This article is a transcription of the interview between Edward Black and Stephen Petith.

Key Points:

1. Look at your credit card and bank statements

2. Reduce expenses by 10% in your business and personal affairs (e.g. get rid of unnecessary subscriptions and bills)

3. Increase your income and cash by 10%

Edward:

So, really, the best way to deal with this slowing economy is just making sure you live within your means, manage your money wisely and just be prepared for it.

Stephen:

100%. Earn extra cash if you can. If you’re a small business, really focus on your business and strip out all the stuff that’s not necessary, because there’s bound to be stuff inside businesses that is unnecessary.

I’ve just done a review on a couple of businesses and on myself and gone through and went, “shit”, I’ve got five or six subscriptions here to stuff that I don’t need.

I don’t read it. So grab one Sunday, Saturday or any time you’ve got spare, grab your credit card and bank statement, go through it and find your automatic direct debit and challenge yourself.

One of the things I use is a three month rule. If I haven’t used something in three months, I turn it off because obviously you haven’t missed it or otherwise you’d be using it all the time. And sometimes when you have a look at it, you sign up to these platforms and you go, oh, yeah, they give you one or two months free. They do that on purpose because they know the average person goes full ball for three or four weeks and then doesn’t use it.

It’s like a gym membership and it just keeps getting deducted and away you go.

So really have a look at that sort of stuff. You’d be surprised at. I think I took $300 out of subscriptions and stuff.

Some of them were being billed yearly, some of them were billed monthly and some are quarterly and so forth. That was just having a look through apps on my phone and my credit card statements and a couple of things popped up and I went, I don’t even know what that is.

So I went and investigated it and turned it off.

Edward:

Yeah, it is true. I noticed that as well, because I saw a subscription come out that I don’t even remember using. And it definitely is true. There’s always stuff you forget about or didn’t realise it was being billed.

Stephen:

Yeah, and some of them are quite hefty. They’re in the $40 and $50 mark, especially if you’re getting them billed yearly or twice a year or something.

Edward:

And it’s always the cheap ones, like the $10 a month or so that you’ve got to look out for, because you just generally don’t even notice it, whereas in recessions and when cost of living is rising, you notice them.

Stephen:

I noticed I had a heap of $2.99, where I’ve subscribed to something, some news feed or something in the US and there must have been ten of them that you just get $2.99.

So go through your credit card statements and have a look. And I would challenge everyone to reduce your expenses by 10%. Go through now and have a look. I bet you could reduce your expenses by 10% and then try and increase your income by 10%.

If you’re a wage earner out there, go and ask your boss for not necessarily a cash increase in your wage, but maybe something that can offset it.

For instance, one of the things that we’ve done is we’re paying tolls for a couple of people, right? So that can be a couple of month for people that are transits. And for us, it’s an expense because we say it’s work cars.

End of interview.

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