• Big changes, big wins: We’re diving into simple tweaks that can make a huge difference in your budget, like cutting car payments or lowering rent. These are the game-changers that can save you thousands!
• Small moves, big savings: From canceling unused subscriptions to switching insurance plans, these little adjustments can free up a lot of extra cash.
• Take control effortlessly: With Payactiv, you can automate saving¹ and avoid fees without lifting a finger—helping you stay on top of your money, stress-free.
• Share the journey: Grab an accountability buddy, share these tips, and tackle your financial goals together—it’s always easier (and more fun) when you’re not doing it alone!

Eric Rosenberg:

Hello. This is a quick reminder that today’s episode is intended for education and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered legal or financial advice.

Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the Good Cents by Payactiv podcast. As always, I am your host, Eric Rosenberg, and we’re thrilled to have you with us listening to today’s episode. Today we’re going to talk about a topic I think the personal finance community doesn’t talk about enough. We often talk about those little things in our budget that add up, which are very important to think about. If you can save $5 a day by skipping a bad financial habit, that adds up fast. That’s a lot of money, but there’s also things we can do in our budget and our savings habits that can have massive impacts with a single change. I’m talking about financial big wins.

I’m always looking for financial big wins myself because I know if I can do something that saves $100 a month, that’s more than $1,000 a year very quickly. If I can do something that saves me $500 a month, I know that’s an eye-popping amount of money, that can save me $6,000 per year. That’s huge. That can have a massive impact on our finances. I’m going to say the term massive impact and huge impact a lot in this episode because that’s what we’re trying to do. We are on the hunt for financial big wins that have the biggest impact on our budgets with sometimes not even that much work. So let’s dive in now to our five financial big wins that we all want to look for when managing our money.

All right, so our first area to focus on when looking for financial big wins is our cars and our vehicles. I have a couple very specific stories that come to mind when I think about how we can change our attitude and our mindset when thinking about how we can save money with cars. When I get a car, my advice for most people is to find a reliable used car, something that’s affordable that fits your budget. Ideally, you don’t need to get a loan, but if you do, it should be the smallest possible loan. That means saving up a big down payment can be helpful. And if you think about it, a lot of people pay as much as around $700 a month or more for a car. And while it might be fun to have the newest, flashiest, coolest, biggest, whatever you’re into car, finding a car that is more affordable can have an outsized influence on your money.

Think if you have two cars in your household and you’re paying an average of $500 a month each for a lease or a loan payment. If you could eliminate those two payments, that’s $1,000 a month you could put back into your savings. You could build an emergency fund. You can pay off debt. There’s so much you can do. Think about what you would do if you had an extra $1,000 every month.

And the two stories that I think about most when thinking about how to save on cars, the first one happened when I worked in a bank. When I was the bank manager, I noticed that a lot of the tellers who made less than the managers had newer and nicer cars than the managers. So I asked one of the seasoned managers who’d been around a long time, someone who has helping train me, “Why do you think the tellers who often made about half as much per year as some of the managers would have cars that cost so much more?” And the manager said, “Well, the tellers are…” And this wasn’t all tellers, I don’t want to generalize, but he said, “Well, a lot of these tellers are just thinking about their short-term enjoyment of the car, but they’re not thinking these cars are depreciating assets.” That means your car becomes worth less and less overtime.

He said, “When the managers get in their car, they might not look as flashy, but they’re driving home off into a much nicer home. They’re spending more of their money on property, which is an appreciating asset.” That’s something that becomes worth more over time. So if you’re able to cut expenses for something that becomes worth less and replace it with a mortgage payment, hopefully an affordable one, for a property that will grow in value, that’s a way to increase your net worth and improve your finances over time.

And the second one is more about mindset. One time I was talking to someone I knew who worked in the construction industry and he said he always had to have, again, construction, we like the truck, one that was from the last two or three years because he wanted the latest technology and he wanted to look good to the other guys on the job site. And I said, “Well, why do you care so much about looking good on the job site? What would happen if you bought a reasonably priced car and kept it for 10, 15 years? The average car right now in the US is about 10 years old. So if you kept your car just 10 years and paid off your car loan in five years, that would mean you would have five whole years without a car payment.” Then he hadn’t really ever thought about it like that before.

Leasing is a very expensive way to buy cars. I would only say leasing makes sense if you have a ton of money and you would get a new car every two or three years anyway, which for your finances, that doesn’t make any sense. I’ve never leased a car. I’ve only ever bought reasonably priced cars that I intend to own for 10 years or more.

So that’s a couple things I would think about when it comes to finding financial big wins, start with your car. If you can get rid of a car payment or get on track to not have car payments, that’s going to have a huge impact on your finances in a very good way.

Number two to talk about is housing. Housing is often our single biggest expense. I know my mortgage is one of my most expensive costs every month. Before that, when I was a renter, rent was always one of my number one or two costs every month. Rent and mortgage costs can be a lot. If you’re a renter especially, it’s easy to move into an expensive place that might stretch your finances a bit, but the next time your lease comes up, think about maybe if you could downsize or move to a little different area where you could save hundreds of dollars a month. If you’re in a high-cost-of-living area, you could maybe even save 500 or $1,000 a month by adjusting where you live. So thinking about how much you spend on rent, while it’s not always fun and easy to move and there’s definitely costs involved, if you can save hundreds of dollars every month, again, that’s a financial big win.

And if you’re owning a home or thinking about owning a home, there’s also places there you can find financial big wins. If you can make a larger down payment, for example, when you buy your home, that means you’ll have a lower monthly payment for your mortgage. When we bought my house, we put down something like 40%, and that made it so our monthly mortgage payment was much more affordable than if we’d put down the minimum. But with an FHA loan, that’s a Fair Housing Act loan, that’s a government-backed loan, you can sometimes put down around 3%. If you’re in the military, you might be able to buy a house with 0% down through the VA loan program. But even if I qualified for a lower down payment, I wanted to put as big of a down payment as I could comfortably afford because that meant for the next 20 or 30 years, depending on how long my mortgage was and whatnot, I could save a bundle of money every single month and I can use that cash flow to pay off my mortgage faster or to save or to invest and other big needs for the future.

Also, if you have a higher interest rate loan, if you’re an owner, you can refinance, which might save you a lot of money over time. Now, if you refinance to a longer time period, this is true with both auto loans and home loans, your cost might go up in total even though your monthly cost goes down. So keep that in mind. But if you can refinance with a lower interest rate, maybe your credit’s gotten better or market conditions have changed, maybe you can put down a bigger down payment and decrease the size of your loan, if you’re able to do that and refinance, getting a lower interest rate even by a quarter of a percent or a half a percent or a whole percent can add up to huge savings over time. Always do the math before refinancing. But either lowering your rent or finding a lower monthly cost through a lower interest rate on your home loan is another big financial win that can have a huge positive impact on your finances.

Number three, insurance. Now, for my family being self-employed, health insurance is actually our single biggest cost. It’s even more than our mortgage. So insurance is something that’s always top of mind for me. Now, if you’re like a lot of Americans, you have your health insurance. Hopefully you get that through an employer which covers part of the cost. But even if you don’t, you might get a subsidy through the local state marketplace wherever you live if you can get an Affordable Care Act insurance policy at healthcare.gov or a state insurance website. But health insurance, if you’re able to adjust your plan a little bit, that’s another place you could see hundreds of dollars a month in savings. But before you switch to a different plan, it’s always important to look at what your typical healthcare spending is.

Sometimes it’s worth a lot to get a more expensive plan every month if it will save you on regular healthcare expenses. If you go to the doctor a lot or you get a lot of medications, in that case, sometimes it’s worth paying a bit more. But if you don’t go to the doctor often and you’re healthy, you might be able to switch to a lower-tier plan. Like in the marketplace, if you went from a gold plan to a silver plan or a silver plan to a bronze plan, that would typically mean if you get sick, you have more upfront payments, but your monthly payment is lower. So depending on your health, insurance is a big way to save money.

Also, think about your car insurance. We’ve already talked about cars, but just a couple of months ago, I opened up my phone, we were on a long drive, I saw our car insurance cost was going to go up in an email from our old insurer. Then I found I could save about $150 a month by changing our car insurance. So I did it. I also review my life insurance periodically. I review all of the different kinds of insurance we have for our family to see if there’s ways that I can save. And sometimes I can’t, but sometimes I can. And sometimes those savings are big. So as with my last car insurance change, I saved over $1,000 a year. That’s money that I don’t have to give away to an insurer and I can use for whatever else I want.

Next, we’re going to talk about something with smaller dollar amounts, but the impact can be big over time. And we’ve talked before about budgeting habits, like skipping the $5 cup of coffee or bringing your lunch to work instead of going and spending 10, 15, $20 a day a lunch, that if you are able to find subscriptions that you have… And these days it seems like everything’s a subscription service, from what we watch on our phones or our TVs to what we do online or on our computers or on our smartphones. There’s so many subscription services. So take a look at all of those recurring costs and look at places you might be able to lower your costs or eliminate them completely because if you can save, let’s say $10 a month on three different subscriptions, that’s $30 a month. That quickly adds up to hundreds of dollars a year.

My mom just changed her phone plan. She changed from one of the big phone service providers that everybody knows to one through her phone and TV company she uses at home and gets her internet from, and her cost went down by about half every month. So she is now saving about $40 a month just on that one bill. That’s over $400 in 10 months. That’s almost $500 a year just from one bill. So think about those subscriptions. They might seem small right now, but they add up fast. And every dollar you can save on a recurring basis benefits you for many, many years,

I actually cut cable TV completely more than 10 years ago now. I was paying something like $50 a month then, but the costs are much higher now. They always raise the rates, right? So over years, I’ve saved thousands and thousands of dollars on cable TV because I just decided not to have it at all. I didn’t need it. I could get enough from a much less expensive online streaming platform.

Number five on our financial big wins is automation. Everything you can automate is a way to improve your finances without thinking about it. Just like we talked about a moment ago with subscriptions, those little bits add up. The same thing happens when you automate your bill payments or your savings. For example, if you have credit card debt and you want to get a credit card paid off faster, you can automate payments once a week or every payday for more than your minimum payment. And the more you can put in, the faster that balance will go to zero and you won’t have to pay interest and you won’t have that payment at all.

For your savings, you could log into the Payactiv app² if you have your direct deposit going to Payactiv, and just a few taps on your phone screen, whether you use an iPhone or an Android, I have Payactiv here on my Android phone, you can set up maybe a $5 a month or a $10 a month or $5 a payday, whatever works for your automatic saving plan. And again, that adds up over time and the money will go to your saving before you even think about it or have a chance to spend it. And when you blink a few months later, you’ll have a growing saving goal, something to get excited about. And if you can afford it, adding a little bit every month or every couple months to how much you save automatically will accelerate your saving growth. Before you know it, you’ll have a big emergency fund saved up. You can break that paycheck-to-paycheck cycle and feel like you’re really the master of your money and in charge of your finances.

So for a quick review, our five areas to focus on financial big wins. Number one, cars and vehicles, saving by cutting monthly recurring costs there if you can, or lowering them if you can. Number two, housing, getting lower rent or a lower interest rate if you’re a homeowner. Number three, insurance, finding lower cost insurance with the same level of benefits or decreasing your insurance if you’re overpaying for something you don’t need. Number four, subscriptions. Every little dollar adds up. Canceling subscriptions and finding lower cost subscriptions has a huge impact in the long run. And number five is automation. Those little steps add up and automating your bill payoffs and your saving can put you on track for great financial health for years to come.

Well, I hope you found that one helpful, everyone. I know I’ve talked with friends and family acting as a little bit of a financial coach, and I know that when they’ve been able to get rid of a car payment or cut their cell phone bill in half or eliminate cable TV, those dollars can add up so fast to making their financial situation a lot easier to manage. Imagine not living paycheck to paycheck or feeling stress-free when you open up your bank account and look at your balances and your expenses knowing you can afford everything. And those financial big wins are a huge way to make it all possible.

Remember, as we talked about, the Payactiv app is a great way to improve your finances. It can also help you avoid late fees and overdraft fees if you use the earned wage access³ or EWA feature. So if you’re not already using it, make sure to download the Payactiv app today to get yourself started.

As always, thank you for listening until the end. If you found this helpful, please share it with a friend. They can turn their finances around along with you. An accountability buddy is a great way to make sure you stay on track for your financial improvements while someone else is on the same journey. So thank you for listening until the end. And until next time, keep living the life you’ve earned.

¹ Goal-based saving is a set-aside account, and you will not receive interest or other earnings on the funds within the goal-based account.

² Standard data rates from your wireless service provider may apply. 

³ Earned Wage Access requires employer participation. Employees can only access a portion of the wages they have earned to date.

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