Hey, this is Daniel. Thanks for listening to DIY Money. If you haven't already, be sure to give us a five-star review on iTunes so your friends know that they can learn from the show. Now, enjoy the show.

Welcome back. Ladies and gentlemen, you're listening to another edition of DIY Money, DIY Money.

So I am log it.

So I am super pumped. We normally don't do big gifts at all. My wife had some money set aside in a different account that she had been saving up for my birthday present this year. So the thing is, my birthday's on January 4th. It's two weeks after Christmas. I never get Jack for my birthday.

And I guess technically I didn't get it for this year on my birthday, but it was a quote-unquote birthday gift.

But she got me a Trager smoker.

Smoker.

I'm going all in.

Somebody stop me.

Like I love cooking.

So you've heard me talk about Blackstone on the episode and things like that. And I just, I throw down. I love to cook and entertain and that kind of thing. But this year, I'm going to become like pit master. I'm going for it. I am super excited. What would be the first thing you would have me do? I don't know. Is, is a Trigger, like a smoker? Yeah, smoker. Smoker. Yeah. So you put like the pellets in it and then it does the thing. Yeah, man. I don't know. I mean, honestly, I have no idea. I wouldn't even know where to begin. I think, I feel like you got to work up to like the pulled pork and the brisket kind of thing, because those are more expensive. So I'm thinking like just trying wings up front and then maybe ribs. And that's that's going to be the project this weekend is trying to get that kind of stuff done. Yeah. I mean, but it's a thing. It's like a thing. People like love it. I mean, I like typed into YouTube. It's like 40 million things. And now I'm getting all the ads.

You know, of course, now everything has ads on it for, oh, smoke this and smoke that. But I'm going to figure it out. I'm excited. That'll be great. Well, do it and then bring a sample in. Oh, I absolutely can. That would be fantastic. Come on, do it. Do it. That's great. All right.

Let's, we kind of talked a lot about our lives, last one, or I talked a lot about my life. I'm monopolized. But let's move right into the back to the basics that we're talking about today. And it's about creating margin. So, again, we inserted saying no, just because I think from a psychological standpoint, that's important and probably a lot of people needed to hear that. But I'm going to back up a little bit. Step number one, tracking your expenses. So everybody talks about, oh, you need a budget. You need a budget. And you're like, well, how do you get a budget? Well, you get a budget by tracking your expenses, seeing where your money goes, and then using that data to start building a budget.

I'm going to insert here, there's no shortcuts.

I mean, it just, again, I know a lot of you, you are A-type personality, you are shortcut-driven, you use hotkeys on the computer.

Like, you're always looking for that, for that,

you know, shorter route, the more efficient route, et cetera.

Sometimes it doesn't work.

Yes.

I mean, literally, you want to get stronger, you go to the gym.

Day after day, after day, after day, you go to the gym.

You may not see results for six weeks, eight weeks.

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