Your Biggest Single Expense
The Jesse Mecham Show
YNAB
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2024
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Your biggest single expense is one you probably don't think about much... unless you're American and it's April 15th. You may think it's housing, or maybe education, or raising kids, but all those costs are dwarfed by the elephant on your income statement: taxes. We are taxed in hundreds of ways, some obvious like income taxes and sales tax, others more insidious like fuel tax, air travel tax, liquor tax, etc, etc. Jesse points this out to demonstrate something important -- you can be desensitized to almost any expense, even the single biggest expense in your life!
Beginning Balance Podcast with Jesse and Mark Butler
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, whinevers. My name is Jesse Meekin with another episode of the |
| 0:07.9 | whineb podcast and I'm here each week to obsess out loud about spending |
| 0:11.3 | purposefully, saving aspirationally, and even giving joyfully. |
| 0:15.2 | It all comes down to just four simple habits. |
| 0:17.1 | Today I want to talk about spending coercively, forcefully? |
| 0:20.9 | No, I wasn't even going to do this episode and then I saw on what date this episode |
| 0:27.6 | would air April 15th if you're here in the great old United States, you know that today's tax day. |
| 0:34.0 | And so I thought back to an article I wrote years ago when I used to write for our blog, |
| 0:42.0 | now they don't let me. And I just said something |
| 0:46.6 | along the lines of it's your single biggest expense. And occasionally I don't like talking |
| 0:51.5 | about it because it's not the most fun it's not it's not very |
| 0:55.6 | Purposeful. It's certainly not very aspirational to talk about taxes, but when you are talking about allocating your scarce and very precious hard-earned resources, |
| 1:05.0 | every once in a while you do need to kind of look up and acknowledge your life's single |
| 1:10.5 | biggest expense. |
| 1:12.0 | And when I would trick people and ask them this back in the day |
| 1:14.4 | they would say my mortgage and I would say oh if only if only your life's single |
| 1:20.2 | biggest expense is taxes absolutely and now there has been I don't I still to |
| 1:26.8 | this to this day of this part of the year I do not have a 2024 experiment it might be that I do not experiment in 2024. One that I've |
| 1:36.8 | wanted to do for years is to break out in Wyanab all of the different ways that I'm paying taxes and the reason I don't do it is |
| 1:46.1 | because it would be extremely hard to do tedious even and I thought maybe I could hire a |
| 1:50.6 | college kid to just kind of come behind me and just look and like I |
| 1:55.6 | fill up at the pump and he or she'd be like, oh, okay, that's this many cents per gallon and |
... |
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