The Last $300
The Jesse Mecham Show
YNAB
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 31 October 2022
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Once you've started working the Four Rules, you start to realize that most of your money is kind of... spoken for. You need to pay the rent, the utlities, insurance, and so on. When you get through the list of non-negotiables, there's often just a few hundred dollars each month to play around with in the budget, and those dollars are where the real gains are made. Like David Bach's "latte factor," the small optional expenses we accumulate without budgeting properly can add up to big savings over a surprisingly short amount of time.
Got a question for Jesse? Send him an email:
Sign up for a free 34-day trial of YNAB at www.youneedabudget.com
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, Wine Embers. My name is Jesse Meagam with another episode of the Wine app podcast |
| 0:08.8 | where we teach you four rules to help you stop paying to paycheck, get out of debt, and |
| 0:12.1 | save more money. I want to call your attention to what we call the last few hundred dollars. |
| 0:19.6 | And really, it's this idea. You are not making decisions. Really, you aren't deciding |
| 0:25.2 | regularly on most of your money. And you'll see this pop up in personal finance books and articles |
| 0:31.3 | where they talk about your discretionary income. And there really isn't a lot of, well, for many, |
| 0:36.8 | there, we don't have a lot of discretion or at least we don't think we do right out of the gate. |
| 0:40.5 | So as we begin to work the four rules, we begin to give every dollar a job, we start to |
| 0:47.2 | realize that some money is going to places we don't like and we reallocate. But at the end of the day, |
| 0:53.4 | even if you're following one of four rules, you're winning, you really, it's helpful to realize |
| 1:01.0 | that you don't necessarily have a lot of decision-making power in the day to day over all of your |
| 1:08.8 | money. It's really just over the last few hundred dollars. And sometimes that's important because |
| 1:14.8 | you aren't always sitting there saying, should I or should I not pay the mortgage? Once a year, |
| 1:19.4 | I've mentioned this many times over years. We do the the burn down where you just burn down all |
| 1:24.8 | of your assumptions and you say, okay, do we want to rent or do we want to own or do we want to jump |
| 1:31.3 | into an RV and travel the world? That kind of a thing. You really question every assumption. We've |
| 1:36.4 | been buying this health insurance. So we do something else. Like you look structurally, do we need |
| 1:40.6 | three cars instead of one? I'm just kidding. It's normally the other way around. But all that to say, |
| 1:45.2 | you're looking at the financial structure and you're really, you're inspecting everything, |
| 1:49.7 | you're inspecting what you thought were pillars, you know, load bearing beams and you're saying, |
| 1:54.5 | no, no, we can actually remove that. So in that way, once a year, you're doing the burn down, |
| 2:00.4 | but in the day to day, the real money's to be made, so to speak, in the last few hundred dollars. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from YNAB, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of YNAB and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.