No Buy 2025 – Episode 632

This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors.

[00:00] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers on today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about the No Buy 2025 movement. Kim, I shared this with you before we were going, and even just the name of that is like, what? Isn’t that right? Absolutely. So here’s what’s crazy. So there’s an actual movement. I’m pulling it up right now. It’s on Yahoo Finance. We’ll put a link inside of the show notes. There’s a trend right here, which is like No Buy July, where participants challenge themselves to avoid spending money for a full month. I get it. I understand technically some of these things, but I don’t understand it. How is this contradictory to prosperity thinking? Because I get the intent. But man, sometimes you can have the right intent and just

[01:02] end up off course. Absolutely. Unintended consequences. So it is interesting. I’ve put myself through various No Buy environments for a particular item or a particular area like clothing, for example, for periods of time. And it is not a prosperity oriented approach. And the reason is because it’s not sustainable. And we want all of our prosperity economics work, which is a term that I coined to help people understand the difference between all the typical financial planning work that is out there, which is often brought down to budgeting. And that’s essentially what No Buy is. It’s forcing yourself to go into a restrictive environment. And maybe there’s nothing wrong with doing that short term. And there’s definitely

[01:54] some people that have some habits that need to get a little bit of a strong reversal. And so if that helps you do that, great. But we want sustainability. And I’m not talking about a green earth. I’m talking about monetary sustainability. And so underneath prosperity economics, we do not recommend budgeting. We recommend taking a look at your life. And again, there’s always exceptions. But for 99% of the people listening, you take a look at your life. You have a certain amount that you’re spending. Keep spending that. And develop a structure whereby you can get some cash flow control. And it’s so interesting that we see this help people no matter what level of income they earn. I just met a couple weeks ago. They

[02:50] each earn about $500,000. And yet they cannot save. And it’s because they are putting all of their earned income into their checking account where they pay their bills. And then all of that earned income is being spent. And it doesn’t matter whether the number is $500,000 or $50,000. If you put all of your earned income into your checking account, you will spend all of it. And the more you earn, the more you will find things to spend money on. And so if you layer in this false restriction of, for example, a No Buy 2025, you might get some good results for a month. And maybe it will help you shift a habit. Yet the way that our world works is because money moves. We call it the velocity of money. This is an economic

[03:46] concept. And we need to apply it to our personal lives as well. So let’s hit it from a worldwide standpoint first. Or you could just look at the U.S. economy. When money stops moving, think about 2008. Think about 2020. Think about 9-11 many years ago. Money stops moving. The economy grinds to a halt. Nobody gets any good out of that. And then it takes the economy a little bit of time to shift gears and when money starts moving again, rise back up to its currently productive levels. This is no different for us as humans. If we try to stop the movement of money in our own personal economy, we will cause it to grind to a halt. We will develop inefficiencies. We will have false confidence because maybe we made a difference for a month,

[04:50] but that’s not sustainable. It’s not generational. It’s not prosperous. And so we must learn that money must move. And we want it moving in our personal economies just as well. I actually had a time personally, this has been quite some years ago, where I was very stuck financially. There was just not good going on in the business and I felt it personally and I didn’t feel like there was a lot of extra cash flow at the time, yet I knew that I needed to get money to move because our minds move, our bodies move, blood flows in our bodies. When any of those things stop, that’s not good and money is no different. And so I donated, kiva.org had just come on to the scene. I donated $25 to kiva.org. That’s all the extra

[05:38] cash flow that I felt like I had at the time. And it absolutely made a difference. It shifted my thinking. It shifted money. It got money to move, right? And it within that shifted my being so that the business got to do what it needed to do. Right now, I don’t even remember the problem and I don’t even remember the solution, but I remember getting the money to move and that is the exact opposite of Nobuy 2025. Very well said. You know, this movement is well-intentioned, but there’s a lot of negative pieces that can happen to it, as you were mentioning. Yesterday, as you were saying that, it flashed into my mind. Yesterday I was driving in the truck and I was like an hour away from where we live. I just happened to be there. I was helping my son with something. And I saw

[06:30] the tractor supply store there. I haven’t been to that store since 2020. Now, I had to go there during 2020 because I needed to get chicken feed. And we couldn’t get it at any other stores nearby, the co-op, nowhere else. That was because everything shut down and it created a lag. It created so many other problems. And it’s one of these, as you were talking about this, that someone may shut down their spending for a month. And then they won’t see the real implications of that weeks, months, years later. Now, there’s two pieces that I wanted to ask you about. So, one, Robert Kiyosaki often says, pay yourself first. The second is this, that you’re talking about how you have the flow of money move,

[07:22] meaning not into your checking account. Explain the dynamic of that versus stopping the money. Sure. So, it is very important that we develop a structure that supports our human habits. Because if we’re going constantly against our habits, it’s going to be very difficult to make change. And so, the concept of paying yourself first has been around forever. And yet, it’s very difficult to do because we are wired to spend money. The Amazon immediate buy button is their most valuable patent because it’s so easy. And there’s a whole series of studies now that show that you get the dopamine hit from buying things, etc. And so, it’s critical to put a structure in place. And you can either do this yourself or you can reach out to us for

[08:14] help. But that structure is putting a separate account between your earned income and your expenses. And you should do this personally. And if you own a business, you should do it with business. It’s the idea of developing that profit first or saving first or putting yourself first in place of literally every other thing that you spend money on. And there are then so many good things that can happen because it will allow that intermediary, that account that is going to collect our income. And I’m not talking just our earned income. Investment income, dividend income, bonuses, all kinds of income that people have. Gig income. You know, so much of that stuff just gets wasted. Tax refunds, the fact that we get typically

[09:10] 26 paychecks in a year but our bills only need 24 of them. Those two checks get lost if we earn enough income that we supersede Social Security at about $175,000. October, November, that money gets lost if we max out 401Ks and you know, that money gets lost. I mean, all of those things are lost just because they’re habitually put into our checking account and spent without purpose. They’re just getting spent. I have a friend that went through, she doesn’t normally do this, nor do I, but she actually went through somebody’s credit card statements for a year because they literally could not figure out where about $10,000 a month was going. And it was all right there on the credit cards, thousands

[09:54] and thousands of dollars to Target and Amazon and they thought about what they had spent their money on during the past year. And the guy came up with one thing that he really liked was like a $30 pair of shorts from Target and the gal came up with one thing from Amazon or whatever, I don’t remember the details, you know, that she really liked and they literally couldn’t even remember the rest of the stuff. I have another friend that went to a kid’s birthday party and was so disgusted with the massive amount of plastic that was given at that birthday party. You know, we’re just in this consume society and we do it without thinking. And so we need to put a position in place to separate out our earned income from our expenses and then it will cause

[10:42] us to think. We should live our lives the same way we are right now but let the system or the structure or the automation whatever word works for you, insert that reservoir is the term that we use for it between the earned income and the expenses and that will drive that save first mentality. It will drive that pay yourself first habit. And then you’re measuring progress. It does you no good to maybe more than once, you know, everybody should probably go through this experience once to really look at all the stuff you’re spending money on. But the fact is that’s looking really down a hole that is a black hole. I mean it’s an endless hole, right? Like we know that it doesn’t matter how much money you earn, you can spend it all.

[11:34] But if instead you’ll measure the progress that you are making by seeing your emergency reservoir, your savings account, your profit first account, whatever you want to call it. In fact you should probably name it. Build and you measure that account building and the progress that it’s making that’s so much more positive oriented. It’s a prosperous mindset. It’s enabling you to look at things from that abundance mentality that we talk about all the time. Whereas budgeting and all the limitations are the scarcity mindset which we know does not serve us well. And so the way that you pay yourself first is to install that intermediary, that reservoir, that stopping place for all of your earned income. And then

[12:18] you only put a certain amount, the amount that you need to live your life today, the same way you’re living your life today in your checking account to spend every single month or twice a month if that works for you. And you will start to see massive results. That’s so cool. You know depending on where you are as a listener or if someone’s sharing this with you or you’re going to actually take this podcast in and share it with someone else. In my mind I think that there’s going to be one of a couple different things. Either it’s going to be like staging an intervention and that intervention is with yourself or with your spouse or child or whatever that is. As parent possibly. And the intervention says okay

[13:10] we’re aware that there’s a problem, we’re now going to solve it. You can solve it through willpower as you’ve mentioned or you can solve it with a system or process. Willpower only lasts so long and it’s really difficult. System or process is the way to go. Kim, very helpful. For any of our listeners what is the best way for them to adopt the system or process or maybe just to ask some questions and try and poke holes around it? Well if people think they should do it on their own then they should give it a try. Go install a separate account and see if you can make it work for yourself. And if you can’t or if you’re the type of person that knows that you want help then reach out to us. Because for our podcast listeners

[13:58] Hello at Prosperity Thinkers will get you the opportunity to ask those questions direct and get the help if that’s what you want. Some of us get way better results when we bring in an accountability buddy. And part of our structure is technology but part of our structure is human help. And yes AI is awesome and yes robo advisors can do some good. And we find that in the area of cash flow control having a structure plus a human is the best way to get even better results. Thank you Kim. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you visit ProsperityThinkers.com Shopify.com Shopify.com