Hello, I'm your host, Mr. Chuck. I'm a retired accountant, turn truck driver, I have reduced my debt to zero in a short matter of time, debt reduction to achieve financial freedom takes commitment, confidence determination, you're thinking about getting started with the fire movement, but you don't know what extreme cost cutting measures you can do to maximize your savings, whether you want to retire early, or start your own business, whatever your future goals are, you want to maximize your savings now, we'll get started in one moment. Together, we're going to explore our finances and figure out how to improve them. reduce debt increase wealth is a podcast to inform those to improve personal finances, whether it's eliminating debt or making smart investments. I'm gonna talk about extreme ways you can cut your cost. This is not for the casual person trying to save money, but this is for somebody who is very serious about saving money. I'm not talking about just being cheap. We're talking about being frugal on everything in your life. And everybody in your family, whether it's yourself, your spouse, and your children, all must take these and do these extreme measures. If you really want to save money, I got these extreme measures from two articles. The first article is from the www.accounting degree.org resources and extreme ways to save money. And the other sources, the crazy coupon lady.com 40 borderline extreme ways to save serious money and 2017. I know it's an older article, but it's still relevant for today, don't matter which one of those you go to and read, they both are coming to have an overlap of some type. But if you really want to be a part of the fire movement, don't buy a house, if you're already in a home. Unless it's a fixer upper, and you got it really relatively inexpensive. And you can do all the work yourself, you need to get rid of it. You need to downsize your home. If you have extra rooms, you're not using extra garage, you're not using anything you need. If you're going to stay there, you need to start renting those rooms out. If you live by yourself, and you're not very handy and you can't fix things up. I would suggest you find a roommate that can do those things and teach you how to do those things, then you get that home fixed up. You want to flip it, you want to sell it and downsize. We're serious here about saving money. So the less money you spent on your home, the more you can say your goal is to save at least 50 to 70% of your take home pay some of these measures I've learned when I was a younger person a child growing up, because when my family we had a sister in if you don't know what a sister in is basically a holding tank for your water source. We didn't have a well or city water. So when there is times when like late summer when it hasn't rained a whole lot. Our water got low, we did a lot of extreme water saving things. And that's what we're going to talk about next How to say water. Some of this is going to overlap into the personal care category. Like don't take a shower every day, take a shower every other day. And everybody in your family must do the same. That's going to save your cost on water. heating of your water. And your sewer bill also is going to save costs on soap and shampoo. If you think that's extreme, or if you go to the gym and workout, don't go home and shower, shower at the gym, if possible. That will save you some money, boats and travel time, auto expense, water, heat, heating the water etc. You got to take your soap and shampoo with you. It shouldn't be too much of a big deal. Now we're going to get into some disgusting things. Every time you use the toilet, don't flush it. Only flush the toilet. If there's solids in there, that's a nice way of saying in it. So if you are only doing liquids in the toilet, don't flush it, and everybody in the house must do the same thing. And if it's summer out, and you're not running the air conditioner, you got the windows open, because you're trying to save costs on electricity, which you're gonna have to do, that toilet can get smelling pretty raunchy, but only flush it with solids. When you take a shower, don't let the water go down the drain, close the drain, let the water build up in the tub. And when you take a shower, it should be a Navy shower, you turn the water on, get yourself wet, you turn the water off, you soap up, shampoo, turn the water back on, rinse off, turn the water off, dry off, you're done. That's what they call a Navy shower. And you only gonna do that every other day, the water that you build up in the tub, you get out of the tub, and you put it in a five gallon bucket. Why? Because when you go to flush that toilet, you want to turn off the main water going to the toilet, and use foot, go ahead and flush it. And then use that five gallon bucket of water to refill your tank, you're gonna save water, you're gonna reuse water. If you start getting too much water. And from your showers, you're taking too many showers. But you can also use it in the summertime to water your plants outside won't hurt nothing. These are extreme measures to say money, you're going to cut down on your water bill, you're going to cut down on heating your water and you're going to cut down on your soap and shampoo expenses. So that's kind of everything that's your housing. And that's some personal care. And they're saving electric electricity and gas natural gas if you heat your house with natural gas in the summertime only run the AC when it gets hotter than 80 degrees. If it's humid out, like where I live, it gets humid and might be 78 degrees, but it's 90% humidity and it's not raining. I said we have to have a programmable thermostat. When you're gone for the day and nobody's in the house, you set the AC to run at 85 degrees right before you get home you lower it to 80 degrees at seems hot. But if you leave the windows close and you run the AC that will keep the humidity out of the house. It's cheaper to turn on the whole house fan. pump that cooler air out of the basement if you have a basement and circulate that cool air out throughout the house. Even running the pan 24 seven is cheaper than running that air conditioner. The newer furnaces if you got a new furnace was in last three to five years. Most likely the fan is a high efficiency fan. And it won't cost you a whole lot of money to run. He do the same thing in the winter, but it's the other way around. Set your thermostat below 65 degrees with is gonna get extremely cold out, open up your cabinet door so that he can get underneath or sinks so that your pipes don't freeze up. Make sure you got the windows closed in the basement so the pipes don't freeze up. It's cheaper to insulate the pipes to keep them from freezing than it is to repair or replace the pipes. So it's the same thing. You said the heat lower when you're gone. And right before you get home, you raise it four or five degrees, not a whole lot. The other trick that I do is when the wind summertime, I let the house warm up during the day because it really don't get too hot in the house until late afternoon. And then once the sun starts going down nine o'clock at night, eight o'clock at night, and I set the AC down lower, let it start cooling the house. And when it's not hot outside and it runs a whole lot less. You do the same thing and the winner you let the house cooled down when you're asleep right before you wake up. You warm it up to 245 degrees. Not a big range there. That will save your costs on electricity and or natural gas depending on what you're using. They eat and cool your home. Other things would be to only mow your yard one Once a week, don't use a service, you got to do everything on your own. If you have something that needs to be replaced or repaired, you got to do it yourself, you go to the store, when you're buying stuff for replacement repairs, don't go cheap, buy a quality product. Like if you're if you're got drips, if your water is got a drip, and maybe your faucet, get rid of that old faucet, put a new one in there, if you can take the faucet apart and replace the seals and gaskets in there. That would be cheaper. Maybe could try that first, YouTube videos on how to do things are great. There's about every subject matter is out there. If you think it's dangerous, and you're not comfortable doing it, well then don't do it. Find somebody that can, if you have an extra room in your house, rent out that extra room, maybe something you live closer into the city, maybe somebody that lives farther away would need to rent that room for the week. So they're closer to work, take public transportation, if you have two cars, get rid of one, if you have a car payment, sell that car, buy an older, less expensive car and try to pay cash for it. If you have to have a car. You want to use public transportation, you can take Uber to get a ride to public transportation, you can ride a bicycle or you can walk these are extreme measures to say your cost kind of kind of lumped all that together between housing, transportation and personal care. Now I'm gonna start and go through the articles and see what I missed. And the first one is gonna be the accounting one on why do accountants have anything to do with extreme savings? I have no idea. It's accounting degree review, written by an accounting degree.org staff and it was updated June 1 2020. It's a pretty recent article with rough economic times, it seems that everyone is looking for ways to save money. The following list offers 100 extreme ways to save yourself some serious money without having to be in an accounting major. Some of these suggestions aren't too out there, but others may require that you have a strong constitution or a very understanding significant other. Now everybody's got to do this or you're just wasting your time. from washing your clothes in the shower to Darren and new socks. These frugal trips will save you some cash. Don't shower every day, shower every two days to save money on water and soap usage and that's including eating the water. If you worked out at a gym, they got a shower shower at the gym, reduce shampooing, many experts believe that shampoo any more than two or three times a week is not good for your hair. Plus, it really save you on shampoo. No more toilet paper. Some frugal people start spending money on toilet paper and use newspaper or cloth towels instead. And note the cloth tiles they throw them in like a pillowcase or something and they wash them and reuse them. I don't do that. I've never been that. We talked about the Navy shower. So your own clothes fix you know resell your clothes Darren your socks so you don't throw them away. Now men with underwear I know you wear them out to fix your underwear. I know you're gonna wear them out anyway. So you know don't buy them unless you absolutely need them. Or share clothes in the shower. Take your clothes in the shower and wash them while you wash yourself. I don't agree with that. But make your own soap you can look up how to make soap. Make your own toothpaste, make your own shampoo, stop wearing makeup, you know and I forgot to start out I was gonna say if you really want to save money, quit drinking alcohol, quit smoking. quit doing these bad habit. Things that cost you money. Stop shaving. Never have to buy another razor or waste expensive water when you eliminate saving. So man, you can grow a beard and if you have a spouse, I guess you better get used to Harry everything. Cut your own hair and I'm not gonna mention that use mayonnaise moisturizer. recycle everything you can don't throw nothing away. Keep it in case you needed to fix something else. One man's trash is another man's treasure and they say drive around and look for what people are throwing away and fix it up and use it. I've done that with grills. No big deal. Go to lost and found the go unclaimed instead of buying hats, coats, umbrellas and other items left behind gloves would be good. You can help yourself from those lost and found bins after it's been cleared as truly loss shop for clothes and furniture at thrift stores. Buy your furniture use on Craigslist or other places have a swap meet where you get rid of their say children's young children's clothes and trade for older children's clothes. And they go in house build your own house downside your homes live in portable housing, fix it yourself use all the energy source sources, which could be expensive to start with, collect rainwater for a garden around the house, sell luxury items taken borders, live in your car. If you're thinking about building if you have a lot that's not in the city, and it's a country lot to start with, build yourself a tiny house to live in. He can even do it faster than that by buying a used RV and sitting there. It's already on wheels. It's already set up. Kitchen, rest Bathroom Bedroom, if you got the proper zoning, you can do it. That's what I would do. I'd stay out of the tent. If you're living in a city and a city street in a tent. I think that would classify you as being homeless. Maybe you wouldn't be working I don't know and you still got a shower every other day and a place to go the restroom on that tufan on tents the cuts kind of a temporary, maybe while you're looking for that RV to buy to put on your lot. downsize watered down your products shampoo cleaning my last longer may not work as good if you select flushing people choose not to flush the toilet each use limiting flushes to every second or third P and when solids are present. I'm saying only when solid are present and use your shower water that you saved up to flush it with your tanks for water it waters turn off to the commode you flush the water out, make sure everything goes down, put the flapper back down, add the water carefully. You don't want to spill it everywhere. And you're ready for your next flush. Don't use a dryer, dryer clothes out on the line and they do smell a lot better fresher. And you don't have to be Amish to do that. You can still use your washing machine and it's also frugal to use your dishwasher. your dishwasher is gonna use less water to wash your dishes and then you doing it by hand who would know but that's you know I saw commercial that's how I know that assuming you got a newer dishwasher and it doesn't use a lot of work because you know it puts like a gallon in there or a half a gallon in there then it recirculates it and sprays it around, get rid of big stuff sell you you unused furniture appliances you don't use or any of the big stuff around your house, you're just taking up space. Learn to live without heat or air conditioning. Less than 100 years ago, people live just fine without central heat or air conditioning and many countries around the world still do. So imagine how you would save if you eliminate those two expenses. Okay, well you can do that that would be extreme, I would say just control it through a programmable thermostat. Put a brick or a jar in the toilet now a jar would have to be full of water a put that in the tank of your toilet and that is going to display some water so that when you do flush, you're going to use less water. Make your own pesticide, pesticides, etc. Food have a garden can try to eat as much as your garden and candidate for the winter. live off the land. A lot of people do that. Use a diaper in your plants if you're growing vegetables and containers put some of the sorbent material from a Dave baby diaper at the bottom of the container below the soil. When you water the plants the excess water or be absorbed into the material and when the soil dries out, the water will soak up into the soil and eliminate the need for frequent watering. Now that's important for containers because they're sitting outside in the sun beating on they dry out fast you got to water them every day. So it's not anything to keep it moist. It's going to help your plants cook from scratch so you can buy a raw materials much cheaper. Hunt for your meat. take home leftovers, free groceries take advantage of stores. Buy One Get One Free decals and coupons and all that kind of stuff. Restaurant freebie, sign up many restaurants merilis to get free food. Don't forget to include your birthday to get free meals then to save restaurant packets. put salt pepper hot sauce So now they're condiments you keep getting when you purchase fast food in your pantry to use later. Now the other article says hey, use the ketchup packets, the replace the ketchup in your ketchup bottle. That's you know, cut them open, squeeze it out and fill us to catch it from the packets to refill your ketchup bottle. Probably do the same thing was mustard. Of course cut out alcohol, alcohol cause plenty of money, stop drink the drinking, to really save or learn to make your own. He can legally make your own beer takes a while but you cannot eat legally distill your own hard liquor health and medicine. Learn about alternative healing methods. Best thing about medicine is if you take the proper vitamins every day, you're going to be less likely to get sick, proactive, ie naturally organic, staying physically active and knowing your body all the excellent ways to stay healthy and avoid costly medical bills. Learn first aid, treating minor illness and training yourself reduce the unnecessary medical care that can be done at home. Don't go to the emergency room when you got a cold as a good example, entertainment, free TV antenna, watch local channels only. No more cable, no more internet no more than nothing. I don't go that far. But that's what they're saying. Entertainment home instead of going out to a bar or restaurant to have your friends come over for an inexpensive yet fun night in. Have them bring their own alcohol. That's what are my friends used to do? Go to each other's homes, take turns, take your own alcohol and have a nightly party. It's safer, you know where you're going. If you can't get too drunk can't go home, you got a place to crash. Go to free concerts when the cities offer free concerts go to them. Go for dates at lunch. Instead of asking out somebody for a date and going out to dinner. Take them out to lunch because lunch meals are generally cheaper and you're not gonna drink because you'd probably have to go back to work surf the internet, outside your home don't pay for internet connection when you can serve at libraries and free Wi Fi spots such as Starbucks McDonald's and about everywhere else nowadays. Caution with that you need to have your own VPN Virtual Private Network cost you a little money upfront, but it could save your from getting hacked, or spammed or whatever. Free popcorn, don't buy, go to a movie, don't buy popcorn, don't go to movie watch at a home used to rent movies. Now you can stream them. If you're paying for Internet service. Stream all your TV, that's what I do. No more cable bills, you can save 100 $150 a month easy. By streaming the only stream no more than two different services. Make sure you find the streaming service that gives you the most for the amount of money you're willing to spend. You can get all bunch of local channels, you get a bunch of all the cable channels, you get all the news channels, get some movie channels $65 a month. I don't know what cable TV costs. But last time I had it, it was $100 a month and that's been quite a long time ago. I probably been streaming for the last five years. Transportation getting rid of your car becomes like a bike commuter. Find out how to save money on your transportation expense, recover some of that conserve gas, carpool when you can only dry and take public transportation. If you work downtown, if you have a newer car, sell it and buy an older car for a cheaper amount of money fine if you don't know how to do it basic tune up which now the new cars a tune up is a matter of changing spark plugs every 50,000 miles getting an oil change done. He can do that yourself. It's not hard change to drain the oil. Take the filter off, put a new filter on put the plug back in, put the oil in, make sure it's level, the right level. You're done. Check air filters, make sure your air filters for your car are clean and make sure you have the proper tire pressure at all times. All those things will save the life of the motor, the transmission and reduce the cost of operating the car. Only walk or bike anywhere. Your destination is only one two miles away where I live every Things like five miles away. Again, take Uber to public transportation and take public transportation to work a monthly pass if you do it on a regular basis, it says move closer to work or school, make sure you live close enough to walk or bike to school so you don't have to own a car, car share, commute with somebody drive a scooter, have a motorcycle, if you can easily get licensed to do that, which I do. I used to ride my motorcycle to work every day. Stop buying it is extreme. But see if you can stop making purchases all together for 30 days. Not only will you save money, but you also begin to see ways to do things without spending money for the long term. Good thing. freeze your credit cards learn from this bloggers and how the literary freeze your credit card set, you won't have access to them. just any old time, make gifts frustrated, got credit cards that are maxed out, get free samples, live like a farmer go to bed when the sun sets and rise when the sun rises, so you use less electricity. Well, I think a farmer stays have way beyond dark. But now that that's the principle hide cash, hide five or $10 bills around the house in odd places, you won't be tempted to spend what you don't see, that's kind of weird, but you still wasting money, I would leave it in a savings account draw interest on it. I know it's not much but something sell pigeon droppings at church and Harvard kind of sold pigeon droppings they collect from their church and make $30,000 I guess that would be fertilizer for the garden. Look for spare change. Yep. When you have extra money if you just thrown it in a jar on your dresser once a week, once a month, take it to the bank, take it somewhere and deposit it in your savings account. That way you're building your emergency fund up. Now let's go to the other article that crazy coupon lady. She basically are doing the same thing a little more extreme like if you buy sponges or the dryer. Things you put in the dryer to make your clothes smell good or soft. Cut all that stuff in half, he doubled them out. Don't use toilet paper. Use newspaper which would be rough or paper towels sign up for free samples chair and neck flex account with a family member but they live in your house what goods are going to do and nor expire ration dates, and it goes through cell by lesson knowing how long to display the products for sale. Best if used by is recommend for best quality of flavor not safety. Used by indicates when the product will start deteriorating in quality and flavor as determined by the manufacturer. She's saying don't pay any attention to it if you use it until it's gone. Then through the rinse it out and recycle the bottle. Get a grand a cup for your tall drip coffee and save up to 30 cents at Starbucks I'm not really sure about that make dryer sheets lasts longer by cutting them half. Same thing with sponges. Use a ball up piece of foil to soften clothes. If you're gonna be this do it yourself, you're gonna need two to three aluminum balls per load and pull three or four feet of foil for each ball. So you take aluminum foil three to four foot he crumpled it up into a ball and you make two to three of those balls and throw them in your dryer with your clothes. And that will soften your clothes. So she says I don't know if it's to a damaged clothes use coupons to save even more on sale items when they're on sale stockpile. If something is at half price by three or four, instead of one put in in your pantry and you just extended the cost of you know reduced your costs for a longer period of time by the whole cow to save hundreds on meat. If you eat a lot of beef and you got freezer space, you need to freezer space, buy a whole cow have it cut up and it's a lot cheaper than going to the store and buying a few pieces here and there. Now remember if it's frozen, you got to plan ahead you got to take it out and let it fall before you can cook it. So you need to plan ahead in that particular case. always buy clearance mean in the grocery store because they mark it down. There's nothing wrong with it. It doesn't. It might be turning gray but it's not bad. Ask the butcher to remove skin from salmon filets for a cheaper price. It may not be the biggest price cut but always take away from the overall weight of the salmon fillet and save you some money. So weigh a little bit less for your alcohol drink. I only drink alcohol if there's a rebate for it and good luck on that because it's probably illegal in most states get hard cash for buying products was dosh app don't know anything about it. buy snacks in bulk and individually packaged them for yourself. So she's saying is you buy a big bag of something and then you put in little baggies, serving sizes. That's definitely cheaper. It's even save more money is don't buy snacks, make your own toothpaste, watered down body wash shampoo and soap cut sponges and half clean was use dryer sheets so you use a dryer sheet a cut in half. She uses those sheets to dust with good idea. Wash and reuse zip baggies. Don't pay for mailing envelopes. I don't because I don't mail nothing. Rent a spare room out Airbnb, take coupons with you on vacation now renting a room out I wouldn't do it on air a baby I would try if you live in by yourself and you're not too handy. And you want to learn find a roommate is handy at doing things and if they fix things up, you reduce the rent, maybe give them free rent for the first month and then they have to fix up so much help you show you how to do things like fixing plumbing cape, the you know new faucets or whatever painting, carpentry whatever. If you find somebody can do multiple things and is willing to do it for reduced rent, you'll be better off and maybe they will teach you how to do those things. So you can do it yourself later on. Share internet cost with your neighbor. I'm not too keen on that because I have a greedy neighbor that I really didn't do it. I let him use my internet because his was down for a while but it really slowed me down. Hang your clothes instead of using a dryer. Learn how to read price tags. Now this is good at Costco. You know how to read it when you can tell when it's marked down. All those far is gonna get marked down. Costco at ends and 97 cents. at Target it's four cents at gap is 97. at Walmart at zero JC Penney's, it's 97 cents at Kohl's, look for the square in the upper right hand corner of their price tag and indicate the AMS has hit the lowest price of the season. Read a faded black clothes for about three bucks. So if you have black clothes, and they're faded out redial trade in your old books at Amazon. Instead of buying perfume you samples from magazines, if you get the magazine for free, good luck, enter contests to score free tickets and giveaways I never win much discount. Okay, here is a good thing. Use discounted gift cards for everything. So you can go to rise.com and buy a gift card for some place or something you're gonna do. They usually buy them cheaper. So you get a like a $20 gift card is is only an example, you might be able to get a $25 gift card for 20 bucks, you say $5. When you go to use it, you spend $25. So it's like getting free money. So use that for things you use on a regular basis like Starbucks or going target to buy groceries or whatever you can find. Don't buy wrapping paper use newspapers, especially the comics as wrapped gifts. Instead, my mother used to do that buy fresh bread and groceries at $1 store. If you have a thrift store or a bread store, go to the bread store and buy day old bread is a whole lot cheaper. And I always would toast it. They're saying the break off the stocks of the broccoli so it weighs less. But I eat the stocks. It's got just as much trician in it. So I eat the whole thing. Ask your grocer for the ugly produce to produce this starting to go bad maybe and they're gonna throw it away. Maybe they'll discount it and sell it to you freeze food so they don't spoil and this picture they cut bananas in the freezer and I'm not sure about them. Some things don't freeze good. You can freeze milk. If you buy an extra half gallon of milk and you don't use a whole lot of milk he can maybe on sale, buy a cheap put in the freezer. Again, you need to have room in your freezer to do these things. And on and on it goes unplug appliances save on electricity. Now I've read this in a couple different articles that whenever you leave a room, you gotta turn everything off, but you should unplug everything also. So all your lights, your TV, whatever you have in that particular room should be plugged into a power strip. So when you go to leave, you turn the power strip off because everything that's plugged into the wall is dropped. Some electricity, especially a TV to keep it warmed up and ready to go. Even though there are cost saving lectric reduct reduce using appliances, they still use a little bit. The main things would be your coffeemaker, your TVs, your computer's, things like that, that are gonna be using electricity when you're not in there. And then I talked about that. So over time, unplugging these appliances save you one to $200 a year. Again, these are extreme measures, and at the outset, you won't see any benefit. But over a long period of time, you will say money. I'll be back in one moment with my final thoughts. If you listen to this podcast using an apple podcast app, please rate and review this podcast for all your non Apple users. You can download iTunes on a Windows machine and go to the upper left hand corner, select podcasts, do a search, reduce that increase Well, he can subscribe to the podcast. And you can also rate and review the podcast. I appreciate any feedback that I get. Well, some of these extreme cost cutting savings may seem normal to some people, it may seem very extreme to other people. But if you're considering the fire movement, so that you can have an early retirement or increase your savings, the number one you need to do first before you get started, is to reduce your debt. Get rid of your credit card debt. First, these cost saving measures will help you achieve that goal. Also, the fire movement is two parts financial independence first retire early. Second, you don't necessarily have to retire early. But if you want to quit a full time job and do a part time job, or do whatever you want to do, you need to get rid of your debt. So if you start out in life, and never get into debt, you're gonna achieve early retirement much earlier than those who got into debt. Well, saving money may seem extreme to some people. It's normal for others. saving water because you don't want to run out may seem extreme to somebody who lives in a city that's normal for somebody who may live in the country. walking and bicycling may seem extreme to those in the countryside. Well in the city that is a normal everyday activity. So it depends on where you live and what you can do to save your money by not spending it You work hard to get your money. So hold on to it, whatever you have to do, so you can keep your money