Practical Tips to Keep More Money in Your Pocket

This is the first video in a series that I am doing this summer where each week I will take a handful of money-saving tips and we will deep dive into them. We will talk about the how and the why, the best practices, and how you can implement them in your life. If you like the videos where I have longer lists, I will put those down in the description bar below. You can check those out. But in these in particular, we're going to take a handful and really look at them each week. I'm going to try to keep these videos to 10 to 15 minutes-ish every week so that over the summer you can just take small bite-sized pieces. You have plenty of time to go out and do whatever you were planning to do this summer, but you still have the constant money motivation throughout the season. Now I want to hear from you. What are some of the money-saving tips that you have wanted me to deep dive in, that you want to know more about? Put those down in the comments below so I can address those when I do upcoming videos in this series. Number one in this week's series is to curate your closet. Now this could be you're just one that likes to spend money and go shopping. You have clothing, a lot of it. Or maybe you want to utilize what you have and have more of a style and find the style that works best for you. It's a great tip to help you hone in on what works best for you and in the end you will save money. Now the first thing you need to do here is clean out your closet. This is the most important because you've got to start somewhere. You're going to take everything out. This is going to be an afternoon or maybe a full day on a weekend project. You're going to make three piles. You're going to have a keep pile, a maybe pile, and a toss slash donate pile. Now remember these things, when you're going through all the things that you're pulling out of your closet, when you're putting your keep, your maybe, and your toss, do you actually wear this? Let's be honest with ourselves. When's the last time we actually wore this? Number two, do you feel confident and comfortable in this item? I have a hard time believing that somebody feels confident in something they're not comfortable in, so I think those two go together. And number three is you're going to ask yourself, if you are out at a store again and this item were hanging on a rack, would you buy this item again? Those are the three questions that are really going to help you determine keep, maybe, and the toss slash donate pile. Now when you look it back at the maybe pile, you've got the toss, you've decided on that, go ahead and get rid of that stuff, donate it, you've got the keep. When you look back at the maybe pile, really ask yourself if you should keep that item. Here's my train of thought, my opinion on this. If it isn't an automatic yes, then it's an automatic donate to me. It's the same as if I were out purchasing something. It's not going to be a maybe. If it's not a solid yes, then it most likely is a solid waste of your money. Now the next step here is to really take what's left, whatever is left over. This might be you do this another afternoon. Maybe it's Saturday you've done the cleaning out and a Sunday you do this part, but this is kind of fun because you need extra energy. That's why I recommend doing it on another day. Extra energy to be in that creative mindset. You want to go through your clothing and sit down and actually put some pieces together. You know when you're getting dressed to go to work or go to church or go out for dinner, you really don't have a ton of time to see if this looks good with that. You get stressed out, your hair gets messed up, you get makeup on something. Spend this time, go through and play like when you were younger and used to put outfits together. See what outfits might look fun and you can do this just by lying the clothes out on your bed. You don't have to put them on whatsoever. You can really see how something looks. Maybe you put a maxi skirt with a cute t-shirt with a jean jacket. You find a sweet cool pair of sandals. Then what you're going to do is take a photo of it with your phone. Again, you don't have to be wearing it. You could just lay it out on the floor, lay it out on your bed, hanging up on the closet door, whatever works best. Then in your phone you're going to then take those photos and you can usually in your phone create albums. So you're going to take those photos and move them to an album that you're going to name closet. So next time you go to get dressed, you can easily just look at your closet album to see those clothes that you put together and pull out a great put-together outfit. If you're enjoying this video already or you're just excited about the summer money-saving series, help my channel out by clicking on that like button below. Make sure to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on any other of the summer saving videos that are coming up this season. Number two is one of my favorite money-saving tips and it's to do money-saving challenges throughout the year. Maybe you're like me and I need a good challenge to get my motivation going. I think it's the competitive spirit in us, but a challenge is a great way to get started. Whether it's trying to get healthy and doing a fitness challenge with your colleagues, the people that you work with, you can do the same thing with yourself and your money. So here are some of my favorite or a couple of my favorite money-saving challenges that I think really do work. The first one is the 30-day minimalism challenge. Now you do not have to be or even want to be a minimalist to use this one effectively. I think that the minimalist came up with this. You can look them up on YouTube if you're interested, but basically I heard about this I think six or seven years ago and it's a great challenge. Basically what it is is where you start from the beginning of the month. So you'll take from the 1st through the 30th and on each of those dates you get rid of the number of things that coincides with that date. So on the 1st of the month you get rid of one thing and on the 2nd day of the month you get rid of two things so on and so forth. 12th day of the month you get rid of 12 things. The 30th day of the month you get rid of 30 things. Now if you do this for an entire month there and there are the 30 days in that month you will have gotten rid of 465 things. That really will put into perspective how much stuff is actually in your house. Now these don't have to be big things keep in mind that and you don't have to get rid of them. A lot of it you might find is actually just trash but you could have donate things so those use those interchangeably during this time. But you could be cleaning out just a junk drawer and you could find two dried out pens that's two items. You might find an empty shopping bag or a shoe box each of those one item. Then you might choose one of the days of the month where you've got something really big to go through. Let's go with your closet as we talked about earlier in this video where you find 15 items that you can get rid of and there's 15 you're on the date the 15th of the month. But you'll understand what this does is by the time you are done you will have really pushed down that consumerism hold on you. You will have broken through from that consumerism hold and realized just how much stuff there is around you and how stressful it is and you will then think twice before you go out and buy new things or bring one item or more than one item back into your home. The second money challenge that I recommend is a no spend challenge. This is one of my favorites because it really helps you save a lot of money quickly and I did a video on this I think in November. I will link it down below because the I do it for January because January is just a great month to do this after the holiday season to have a break from consuming and you know you have all those meals and you just feel full and you're going through all the gift season and it's just stuff. So it's a great way to start the new year but the I will link the video down below because really the topics that are covered in that video are evergreen. You can use them whenever and many of the people that video actually did really well. Many of the people said they were going to do these throughout the year but I first want to clarify what no spend actually is because some people think what do you mean I'm not spending any money throughout the month. No that is not what it is. You're not spending nothing at all. You will pay your bills. You will buy your groceries. You will go out and get a new pair of tennis shoes if you are a runner and you've got your toes sticking out there's a hole in your shoe and you don't have any other pair. What it is is you're not spending on unnecessary items. So you're not going out to eat. Not necessary. You're not going on Amazon buying random things. Not necessary. You're not going through the drive-thru coffee to get drive-thru coffee. Not necessary. These are great again because what it will do is it will really put some space between the spending and the or the want to spend and the action. You've got a game going on. A challenge and oftentimes it's that space in between where you can come back to reality. Come back to consciousness that you need before you just go so easily now and swipe and hit buy on something. But you'll see that you can actually save a big chunk of money and then what you'll realize when you look at that big chunk of money is how much unnecessary money you actually do spend. Number three is to check your paycheck withholdings. Now this is in reference this tip is to the tax system in the United States. I do not know about other countries but essentially if you get a big chunk of money at your tax return at the tax after you've done your taxes and the money's returned to you as a big chunk it is not actually a good thing. What it actually is as a tax return means that too much money has been taken out of your check each week or each month however often you get paid. This means that the government has had your money all year and they are giving it back to you minus any interest. So they just you know courteously held on to it for you. So I mean even when you put your money in a regular savings account at the bank you may not make much but you may make half a percent interest which is better than nothing. But this is not the case when you get a tax return. Now a lot of people will argue and say they like this. That's usually because they don't have the discipline to save money on their own. So this is just an easier way to do it and I understand that. If you spend every bit that you have coming in I remember those days and setting aside money was just not something I thought about. This is a way to automatically do it. But think about this. Think about the other alternative. What if your weekly or twice a month or monthly paycheck was more? Wouldn't that be nicer if you had more money each month? Wouldn't it be nicer to have that money now versus once a year? In this I highly recommend you speaking to a tax professional to help you understand tax withholdings when you sign up for a job. When you first start a job you have to sign up for tax withholdings and many many people go by the recommendation or don't really understand the nuances behind it. Trust me I mean even really really intelligent people high up in business I've seen this because they've asked me about it. They knew what I I do on this channel and asked me if I knew about tax withholdings. Many people don't understand it. So speaking to a tax professional which is what we've done for years and making sure you have the right allocations. So when you sit down you you what you're trying to aim for is at the end of the year when you've done your taxes and you get what you owe or what you're getting back that that is a small amount that you pretty much gauged it right around what it needed to be your tax withholdings so that what was taken out was right around what it needed to be. So if you owe just a small amount or you get back just a small amount that means you were almost right on target. Again if you're interested in this one dive deeper into it. Look into it. Speak with a tax professional. Number four is to create a protective money bubble. You may have seen those bubble things that people can get in and roll down a hill. I'm not sure that ever will but I like to imagine this picture when I talk about this tip and if I can find a picture of it so you understand what I'm talking about I'll insert that. But basically what you want to do is put this protection around you so that if something happens and things go downhill you're protected when you get to the bottom of it. And what this looks like is creating liquid savings and what liquid savings are savings money that's accessible to you. Some people can call this an emergency fund. Call it what you want but I think people hear protective money bubble and it just resonates maybe a little bit more even if it is basically an emergency fund. You're going to put this in place so that you aren't stressed when life inevitably does throw unexpected large expenses at you or many small expenses that add up to a lot all at once and oftentimes they come all at once. The fact is 70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck meaning they wait until the next paycheck before they can do anything. They don't have extra savings sitting around. Now I don't know about other countries but those are the statistics here in the United States. So if you think about this you're driving down the street basically what that is is you see ten households. Seven of those ten households are living paycheck to paycheck without a protective money bubble. What you need to do is make that protective money bubble a priority. Decide how much you want that to be. It can be your decision in all of this. Some people say three to six months of expenses so keep in mind that's not income. So if you bring home $2,000 a month that's not $6,000 for three months if you only using round numbers here your expenses are only $1,500. If your expenses are $1,500 a month three months would be $4,500. You're going to make this a priority and one way to kind of do that is to make it a bill to yourself so you have some extra savings or you could dial back some of the unnecessary spending and let's just assume you could put $300 a month right now towards that emergency bubble. Again just using round numbers if you saved that $300 a month for 12 months you would have $3,600. That isn't $300 if you can't do that that's okay. Maybe you can only save $50 a month but $50 is more than you would have had if you hadn't started at all. What you'll see is you'll start to quickly it kind of snowballs when you start that habit of saving especially if you make it look like a bill that you're paying that you have to pay and you're forcing yourself to do it you will start to quickly see that account at that bubble which is in your savings account start to grow and the stress that when you hear something bad about the economy or you think about what could happen with your job or you think about an emergency that may come up the stress of it just is not at the same level as when you were living paycheck to paycheck. Don't forget to let me know in the comments down below what specific money saving tips do you want me to take and deep dive in during this summer series. I would love to include those. If you enjoyed the video click on that like button. You can also share this video with others. Make sure you click on the subscribe button as well and I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.