We on this channel are highly anti-consumeristic. Okay, that's why we use old think pads that only cost 100 bucks that are from eight years ago. But I wanna talk about some other things. One of my viewpoints, I did a video on this a while ago, is that whenever you are spending money on any kind of purchase that isn't like basic living like food, you have to make sure that you are spending money on saving money. Okay, very simple heuristic. Like everything you buy, you gotta think, is this gonna save me money? If I'm spending a dollar, I wanna be able to save two dollars in the future, or at least two dollars, maybe a whole lot more. Okay, so let me talk, now I do this video because we are now living in that yearly period of golden opportunity, at least for Americans, because, you know, Black Friday is coming. Now, Black Friday is a consumerist holiday. So when everything's cheap, people who don't have any kind of impulse control, go out and buy a whole bunch of stuff. But it is also a good time of the year for people like us because things are cheap. And if you are smart about it, if you know how to spend your money, if you know how to make investments instead of cons, we're not really consuming, we're investing. Okay, that's what I'm saying. If you know what kind of things that can make your life easier, can make it cost less, now is a golden opportunity for you. Now, let me give you the example of what I did last year. Okay, if you've been around, if you saw my video on that, you might know, okay, here's the deal. This thing right here, this is a, now you don't care, I know you don't care about this, but it's, I know you're Linux, and ours you don't care about power tools. Well, let me explain why this is important. This is a 12 inch double bevel sliding compound mighter saw from devalt. This is like the highest quality there is out there. This is a fine, like there are a lot of contractors who, you know, really, oh man, I really want that devalt. That's a great thing. If you look on Amazon right now, the saw is unplugged, so don't get nervous about me. All right, well, no, I should be safe. I'm not even gonna touch it, okay. But it is unplugged, so don't worry about it. So, this saw, if you look on Amazon right now, this thing goes for 600, 700, 800 bucks. Something like that, some ridiculous price, okay. It's not actually ridiculous. This is actually just a really high quality machine, okay. This is like number one. All right, devalt is like one of the best companies. This is like the devalt's number one slide. It goes at all these crazy angles. It's really precise. I got this last year at Black Friday, and I did not get it because, oh, it wasn't an impulse buy. It's something, I mean, if you get a tool like this, this is something like you can build a cabin with, and I still plan on, do, I actually do plan on making a little cabin out there, a literal cabin. Like, I want the meme to be true, but that's just for fun. But this is kind of thing. I've gotten a lot of steam. I've gotten a lot of work out of this thing. It's say, I don't know if it saved me 600, 700, 800 dollars yet, but it saved me a good bit. But here's the deal. I did not get this for 600, 700, 800 dollars, okay. And in fact, I also, same thing with the stand, okay. That usually costs like 70, 100, maybe even 200, some places, okay. I did not pay that money for that. That's ridiculous. Okay, you know how much I paid for this saw and the stand? Together, I paid 200 bucks. How did I, how did I work that out? Very easy, okay, two things. First off, I waited all year. I waited months and months to get to Black Friday. At Black Friday, this thing not only had been marked down to 400 dollars, but this stand, you get the stand for free if you buy it. You know, this thing with all the perks, okay. If you buy the top of the line thing, you get the stand too, okay. So that already, fantastic deal, okay. And that's the kind of thing you get at Black Friday. But even more than that, I doubled that up. I doubled that out with something else. Now, something I did a video on a month or so ago. Credit cards, credit cards in America, they are, they know that they can make a lot of money on stupid people, okay. They know that if they put off introductory offers, they put out these introductory offers that are literally steals. That is, they will say, open a card with us. If you spend 500 bucks in the first three months, we will give you 200 dollars. As a credit, or you can redeem as cashback or something like that, we'll give you 200 dollars, okay. So for dumb people, for consumeristic people who buy things impulsively and don't know that they're supposed to pay off their credit cards, or don't know how, first of all, make sure that every single one of your credit cards has auto pay enabled. I don't know why. And I will say there are a bunch of people out there who apparently, I know from my last video, don't even know how credit cards work. But if you set up auto pay, if you pay everything off, that money is quite literally just free money, okay. Spend 500 dollars, get 200 dollars of that back. That's fantastic. I mean, especially if you're gonna be spending, I mean, you nearly certainly are gonna be spending 500 bucks. If you, well, if you're like an adult who like has their own bills, you're nearly certainly gonna be spending 500 bucks in three months, okay. So what I did when I got this saw is I opened a card, I think it was with Wells Fargo that had exactly that deal. Spend 500 dollars, get 200 dollars back. So I spent 400 of that 500 bucks on this thing, and then I'll other 100 dollars on something else, who cares, I don't know, just like different stuff. So that means, although on paper, I paid 400 bucks, I get 200 dollars back immediately from that. So that's why I say this whole thing, cost me 200 dollars, okay. That's what I'm talking about. So that is, now, here's one thing that I don't want you to do. Do not do this, okay. A lot of you guys are gonna be like, wow, that's really cool. You can use these credit card introductory offers and basically just get free money, okay. That is true. In fact, I do that, I've done it in the past 12 months, I've done it for three credit cards, and next year I'm gonna be doing it for three more. I already have it all planned out. But do not just do that because you can do it. Don't just be like, oh, I gotta find stuff to buy with this stuff. No, that's what they want you to do. Oh, actually really, they want you to go into crippling debt or something like that because you don't know how to pay off a credit card. Again, just enable auto pay, okay. But what you don't wanna do for your own good is say, oh, I could get free money if I spend more. That is stupid, that doesn't make sense. You know what, why I bought this? Because it's gonna save me money. Because I already had the plan of buying this kind of stuff, or buying this thing. And that could apply to you. It might be that you, oh, I need to, you know, let's see, I wanna get a new ThinkPad. And frankly, you can get a ThinkPad for 100 bucks on eBay. So, okay, that's part of it. You know, my bills, they might be in the next three months, they might be, you know, $200, $300. And then, you know, I'll use this. Okay, if you can get to that 500 bucks fine, open the card, get your free money back. That's like living, it's like living with a permanent 20, 25% off a gift card, you know, for a coupon, for everything you buy. So that's something that you can do. But why I mentioned this is there are just so many ways, like if you planned, like my heuristic for spending money, first off, only buy things that are gonna save you money. I could not put my hand on it. Just being an example, okay. Only buy things that are gonna save you money. And when you buy them, plan them out, okay? I plan this out. I saved a lot of money. It was fantastic. Another thing while I'm thinking about it, because I'm looking over here, okay? Recently I got some Pete Moss potting mix, some Pearlite, other things that start with P, they're important for planning. And the reason I got that one other, nice little benefit of having all these stupid credit cards and I'm never actually gonna use for credit. But one nice thing that I have about that is, you know, different credit card companies, they'll do deals with different businesses. Like for example, in that case, Chase did like some kind of deal with lows, where like you could buy stuff from lows and get 10% back, okay? That is in addition to any other coupon you have. So I bought that stuff that I'm gonna be using next year for planting and stuff and gardening, which is obviously gonna make me money back. I went ahead and bought that on my Chase card that I had opened just to exploit for an introductory offer. And I also got 10% back on that. So that's nice, in addition to all that kind of stuff. So that's what I'm talking about. So this has been your Clark Howard advice. Just plant things out. If you're buying things, make sure that you are gonna be saving money in buying them. That's what I'm trying to say. My goal is to get my daily expenses basically down to zero. I mean, usually I don't have any daily expenses, but you know what, monthly expenses will say that. That's my goal. And I'm actually getting there. I'm actually getting like at this point in time, in addition, even stuff like food, like things, you know, meat, I don't have, you know, I have no way of growing meat. I don't have animals out here. But I still do like buy meat extremely tactically. Like I will free stuff. You know, if there's a meat sale, where things are just a little cheaper than usual, like or significantly cheaper than usual, I will buy up for like six months. I will keep my entire freezer stocked. I have not, I probably, I think I'm gonna buy some chicken breasts soon, but other than that, I have not bought meat in like two months, just because I have so much of it in my freezer that I've just been defrosting. Defrosting things can be a big pain, but yeah, it's definitely worth it still. So anyway, there's my advice. Don't take this autistic thing that people do where they say, oh well, I want to be anti-consumeristic, so I'm just not gonna buy things or I'm just not gonna think about how I'm gonna buy things or I'm not gonna optimize things. I'm not gonna have credit cards. I'm not gonna do any of this stuff. No, all of this stuff that is there to exploit stupid people can be exploited by people who know what they're doing. Okay, that's my message. All right, see you next time.