for hours about this. This is a, could be a tangent, but I think it's critical to involve if you're married your spouse, because what happens is I'm the one that kind of does this monthly check typically for our family. And so it can be, you have to be careful because it can become the finger-pointing session. So I do the numbers and I'm like, Ooh, they're not looking very good. And so I go home that day from work and I'm like, Alison we're spending too much money. And she's like, she feels like I'm accusing her of spending too much money. And, and even if I try to use good tone and everything, and it can become, we spiral to a bad place. So you have to be intentional about introducing it to your spouse, especially if you're the spouse that takes care of it.
Speaker 1 00:20:39 You want to kind of make it a team effort and it's our money. And you know, we're going to look at this together and, uh, identify any areas that we need to work on. And, uh, even switch like we've switched before my spouse has started taking it over for a few months. Maybe she might've done it for a couple of years and then flipped it back over to me. And that, that was helpful. So, but cause if one spouse has it down and the other spouse is not aware that it has to be a team effort at that point,
Speaker 2 00:21:06 My wife, Mindy, if you're listening to this, thank you for being a great spouse. Yeah. Yeah. But just talking over basically any kind of new purchase or something we're talking about adding is a great way to make sure I'm being intentional about spending. Because me personally, I am naturally not a Spaniard spender. And so I, but when I do start to spend, so, you know, this probably resonates with a lot of people with home projects. So we did one home project, we added it, we replaced windows and I loved it. And, and now I'm like, Oh, so now let's do the back porch and make it an all weather room. And then what about the kitchen and me? And she kind of reigns me in, once I start spending, I am ready to open the pocket book and just keep doing things. Um, and she, she is great at helping me look at these ideas and say, Jeff, do we really do we really need to do yeah.
Speaker 2 00:22:03 Bringing up, Oh, you know, just even looking at the alternatives and saying, all right, these other options might be harder. Or maybe, you know, not as easy, it's always easy just to spend on something new, as long as there's money or credit available, but to look at the other options and say, what are the positive things out of maybe doing this project ourselves or, uh, you know, waiting or just not spending on something. Because sometimes I look at not doing some of these spending decisions as a, as a painful thing to, or I'm used to doing something. But when I start, start to look at it in a positive light, what are the good things that come out of this? You know, it makes it easier to say no to some of those, uh, spending decisions.
Speaker 1 00:22:43 Yeah. So your, your spouse is, can be a big time benefit. Cause you, you get that added accountability and you're kind of functioning as a team, but you have to be a team like you can't just be driving the ship completely. And, um, you definitely have to involve them. One of the things we will do every so often as part of a supplement to that system, I was talking about like when our lifestyle kind of starts to creep, I see it pretty quick because I check it every month. Uh, I don't check the details. I just see the total. But if the total is creeping, I can tell. And so what I will do if it's happened for like a couple months in a row, that's when I'll dig into the weeds. And so basically I just look at the month, the one month and kind of summarize or, uh, figure out all the expenses for the, just that one month.
Speaker 1 00:23:29 And then that's when my wife and I talk through it and we're like, okay, what's where we got in a little loose on what's what's happening? What do we want to change? What's not in alignment with what our goals, our values are. And then we just hit make a hit list of stuff we're going to work basically that way. It's not overwhelming. It's not just like, because when you're what happens is you're like, Oh, I need to, my lifestyle's crept and now what do I do? It's so it's like overwhelming to think, I just need to cut spending. It's also difficult. You're like, I don't even know what to cut. And so you kind of have to take baby steps. I think at least that's helped for us. It's like very difficult to just, nobody's like, man, I'm throwing away money every month or very few people say that. And so you have to kind of that's when you do have to get into the weeds a little bit, I guess, or it helps. And then that you had mentioned Jeff having kind of a, a point where you check in with your spouse, like on, uh, on bigger purchases, especially a lot of people do it for a certain dollar amount. So that's when just kind of an accountability check to say, Hey, let's talk about this thing when it's over $5 or
Speaker 2 00:24:35 Whatever. Yeah. My wife told me a long time ago that anything over 20, we can talk about that. Yeah. That's a little low. That's what I told her, but you know, maybe you're right though. Yeah. But yeah, just having kind of that, whatever that line in the sand is, you know, if, if your money is really flying out the window, probably a lower limit to talk about things is a good place to go, you know, figure out what that point is for you personally. Or you need to talk about different purchases or if there's a category that goes on, um, you know, for us during pandemic life, it's been, Amazon has gone way up. Right. Right. Things are being delivered all the time. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:25:11 Yep. It's a, it's a challenging time. So as we start to wrap up, I think the last thing I wanted to kind of get into is, uh, what, what sort of things potentially might get in the way of us? Um, gaining awareness? I think the key is awareness. We've talked about lifestyle creep is kind of the by definition is lack of awareness of your lifestyle and it creeps up. So the key is to gain awareness. And so what are some of the things we can look out for and how do we start to navigate those and then take action. I think the first one that comes to mind for me is maybe you have some underlying financial issues, like, um, like a big credit, uh, credit card debt or something that you just don't even want to face. So you've kind of buried your head in the sand type approach. That's natural in that situation, if you're like, I'm not even gonna pay attention.
Speaker 2 00:26:00 Yeah. I think, and another, another one that I would think of is just the once you're, it's a lot easier to do this and be intentional before you start spending money. Right. And so if you're already at the point where you're examining some of this stuff, it does, it just takes work to actually go back and say, what are my highest priorities and how do I intentionally align my findings with that? It's a lot more comfortable to just keep the status quo going than to, um, it's rewarding, I think to examine life and decide what your highest priorities are, but it's work and it, you gotta make time. And like you said, even the same idea you have, uh, maybe you're avoiding just facing the issue of a debt. You know, sometimes a deep is tough. You know, it's something that you want to avoid too. You might come out better in the end, but by having good discussions on values and aligning. But, but it's also something that if you haven't done a lot of maybe seems like a painful task to avoid, right.
Speaker 1 00:26:57 Even with the credit card debt, it's like, once you, you have to get over that hump of like, it's there, I'm going to deal with it. You know? So if there's an underlying issue, sometimes you, you gotta get to a point where you're ready to tackle that. And the means to getting there is to gain greater awareness of your, you know, month to month lifestyle. Some people have another issue that can come up is some people just have kind of like a bad relationship with money, or they have some deeper issues with money that I think need to kind of be dealt with. And that's, that's where counseling or financial therapist, uh, can, can be helpful that we, we talk with a financial therapist and, uh, one of the earlier episodes, um, the third episode, but those types of people that that's what they do is they peel back the layers. That's typically something that when things are not adding up, when it's like illogical, when you're like, I can't explain what's going on here, I've done what I need to do. I'm taking, I'm taking the steps. I've dedicated the time I'm working, the systems I'm doing what I need to do. It's just not adding up a lot of times. That's what the, there's some underlying issues that can, can be causing problems,
Speaker 2 00:28:04 Especially maybe see that with, with family history, maybe how you grew up with money,
Speaker 1 00:28:09 It's usually your childhood. It all comes back to childhood. It does. It really does. I mean, and that's how it is for most people. So it's like, you're maybe
Speaker 2 00:28:19 Habits that you learned in childhood. They become like subconscious and they're causing problems. Uh, you're just, you're like, I don't even know where it's coming from. Uh, but you kind of have to work through that and get to a
Speaker 1 00:28:28 Point where you, but everybody's got their issues.
Speaker 2 00:28:30 Uh, I think what it comes down to is,
Speaker 1 00:28:32 And a lot of this stuff is acknowledging them coming clean with them, realizing you're not like perfect, you got issues. And you got to, everybody's got to work through them. And, and the quicker you can get to a point where you're like, okay, well maybe I'm not so great after all. Let's just see it for what it is and, and take a minute to look at things. And you know, I'm not going to be perfect at this whole budgeting thing. It's gonna just be work in progress. So we're going to start with the baby step. That's another thing I think perfection is sometimes the aspiration, but really all you need to do is start with little, a little tiny small steps. So Jeff, you mentioned your Disney plus and Hulu. I mean, if you feel like you're not, if you're, if you feel like you're spending too much or you've lost control of your lifestyle, you know, you could just start with one little thing.
Speaker 2 00:29:16 It would be, yeah. You can start with just one thing, you know, looking at that, what, what am I getting, what am I, what do I think I'm getting from Disney plus? And, uh, what is an alternative that would actually meet that need, but maybe not costing me money. So, you know, there's always alternatives. And usually there are cheaper alternatives that hit that scratching. It's you're trying to get to. Um, so if you're looking for some kind of entertainment, but with Disney plastic, it could be books or playing with your kids or yeah, my kids are awesome. Dad, stop watching the Mandalorian. They'll come play with us. I'm just getting it right.
Speaker 1 00:29:51 Or go to the library,
Speaker 2 00:29:54 The library, you know, there are alternatives there. Exactly. So much of it. If you're interested, libraries offer digital stuff now, too. So we would have to go to the library to get the libraries. It's crazy.
Speaker 1 00:30:06 Yeah. But do you have to, it takes a little bit of a, it goes back to the time and dedication. You have to, it takes a little bit of intentionality and dedication and time to kind of work through that and be like, Oh, maybe there is an alternate, uh, what, or what are their alternatives? And then once you, so when you free up the free, you know, say S you're spending money on Hulu or, you know, uh, blowing money, going out to dinner and you don't feel like that's in line alignment and you want to instead pay off your student loans faster because it's keeping you up at night. As soon as you get kind of improvement, see improvement on that one issue, maybe it's the dining out. Then you, I think another thing is you immediately redirected to the other thing you want to focus on. So you kind of start to redirect those payments to the student loans after doing that for a while. A lot of small things add up to big things.
Speaker 2 00:30:55 Yeah. I think having that alternative and actually a different thing to do with the funds makes a big difference. So that of just saying, don't think about this, you actually give something to do instead of that. Right?
Speaker 1 00:31:07 Because that goes back to the whole livestock group thing. It's like when we introduce more kind of unaccounted for, uh, money that, uh, is prone to livestock Creek. Really cool. Well, Jeff, always fun catching up and, uh, appreciate you hanging out on this path. Thanks for having me Daniel as always. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you found this valuable, please give us a review on iTunes and share with a friend. Also check out our
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