Friday Flight - Cable Comeback, Robinhood Retirement, & The $42 Billion Question #603

dollars to our listeners. Why not? And I said six thousand, But you said, I don't have that kind of money. Ain't got that ft X money. But ft X doesn't have any money anymore. They don't have money, just like us. So the way that listeners were able to enter into win that money, all that you needed to do was to sign up for the How to Money newsletter. Um and as long as you did that, you were entered into win. And you and I we did the randomizer

and chose the top six results. And uh so, Stephen W. B. Tyler, s Jen R. Normal Ty, Miranda Kay, and Mike E. G. We will be reaching out to all six of you because y'all just won a hundred bucks each. By the way, if you forgotsh money didn't get around to it. We had a ton of people sign up for the newsletter. Thank you for that. But if there are folks out there listening, they're like, I forgot and I can't win six hundred bucks, So I'm just not going to sign

up for the newsletter. No, No, that's the exact wrong thing to do. Well, We're gonna have more giveaways in the future, but we'll do this again. There is a reward just in and of itself by being a Hot of Money newsletter subscriber. That's right, all the financial wisdom and nuggets of information that come your way via that newsletter every single Tuesday morning. But Joel, real quick, I wanted to take a minute to update everybody on my the grocery experiment that Kate and I said that we're

going to conduct. Remember this took a month off Costco, right, So, so basically we wanted to take that month off Costco because I noticed that ever since we started shopping primarily at Costco for our groceries, our budget had increased significantly. And so I talked about it with Kate and she was totally down to conduct this little experiment, and so we switched back to our original o G which is Aldi. And are you ready to hear the results? I don't know.

If I want to, I might plug my ears. Dude. Our grocery budget went down over thirty percent, Yes, over and so weather. So Kate will argue, She's like, well, the quality and this is one of your favorite lines. Do like the quality is higher at Costco? And I understand. I get that. I think there are certain things where you are getting a superior product. But I think I

bet too. I wonder if one of the reasons is you I wonder if you still have some things hanging around from that Costco trip from Sometimes we took that into account though, because Kate was just like, yeah, we you know, we do have some frozen veggies and some frozen meat that that we did consume in the month of November that we purchased in October. But we based

the accounted for all of that. And even still, dude, even still they're over And there are various reasons why that might be the case for us, right, like whether it's just they've got a variety of products that Aldi doesn't carry, right, Like Aldi just has the staples I've talked about that before and how at Costco, I'm tempted to get the special Japanese barbecue sauce or the truffle Hot sauce fridge they got all the sauce in our clubhouse right now, I love putting that on the leftovers.

But I think there's an element of the fact that everything comes in larger quantities in bulk. I think we were just eating more. I think we were being encouraged to consume more calories that plus, you know, I think that we were tossing more more food away. Uh just I think there was more waste as well. But but regardless, I you know that this is anecdotal, this is just us. Your mileage may vary. But I definitely wanted to share

that with listeners because hey, we do love Costco. There are certainly benefits, but I still think if you are looking to slash your grocery bill to the bone, I do think that the best place to do that is at Aldie. I think you're right. I think you're right. I think when you're talking about how can I get away by spending the least amount of money possible on food while still being able to eat like decent stuff, right,

I think all the is the answer. I mean, I think Costco takes a little more creativity and maybe a little bit more time in the kitchen preparing the because that's the thing too. Man, At Costco, we're buying so much more prepared stuff like snack kind of stuff, and that's a budget buster. Man, Yeah, for sure. So I think Costco makes sense for a lot of people if they're going to it, it's wide open knowing that they might spend more money, but knowing, hey, there's a trade

off and I'm getting better quality of certain ingredients. Like, Man, you can't compare the quality of a Costco steak to the quality of Manality steak. Like they're different probably true, different animals, right, like literally different animals, but with the one you're talking about horse and the other one you talk about the right. So um yeah, just from something like that, you're not directly comparing apples and apples, but if you're talking and in all these is more accessible

for a lot of people for so many reasons. There's like smaller stores, they're closer, and you're just like talking about less likely that your budget runs a muck because you spent too much on Japanese Barbecusa, the ware Club. There's all sorts of little things like that to do peak your interest. And if you're not careful, you you can let those I forget what they have. The CEO refers to them. But like those things that you find along the way, like they want to excite your interest

in Costco with the rapid turnover of products. They want to delight you as a customer. But that can be to the detriment of your wallet, for sure. A man. All right, well, I wanted to quickly share that, and again to the six winners, we will be reaching out to you because of course we have your email since you signed up for the newsletter. We'll be reaching out

to you to get you that money. Joel. Let's move on, man, Let's get to our Friday flight, which is of course a quick sampling of the stories that we found most interesting this week. And the Times they had an article about inflating prices of Christmas trees. Yes, inflation has made real life Christmas trees more expensive as well, along with everything else in your life. The average price last year for Christmas tree with seventy bucks for alive for tree

uh this year is closer to eighty dollars. Uh. And the best advice from the Times is to buy a smaller tree, which I think is uh. I think that's good advice. So go the Charlie Brown route, because yeah, I mean prices on the six ft tree, it's gonna be a lot less than what it'll cost you for an eight fit tree. Back in the day, That's something

Kate and I used to do. We literally would get the smaller tree and put it on a like a milk crate, like on a box, elevate it and then kind of like wrap it with the what do you call it, tree liner or the skirt or whatever whatever goes around at the bottom, so you get some of that some of the actual height, but you're just not spending at all on the actual tree. Like. But it

also pays the shop around of course. And if you aren't massively attached to real real life Christmas, you know, like natural Christmas trees or whatever, you might want to look for a deal on a fake Christmas tree after Christmas is over. For sure, you can pay for it in less than two years. I think you paid for years and listen two years same here. I think we spent seventy bucks on ours or something. You've got fancy ones,

I mean, speaking of costco inflation. Was there the other day I saw they had five artificial Christmas trees and like, okay, got this premium ones that look very real like those of the fantasy ones. I don't need that. Keep an eye on those jokers if they go. I mean, because ours isn't. So I told everybody how I removed that bottom section. Yeah it did in order to fit our new lower ceilings. But it doesn't sit super well in the stand now because yeah, because it wasn't, it's not

as fat and so it leans. So so you are in the market for one of time we actually invite Vacember twenty six, man, that's the day to do it. Yeah, I know. Actually, so you watch Spirited is what like they that movie or whatever the story of referenced like the real life Christmas Tree Guild or something like that, and made just made me think of that movie because like that's a pr campaign that he launched. I was like, oh man, there's actually this real life, real life there

really is one of those. Yeah, well let's move on at like obviously, yeah, Christmas is Christmas trees are a little more expensive this year. Which is a problem. But I think most people they've probably I don't know if they haven't gotten there's yet, they're gonna give it this week out of all likelihood. And I'm not sure if Costco still does the live tree thing. If they do, that's always been the cheapest place actually over the years to get Christmas trees because they literally like don't set

them up in storage ornything. They're like handing them to you out of the back of a truck. But let's move on. Let's talk about savings rates, Matt, because savings rates in the United States are plumbing, and after seeing a massive spike in the savings rates Americans in one October of this year, we have some new data and it turns out savings rates dipped quite a bit to the lowest levels actually since two thousand and five. The average savings rate in October, when you were still shopping

at Costco, was a paltry two point three percent. That's according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. And basically, folks are less interested in saving because they have and I've never really loved this term, but they have what's known to economists as excess savings still on hand. So Basically, people feel like they can hit pause on saving that money because they've still got more money in the bank

than they're used to having. So because of the lingering stimulus checks, people like, yeah, I still got I still got more cash on hand than I typically do, so I can I cannot save some of the money that's coming in, I can spend more of it. The problem is, it's easy to get used to spending more due to

what's noticed hedonic adaptation. We get used to a certain lifestyle and then cutting back really hurts, whereas it would been easier if we had never experienced that inflated lifestyle to begin with, exactly as it's tough to dial it back. And as a recent Times headline put it, we can't keep spending like this. And it's true, right because at some point those excess funds, those savings, they're gonna get drained. And you know, hopefully we have already experienced pe inflation.

But of course we would suggest that you keep your war chest full. We want you to hold onto more of those savings that I think a lot of folks are, in particular as younger, younger listeners are still trying to save up for those down payments, right Like, that's a lot of money that they want to keep at the ready. But basically, we also don't want you to spend all the money because we don't want you to be like the average American, especially if you're one of the individuals

who has seen their student loan payments paused. Just keep in mind that they're not going to stay that way forever, right Like, we don't want you to take your excess savings as a chance to spend if if you're still hanging on to some use it as a chance to make more progress, you know, towards your financial goals. Uh. Unfortunately, as rates on savings accounts have continued to take upwards, it just doesn't feel nearly as much like you're you're

being penalized for holding cash anymore. At least you're getting paid something for hanging onto that cash, Yeah, for sure.

And on that note, there was another article this week that echoes are our sentiments on that front, and this is this is what we referred to as the forty two billion dollar question, because that's how actually the Wall Street Journal referred to it this week, and that's uh, that article was about how much money that savers left on the table in Q three of this year by staying with the big banks that barely pay a pittance on interest in their savings accounts. And we're not gonna

beat the dead horse. I feel like we talked about this a lot, but let that number sink in forty two billion dollars just in Q three, in one quarter that that savers lost about because they're still or earning mind point zero one percent with one of the big banks when they could have been earning three and a half plus percent, right, And so inertia bias is strong. We get it, but this is one move worth making. You make it once and then you don't really have

to think about it again. We'll link to an article in the show notes that will help you make that switch, because you might be saying, like, I just don't even know how to do this, and it sounds like a big pain, and it sounds like it's it's gonna be I think it's gonna be really hard. But the truth is it's not very hard. And the benefits not just

the interest rate. There are a lot of other benefits to banking somewhere that's other than the big banks as well, like fewer fees, better customer service, better uh APP interface typically, So there's there's a lot of reasons to make the switch, and we want to help you do that with this article. Um, if you haven't done it yet, that's right, and it's easier than you think. So Joel in the UH in

the title of the episode, you mentioned robin Hood. I feel like that's the name that we haven't said recently so that everyone's like, oh, robin Hood. So we talked about them in a while eighteen months ago, two years ago. So listener Tyler. He actually sent us an email basically immediately on Tuesday after an announcement from robin Hood was made about them finally launching I ra a sh There is currently a wait list, but it looks like this is going to roll out to the general public come January.

And of course we've we've knocked robin Hood over the years for not offering retirement accounts. I think that was

probably one of the biggest strikes against them. We were like a lot of these other platforms in one is robin Hood's competitor in a lot of ways, and we were like, one's doing way better and they allow you to have retirement accounts, Like, that's a way better option because of course we want folks investing within those tax advantaged accounts first before you invest in your robin Hood account, which previously uh and I guess even now is just

brokerage accounts. Uh. So it was welcome news to hear that you can now open a traditional or a roth ira A on the platform. Plus, and here's the kicker man, robin Hood is offering a one percent in match on contributions that you make to your ira A on the platform. First of its kind. It's awesome. Yet like literally nobody else in the business is offering anything like this. So folks are you're probably thinking, oh, Matt and Jel, they're

gonna be all about this. They completely love this right well, because typically it's a mixed bag. You have to work somewhere and getting your employer does the match, right, But this is robin Hood saying no word as the brokerage,

as the company itself. They are providing the match, which I think is awesome, and so it is a mixed bag though, like we we love that robin Hood is offering that match incentive, but there are some other things you need to consider, and we would recommend for folks to check out the f a QUES section on their website. Will link to this in the show notes. But if you want to keep that one percent match, there is

a five year vesting period. And also we noticed too there is an outgoing transfer fee of a hundred bucks, which is pretty steep. It's worth noting that our favorite, our very favorite brokerage houses, UH Fidelity and Vanguard neither one of them charging anything in order to transfer funds out of an zero versus a hundred. That's a big deal.

It sounds really nice. But yeah, you might be handcuffed to Robin Hood, which may not be the worst thing in the world though, right like, because I mean, I say, like it almost feels like Robin Hood, like that they're starting to live up their name a little bit, right because by encouraging investors to stick with them for that five year investing period, essentially not only are they encouraging investors to stay with them, but they're encouraging investors to

not touch money that should be invested for the long term. Right and so, as opposed to before, it seems more self interested than than an attempt to help people. Actually say,

but if it's win win. I don't. I don't see the harm in that, right, and if I can get on there as someone who has been self employed virtually my entire life, where I have never experienced a company massage, literally this is I mean, we were able to provide ourselves a match you and I as business owners, but exactly, but for it to feel like it's something that you're getting completely free, I'm actually really stinking bullish on this.

I'm pretty excited about it, and I'll be looking into it and keeping folks posted if I do end up doing that, because I mean I think I will, I really do, and I don't. I think a lot of folks are also saying, dude, it's just one percent. But imagine like basically what I think what robin Hood is doing here, Like they're essentially forcing a one percent fee

on everybody else. It's almost as if you're four one k because if I can get Voo, which you can, you can get Vanguard e t s. You know, on the robin Hood platform, by going with robin Hood instead of even through Vanguard. By robin Hood offering that one percent, it's it's almost as if Vanguard, if they instituted a one percent expense ratio or something like that. And so while it doesn't sound like a lot of money, those you know that that one percent it adds up over time.

And I always said it's not meaningless. Right when you bump up your four ok contribution by one percent, that matters over the long haul. And so if you're this holiday season, you're thinking, Okay, I have more money on hand than I thought I was going to have, and you bump that up, that's a big deal, Like that's

something worth worthy of praises. So I think you're right, Like, I don't want to compounds over time, but I also want to make sure that Robin hood is going to do right by investors, because yeah, I'm not sure hopefully they do right. Like, yeah, they haven't been around as long as Vanguard or Fidelity. Then they've been around for like, you know, a hundred a long time. I don't know if the hundred years yet, but Robin Hoods, I mean, I think they've been a on for close to a

decade now. They're not like a new fintech start up where they also haven't septation in that decade's and so I'm not sure if I'm willing to give up the burden the hand that is one of these low cost brograges that we love to head over to robin Hood for this match. But I will say, like, if you haven't started contributing to Traditional or roth Ira yet and this match, this incentive actually gets you to do that. If this is the behavioral kicking the pants, you know

that that pushes you in that direction. I think that's great. And I'm not gonna disswage people from doing business with robin Hood. I just don't know if I'm gonna migrate over there just for this fair enough, But yeah, we'll see more, especially as the rollout continues to happen. Right now there's I think I I signed up to be on the wait list just to check it out, and I think I'm four and people behind. So it'll be

a minute. But while we're talking about Iras, Matt, I just wanted to mention too that the roth Ira we robin Hood offers the Traditional and the roth just like just like most of these brokerage companies that we talked about, just like vanguardien Fidela, you can do either one with with both of them, or with Schwab or within one, which is great But there's so many reasons that we've talked about ad nauseum on this show over the years about why you should opt for why so many people

should not for a wrath over a traditional ira that you know, the fact that tax rates are historically low and set to go up, you know at the the expiration of the Tax Cuts and Job Act. That's a solid reason to contribute more to your wrath instead of a traditional you know, the flexibility of that particular account

is another reason. But a third is that roth iras do not force you to take required minimum distributions and those r m d s. Yeah, I know most of us were trying to visualize our future self and that's actually helping us save more in the here and now for our futures. Identify with sixty five year old Matt and Joel, Right, we want to like kind of realize, wait, we want to be well taken care of at that

age and and we want the more financial flexibility. But require minimum distributions can really have a major impact on your tax liability and retirements. And so yeah, if it will link to an article that will kind of help you see just how bad it can yet. But yeah, for most folks, not all, but for most, prioritizing a roth ira is going to be the best way to optimize your retirement contributions, allowing you the most flexibility throughout

the years. That's right, man, We've got several other stories that we're gonna get to here right after the break, including that cable comeback story. Looking forward to that right after this. All right, the Friday flight continues, and of course we always are. Right for the break, we have to get to our ludicrous headline of the week, and this one comes from the Washington Post, Matt, and this one it's a curveball. Okay, I'm not gonna lie. It's

it's not typically like what we talked about. This isn't quite as much personal finance as it is. Just literally a ludicrous headline and definitely definitely ludicrous. Alright, So here's how it reads. It says her mac and cheese took more than three and a half minutes to make. She's suing, and yeah, like, it just struck me as cringeworthy when I read it, And to me, it just speaks to how lititious we've gotten as a society, which actually costs all of us more money. So I guess in some

ways it is kind of a personal finance thing. Like these this these lawsuits that they they are going to mean that Velvita now has to pay their lawyers. They got a lawyer up in order to defend their reputation. And basically what this this woman is alleging, and she's saying that the Velvita mac and cheese carton takes it says it takes three and a half minutes to make, but that's just how much time it takes in the microwave. She's got to take the lid off at the water

stern cheese. It just made me feel like we're living in odd times. I don't like to see stuff like this, and you know, I false advertising is a problem, and it needs to be sure. Sometimes lawsuits need to happen in order to curb bad company behavior. This feels like one of those frivolous things that's just kind of frustrating to read. It seems pretty done. Yeah, that's exactly whether

what the case that they're trying to make. They're like, no, it doesn't matter how ridiculous, Like this is false advertising and and so there's like a part of me that kind of understands where they're coming from. Like, so it actually it makes me think of as a kid, I would open the paintry and there's a box of ice cream cones, right, like of sugar cones, And I would always open the box because it had a picture of

an ice cream cone with ice cream in it. And I would open always open the box as a you know, dumb little kid, thinking that there might be ice cream in there. And I would actually do it multiple times, just hoping that the results were gonna change magically somehow.

Uh And so yeah, a part of me gets the whole false advertising thing, but again I was a dumb little five year old and so as uh an adult, I think Amanda Ramirez maybe just think if if she spent her time in better ways that would be more productive for society, if she, you know, maybe focused on her personal finances instead of taking vil Vita or craft or whoever the court right Yeah, now it's I mean,

I don't like seeing it. And fortunately your five year old self didn't end up suing the ice cream cone. I had better things to do with my time. But think about how much how wealthy you be if you had uh yeah, plus Bill, I mean mac like mac and cheese that comes in a box or comes in a cup like that, I'm not going to touch that stuff. Sorry, even if they do fix growth out marketing, just watching their commercials and the liquid gold stuff, I'm sorry, it's

not for me. Not not good. But moving on. So a while back, we did an entire episode about streaming and how it is that you can curb your bill.

One of our major suggestions actually was to watch less content in general, right because a cadre of streaming bills can quickly add up, and as more and more streaming services have launched over the past couple of years in particular, there's just the potential for your bill to get really out of hand, so much so that the folks over at c net they wrote an article about how traditional cable, how it's not nearly as terrible of a deal as

it used to be. The average cost for basic cable plus internet these days is eight dollars, and they found that the average cost of live TV streaming plus internet for those who cut the chord, for those who cut cable, it's actually a hundred and twenty dollars. That's pretty damn close, like so close. The horse race on her hands. Yeah. Yeah,

that like we think it is worth revisiting. That's why we're talking about Yeah, I mean it certainly feels like has a point here, right because cutting the chord it used to be the obvious way to save Like, I kind of got tired of hearing it from personal finance experts because it's like, duh, yeah, I know that's it became ubiquitous and everybody knew that the way to save money every single month on you know what they watched

was to cut the chord and ditch cable. But the opposite might be true now, which is crazy because if you're paying for one of those live streaming services, but you're also subscribed to a whole bunch of other streaming services too, there's a chance that you might be paying more now than you used to pay for your old Internet and cable bundles. And I doubt that there's going to be this mass exodus map from streaming back to cable,

partly because we all got used to no commercials. But it's at least worth doing the math and considering if you're a heavy TV watcher, especially for sports, especially for live sports, it feels, oh yeah, I still can't believe I'm saying this, but cable might make more sense for you. Foobo TV, they're monthly. It's so expensive, like yeah, it's like seventy like maybe sevent it might be eighty bucks. And I mean same thing with like YouTube. You've gotta

buy internet on top of that standalone internet. It's really expensive. Yea. So again, watching less TV overall leads to spending less. But cable might be the better solution. It's just it's worth shopping around packages. If you're saying, man, my streaming bill has gotten out of control, it might. I don't know.

This could be the best most effective financial solution for you to move back to cable if that suits your lifestyle, If that suits you're watching habits, and if it's going to suit your budget better, that's right, man, let's keep moving. So we've never loved the credit scoring models, right like, so the major credit bureaus, for the most part, they're not very good at their jobs. Errors are rife, and they hardly ever respond to please for help in a

timely or an effective manner. If you fill out a complaint, they usually just don't respond. That's how they like stone. While you maybe we'll get back to you next year. But still it's necessary to keep a watchful eye on your score. Uh, It's important to seek to improve your score. It's basically, it's just like a crappy game that we're all basically forced to play. Well. Credit scores are under fire again, but this time because of identity theft claims

from individuals that actually might not be true. The Journal wrote a story about how more Americans are hiring third party companies to help challenge negative information on their credit reports. But many of those companies are also challenging actual legitimate debts as well. And so while you know, for the most part, I feel like the credit beers are crap, right, but but many of these credit repairer companies are are actually worse than their horse race. This is a horse

race or yeah, which which one sucks the most? Uh? And so what we would recommend is just to not ever pay one of these companies to challenge something on your credit credit report. For you, if you think that you've been a victim of ID theft, we would recommend that you go straight to first of all, like your bank, but in you can finally complain at identity theft dot GOV. But there's there's rarely anything that these companies can do

that you can't do yourself. And it seems that I don't know, maybe some of these individuals, some of these folks out there, maybe they're kind of like hiring these companies thinking that they've got like some sort of magic sauce, some sort of special algorithm, uh, when in reality, what they're doing, they're just bombarding the credit carrows. It's almost like a brute force attack on a website, website nursery

for you. And then and then some of that's slipping through and because of that, it's allowing some of those scores to improve. But don't do something like that when like you're basically you're hiring a company to do the dirty work for you. It's just not cool to do that when you wouldn't lie to them directly. So don't do it in a roundabout way by hiring one of these companies. Well, and it's not like the results are gonna be long lived, and you're just gonna cost you

a lot of money potentially as well. And so it's just a bad idea. And the FTC they just sent out a warning about these debt relief companies in the aftermath of a lawsuit that they're heading up on behalf of consumers who have been impacted by some of these shady companies. And the biggest piece of advice they offer is to never pay someone money upfront who tells you that they can reduce or eliminate credit card debt, or if they claim that they can lift your credit score

out of the dumps. These are common claims and it sounds really nice. It's like, Hey, this company is gonna do it on my ma half. I'll pay him a couple hundred bucks, pay me first fucks right now, and then they are going to lift my score or find a way to help me jettison some of this debt. Well, sadly, that's not what ends up happening almost ever. And so if your credit score is subfar, we would say go back and listen to episode to eight seven will link

to that in the show notes. The reality is you don't need a perfect credit score, but having a solid one is crucial for your financial future, and this is something that you can d i y though, right This is something you don't need to hire someone else to do on your behalf, and actually it's it's not gonna work in the long run if you do. But let's say your credit score is in good shape, but you have debt that you're finding it basically impossible to pay off.

Call your credit card company directly to ask for a payment plan, or to ask for a lower interest rate, or you know, go speak to a credit counselor at a nonprofit like Money Management in National or NFCC, the National Foundation for Credit Counciling. Those are the place those

are the places you turn. Those are the people that are companies, legit organization, nonprofits that will counsel you in the right direction, who won't lead you astray, unlike these for profit companies that say, yeah, based five hun bucks and uh, we'll see what we can make happen. That's gonna leave you just poorer and still with a crummy credit score at the end of the day. That's right. All right, let's move on to our last story of the day, and let's talk about the cost of utilities,

because home energy costs are not cheap right now. The average cost of heating a homes winner it's predicted to be eighteen percent more than it was last year, which is a significant increase talking about inflation and the Yeah, the weather. It's getting colder across the you know, most of the country at least, even though yesterday it was

like seventies something degrees in Atlanta. That's Atlanta. It's I saw somebody post and it was something like, it's gonna be winner at six am, it's gonna be fall at nine am, it's gonna be summer at one pm. It's like, yes, that's exactactly. But yeah, you know, with the timing, we figured this is a good idea to cover maybe just a few ways to lower the cost of heating your home. So we've got a few tips, a few thoughts for you. First of all, of course, lower the temperature on your

thermostat by a couple of degrees. Put on a sweater, right like everyone in your household, this winner should be wearing Long John's or thermal thermals or like whatever it is that you in your in your region. Because it's something like every degree you turned down your thermostat, it's gonna save you a percent on your interview bill. And if you think about it like that, ye three takes down and like significant, but I'm gonna save a giant chunk on on what I'm spending to heat this house

this this month exactly. But obviously there's other things you can do too, right like taking shorter showers, running your washing machine on cold water instead of hot That's one that I recently, I can't remember when I heard it sometime earlier this year, but I heard a story where a lot of folks they do hot water when they're washing their clothes because they think it works better. They

think it it dissolves the soap better. But in reality, a lot of the detergents there may they're they're formulated to work better in cold water, And so that's one where you actually might be wasting money without receiving any benefit from that. Plus shortening the life the life expectancy of your clothes as well, because that hot water doesn't hot water kind of where done, your clothing maybe causes

a little more shrinkage. And on that note too, you can lower the temperature on your actual hot water heater as well, although that's one that I was gonna say a dad joke about that. That one got me in hot water as well. Actually, we've got our hot water hot water heater turned down to where it's pretty much good for like two showers before our kids have to start, like the water is getting cold and they have to get out of there. That's good, we're getting hard. Yeah.

And then it lowers your bill too. Yeah, I lowered. My mind was like scalding. So I just like brown down a few ticks and it's like, okay, now it's kind of normal, which is great. Save save me money though, and a little bit of weather shipping can go a long way in preventing from escaping too. There's a little

things you can do, right uh. And and if you want to do something bigger, well, next year is going to be the year to do it because there's gonna be increased tax benefits in read when it comes to taking some of these energy saving measures. That's my plan. I'm going to put in some additional installation in my attic space because I want to take advantage of tax

credit it's coming into being next year. Yeah. Yeah, our attic is good, but I want to My plan is to put installation in the crawl space, like up underneath the floor because the floors I've noticed this winner on the main level or on the lower level, it's cold, man, Like, there's no installation up under there, so I've been waiting to wait for the Caldar. Exactly can do that well.

And one other thing, if you're having trouble with how expensive the energy bills are getting in this country, a lot more people are gonna have trouble paying their bills, well, there's a low income energy assistance program. Will link to a site that can help you figure out how to get help if you need it in the show notes, but you can also just reach out to your state program manager or to your local utility company to see like, hey, do I qualify with if this is my level of income,

do I qualify for subsidized energy assistance? And and I think, Matt, just a lot of people don't know about that program. But who knows how many How Money listeners that might apply to, Exactly or at least folks that they might know who help as well. That's right, man, Um, Well that's gonna be it for this episode. Listeners can find our show notes up on the website at how to Money dot com. Will make sure to link to these

stories plus a new resources we may have mentioned. We hope everyone has a fantastic weekend, and like we mentioned at the top of the episode, go ahead and sign up for the how to Money newsletter. That way, you are guaranteed to not miss out on any future giveaways that we do via the newsletter. But Joel, that's gonna be it for this episode, Buddy. Until next time, best friends Out and best Friends Out