Episode four seventy two, how to Buy what you Love without going broke in twenty twenty five.
Welcome to the Frugal Friends podcast, where you'll learn to save money, embrace simplicity, and live at your life. Here your hosts Jen and Jill.
Welcome to the Frugal Friends podcast. My name is Jent, my name is Jill, and today we are talking about essentially the topic of our book, How to Buy what You Love Without Going Broke, and we are telling you what it's about, but it's not going to be about
the book. We truly want you to leave this episode with an idea of what you need to do in twenty twenty five to feel like you the things you are buying are the things you love, and that you have an idea of what you love that does not cause you to then go broke as a result.
It's that concept of how we truly can get after the things that we need and want and while being stewarding our money and all of our resources well in the process and.
Really turn the ideas idea of needs and wants on their head.
We will definitely do that today, but first, this episode is brought to you by No Regrets, No regrets despite what's been thrown at you this past year, whether it be unexpected bills, health scares, maybe two back to back hurricanes, that you were able to enter into a new year with no regrets. Sound like too tall of an order. We've got a solution for you, and it's called By What You Love Without Going Broke. Our new book you
Know It, You guessed It. It is still available for pre order and will help you, in this book live with at least no financial regrets and even refrain some of the previous money decisions you've made that maybe you don't feel great about. It. Truly is the perfect thing to purchase this January. We believe going to be one of the most helpful resources for you in twenty twenty five.
Can really help to shift some of the thinking that we have around our money and then the actions that we take around our money in some really beneficial ways. So let's have no regrets by what you lovebook dot com.
Yes, and we're also doing for everyone who pre orders over the next week, We're doing a free class on how to make a one year spending plan so you can spend out your You can plan out your spending over the year but in a way that still leaves room for flexibility, naeity, impulsivity, all those things that we do not think are bad things in your spending. So buy what you love book dot com, and let's talk about how do you buy what you love without going bro.
So for us, we've broken it down into three parts. The first part is to figure out what you love. The second part is to figure out what you don't love, but maybe outside forces like marketing are trying to tell you that that's what you love and deserve. And then the third part is how, once we know parts one and two, how do we live that out? And how
do we live it out sustainably? How do we take it with us when there's a lot of nuance like so much stuff in books would be easy to execute if we lived in a vacuum, right, but we don't. We are surrounded by other people, outside forces, So how do we live it sustainably? So those are the three things that we are going to in this episode. And the first one identify what you love. Now, if you are a regular listener of Frugal Friends, you know that
we usually go through internet articles. We will google something, we will see what Google throws out as their first page results, and then we will give you real life opinion and ideas on it versus algorithmic ideas and opinions on the answer. But this one is going to be all us today. So the first part, how do you find what you love spending on this year in twenty twenty five. So for us, the first thing, the first actionable tip is to do a ninety day transaction inventory.
So there are some a few things before that in the book that we say that kind of prime you for being able to do your transaction inventory wall, but let's start out with something actual you can do as soon as you turn this episode off. For us, a ninety day transaction inventory is the right length of time. I was talking to my husband Travis when we just did ours a few days ago. We do it once a year, and he was like, I think we should do it for twelve months. I think that would be better.
And I was like, well, I just I just throw a bug on it. But it's like not a big deal. So here's why we say ninety days. We want you to get it done. And you might be thinking, okay, I'll do ninety days. That sounds about right, but I'm going to do it like for October, September, November, because
that's probably more accurate. No, you need to do it for the past ninety days that you have, not what you're spending was over the fall, not what it was over the summer, but what it has been for the past ninety days, because this is going to give you the most accurate picture of what you spending habits are now. We're not looking at our spending habits from the rest of the year. This is not to shame you or make you feel guilty about what you have spent over
the last three months. We kind of risk that if we go beyond ninety days, it's not going to help us change our habits. It's just going to make us feel either better or worse about our spending. So what we're really trying to do with this transaction inventory is figure out patterns in our spending. We're trying to figure out what have I what spending habits am I currently in? Am I going to Starbucks a lot, either on my
way to work or on my way home. Am I stopping at Chipotle on the way home from the grocery store every Sunday? Am I? You know, picking up a I don't know, a bottle of vodka on the way home from.
Seeing my mother in law.
Every t right looking for patterns, and we use atomic habits habit cues to kind of define those patterns. So we're looking for preceding event, person, time of day, stuff like that, and.
What that will do.
Identifying those patterns is going to help give us an idea of what values we are currently trying to spend on values or the things that we love. What are we currently spending on, and then how can we spend other resources to possibly achieve that value more fully. So maybe I am spending money on coffee so that I can stop by and see a friend at their work. Maybe that I am spending on friendship. Maybe I'm trying to spend on relationships. Maybe I'm not trying to spend on coffee. Maybe I am.
You have to figure that out for yourself.
If I'm trying to spend on relationships, connections, friendship, I'm not doing that one hundred percent by doing that action. So what is a way I can do it one hundred percent? That first maybe doesn't cost me money. Maybe I'm inviting a friend over to my house. Maybe we're meeting at a park if your house isn't a place you want to invite people. But we're getting creative in how we meet those values.
And a framework that has been helpful for us and understanding kind of well, what are my values? What might I be trying to get after in my spending? How could my spending be telling me about my deeper self and my needs? Is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So this triangle that many of us are probably familiar with, created by Abraham Maslow to describe are various layers of need as humans. So the bottom couple layers begin with our
basic needs. It includes physiological needs like food, shelter, water, clothing,
and then followed by safety and stability needs. And then the top three tiers are a little bit more nuanced in what they're describing, from love and belonging needs to self esteem needs to the tippy tippy top triangle of self actualization, and this one refers to kind of being able to operate in some of the ways that we feel we've we're kind of created, made to operate in the things that make us come alive, the things that make us feel creative, exercise our ingenuity, the things that
make us feel spontaneous. These are also needs of ours, and so where many personal finance advice stops is at those bottom two levels of you should spend and save and mostly save and not spend around these basic needs. Once you have your needs met, then you're good and you shouldn't be spending on wants. And so that's what kind of makes it really tricky to determine and decipher
between well, what's a need and what's a want? Because I need a house or shelter, I need clothing, I need food, but I want it to look good, I want it to taste good, and so how do we
really parse this out? And so we believe that kind of this values based spending concept and allowing ourselves to understand our needs from this perspective of Maslow's hierarchy of needs can help us to put value and priority on all of our needs that we may be having and not just stop at some of the basics, but recognize we have these higher needs and they do need to be met, and we will often look to meet these needs even if some of the lower level needs aren't
fully one hundred percent met. And what we've also noticed in this is we will spend to meet these needs. Many times we have to, right, like we have to buy food to meet our hunger needs, and we've got to pay rent or a mortgage to meet our shelter needs. But we don't always have to spend to meet our esteem needs, to meet our self actualization needs, to meet
our love and belonging needs. But we're so accustomed to throwing money at our problems that money is the solution that without thinking, without giving ourselves the space to consider this, we will spend in that area. And so what we're describing with this ninety day transaction inventory and the foundational understanding of our layers of need is that when we can bring these things together, we might be able to get created in how do we get after love and belonging?
How do we get after esteem and our creativity in ways that maybe don't require us to spend money, And then what decisions can we make with our money from there?
Yeah, this is where I found like this in my own life, with being sow ingrained, with diet culture, I have always found myself purchasing exercise subscriptions, gym memberships, like nutritions subscriptions, and it's I'm obviously not alone.
Weight Watchers is still a thing.
Ozembic is a big thing, Like it goes beyond even like I'm small potatoes versus like everything else that's out there, living on shakes and all of these things. And it's based on this really like foundational need. Yes, we need to eat and we want to eat healthy, right, but it's marketed to us in a way that is saying, if you meet this need, like it meets a basic need of food or health, but it will also make you feel better about yourself, Like don't you want to
feel better about yourself like all these other people? When really what we can be doing is focusing on the actual values, the actual needs. And yes, we'll still find ourselves spending money. This we're not trying to teach people how to not spend money. We're trying to spend money. We're not opting out of the system. So it will involve spending money, but usually less money.
Yeah, so you've heard us describe it's not about deprivation. There may be some sacrifice along the way, but it's about understanding ourselves better and actually meeting the need where sometimes our purchases were attempting to meet need we're buying in order to maybe experience belonging or experience some fantasized version of ourselves, but it falls flat, like if we're honest with ourselves, it doesn't actually get us there because the marketers are kind of wrong in attaching these products
to our identity. And so if we can kind of begin to detach that, it doesn't mean that we won't be spending anymore. We just won't necessarily need to spend in order to get what we truly are after.
Yeah, so this might feel very big, but I would say we try to break it down in the book to give you a foundational like starting point for your values. So we base it off of the hierarchy of needs, but we start with four f's, family, friends, faith fulfilling work.
So if you make those the foundation of when you spend, you try to get at those things versus the actual things, or you give yourself space to think about these things, like to consider when you're asking yourself questions, non judgmental questions like what am I really trying to get at, and kind of filter it through these four things. They're a very good starting point for aligning your spending with what you love. So it's not going to be one
hundred percent. I would say it's like an eighty twenty eighty percent of the time, it's gonna be one of those four.
But when you look at.
Those four, they hit pretty much every single higher need, your connection, belonging, your esteem, and your self actualization, which is your creativity, innovation, et cetera. You can hit all of those with any four of those needs. That's why they're so foundational and a really good place to start when you're just starting out with values based spending.
And I love how this concept can really help us push back against that needs versus wants. This I deserve this culture that I know we've talked about in a previous episode of Yeah, certainly you deserve a little treat, but you also deserve so much more than that in what you can accomplish with your finances and then in the ways that you can meet and value all aspects of yourself. So really allowing this to be the foundational piece that then we can continue to build our actions upon.
So some of that action includes the second part that we mentioned of saying no to the things that we don't actually love and value, and so some of that is going to require understanding our own impulse spending tendencies.
We mention five different types of impulse spending in the book, and this ninety day transaction and tory can really help us to understand what kind of impulse spender we are, Whether our unplanned purchases are the results of a habit like you mentioned, you know, every time I go into the store, I'm gonna buy this thing, or every time I'm driving home from work, I'm gonna stop off and you know, get myself a beverage. Whatever, that habit may
be kind of that queue, that location that's happening. Is it maybe the result of social influence? Is it maybe when I am scrolling on Instagram or even just out with friends, that I'm spending more money than I intended to because of the people that are around me. Is it an activity for me? Have I just been kind of socialized in a way that we spend money when we go out to have fun. Is it maybe that I just love the thrill of the hunt, I love a good deal, I love to dig. I'm calling out
all of my thrift store girlies. I'm right there with you. That's the one for me that can kind of draw me in and cause me to spend where maybe I
didn't necessarily need to. So identifying kind of where our impulse spending tendencies lie will help us to then be able to create a better strategy and action plan from there, because if we're just throwing some random solution at it that isn't in line and congruent with the issue itself, then that too is going to fall flat because the way that we respond to habit spending is different from spending as the result of social influence.
This is why I hate when people say start with a budget. I hate I hate that concept. I don't hate the people that say it. I just hate the concept because a budget is a plan for your money. It's a future plan.
It's great.
But when I was starting to budget, every month, I would make this perfect budget, and every month midway through, I would be like, why can't I stick to this? Like every week I'm checking in with this budget and it is wrong, Like I am wrong every single.
Week, right, Because I'm the problem. I'm the problem.
It's me.
I'm saying, like, this is what I want to spend on, and for some reason I can't do it. And I had never taken the time to look at my past spending to let that dictate what my future plan should be, but also had not started working on the skills to spend in alignment with that plan. And that's really what looking at your impulse spending tendencies and creating healthy coping mechanisms for different types of impulsivity can do for you.
And impulse spending is not bad. We don't hate impulse spending. I still impulse spend jill Us, We all do. Impulse spending is not the enemy. It's what your impulse spending on that will help you or hurt you. And it should always be including the budget, and I think budgets should be much more flexible and include a lot more room for impulsivity.
But that is another time.
That's for another day. So next is where I start to geek out, and it's starting to recognize the marketing tactics that are in play. So once we figure out what we love, then we have this task of in the short term figuring out how to say no and in the long term figuring out how to make it sustainable.
And I think in the short term understanding that so much of our overspending, especially our impulse spending is a result of long term conditioning for being honest, like all the way back to the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds at the Industrial Revolution, when mass production became the way we produced items, and into the nineteen twenties where people were producing items cheaply, but they were just marketing
that they were in awareness. And then in the twenties marketing changed to not just market in awareness but also be manufacturing desires. So from for the last one hundred years,
manufacturing has not just been manufacturing products. Marketing has then been manufacturing desires, telling us that these products will solve problems that we have that we didn't know we had before we heard about it, or creating desires in us that other people had desired and that's fine for them, but then insinuating that we also should be desiring them, and if we're not desiring, that's something wrong with us, not just that we have a different interests or perspective.
When we have the ability now post industrial revolution, to create products so cheaply, then the issue is that you've got so much supply and not enough demand, So how do we create demand? And that such a wild concept that I think is a new issue that we were facing now in the last few hundred years, I suppose. But as far as humanity goes, a relatively newer issue, not that we haven't desired things before. I do think
that that is human nature as well. But this playing upon and incorporating behavioral economics and understanding of the human psyche and cognitive biases in order to have us crave these things in order to get us to buy the solutions to problems that really can't be bought, is a relatively newer thing that we're facing, and we're being bombarded with so many more messages of it. Social media is that and even just who we're surrounding ourselves by or
or we're influenced by our neighbors. Like we see our neighbor has a thing. It seems as though it makes their lives more efficient. I'm gon buy that too. Not to mention our individuality and our reliance on independence, that if I have a problem, I have to be the one to solve that. I can't ask for help, I can't borrow anything. There's a lot that is happening internally that is our own kind of bent towards impulsive spending. But there's also a lot happening externally that is drawing us, in,
pulling us in, influencing us to spend. And part of the solution here is just educating ourselves on that, because the more we can see it and identify it happening in the world around us, the more.
Not I don't.
I don't think we need to be fearful or unguarded way.
It's not like we want to incite anger or malice towards marketers. Like a lot of these products are very are good, but it's impact. We want to empower you.
Yeah, I mean I do get a little bit fumed about a level of consumption that that happens.
You can be a little few if you're if you're listening to you, a little fuse happening.
I can't say we haven't been, But honestly, that.
Does help me a ton when I can recognize, Okay, no, here's actually what's happening. I know that that commercial almost made me cry, but now I'm a little bit upset that you're playing about my emotion.
It's manipulate to try and get me.
To buy a car. It's a car. It's gonna take a very good car to another It is not going to make me a better, more adventurous person that comes from inside of me.
Yep, okay, okay, keep doing.
So if you are a little the more you look at it, the more the more fumed you might get. But it's a short term solution at first. Actually you may feel hopeless, like when you start. It's that cognitive bias that once you know and you know to look, you start seeing it everywhere right, and it can make you feel a little hopeless. So that's why we want to also instill you with some education around what we
call saving smarter, not harder. The whole book is about values based spending, but we want to kind of take a little bit of the pressure off of you by giving you these key factors to focus on in your finances. And if you focus on saving here, then you have room to make more mistakes in the rest of your smaller spending.
So we like to reference here the puretto simple, that eighty twenty rule that usually twenty percent of our efforts equal eighty percent of our outcomes, or at least that's kind of what we want to be aiming at, and so too when it comes to our money. We can apply this a lot of times we want to be focusing on all the all the eighty percent of decisions, and we're getting into the weeds on oh, how can I save fifty cents here or twenty five cents there? How do I get a deal on this? How do
I cut out that latte? How? And Okay, it's okay, that's fine, like it, I like it, deal too. But those are not going to be the heavy hitters with our finances. The better place to start would be the twenty percent of our spending that usually takes up about eighty percent of where our money's going, and that's going to be our our housing, transportation, and food. These are the top three categories of spending where that takes up the most of our money. So it's not big line items, right,
it's not parsing out a ton of miscellaneous things. It's three things twenty percent, But for most of us it makes up about more so sixty five to seventy five percent of our spending monthly. So if we can look at making better, more informed decisions that are going to be beneficial for us in these categories, then we almost don't need to worry about some of the other spontaneous spending,
impulse spending. We still want to feel really good about the decisions that we're making and keep things in check, but we would be much better off making a really informed money decision on housing than all of these other kind of willy nilly expenses. We give a really great example in the book about tangible real numbers here. If
you were, let's say, looking at a house. You were looking to purchase a house for three hundred thousand dollars, and as you're in this process of looking, you start to realize, hmm, that's not getting me exactly what I want. It's not everything on my list, and I would like to see more, please, And your real estate agent takes you to maybe a house that's three hundred and fifty
thousand dollars. You're approved for that loan. You could do that, and your real estate agent would probably tell you, Ah, it's just going to get wrapped up in your mortgage. It's not going to represent that much more money monthly, just an extra fifty thousand dollars over the life of the loan. You should get what you want here. You
deserve that extra money. Yeah, but what that actually represents in the lifetime of let's say a thirty year mortgage, and whatever interest rate might be attached to, that could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars that you're losing out on that you could have, let's say invested for retirement.
So that extra fifty thousand dollars is actually costing you far more than that fifty thousand dollars, not to mention what you just could have done with the extra fifty thousand dollars over the lifetime of that loan.
And really that's not even the most important thing, because a house is an investment, right, But whatever whatever space you're trying to get at, like in your housing, whether you're budget's three hundred, five hundred, one hundred, that extra fifty thousand dollars is a seventy dollars date night every week, it's a three thousand, six hundred dollars summer vacation every year, or two eighteen hundred dollars vacations like it. Just it costs you in the short run, even if you plan
to refinance. And so we go into numbers like different options in the book, and like, no, the option isn't just move further away from the city and get a cheaper house, like that's not the solution, right, So the solution has to be right for you, and we go through that. But so these are some of like the short term things, but I think the long term is going to make an even bigger impact. And so that's
the third part is don't go broke. The way that we avoid being broke is by making small changes, small improvements consistently, or just by doing the right thing, not even improving, maybe just doing the right thing over and over and over for the long haul. So how do we do that? How do we make these good decisions long term? And we believe the easiest, lowest barrier to entry is cure your environment. There are so many things outside of our controls, so the only things that we
can focus on are the things within our control. So the first thing within our control is our physical environment, so our spaces. So we some practical things to do are make make sure you have a space like a home that you feel comfortable inviting people over to. That's a great way to meet a lot of needs like with family and friends and not have to spend money.
Make sure it's a place that you can do creative work in that you are feeling that you have created a space that supports whatever your creativity or your innovation or your individuality. And so maybe that means you're decluttering. If your space is very cluttered, maybe that means you are downsizing so you don't have so much to clean, or maybe you are getting a bigger place. Whatever that means for you, we want you to simplify your environment.
To curate that physical environment, it could also mean your car, your desk at work. You're looking at these four f's and you're thinking, Okay, my physical space is a resource. I have to get more of what I love, and how can I set my physical space up to be a resource that gets as much of it as possible?
And part of this is recognizing how we operate. We can make better decisions when we feel less chaotic, and so we're not talking about just minimalism, but a lot of these efforts will include a degree of simplification so that we don't have as much taking our time, energy and attention away from the things that are really important. It's about identifying what is our enough where many times we will choose additive solutions when subtractive solutions would be
even better. So rather than you know, maybe this I don't want the message to be make sure that your environment feels really good to you, and now all of a sudden you feel like you've got to decorate it really beautifully and you've got to make sure that it looks so esthetically pleasing. No, it doesn't have to be that. More so something that feels calm and inviting to you and not chaotic, not overwhelming, not inhibiting our ability to
make good decisions. And usually that's going to come through simplification. And also, in addition to curating our environment, our physical spaces, well, that's a really good place to start. There are other external pieces that are important to be curating as well, and that includes our community. So recognizing the impact that our relationships are having not only on us, but on
our spending decisions. We are not talking about cutting people out, but we are talking about taking inventory of the friendships that we have, the way that we're engaging with our family. What is meaningful, what's life giving, what is helping us make these beneficial decisions, and what's not. That might mean that we begin to put boundaries around certain interactions. It could mean that we increase engagement with certain communities, certain people.
It could also mean that we are a little bit more vocal about the things that we're getting after in this new year, the goals that we've set for ourselves, the things that we want to do with our finances or other So often, when we can be a little bit more vulnerable and share about what's happening for us and the things that we've set our minds to and what we're setting our hands to, it can be inspiring
to others. It can spark really helpful conversation. It can help you find your people to help you in this journey. And so well, community and relationships are so necessary, crucial, vital, They can also be the same place that some of
are not so helpful spending decisions come from. So recognizing that and making small shifts in those areas, not cutting people out, but potentially increasing Where you do have that community that's really helpful to you, how can you engage with that more and really curate your community in that way.
This is one of the things that I think is going to transcend spending money because I hear all the time people who want to increase their income and they've filled out fifty applications, sixty applications, one hundred applications for new jobs and haven't gotten any thing and feel like it's just not for them, and they feel so stuck, and honestly, like filling out work applications a hundred of
them is not a flex. If you want to advance in an industry, or advance in a position across an industry, whatever, it's the people you meet who will get you the connections that will get you the best jobs, the best salaries, the best ways to negotiate with people. It's connections. It's people. And you want to be not just curating your relationships between friends and family, but also to do your fulfilling
work right. And we want to be curating relationships where we feel like we're giving back to the community.
Right.
So this is such a powerful thing that will transcend how you spend money, and it will change the way that you earn money and that you and the ways you spend your time and feel about everything like I'm just this one will like that chapter alone will change your life.
We are throwing a lot at you, and I do imagine that this could feel like you're drinking from a fire hydrant right now, because this is a bit of a bird's eye view of everything that we have put into our book, by what you Love without going broke, by what you loovebook dot com. If any of this is resonating with you and you're like, wait, but I wanted to know more about that, how would I actually
do that? It's there, but I do want to kind of wrap up this concept and kind of land the plane here, start to slowly turn off that fire hydrant water to encourage you with this part, and it is one of the final chapters of the book, talking about contentment over complacency. I think that when we hear so much about what we could be or should be doing with our money and the best decisions to be making and the action steps to be taking, it can all
feel really overwhelming. And while we hope that you can kind of take one step here of you know, start with the ninety day transaction inventory, but also there is room here to identify just what is enough that we don't have to be doing all of the things all at once. We can take this in stride and recognize that it is a journey, but it doesn't have to
be one where we then find ourselves complacent either. We never will come to a point of arrival, but we also want to be living within our enough along the way as we identify what's next. And one of my favorite definitions, well or just the definition of gratitude is expressing thankfulness for benefits received, so allowing ourselves to sit in the present of what has already happened and transpired, what is currently happening in this moment. We can be
hopeful for things, we can set goals. That's amazing, but that's not what gratitude is really aimed at. Not about being grateful for things we hope happen, but what is currently going on.
Or even in the past, like not being thankful. I have a problem with thinking so much good stuff has happened to me in the past, Like I should just be thankful for you know, I should just be thankful because of that. Now there are things in your present, maybe big, maybe small, but there are things in the present day to be thankful.
And even what have the difficulties that you faced financially taught you? Who are you now? Who are you becoming? Because of some things that maybe you wish hadn't happened, But how are they forming you? I think this could be a really helpful way to view some of the things of the past and then can continue to build on from there. So that could be a helpful kind of mind journaling exercise, while we also do this ninety day transaction inventory. But rest assured, all of this is
in the book to much greater degrees. But please know that it is never too late to start, and there are ways to actually meet your needs fully within the parameters of your current life, season, and income, while also aiming for what's next. What goals can I set for myself? What excites me for the future.
You know what excites me for the future, and that I am presently grateful for every time.
I receive this benafes the bill of the week.
That's right, it's time for the best minute of yourance high week. Maybe a baby was born and his name is William. Maybe you've paid off your mortgage. Maybe your car died and you're happy to not have to pay that bill anymore. That bills Buffalo bills, Bill Clinton, this is the bill of the week.
Hi, Jen and Jill, This is Marla from Ontario, Canada. We have many bills this season as we're building a property in the woods for the next phase of our life. But My favorite spend this week is the pre order of your new book. Can't wait to read it. Love everything you do.
Thanks so much, oh Marla, I promise we didn't put that one in on purpose that if we just.
Go down the list, So thank you, Marla. This is so exciting. We love bills that we don't mind paying for, like the bills we are excited to pay. And the fact that you chose our book as something you are willing to spend on means a lot twenty five dollars. We don't take it for granted. We know that you all are very judicious and prudent with your money, that you have learned spending as a skill, and you're not just throwing money at problems or you're here because you
don't have a lot of money to throw. So it does not escape us just how special it is that you would pre order our book and those of you listening who have done this as well, our deepest gratitude for this benefit received and thank you, thank you Marla for sharing that. We so appreciate it. We hope you love it. If you all are listening and you have a bill that you want to submit, if it's about pre ordering our book. Wouldn't that be so fun to be flooded with bills of the week about people having
ordered our book? Or if your name is Bill, if you have a kidnamed Bill.
If you're Bill Curtis here you know, oh Bill Curtis, and you can get him to.
Call Frugal friendspodcast dot com slash Bill. We can't wait to hear it. And now it's time for the lightning round. I have a lightning round in the book, and we read our audio book. So if you get our book in the audio version, it's us talking, obviously, and every chapter has a lightning round where we ask a question something that you can consider that's related to the content of that chapter, and we make pupu noises poo.
All right, so what is your favorite thing to buy?
What do you love to buye? We don't do that, and we don't do that, Okay. So for me, I've said this before and I will die on this hill.
It is daycare.
I love to support my uh it's a license in home daycare. She is a small business owner immigrated from Cuba. I pay good money.
Every week for her to love on my son. And he needs so much love.
He is so violent and I love to support her, but I also love to send him away for eight hours a day so that I can do fulfilling work and spend time with Jill in person instead of just virtually because we live fifteen minutes away from each other. It meets so many of my values. And it is a big bill. It is a bill that some people would say is inefficient to pay, but it meets so many allows me to meet so many of my values, and I know it's not forever, and I just love the quality of her care.
What are you going to do with that money when you don't have to pay for daycare anymore?
Oh, I'm going to invest it for retirement. Well, first I'm going to put some away for his college and then I'm going to put the rest towards retirement. So that's and we invest less for retirement right now because of that bill, And for me, that's okay. That's still part of our plan of embracing the present and not being so focused future focused that we forget now is here.
Yeah, So for me, I would say flights. I love buying flights because it represents adventure. It represents usually going to see a beautiful place or beautiful people, the people that I love. We live away from our family and friends, and so we often are going to Ohio or Pennsylvania to see family and friends, or we're going to see someplace really amazing, and that is just so fulfilling to me. And I think it's important to have things to look forward to. I think it is one of the things
that keeps us going, especially during difficult times. Like one of the things as I've kind of counseled people over the years going through really tough, particularly trying seasons of life, that's one of those anchor points that is usually helpful for people, like what do you have to look forward to? And if you don't have something, can you create something? Can you find something that you can put not in the two distant future that you can look forward to?
And for me, that's one of those things.
Yes.
So we hope that we have inspired you to start on the path to learning what you love to spend money on, learning what you love to spend time and energy and space on, and that you can do more
of that in twenty twenty five without going broke. And if we have, we hope that you will pre order buy what you love without going broke, or if you're listening to this after January soth, we hope that you will buy it, buy what you loovebook dot com if you've already pre ordered it and you want to leave a rating and review on the platform that you purchased on, or maybe just a review of the podcast, like this one from Run and Jess hands down my favorite podcast,
five stars. It says if you would have told me five years ago that I'd be binging a podcast on finances, saving and frugality, I would have laughed in your face. But here we are, enjoying every episode, taking notes on all the juicy info nerd Alert, nord Alert, nord Alert, and humming the bill of the week jingle as I'm doing housework. Jen and Jill have excellent content and even better delivery. I've only been listening for a couple of
months after they were guests on another podcast. I listened to Hijes Massey from Hustle sanely, and I've been binging ever since. And yes, I've pre ordered their book as well and counting the days until i can dive into it. Thank you for spreading the frugal gospel with fun and positivity. Providing great resources, validating good habits, and celebrating all the milestones along the way. This podcast is a game changer.
I'm not crying. You're crying, Liz.
I'm literally have goosebumps over here. Some of these reviews, you all go all out your great this head all of the things that I love, including the fact that you've also pre ordered the book. This feels like such a gift to me to have both a Bill of the week and a review saying we pre ordered is It's kind of.
Like Goldie podcast manager may plant it. Well, you know what she.
All collectively gave us. I guess she said good, And I'm here for it. And I'm so glad that you who would not have ever described yourself as someone who would listen to a personal finance podcast are listening and enjoying it, because that has been our whole goal from the beginning, is accessible, fun personal finance content for your average person who doesn't know all the lingo but wants to learn. So I'm glad you're here. If you all are listening and you've not left a review, you don't
have to make us cry with your review. But like this one, it's so helpful to know. Oh, this would be a personal finance podcast for me, because yeah, I don't want it to be boring, and I don't want to feel ashamed by my spending decisions. I want to feel seen and I want to be helped. If you felt that this podcast has done that for you, let others know it can really help to get this content into the hands of more people. And by doing so,
you would be helping. You'd be helping us, and you'd be helping others.
So thank you, thank you, See you next time.
Bye.
Frugal Friends is produced by Eric Sirianni. All Right, it is New Year's Eve and when this comes out, what do you think you will do to ring in the new year?
To go for the new year? I think you found yourself at our party. Yeah, yes, remember the one year it was it was hot tub and roof. We're on the roof, you're on the tub.
I don't know that you were able to come last because there have so many children they need care. So there's just two of them, but they all require something.
So what do you think you'll be doing this year?
Going to bed?
Yeah, see, I think that's what you said last year.
Yeah, I did I did do that last year. I am past the point of my life where I want to tackle crowds at one am. That's I think the barrier for me. I will tackle crowds at probably until around nine pm.
Most of the time. I hear you. I think New Year's is my one exception. And here's the funny thing about that. I just made this comment too, Eric. Recently. I think a lot of parents claim and blame their kids for not wanting to go out and blame do these flame But in reality, I think it's age. Because Eric and I are home and in bed far before midnight on the weekends, even on the week didn't.
Go We don't.
We don't want to be out past ten o'clock, Like I don't want to drink past that time. I really, I don't want to drink past seven pm anymore because it messes with my sleep. And I don't want to be out because I have things that I need to do on Saturday morning and I'm just tired, and I like my bed and I want to get a shower, and I don't need to be in this conversation with you longer than is necessary. Like I like meeting new people, but you get it like okay, yeah, yeah, it's I'm
not the kid's fault, it's age. Yeah, and learning that like I met all my needs tonight.
That's it.
Ten thirty. We got there. There's nothing more that we're going to learn about each other or connect on. If I'm out for another two hours.
I think the crowds I'm talking about are traffic on the way home. That's because I never really went downtown before kids. I would go to somebody's house and then go home afterwards. So it is now I just can't because I can't bring the kids out that late.
But I.
Know we'll see, we'll see
Where the wind takes me, and it might be straight to Muppet