There's gift I've ever received has to be a bike when I was younger, a pedal bike.

It was a sort of slick little road bike and I remember it was all like it was so it was all wrapped up

but it was so obvious what it was obviously because nothing shaped like a bike and I had a little ribbon on it and I was so

I guess. For that was a life changer and I'm still sort of big on cycling around my area now so for that one change me a little.

Enjoy in every sip with red cups now back at Starbucks.

It's my pleasure to welcome you to the Clark Howard Show. Our mission is to serve you so you are empowered with knowledge so you make better financial decisions in your life.

Today I want to give you some great strategies to save big money in your life easy to say not necessarily easy to do.

Later I've been getting a lot of questions about people stealing your home from you right out from under you and I want to tell you what to watch out for and I want to tell you how you can protect yourself.

So I am someone who was very lucky in my life in a lot of ways but part of it I made my own luck and I may be repeating part of what I'm going to say now maybe something you've heard before others have not heard it at all so I'm going to digress for just a second.

When I was a teenager my dad lost his job he'd worked for a family business for his in-laws for almost 30 years and they let him go and it was then and only then I found out when my dad sat me down and he was really upset and I thought you know it's a teenager I thought oh my goodness.

My dad is going to tell me he's dying of something and he said I have something terrible to tell you and it's like oh yeah so he's going to tell me and then he said I lost my job and I started smiling here to ear and he said what are you smiling about I said well I thought you're going to tell me you were dying.

And all of a sudden he broke out in a big smile he had this wonderful smile and broke out in this big smile because it took a teenager to give him perspective that there were things worse than losing your job.

But then he went on to say and I was just gotten into college and was in college and this was a Thanksgiving I'd come home for a visit he said I don't think there's money for you to go back to college in January this is Thanksgiving and I'm like what.

Because I thought my parents like many of us might you know they they had money but it turned out they had always spent everything that came in and this was a real bump in the road and it took a few years but my parents got back up on their feet but it was a life changing moment for me.

And so I went back and where I went to college most people were night students they were people who worked full time and went to college at night I went to the American University and at the time I was there don't know how many kids there are now kids I mean the people of different ages but there were I think 14,000 and a little over 2,000 were daytime college students.

And the rest were night students and so it was really easy there for me to reregister as a night student I scrambled and got a job who's the tail end of the Vietnam war and I got a job as a civilian with the Air Force.

And I worked my way through the rest of school and I then got a higher paying job when the war ended at HUD department housing and development because I was going to school in DC I mean most college students wouldn't have most places the opportunity to get what was a really good paying job for a college student at that point a lower level government employee makes more than people do in the private school.

And the private sector a higher level government employee makes less than people doing the private sector so if those of you are old federal government employees I was a GS 4 and then I was a GS 5.

It's kind of like a rank in the military but it's what I was there and then when I finished undergraduate school I got a job with IBM as a bill collector for IBM and they paid my way to graduate school.

Not with the salary I made they had a tuition reimbursement program which those are very present today so many places will pay for you to go to college working for them and so I was able to get through school no student loans.

Tuitions were much cheaper in that era and then of course I be unpaid for my grad school and when things happen to you as a teenager it has the greatest impact on our lives I know Christa you've shared with me things that happened to you as a teenager and those things still color your life the rest of your life and for me in my case it was the finance and so knowing my parents had not saved money I

lived on every other paycheck when I was working after I got out of graduate school and then I didn't have to worry about school tuition I was used to living on very little and I decided extreme that I was going to live on every other paycheck well the funny thing is today that's a very common strategy that's talked about a lot that you live on

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