So let's start off with a word for each other. Our Father in heaven, we thank you so very much for all that you've given to us, the fact that we have a concern over taking care of the resources that you've given to us, the fact that you love us very much and have given us so very much. We pray, Lord, that some of the insight that we gain today will be helpful to us as we make decisions to glorify you in Christ's name. Amen. And if you get a little bit of extra, that's wonderful. And then use that on special projects. But make sure your cash flow that you're counting on doesn't have any of these extra, because you can't count on that extra. I was counting on my bonus this year. My boss said, our company lost $2 billion this year on unexpected things. Therefore, I'm going, OK, probably that's an impact on that bonus that is looking for. So we'll see. I don't know if it's a big company insurance insurance insurance comes out of our check as we work. So I know that he's just a whatever cost. these ones this and this is that, you know what I'm saying? Very soon to address that. In detail, just for you. Other questions about the mechanics? Would the room be to just sit there and look at your Tax history, how you spent money before, or looking in your checkbook, or looking at a little cash flow sheet, sticking that in your budget, and then looking at your expected expenses, and did all that kind of pull together. OK. I'm still struggling with one of them. We're trying to update ours at home. And two problems that we have is, one, who's going to pay which bill? And the other one is taking the time to sit down and work through it, because we're all very busy people. So if it's easy for you, you're the exception. Usually it takes a struggle to work over a period of months to get a bill. Good. Pleasure. OK. I was talking to Kim here the other day. Kim was telling me. that he was at an automobile dealership the other day and he was having his car fixed and he was sitting in this really nice S-Class. Does everybody know what S-Class is? Yes. Okay, this is an S-Class. He was sitting in this S-Class and it's just what was $124,000. He's sitting there and thinking, this is such a nice car. It feels so good. I really like this. And he puts his hand over the leather and everything. It felt so good. And he said, you know, based upon what I can turn in, and based upon what the least payments are thus far, I'm not just able to have this, but I'll have to be careful. And so he's thinking, maybe this is the right car for me. Plus, if I've already used one, I can keep it for like half the price. That's only 60 grand. So maybe this is the right car for me. And he was just kind of thinking through that process. So the question I have for you right now is, shouldn't you take that car? Isn't that the right thing to do? Because when people look at us as Christians, they say, there's somebody who gets all their money to the church, and they drive these stony old cars. As a good Christian, he needs to be able to say, I can live a high-quality, nice lifestyle, too. So as a Christian, he needs to drive a high-end, really fancy, classy car. And maybe you're right. We're going to talk about that in a minute. So what is the right kind of transportation for us? Do we need it? What do we need? We need to get from point A to point B. Do we want it? That is, do we need an automobile? Do we need an upscale automobile? Or do we desire what it is? We want the S class, but it can't be. So I don't know what you think. He's not smiling at me anymore. As far as a warranty is concerned, do I need a warranty on my automobile? At what point do I not need a warranty? Should I buy a used car or should I buy a new car? My friend Gary recently was sitting at home and people came and they took his car away. It's a really nice, deep Nissan, really nice car. The reason they took it away is because his lease was up. So it wasn't a bad thing that they took it away, but now you're sitting down looking around for another car. I'm trying to decide what to do. I didn't have any equity to build on. Is that a good thing or not a good thing? Here to answer everything you ever wanted to know is somebody who happens to be an engineer. So he's doing that methodical in this thought process. And he's a good friend of mine. His name's Keith McDonald. And Keith's going to come and share all kinds of levers with us. I hope I hit you up all right. That was good. First of all, I mean, I welcome all of you to throw in your input as well. I mean, I'm an engineer, but I don't know everything about buying cars. You guys have probably bought more cars than I have in my lifetime. So any input you guys have, please throw it in there. But first of all, did you guys get this handout? It was in the back. So my email address is there as well. If you guys want the last page of this, send me an email and I'll send it to you. It's an Excel spreadsheet. You just throw in the numbers. I press enter and it changes all the numbers away. It can pay a fine and everything like that. So if you are actually buying cars, I just wanted to set that up in the beginning and fuck it up later on. The first thing you have to ask yourself is, like Frank said, do you really need a car? I was down in Houston for an internship for a summer and I rode my bike around the whole time. It was not economically possible for me to drive my car down there. and have it. I mean, it was pretty sweaty riding my bike around and everything like that, but it was very costly. If you live and work in the city, you can easily use public transportation or ride your bike around. And it saves you a lot of money. I guess, what's the parking around here? About $200 a month to rent a garage or something like that. That's pretty much like a small apartment in some other places other than here. So you kind of have to put that into perspective of what you're actually doing with your car. For most of us, like I said, we need to work outside the city. We're traveling, sending our kids to soccer practice or whatever. So you actually need a car to take you around and bring you around. So you've got to try to ask yourself other things too. And one option that I noticed as well, if you don't You know that you're not going to need a car, and you're going to take random vacations or whatever if you cross the front of a car. And I put Orbis up here. They pretty much repair a bunch of different car oil places. You can take it out for the weekend. The cost, I guess the minimum is about $75 for a small economical car. That saves you a lot of money. You might just say, okay, that's $75 and I have to pay for gas or whatever, but you're only paying that for a weekend. How many weekend trips do you take? It's a lot better to buy a $25,000 car the longer you're living in the city and you want to take a car around. There's also another thing I've heard about, I couldn't find it on the web, but I heard it's more of a class thing. type of planning thing. I think you sign up for it as kind of like a contract thing. Yeah, that's right. I couldn't find it. You guys can find it on the web. I couldn't find it myself to give you guys information. You can just go over here to the corner of the parking lot and see what's lined up there. Oh, okay. They're available and I think eventually the church may go into that group for the visitation. Do you know more information about it? I couldn't find myself. I know from talking to people about it. All I know is that you paid for the cost of the car for the time period that you visited. So is it kind of like a minor lease? No, no, it's just an hour contract. It's like $7 an hour. So now I have a contract. OK, so that's the real issue with their brain. That could be something very useful to see. I heard they pretty much drop it off wherever you want it. No, they have drop-off points, but they're pretty widespread. The big thing about Philly Car Share and its other vendors is that you can rent a car for as little as one hour. So if you want to go to a grocery store, pick up some things to bag on a two-hour trip, you don't have to own a car for that. You can just rent a car for two hours. That's a good deal. Yeah, and it's really nice to park it early and all the other expenses. And don't you have to have a membership with Philly Car Share? You have to pay down a certain amount, like $300 or something? Not much. You should check it out. It's not mine. I just became a member last week. But don't check the state membership. By the year or so ago, they were asking for memberships, and I believe they have either dropped or drastically reduced it. So that's no longer a barrier. Thank you. That's a great deal. If you live and work in the city, a car's a great option. I didn't know the details of that. Once you do find out, do I really need a car? I'm going to be traveling to work half an hour back and forth each day to work and it's not going to be convenient to be driving a car hourly or something like that. One thing I've read said is When do you really need it? Do you really want it, or do you actually need it? There's a big difference between that. I mean, my friend has a Honda Accord that's about four years old, and he's like, oh, I really like that new Acura that's coming out. His car's in perfect shape, and he just wants that new Acura. I wouldn't think that's a good time to buy a car. I'd rather say, buy a new car once your car's sold its last leg, your old car. Some people get all caught up, all of a sudden break down, it's going to be expensive towing and everything like that. I don't want my kids to be bringing down, my wife. But I looked at AAA and it's only $260 for a family of four for a year. And that includes towing and everything like that. Check that out if you're from Philadelphia area. That's really good. My car, which is the one I have now, I had for like seven years. It was a pumpkin, but it lasted me forever. And we had AAA, it broke down a couple of times, and we had a tow that was going to cost the same. It was just minor things that went wrong. But just to have peace of mind with an older car, AAA is a great way to go. Just to save money in the long run. Sorry, I wasn't sure if you were familiar with the New York Times or the Philadelphia research on reliability of cars, used cars. And he took the idea of, is it really saving money to buy a used car? Of course, you're going to drive it up a lot here. It's got a lot of depreciation and everything. And is that really bad? He found it was. And in a period of his research, he found the best way to get the most money out of your car. And I don't know if I was specifically beefed up. I can't remember now. But the idea was to buy a car when it's three to five years old. You get eliminated in depreciation. But then what you do is you broaden for two years. sell it and buy another car that's 3-5 years old. Because what happens is that your car is kind of an easier value for that time. You can usually sell it for the same amount. And as well, they don't have any problems during that time. And you found it around 7 years when you start to have any component problems. So if you're getting around 3-5 years, keeping it 3 years, and then selling it, buying a new one, you generally get the same money out that you put into the car. and as well not have much in the way of maintenance. So this is, I don't remember who he's affiliated with, but he's done this research over a period of time with a lot of used car bodies. That's the best way to go about it. I don't remember honestly. Yeah, I think so. Probably. That's a tough thing with used car dealerships. I can't say that they're honest. Usually the interest rate if you try to finance them is a lot higher than if you go to a real new car dealership and you'll be paying more in the long run for the used car than for the new car. But if you get afforded the cash, like he's saying, if you go to places that You get a lot of cars from leases. The three-year leases are up, and then they sell to these car dealerships. And then you can buy it from them for, you can have a $25,000 car that is now being sold for $15,000. But you still can't afford $15,000 to pay an 89% interest, which isn't too sweet. So that's a good thought though. The cars do hold their value and their reliability for about five to seven years. Where's a good place to go to get a bit of steel? A credit interest deal? Yeah, I'd love to get these. What do you mean, like cards? I mean, like the actual dealership? You should go to the dealership. You could go to the bank, credit union. Where do you think? You can go to the credit union. What I heard sometimes you could do is when you go to the credit union, you might be paying a little bit of higher interest rates than the actual dealership. You could bargain the price down lower for the actual card that you're buying in cash, because they don't realize where you're getting the money from. you're pretty much paying out of cash, not out of fat. Sometimes the bar doesn't feel that good just looking at the interest rates. You can get deals at some car dealerships and ports advertising 0% and other dealerships are 2% or whatever. You just have to compare the interest rates. Why would they let you bargain down cash? I know guys in cars spend a lot of money on cars and for dealers it makes money on the side as well. Why would they lower the price when you can handle cash? This is what I don't make very well of. Studies have shown you negotiate a lower price, making them think that you're going to finance it, and then you pay them a catch. That's the way to go about it. It is pretty evident that they're trying to buy cars from used car dealerships or normal dealerships. Like you said, once they have a price set, they can't back down. They have to check it forever. Yeah, that's a good point. So, at the end of the month, they're all trying to compete with the Oceania team and you get pretty big deals like that. This is also, that's what I thought Miami was about. There's a lot of pressure on the team, there's a lot of pressure on the team, they're trying to beat some quarter. So watch out for that too. You kind of feel like you're getting stomped in. It's all the same stuff. Like, oh, we've got a lot of deals we're going to be doing for the next month. Going back to AAA services, there's also services like that you can get through insurance companies like I have it with Beko. It only costs $2 a month, maybe $4 or $5 a month in road service. Yeah, it gives you a really good peace of mind about your car when you have AAA or some type of hard side assistance. And my car, like I said before this one, it was on its last leg for the past three years. But I was fine driving it. I don't know why I didn't burn it down. I just called AAA to sit around for a half hour. It wasn't a big deal. I was in college and everything else. I didn't have the money to get a new car. But one verse that's really good that I think, like I said before, when you finally figure out you're going to be buying a car, you have to buy a car. Luke 14.28. Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. When you first sit down, estimate the cost, see if you have enough money to complete it. I think a lot of times we go and walk around the dealership before we even figure out how much we can actually afford to pay for the cars. And it's really frustrating to do that. That's what I kind of did that first day when I was looking for a car. My old car's transmission was gone. I was going to start a new job in a week. I had to buy a car right away. It had to be reliable so I knew I was buying a new car. I was driving 25 miles each one way, so 50 miles in a day. So I knew I wanted something reliable and whatever so I was looking around at dealerships and they were throwing all these numbers at me and they were telling me how I should be able to afford this and don't let them tell you what you should be able to afford because they're always wrong. They're always going to try to make you walk out of the car that you want rather than what you actually need. What you have to do is put down one good website. So it's a good website to actually find out the value of your car that you have right now. Just to kind of get an idea is always the dealership will always. give you a lower price for your card than it's actually worth. I went in there in the morning, they gave me a value for my card for $700. I went home and looked at their credit rule book and it was $900 and something, close to a thousand. I went back and they gave me the $900. They're not going to give you the real price for it. They do say that it is better to sell the car that you have right now by yourself, because you'll get a higher price for it. It's just the way it works. Dealership trading, the price is always lower than when you sell it yourself. But then you have to think about the hassle of showing the car to people and whatever. Sometimes it's just easier, peace of mind, to just you're in the car, and something feels, like I knew my transition was bad. I don't want to feel right to sell to somebody I don't really care about the image of, because I don't know if that's completely Christian-like, but I'm gonna deal with it. So you have to weigh that option too, just what you're going to do with your car, and what money you want to get from it. There's one number that comes up that you should not spend more than 15% of your spendable income. I wouldn't go strictly just off of that because sometimes you can just type in your income and do that, it comes up with a nice number, but then you have to take into account all your other expenses. I would say if you haven't done a rough budget, or a budget at all, do a real rough one with any loans you're paying, any major expenses, and see what a good number is for you. I typed in what I did for 15%, and I found out what I could possibly by that number, way more than what I really should be spending on a car than what I am now. So you have to take into account a lot of other things. So before you walk out there, make sure you know how much you want to spend a month. So you know what type of cars you're going to be looking at or anything. And another thing, I wrote down all these things in red. Make sure you bring a notepad, a pencil, a calculator, and a friend to stop you from buying the car on the first time. Because, I mean, a pen and a pencil are great to have so they think you're serious and fascinated, just so you can punch the numbers down. It gets really frustrating when they throw all these numbers at you and they're saying, OK, we can extend the buying period for another year and you'll pay this much a month. And you don't realize you're actually paying more in the long run. And it's difficult to weigh all these things. One thing, I put these equations down the middle, which will kind of help you out while you're there. If you have a calculator, I don't know if you just have these TI-83s. Grab that from them, you can program these things in, and you can literally just punch in, like you can have an equation all set up, and just punch in the numbers, and it'll pop right up for you. And you'll be able to do it right on the spot. If you don't have them from high school, ask your kids, they probably have to buy them from high school nowadays. You're going to grab your calculator, you can program equations into them. If you have any questions about doing that, let me know. I wish I would have thought of that before I went and started buying cars, but I had a flat test, and I wasn't thinking too much of that. It's just a great way to kind of feel secure about what's going on, because dealers will be throwing all kinds of stuff at you really fast, and it gets really frustrating. Used cars, I would say it's, you have to watch out for the dealers, like I said, because they'll actually walk out on your car before you know it. Also, bring the car to a service person that you might trust, where you're going to cut the waste, any other place. It might charge $25 or something like that. It's just a good idea to get a third party's opinion about the car, because fuel is always going to save the greatest thing ever. And I don't know a whole lot about cars, enough to see. I mean, if it's running, it sounds okay. That's about as much as I can go off of. But if you take it to Pepperwood or something like that and do a diagnostic check on it or something, that costs you about $25,000,000. I just got to plug one thing. Not too long ago, I was crazy enough to think I was going to be a car salesman. I interviewed at CarSense, which is, there's one on top of 76, and I'm not going to be performing in a year's time. Hatfield, and just saying, if I had a youth star, their performance as an employee is based on the value of the car. When their supervisor is away in a month, we just sold 100 GeoMetros and the guy sells 90 Lexus. The guy sold 100 GeoMetros and it's performing better. So the incentive for the car self-location of IFRS car is not there. I would encourage everybody to look at car sense. That's why we bought our car. I used the Allies car. I've heard from colleagues that their prices are a little pricey. I got an excellent price on my flight. I did a lot of reasons. They delivered it to us, but first I think they give you a 30-day... They give you this 5-day, 500 miles, you can return it, no questions asked. They give you a warranty, but you can also buy extended warranties, relatively inexpensive, and they reimburse you if you never use it. And they have all their inventory. Here's the key why I want to mention it. They have all their inventory of all the prices on their websites. So you can go there and see what the average Puerto Rican or whatever it might be is going for. They give you a good gauge. Yeah, of course, you're going to get probably a better value for buying it from somebody poverty. But the question there, then, is what's the history of the car? Unless you know the history of the car, you might be getting into territory there that you're not sure of. The nice thing about car cents is they give you a car facts report. And supposedly, they're pretty picky about the car that they take. So the nice thing is you'll get this car facts report with the whole history of the car. So I'd highly recommend, if anybody's looking for a car, go at car cents, just even if it's just for the research. They put a bottle in our car when they deliver it to us. It's very important as well to make sure that all the maintenance is done on the car. It's very difficult buying a used car to know how well the last owner took care of it. If you're buying from a private owner, that's recommended to someone to look it over before getting it. The best way to do it is from a friend or relative. They're not going to try to make a weird deal. Or an older grandparent or something like that. I bought my first car from a grandparent that put 25,000 miles on it. And they weren't trying to sell the car for a profit. So I was able to get a decent deal that way. Another thing is just understanding what car to get what's best for you. Make sure you kind of make a list of what you need the car for and what you really want to do with it. So you don't overlook different cars and stuff. A lot of times you can say you want an S class or something like that. It's been great for people at work to see me driving in and everything like that, but then you're only going to eat two meals a day or something like that once you go into it. We've been talking about it for a long time because we had a few male students visit and we ended up being able to borrow a car that had a third row seat so that we had four adults and four kids all in Parsons. All the adults in Parsons. Right, all the kids were. So, yes, for us, you know, thinking about what would we use a car for, how would we use it, having a third-row seat would be very nice, but for the number of times that we've actually used it, it goes back to your example of, you know, if it were a Walmart, is it worth the extra expense of buying such a car, or is it cheaper to, you know, use, to rent a car that has a third-row seat? You know, and really considering as nice as it would be to have a nice big car and all that gear and all that stuff and everything, this is a really practical, useful car for now. Yeah, that's a good point. I was doing the same thing I was buying my car. I love doing trips, going camping and everything. It's a fact that there's a bunch of gear in my car driving away. I was like, I want to get something large, either a truck, I was looking at the Dodge Magnum, huge backseat and everything, throw a whole bunch of junk in there. And then you start looking at other things, gas miles and that and that. And like, how many times have I actually been doing a large trip? Maybe about five times a year. And in those cases, you could take two cars, a friendly drive and I would drive. And I eventually came down and I got a Hyundai Sonata, large back trunk, good for doing what I need to do. And then when those situations come up, then either rent a car or do something like that. And it's nice to look at a car and be like, oh, I'll be great for this situation, that situation. Those situations come up like a handful of times in what kind of driving car. And you pay for it the whole time you have the car. If you want a new car, used cars are great. I would say if you wanted a used car, I would try to buy it in cash. Because, like I said, the financing through the companies are usually higher than the car dealerships. But you could get a loan from a credit union or a bank that would be lower sometimes than the actual used car dealership. So it is a difficult situation to be in, not paying for cash for a used car. Then if you want to get a new car, and you know that you're going to be using the car for a long period of time, I would say that you want to make sure the car is something that you're going to want to drive for at least 7 years. You're going to be paying for it for about 5 years if you're financing through that. And you want to be able to have it for over that time. You want at least 2 years. You don't want to be paying for a car so you can save up for your next one or something like that. Ideally, you want to drive until it dies. But, some things to compare. You should compare buying a car with cash, than to have that money in the bank. A lot of people say buying cash is the greatest thing ever. But, you have to look at... I made that worksheet in the back here. It's from a book I referenced on the last page of this. It just looks at, I thought it was kind of neat because everybody that I talked to said you should buy in cash if you can, it seems the way to go. But if you look at the interest rate that some of the credit unions have right now, you have to be a higher than 3.5, somewhere close to 5%. You have that money in the bank that you can pay for the car, you'd be making more than if you were to pay if you get a lease at a lower percent interest rate. If you finance a car, some financing is 0%, 2.9, or 3%. You would actually make more money by having that money in the bank in the time that we can pay the car off. It sounds a little bit awkward, but it's true. You have to look at the interest rates of where you're having the money. And you want to weigh those things out. And it even has them here. they're not only taking out their income tax, so they take that into account as well. So if anybody wants this, send me an email, and I'll send it to you, and you can play around with the numbers of any cars you're thinking about buying, and it might help you have a better peace of mind on what's going on. And we want to also look at is sometimes dealerships say 0% financing, but they say it's going to be $2,000 rebate. And the person is thinking, OK, 0%, that's great. I'll do that. But if you actually play with the numbers, you put it in the same spreadsheet and you get the numbers out, you can actually save more by taking that $2,000 and have an interest rate of 2.9. That's sort of the same idea I got this quote from. You can actually save money by putting $2,000 into it and you have the $2,000 rebate. Either way, you're putting $2,000 down. So if you have $2,000 down and the $2,000 rebate, you actually spend less on the car in the long run. So it's nice to play off the numbers rather than just trying to think in your head, like, OK, that sounds like a good idea. And then you actually pay more in the long run. Like I said, I put these two equations down for finding out money you'd be making by having your money in the bank and finding out the monthly payments that you'd be making on the car, just in case you want to find out if the dealers don't choose them up. Leasing a car, honestly, I don't think it's a great idea. You guys can say otherwise. I think when you start leasing a car, you're getting a car that's out of your league. no offense to anyone that is using a car, but you're basically renting a car for a long period of time and they expect to back it in good condition when you bring it back. You'll be paying for any damages or expenses on the car when you bring it back. I think, honestly, it's a cramping situation to be in. You have a limited amount of miles you're allowed to put on the car, and it's really difficult for anybody else to travel for work or anything like that. I have had my car for five months, and they're close to $10,000 a year. So I would be way over. Most dealerships aren't. I mean, I drive a 15-mile radius, not an hour radius. It's a half-hour commute. I think a lot of people do that. So most dealerships only offer 10,000 to 15,000 miles a year. where you're paying 10 to 20 cents per extra mile. It won't be saying 10 to 20 cents, it's not much, but an extra thousand, it adds up to your expense. And I'll be honest, and like I said, I might be biased, but I would not recommend leasing a car. I'd rather go with someone who's different. Once you get near that mile, go back and tell them that you have a problem, before you're over. Oh, okay. I think that's good. consumerreports.org too. There's some well-made information about the use of these cards there. Consumerreports.org, the Consumer Reports magazine, the product board we have, the car buying guide. Consumer Reports.org too. It's very inexpensive. It's like you can get a subscription to the website for like $2.85 or something like that for a month. You didn't get that one month subscription. You get access to the whole thing while you're doing research on the car. I don't tend to agree with a lot of conserving course stuff as far as other things, like appliances and stuff like that, but they cannot be beat for car information. A lot of building strategy pieces, you know, you can do what cars work, you know, what you're looking for, you know, stuff. It farms you with tremendous amount of information. But nowadays, you buy your car online, you go to the dealer and you list the car, you do everything online, and then you just go to the car dealership too, just to say, because you've been emailing back and forth, before, of course, the person who just does the online is the seller, and say, this is what we negotiated online, let's buy it. That's real effective for the car dealer and real effective for you, because you really know what you're doing. But you select your websites to really arm you with the information that you need, And of course, write down on a piece of paper, what is it I'm trying to achieve? What are the features that I need? And let's get pros and the cons, and then work the system to your advantage. But it really needs to be a quantitative thing, and not one that's just a hard drive. Unless you know you want to get that particular car, this little hard drive car. OK. Now, a very important aspect, Argos on 5th includes clothes. and groceries. And somebody who's an expert because she's purchased clothes, and she's purchased groceries, is Robin. So Robin, would you come and share all kinds of wisdom with us? Yes, it's okay if I grab a little bit of the screen. You can use whatever you want. When Bryce first asked me to do this, I thought to myself, do you not think he's fitting in this class? I should say I need help in this situation. And I thought, oh, and like he said, I know my part is good. My part is close. Maybe I'm not so bad at it. And then I ran the numbers. Oh my. So I started asking people. That's the nice thing about our church is tents have a lot of really great resources. So I started talking to some really frugal women, women who I know and I love. They hooked me up. I'll just tell you that. I taught that to everybody. Dory bag. Anybody know? I told them too that I was going to use everybody's names. OK, I'm going to use your name, right? Dory gave me these books. Now, this is more than just including clothes. This is how to be frugal with absolutely everything. The type work and then it's gone. This woman, she reuses coffee grinds, she reuses pantyhose. This is a good resource for how to be frugal. Tightwad Gazette. What about this one? We can pass it around. Do you want me to pass it around? Yeah, sure. This is Great Secrets of the Coupon Mom. This woman says that you can coupon without having to clip and organize. I didn't actually read this yet, but it sounds good. Frank gave me a bunch of books, how to save money every day. Here's another coupon, shop, save, and share. So I can pass all these around so you can look at them. my socially responsible way of life. So this is the book. The amount of food that the United States consumes compared to the rest of the world is outrageous. And so this is from the Mennonite Central Committee. It's how to make your own wheat things, how to make your own food, roll up things, and how to cook responsibly. I guess you didn't know you could cook responsibly, but. So if you can pass those around too, if you want to look at it, I'll show you. But as far as late-takes are concerned, I'm telling you, I've talked to everything, Sherwood Major, Sarah Peterman, and these are women of style. I don't have a lot of kids. I'm only feeding two little guys and us. But those Senegas, man, they feed everybody. Sarah Peterman told me, buy nutrition, not food. I thought that was very wise. When you go shopping, you can buy boxes of blue macaroni and cheese. Cheap, cheap, cheap. But you don't want to feed your family with that. So you want to go and actually look at what you're buying, read the labels, and make sure that it's nutritious for your family. The first step would be to prepare menus. Review circulars. I brought circulars with me, in case you guys haven't seen them. So what I usually do is I go through the circulars, and I see what's on sale. And whatever's on sale, that's what we're having for dinner that week. This week chicken is $1.69 a pound. So you review your circulars, and then you have your set of tried and true recipes. You can be experimental. You can be adventurous. But if you're working like I am and you've got the family, expect to have the tried and true. So you whip them out and eat them. Make all of your meals at home. You guys knew that that was the thing, right? Try not to eat out at lunchtime, bag your lunches. Occasionally have your no-meat meals. That's actually a vegetable, I suppose. Meat is a special kind. No heat meals over his hair. Sorry. No heat meals? No heat meals. My wife is recovering every day. One week. One week. Because we were really short. I was really trying to reduce that weather. So we had meat and rice, like, every day. And my husband just ran to an arborist, because he couldn't stand it anymore. So you made your menus, you've got your tried and true recipes, you shop with a list. A list will help you keep from impulse shopping. When I go shopping, I don't have a letter if I'm not shopping with my kids, which is another good tip. Don't shop with your family. You've got to do it alone. But I can't do that. So I'm going to the store. I tell my kids. All these people are trying to separate you from your money. They're trying to catch you to leave with more stuff than you need. So you have your list. So keep your focus. So let's go all the way up. You remember what you went to the store for, which is another problem with shopping with kids. You go to the store. I go home. I'm thinking, I forgot bread. I forgot eggs. I forgot milk. What did I go to the store for? I don't know. And then I come back with stuff I didn't get when I needed it. Don't shop hungry. I've done that too. Well, that's obvious. Oh man, I could eat everything. And then, now there's the stores they've got. a hot bar, a sushi bar, a supermarket pizza place. You can get smoothies and coffee all at the supermarket. Going hungry is just dangerous. Shop alone. That was another one. Yeah, we talked about shopping alone. Coupons, loyalty cards, and store-specific coupons. Sometimes you'll get a coupon at the end of that receipt that says, good for only that. You should use those. I hear they help. And I use them when I'm thinking about it, because you have to think about it. I called a friend of mine, and she said, oh, yeah, I coupon. And I said, I never do, because I find there's more markets that are out, and then I forget that I have them. She said, repeat after me, Rob. Free money. Coupons are free money. And if you can get them doubled or tripled, it works even better. And that's what these books that I'm writing in. Oh, she also said, only clip the coupons for items you use. The book suggests clipping coupons for items for everything. And the goal in the book is to buy food in order to share it, which is really great. I'm in a baby's test. I'm not at that point in my coupon flipping yet, but I can only put coupons for items that you use. I can't even think of anything. Potato chips. They've always got coupons for potato chips and candy. We don't get that stuff. But they do have coupons for instant noodles, fairy things. Oh, another important thing, another Sarah Peterman suggestion. Keep a price book and shop with a calculator. A price book, I thought that was wisdom from heaven. I thought that was the best thing. Because in my head, I can say, I know I'm not going to spend more than this on that item. But if you write it down, you actually remember. My friend says she'll never spend more than $0.16 a can for soda. which I guess is the best price she's seen. She's seen it often enough where she knows that if she waits a little longer for a sale or a coupon, that she won't be spending more than that. So you use a price book to make sure that, you know, like laundry detergents. They have prices. It's a lot like the car salesman. You know, they shove these numbers at you and you don't know what to do with it. But if you keep a list and a price book, then you'll know You'll have a better view of the land there. I'm trying to think. A lot of the time you'll hear about cereal, $5 for $10. Now, does anybody know if that's a big deal or not? It's a good deal. Yeah, it's $5 for $10 for a meal. It won't be big. You can spend $4 on a box of cereal. But, yeah, that was it. It was raising land, processing land. Sugar-coated. Sugar-coated. Yeah, yeah, not that good for you, right. Cheerios, they have fines for $10 on Cheerios. Oh yeah, you don't have to buy them all. Huh? You don't have to buy five. Oh, you don't have to buy five, right. But if it's a good deal, one of these books describes that you do suck up. Now that depends on how much space you have in your place and how much you have to spend. Storing is not a bad thing. Yeah, to find a store brand is not always your best buy. I found that out the hard way. You know, you load up on store brand cereal. And then if nobody eats it, then you just, I don't know, you give it away when they have their canned food dry. Or you put it in your barbeque. Put it in your barbeque, that's nice. Yeah, but it wasn't such a good buy. That's gardening. Gardening is a good way to reduce your food bill. Take note of portion size. My example is the toothpaste commercials. You ever watch the toothpaste commercials? They did this big, swirly, loopy toothpaste on their toothbrush. You don't need that much. They say that a pea-sized jug's just as big. Actually, you don't even really separate it. You need the fluoride, by the way. You need the fluoride. A lot of people have fluoride in their water. Warehouse, BJ's, Sam's, Costco's, that's where your price book comes in handy too. Just because you're buying the 12-gallon diet syrup doesn't mean it's a better price. BJ's and Costco's differ. Laundry detergent and cleaners. but not always the best buy. If you keep the price book, then you'll know actually what you should be spending for those items. Everybody I talked to, all these fabulous women, said they shop at Aldi's. Have you guys ever heard of Aldi's? You shop at Aldi's? Oh my gosh, they should hire me. I actually went to an Aldi's for the first time, and it kind of freaked me out a little bit. I just wasn't used to it. But after talking to Cheryl Brubaker, anybody know Cheryl Brubaker, another surgical mom? It's a European style supermarket and they don't have a big variety of items and they're just kind of plopped against the wall there. Tell us about Aldi. I've been going long enough where I know what I like from there and what I don't like. brand oil at all. They don't have coupons or taste coupons. It's all produce that is distributed for Aldi. But I mean, for instance, a box of cereal there regularly is $1.69. So just try to find that in a grocery store. Grocery store cereal, we said it's gross, but it's good stuff. It's good quality. It's good stuff. It's good at all. I just love that when people say, wow, this brownie's really good. And I'm like, oh, no. No, it's so good because I know that I spent $8.10 on that classic brownie mix when I could have gone to the grocery store and spent nearly $2. And they were particularly exactly the same. So, yeah, I've kind of decided that, or we've decided that we don't really want to throw much meat. Fine, we'll throw a bunch of meat somewhere else. But for everything else, I put everything in there. I buy all of our soda, all of our bread, milk, eggs, cereal. I can't take those. It's the only store I really go to except for our lunches. And Cheryl says all the A-M-B-I. And there's currently They're all over the world. I mean, like I said, it's a European-style supermarket, so it's not just here in Berlin. They're from all over the world. And they're online. They're pretty good. They're on their website, and that's really pretty good to check things out, what their regular deals are. But sometimes they have some brand-name things in there, like walshes, apple juice, grape juice. So you can go online and do it. Cheryl told me there are sister companies like Trader Joe's. So, um... You take your own bags. You take your own bags, yes. There are no bags. Everything's on the floor. It's not pretty. No, it's not pretty. There's no sushi bar. There's no coffee bar. I don't want it to be pretty, because most of the places have setups. Exactly. I can't be in it. And it keeps getting friendly. And he has used it. I pulled it out and it had a bunch of ravens in it. One raven brand. And the other thing about Aldi, if you have to go grocery shopping with the kids, I bring both my kids. I can still get from leaving the car to getting back to the car, never more than 45 minutes. Now, I bring the list with me, but it's because it's small. There are like four aisles, not 15. You know, if I forget something, if I'm in the last aisle and I realize, oh my gosh, I walked right past a flower. It took me a minute to get back, not five minutes, but it took me four minutes to get back. Produce Junction is another one. Have you guys picked Produce Junction? Produce Junction, I've heard kind of hidden myths and things about it. So you pass Produce Junction, it's where you can buy 12 pounds of bananas for a dollar, but you have to buy them in 12 pounds, you know. The better deal, sometimes they're rotten, sometimes they're not rotten, it's very interesting. Sometimes it's right where it's bad. Larry Berman told me, when you're buying produce, buying each piece And in the wintertime, buy frozen, because you can eat nutrition, etc., and frozen vegetables. Try not to buy prepared food, try not to eat it up. When you're making dinner, take all the leftovers, put them in a can, put them in a freezer. Then when you have those bad days where you come home and you think, I just can't stand the thought of cooking, you pull your leftovers out, and then there's dinner. She said it's OK to buy a few prepared items, like a lasagna or something to keep in the freezer for those bad days. When you don't have leftover, a really bad day, you don't have leftovers to pull out of the freezer. Buying prepared food is cost less than sending out. So I heard that it's cheaper to buy your cleaning products at Home Depot. There's also Don Adler Cleaners. That's a website, Don Adler, A-I-L-L-E-R-E-D. Apparently it has the same kind of thing. We can buy a gallon cleaner and add water to it. It's fabulous. I find also that vinegar and baking soda goes a long way. Oh, yeah, when we're talking about the circulars, on the front of the circulars, those are the items that the store is willing to lose money on in order to draw you into the store so that you buy all your other things. You think, I'm going for that chicken for $1.69 a pound, but then you buy peanut butter there, your bread there, your eggs there, the milk there, and cereal there, and you've just lost $20. I don't think it's going to work. It's looking close. Can I just put it in front of the play button, please? Yes, go ahead. We're going to be at the Italian market, and that'd be good. Really? At the Italian market. Yes, someone said you buy locally is even better. If you can buy in season and locally, that's the best. And if you don't have the buy, then you have the work. I'm going to have to do some work down there. It turns out that people would come to Grandfather Island and go directly there, but you know, you can go there and find them right here, and they'll sell to you, and you're happy to do it. We did feature standouts, like on Pat Daly, and on Front Road Run, and, uh, I don't know. What's next? Yeah, yeah. It's all, it's a huge, huge canvas down by the lake. Go back to 7 o'clock. Robin, you've got to meet me next week, right? I'll be here. Do you want to talk about it? Robin will share with us a little bit about, of course, how Biden makes sense of politics, I believe. Okay. Of course, he makes sense of that. Good clothes for a nominal price. We'll cover some more on food next week too. Can you wrap up a little bit on the summation of food next week? Sure. Right now we're going to have Gary come and share with us some wisdom on insurance. spendable items for us. And so Gary's going to share some information and some insights on that. And if he doesn't have enough time to finish up today, we'll cover some of that all for next week, okay? So take that advice, get this information that we need, and if we don't have sufficient time, then we'll continue next week, okay? It's our class. We can do it. There's a handout in the back table. I don't know if you saw it. It says insurance overview. You may want to take a look at it because it has charts and figures in the back. Companies that sell insurance are called underwriters. Does anybody know where the term underwriter came from? Several hundred years ago, a great way to make money if you were an Englishman was to build or buy a boat, hire a crew, buy trade goods, sail off to the East Indies, and come back with a fabulous cargo that you could sell for a hundred times what you paid for the originals. The only problem was they sank a lot. And so it used to be that if a captain wanted to put together a venture, he would put a notice in the pubs of England, generally one pub, because it was local, and he would say, I plan to build a ship of this size, we're going to take this cargo over to this destination, We'll be back within a year and a half to two years. We'll have this. And anybody that wanted to invest in that particular vendor would write their name on the bottom of the slide. So people who invested in risky ventures with potential high returns were called underwriters. Now, eventually, this developed into an industry. In fact, one of the largest and earliest companies that did that was located in London. I'll let you know their name. They were one of the original underwriters. Well, insurance underwriters are following the same principle of the receipt happens. The insurance principle is the small probability of a large loss or shared risk. If there's something that doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it's devastating. This is something that is subject to the insurance principle. There's another insurance principle too. When you're buying insurance, you're basically making sure that a catastrophe is not going to ruin your life. You're buying peace of mind. But the principle is how much peace of mind can you afford? I've got a principle you need to know about. It's a business principle. This is a deep, dark secret, so don't let it out. Does anybody know, what is the principle objective of an article deal plan? Yes! What is the principle objective of the plan? To make a profit. What's the principle of ducking an insurance company? To make a profit. There's nothing wrong with profits. Nothing immoral about them at all. But what is wrong is to take advice from a profit seeker and assume that it's objective advice. You don't ask a Chevy dealer what kind of car you should buy. But somehow we forget that rule when we're buying financial products and we think, well how little of a banker has any money I should buy? He has five. That's what he has for sale. Life insurance is probably the most controversial area of insurance and one that has a lot of financial impact. There are two basic kinds of life insurance out there and probably most of you know this. There's term insurance and there's variations on full life. Whole Life is a wonderful product for insurance companies because it has a lot of cash flow and they can make a lot of profit from it. They love to sell Whole Life. Term insurance is not nearly such a good product for them because the profit margins are so damn small. It makes it a great product for the buyer, but not so much for the insurance company. Therefore, there's very few people that are going to work very hard to sell you term insurance. If you're trying to decide what kind of insurance you need, you can find a life insurance salesman who will come and talk to you about almost everything except what it actually costs to protect you from the risk of premature death. They'll want to talk to you about guaranteed parent values and surrender value loans and all that stuff. All of it focused around the concept of cash value. The principal difference, of course, between term insurance and whole life is that with whole life, you pay a premium every year that is far, far larger than would be needed just to cover the possibility that you're paying your debt. The reason is because the insurance company is not only obligated to pay if you die prematurely, which hardly ever happens, but they're also obligated upon the maturity of that policy to pay you the face amount. So they have to save up money to do that. And in order to play it safe, they have to charge you a fairly hefty premium so that even if interest rates are extremely poor and returns on investment are very low, they'll still have gotten enough of your money to be able to give it back to you at the end of your policy. If you really like the idea of giving someone else money so they can save it up for you, come see me after class. I will work this deal with you. On the handout I gave you, the second page, is a little scenario. We're going to look at something else. The real insurance principle here is we want to be insured against the calamity of premature death of the principal provider for a family. That's the large loss that we want to insure against. Let's look at the life of a young lady at the age of 25 who is unmarried, no children, She probably has a good income and an insurance salesman would love to sell her $10 million worth of insurance, but how much does she really need? Who's depending on her income? No one. If she wants to be a responsible citizen, she can have life insurance to cover the cost of the funeral. But in terms of need, that's all she needs. 10 years later, however, she may be the principal wage earner for a family with three kids. Then how much money might she need to be insured for at age 35, a relatively tender age? Well, according to this scenario, if you'll look, there are a lot of things that, as a responsible provider, a family needs to provide. Not only money for their own people, but probably to pay off the mortgage. If someone is going to have to stay at home full time with children, They need to be able to live until that last child is old enough to go to school. That's a cost you have to plan for. Even after the children are in school, someone who is not the principal daycare is probably going to enter the job market, but they're going to be handicapped because they're not entering it as early as others. and they're going to have to not be able to take business and travel and sales and jobs. They have to carry these children every single day. That's going to reduce their income potential. That is a risk that could be provided for. And then there's college. Saving money for power is a big expense. So one could easily argue that a 35-year-old's principal earner wanting to protect their family against premature deaths might be something in the neighborhood of $750 to $1 million worth of life insurance at age 35 with three young kids. That's a huge amount of life insurance. Now, if you want my whole life policy for that, I've got quotes for only $9,031 a year for a 30-day life, you can have $700,000 worth of life insurance. If that seems like a little bit too much to spend, I should point out that you can also get $700,000 with term insurance for $560. Now, with term insurance, all you're getting is protection. No fancy talk about cash values building up and being able to borrow against it and building estates for somebody. But you're protected. If you should die prematurely, $700,000 will be given to your family to manage the rest of their college days. But as you live, you don't get any. The other thing about term insurance is that term insurance can vary over 30 years. If you look at our example person, that same person at age 45 only needs about a half million dollars worth of insurance. Why? Because the kids are older, they have fewer years to live. At age 55, the need is drastically dropping. By the time you're close to my age, you're not really much in the way of life insurance, because it's probably too tight. Term insurance can be purchased in diminishing amounts, and it usually is. Almost all financial experts say that what most Americans should be having to be buying is term insurance for protection. Those who are truly wedded to the idea of whole life usually liken themselves. They'll argue that, well now wait a minute, there are some advantages to whole life. For instance, whole life does build up cash values that you can use to build this magnificent home when you retire. Well that's true. But if you were to take the same amount of money, I showed it on the left column of the handout. If you were to take $90,031 a year and spend it on a 30-day whole life insurance policy and get $700,000 for your 65 years old, that sounds terrific. Especially because you only pay $270,000, 30 times 9,000, for that policy and you get $700,000. Wow, aren't they generous? But if you were to take that same $9,000 a year and invest it in good, well-diversified mutual funds and other investment vehicles, the same one insurance company invests in, would you invest $700,000? Actually, you'd have $1,634,000. Guess who normally is spending the other $900,000? It's the cost of running an insurance company, and dividends double stockholders. Almost every scenario, term insurance and doing your own business makes more sense. The one argument for whole life insurance that really makes sense is forced savings. That is, once you have signed a contract where they can haul you over to jail if you don't make payments, you are more likely to pay that premium that you have. And you will be forced to save some money through the insurance deal. If that's really what it takes for you to save money, well, I guess that's a problem. If that's what you have to pursue, then that's what you have to pursue. But for anyone who has the discipline to say, no, I'm going to invest my money, but I'd rather invest it directly in investments. I keep all that overhead for myself. Bryce tells you, you should take your own banker. You should probably be in your own insurance company in a number of respects. Not trying to take your own risks, but doing your own investing. Because most of what you're paying for, for the whole life policy, is for someone else to invest your money and give you back some of it. And it's just about time for us to quit. So keep your head up for the next week, maybe you'll be able to listen in one language. One quick question. I just wanted to say too that we, after having child and I decided that I would stay home, decided that we needed life in a different way, so we talked about it for a while. And then finally, at the end of April of this year, we decided to look into it, and this was about four weeks before my husband's 41st birthday. Well, wouldn't you know, at 41, your rate increased significantly. Now, they were kind enough to say, well, if you do something now, you can get it back. Anyway, so you can have a 40-year-old or you can have a 41-year-old, right? So my encouragement to people would be, if you're thinking about it, and you're 39, and you're 39, or you're 40, or whatever, you can, you know, line up again, based on the age of 35 and 45. So, you know, but if you're thinking about it, really do look into it, because you really don't know what kind of things you could have or what kind of a rate you can get just because you're one year younger than them. And in general, usually it's five year increments. In general, term insurance is going to cost you more the same dollar amount. Every five years the rate will go up. But that's just reflecting the fact that A, you're more likely to die, sorry to tell you. But it also reflects the fact that you're probably going to need less dollar value as you get older. So that balances out. Right. And the big question he's bringing up is, why do I need this? If I'm 25 years old and have no dependence on my father or dad, I'm not going to get back on anybody, then how much do I really need? Or if I'm 35 years old and have a family that's counting on me, then how much do I need? Sometimes I think we're making a little bit of bottom line. What we'll do next week is we'll have Gary Cobbley share with us some more thoughts. And then we'll have Robin share some more things on clothing. And then we'll have Steve Carter share with us some things on housing. And Jody's going to share with us some things on finding money when you're new. And we're going to have Dan share with us some things on recreation. So it sounds like we have a really cool schedule next week. We'll probably carry over to you in a week after that. Okay, but we do, I think these areas are important for us to be thinking about. So go home and talk about these different areas, and if you'd like to come back, we'll argue about them a little bit. Okay? Also, we already put together an updated agenda that we talked about. Let's schedule an update of what we're going to be covering each week. And we've made those available, so please take advantage of that. Let's close in a word frame. Our Father in heaven, thank you so very much for taking good care of us, giving us opportunities to learn about these things so that we can make wise decisions. We pray, Lord, that you would help us to open the process of talking to them and thinking through them so that we bring you honor and glory in all that we do. In Jesus' name, amen.