10 Ways to Help Overcome Inflation

Shawn: Massive inflation is eating our budgets alive, but with some wise choices like shopping, thrift stores, fixing items ourselves, and avoiding impulse buys, we can overcome it. Let’s get some perspective. Welcome to another episode of Christian Financial Perspectives. My name’s Shawn Peters, and this is my co-host, Bob Barber. Today we’re going to be covering 10 ways to overcome inflation. We’re not going to get really into any details on all the myriad of reasons as to why inflation has been super high, because I’m sure you’ve already seen tons of videos on that and news articles and whatever else is going on. So we figured let’s focus on ways that we can help people overcome inflation. Bob: Shawn, there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t talk to somebody that they’re like, I cannot believe what it’s costing me at the grocery store. And you can’t walk out of the grocery store today without just one or two sacks, and it’s going to be a hundred dollars. Shawn: Oh, I know. Bob: It’s crazy, isn’t it? Shawn: Well, and I just saw a video, I think it was yesterday, that someone had actually, they had recorded from a year or so ago a bunch of different things that they would buy at Costco and they were showing what the prices are now. They’re like, yeah, inflation is way worse even at Costco. It’s way worse than some people even think. Bob: And it’s just eating away at a family’s budget and it’s eating away at savings as well. So I’m hoping today it’s going to save you hundreds of dollars. So I will tell you this, in the next 15 minutes, hopefully it’ll be worth a couple hundred or a couple thousand dollars to you over the next year. Shawn: And there’s no sales pitch or anything on this. We’re not going to be talking about investment management or anything else that we actually do. This is purely educational. So if you do enjoy this video, we’d love for you to hit that like button, maybe comment if there are any other topics like this that you might want us to help you out with. Bob: So Shawn, before we start today, I took the scripture from Proverbs 21:20, but it’s kind of a harsh scripture. It’s kind of hard. Shawn: Blunt, I believe is what you’re looking for. Bob: And so I took three different versions. I want to read these three different versions and then we can talk about a little bit before we start. Alright, so the first one is the New Living Translation version, “The wise have wealth and luxury, but fools spend whatever they get.” It’s pretty blunt, isn’t Shawn: So let’s try the New American Standard Bible version, “There is precious treasure and oil in the home of the wise, but a foolish person swallows it up.” Bob: It’s pretty blunt too, isn’t it? Yeah. Shawn: And then The Message. Bob: Go ahead. Shawn: Which I always like reading something like NASB or King James or something that’s more of a literal direct translation. And The Message is always nice to get almost more of the gist of what the verse was talking about. So here’s The Message, “Valuables are safe in a wise person’s home. Fools put it out for yard sales.” Bob: And what’s so funny, as we talk about some of the inflation data, it says fools put it out for yard sales. I thought about that because so many times what does the old saying, “One man’s junk is another man’s treasure.” Okay? And so many times we throw away things that are still useful, but the color’s not right. Shawn: We’ll get into that. Don’t jump ahead next too much, Bob. Bob: Exactly. Alright. Shawn: So here we go. 10 ways to help you overcome inflation. Bob: First one has Bob Barber all over it. Shawn: Oh this? Yeah. Anyone that knows this guy. Bob: Just tell everybody. Shawn: Bob Barber. Yeah, this is Bob Barber’s. 1) Fix it yourself when it breaks. If you’re watching this on YouTube, soon as we’re done, you can pretty much look up almost anything. I mean, fixing the toilet bowl, installing fixtures, screens. Bob: A couple weeks ago, Shawn, so a couple weeks ago when Jenna, your wife, our daughter, our oldest daughter by the way, when she came down to our home in Rockport to visit before she left, she said, there’s a leak in the bathroom. And I said, what is it? So I went in and it was where the toilet, where the water meets the toilet bowl itself. I’ve never fixed this before and I flush it and a little bit of water would come out on the side. Shawn: Doesn’t seem right. Bob: It didn’t. And I’m like, oh my gosh. Drained it. I had to take the whole assembly off. Shawn: Oh wow. Bob: And it had been sitting on top of it and there was a plate and it got all rusty and I replaced that plate. Anyways. Shawn: Basically the seal wasn’t good anymore. Bob: The total cost for parts was $25. Shawn: Wow. Bob: Okay. Shawn: How much did you pay yourself for labor? Bob: Nothing. Okay. But I talked with some plumbers about it and it was going to be $250 to $400 to fix it. Shawn: Wow. Bob: Because it was a lot to it. It was taking it all apart, taking those parts off. It was three different parts I had to put in. Shawn: Well, they’re making money on the parts and they’re making money on the labor. That’s how it goes. Bob: Well, just to show up, they’re going to charge you a couple hundred dollars. Shawn: Alright, so fix it yourself. Bob: I had no idea how to fix it, but I went to YouTube and I figured it out. I went on some websites, found the parts, and ordered them. That’s an example right there. Very good example of when these inflationary times of saving a couple hundred dollars. Shawn: And I can say from personal experience, Bob actually got me my last Christmas, he got me a very useful Christmas gift. Apologies, I cannot remember the name of the book, but it was a book with a, what do you call it? Laminated like sheet. And it basically gives you all these different kinds of maintenance and things to look for if you’re a homeowner or technically if you’re renting as well. But it’s all these things to be aware of. And then the book is just detailed with all kinds of things from electrical and plumbing and HVAC, I mean just everything. And it’s awesome because I can reference that book even if the Internet’s not working, I can reference that book to fix something around the house. Bob: Anything. Shawn: It’s been great for this last year. Bob: Anything today. The only thing I do say, there’s one thing, do not fix yourself. You’re always hearing me say this, if the roof gets a leak in it. Shawn: Yeah, don’t fix it. Bob: Don’t try that one because your hospital bill at the emergency room is going to be much higher than what you would pay somebody to come fix it, plus you’re hurt then. Shawn: Alright, let’s move on. Number one, fix it yourself unless it’s the roof, otherwise you can try it maybe on your own. Bob: Okay, here’s another Bob Barber one, right? Shawn: Yep. 2) Install an antenna and drop the monthly subscription. Now Bob and I had a little bit of a disagreement, if you will, on this one. He said drop the monthly subscription. I’m like, what? I don’t have cable. I have never had cable in my adult life. For me, Netflix was the only streaming service when Jenna and I started subscribing. Bob: But Shawn, the streaming services like FUBO or YouTube TV, they say cut the cable, but still it’s $79, a $80 a month. So what I did was about a month, a month and a half ago, I just got tired of paying it. I’m like, this is a thousand dollars a year I’m paying to watch tv, so I’m going to get a picture. We need to show this picture of this antenna I got. It’s about this big and it looks like something from Star Wars Shawn: What was it like? It was like 50 bucks or something? Bob: It was $50. Shawn: Yeah, 50 bucks. Bob: So, I put it up, hit the scan, come up with 90 channels. Shawn: For free and their HD. Bob: The clarity is unbelievable. I called a friend that does this for a living. He goes, yeah, your clarity is going to be better. I’m like, really? Through streaming? He said, absolutely. And I noticed all of the stations that I liked that I’ve been paying for came up on the antenna tv. So now I’m going to be saving a thousand dollars a year. A year! Shawn: Yeah. On a $50 investment. I think that’s pretty good. Bob: Yeah, I do too. I think it’s a real good. Shawn: So if you currently have cable, might want to look into that. 3) Eat out less and make coffee at home. Bob: My wife’s the one that said make coffee at home because she loves, she’s got all the different kinds of syrups and she does the pour over and all that. But man, you could save a lot of money there. Shawn: That’s right. Pack a lunch for work, go on picnics instead of eating out if it’s a nice day and it’s a lot of fun. The other thing too, if you don’t want to make your coffee at home, you can also get, for at least for us, if you’re in the HEB area of the country, you can grab the HEB cold brew concentrate. I like the cold brew stuff, and it’s very inexpensive. I mean I think it’s like 25 cents maybe for a cup is what it comes out to. It’s real cheap. Bob: I watch here in our town, we have a local coffee provider and the line is just always huge of cars going through and I’m thinking they’re paying $4 a cup Shawn: Anywhere from $4-6, something really…well, depending on what kind of drink they get. Bob: I haven’t bought it in so long. Shawn: Well, every time I drive by, I see $5 there, $5 there, $5 there, $5 there. Bob: You could save $3 or $4 a day right there. So that’s over a year. That’s a thousand dollars. We’re talking about having to overcome inflation. That’s definitely one way to do it. Shawn: And it’s okay. You know what? Every once in a while, if you want to go through that coffee drive through, that’s fine, but make a habit of preparing ahead of time because if you don’t prepare ahead of time, you’re really going to eat into that and inflation’s going to eat you up. Bob: Yeah. Shawn: Alright, 4) Buy gently used – garage sales, thrift shops, local Craigslist, Facebook marketplace is another one. A lot of those things you can find all kinds of great stuff. Bob: Our middle daughter Jaeci just moved back to New Braunfels, and they sold a lot of the furniture that they had out in California before they moved back. She needed a big dresser. And I found one at a thrift shop a couple weeks ago. I found it for $40. I mean this didn’t have a scratch on it. It looked perfect. Shawn: It was solid wood, too. Bob: It was solid. Shawn: It was easily a 300 plus dollar piece of furniture. Bob: But it was just gently used. Somebody had taken really good care of it. But that’s an example, again, in these inflationary times… Shawn: Estate sales, also. Those are sometimes a little bit nicer because everything must go. Bob: By the way, we have our home in Rockport. There’s a lot of estate sales going on down there because that’s a lot of retired folks down there. Shawn: Alright, 5) Staycations, not vacations. Instead of the hotel or AirBnB, getting those plane tickets, having to Uber around once you get there, stay home, but still take off work. So this doesn’t just mean like, oh, you’re going to work from home or something like No, no, no. Still take off work. Bob: Take a vacation. Shawn: But maybe go to a local state or national park that’s within a hundred miles. It’s not going to cost much for gas. You could visit local museums, go hiking, bike riding, fishing – if you like fishing or even volunteer for a charity. Bob: Yeah, there’s so many things that you can do and I’ve heard a lot of people do this and they really have a good time. Shawn: Jenna and I do this most of the time now that we have kids. We finally got a used but very good price, a little travel trailer we can pull around. We needed somewhere for the kids to sleep in climate control. Bob: So, you let somebody else pay all that depreciation. Shawn: Exactly, yeah. We bought a three-year used one and yeah, we saved almost 50% off of it if we had bought it new. Bob: Alright, let’s go to number six. 6) Compare prices online before buying anything. Let your fingers and your keyboard do the walking for you, and you’ll save on gas. You’ll save on, possibly, if you get hungry while you’re out, you’re not going to have to eat out then. You can save so much by doing that. And we’re going to, by the way, it’s either next week or the following week. Couple of weeks from now, we’re going to do an entire session on buying a car online. Shawn: That’s right. Okay. Bob: Okay. Shawn: Yeah. On the compare prices online, A good example of that one, I know Clayton and I from our office, there’s a particular type of energy drink, which I’m not going to mention because then it almost sounds like it’s paid promotion. But at the local gas station, if you forgot to plan ahead like we were talking about, it’s about twice the cost even with their “buy two, get one free”, it’s about twice the cost as if you get it from the HEB or the grocery store. So again, compare online, don’t do the impulse purchases and definitely don’t make it a habit at least. But that also goes into our number seven, which is avoid impulse buying. So think logically and wait at least a week before buying anything unnecessary. Bob: And I got to say this one, keep emotions out of buying. Okay. You cannot let emotions get into buying decisions and just wait a week and see if you still want it. But do that research. Shawn: One thing that you can use that is free is there’s the Honey browser extension that you can use. So if you’re on Amazon and Walmart and there’s a whole bunch of places that it integrates with, if you see something that you’re considering, this is part of number six compared to prices online. But also, don’t do the impulse buy. Well look at the price history. Great example – Jenna and I, so I used Honey to, you can use it to track something. Bob: It’s called Honey? Shawn: It’s called Honey. I’ll show you later. We’ll put it in the description as well. But again, not sponsored, it’s free, but with honey you can track things that you are considering purchasing and you can see the price history sometimes back as far as I think like 180 days or more. So Jenna and I needed to buy a new trailer hitch so we can actually pull the RV, and it had gone up since we’d been looking at it. We’re finally, okay, we’re ready to actually purchase it. This is for sure the right one, it’d gone up $60. I’m like, oh my gosh, I don’t want to buy it. So I put it on the drop list and after about a week and a half or so, it had already dropped back down and actually had dropped back down even further below then what I had seen it from before the price went up. So then I ended up saving $70 on if I had just bought it right then when I was ready. Bob: Wow. Wow. Rachael bought a vacuum cleaner recently and she said she’d been looking at it for a year. She said it was at the lowest cost she’d seen in a year. Shawn: Yep. Bob: Okay. Alright. Shawn: 8) Avoid the use of credit cards. Bob, I’ll let you cover this one. You’re very passionate about this one. Bob: I am very passionate about this, but studies have shown over and over, even if you’re paying it off at the end of every single month that you spend more when you use a credit card because the credit card is not like… Shawn: How much more do you spend on average, Bob? Bob: 15-20%. Shawn: Wow. That’s more than inflation’s been. Bob: Yeah, much, much more. Shawn: But that’s if you pay it off. Even if you pay it off, you’re still spending more. But then if you’re not paying it off, I mean the amount of interest cost you’re adding on top of that is just astronomical. Bob: You’re buying it already and now you’re adding the interest on top of that. Now you’re really inflating the price. Shawn: Going to be adding 25%. Bob: So we’re going to show you a little chart. I got this off of Dave Ramsey’s site. I really like Dave Ramsey. He’s taught me so much and I know he learned a lot from Larry Burkett who I used to listen to years and years ago. But this chart you can see where when you’re using a debit card, you’re using your own money, and it’s real time. It’s coming down. Shawn: It’s coming out of your bank account. Bob: It’s coming right out of your bank account. Shawn: If your money’s not in the bank account, you can’t use it. Bob: But when you’re using a credit card, it’s not going to tell you when you’ve spent too much. Shawn: That’s right. Bob: They want you to spend more because they’re making their percent of it and your debit account’s not going to charge you interest or a credit card budget. Shawn: If you don’t pay that full balance. Bob: But you still get the same fraud protection. You can still use it for travel. Shawn: You can still use it online, you can still swipe it. You don’t have to carry a bunch of cash with you. Bob: Alright, number nine. Shawn: 9) You don’t have to buy another one if it’s not broken. Bob: Contrary to popular belief. Shawn: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Bob: That’s exactly right. Shawn: Or in this case, if it ain’t broke, don’t replace it. Bob: And just because the color’s off a little bit or the fixture might be outdated, it’s got this certain look to it, but now they’re using this other look because you saw it on HGTV, and you think I have to update it. Shawn: I have a great example on this one for you, Bob. Bob: Go ahead. Shawn: Jenna and I were given, I think it’s a 42, it’s a 42 inch Samsung TV and it’s flat screen, not as flat or skinny as the new ones, but it was a flat screen and we had that from the time we got married till, I dunno, about eight, nine years later, easy. And we were starting to have some issues with the screen. Well it was something I could not fix at least at the time, but I looked it up. There’s a local TV repair shop. I took it down there, cost 30 bucks, maybe 40 bucks, in and out, including labor and we still have that TV. We moved it to a different room. We since then got something, again, used and it was very inexpensive to use as our main TV. We still have it. Bob: I’m a big believer in big screen TVs. You know why? Because you know me, I haven’t been to the movie theater in 10 years. Shawn: Yeah, just have one at home. Bob: And so I just wait. That’s another way to save on inflation is wait for the movie to come out. There’s so many coming out every week. Just don’t look at what movies are coming out and you’ll get to watch it. One of my favorites in the last year has been “Top Gun”. It came out and I wanted to see that. I waited four or five months, it came out and yeah, I spent $5, we rented it for $5. Shawn: And the whole group can watch it for $5. Bob: What would it have cost us if we’d gone into the theater and watched that? Plus the popcorn and coke? Shawn: At least $5 or $6 per person if you go on the Tuesday night when it’s cheaper, but most days I think, what is it now? $8 to $10 on the matinee side. Bob: Shawn, if I go, I’m going to smell the good popcorn. Shawn: Well, you’re going to do that, too. Bob: So there’s another, so I’m spending $20 or $25 just to go the movie. Now I understand it’s entertainment, but still, we’re talking about inflation. Shawn: Don’t replace. Yeah, let’s not get on the movie industry. So, if it’s not broke, don’t buy another one. And number 10) Think energy efficiency. Bob: Last one. Shawn: To lower your utility bills, look for air gaps in your home and apply new weather stripping or insulation. Not expensive to get those items. You can install screens for windows so that way you don’t let the bugs in, but you can it if it’s a nice day, like in the fall and spring and shut off the air conditioner altogether during that time. Bob: We did this with our home in Rockport recently, as you know, this is an older home that we bought. They had all the screens sitting in the garage, and by the way, a lot of ’em had got rusted. But I pulled the screen off, I repainted it, you know me, and got some new screen from Walmart and fixed ’em all. Our average usage for kilowatt hours has gone down by about 75% right now because it’s such a nice time of year. Shawn: It’s a nice time of year. Bob: Right. So when we’re down there, we just open all the windows and I’m amazed, Shawn, when Rachael and I do our walks daily, how many people, they don’t open their windows during this nice time of the year and how much you could save on utility costs. There you go. That’s 10 ways. And I believe if you… Shawn: And only six rabbit trails. Bob: But if you will follow these ways and really follow this, it will help you with inflation. You’re going to save hundreds if not thousands of dollars over the next year. Shawn: That’s right. That’s right. Well, God bless and thank you for joining us. Hope you enjoyed it. [DISCLOSURES] * Investment advisory services offered through Christian Investment Advisors Inc dba Christian Financial Advisors®, a registered investment advisor registered with the SEC. Registration as an investment advisor does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Comments from today’s show are for informational purposes only and not to be considered investment advice or recommendations to buy or sell any company that may have been mentioned or discussed. The opinions expressed are solely those of the hosts, Bob Barber and Shawn Peters, and their guests. Bob and Shawn do not provide tax advice and encourage you to seek guidance from a tax professional. While Christian Financial Advisors® believes the information to be accurate and reliable, we do not claim or have responsibility for its completeness, accuracy, or reliability.