BiggerPockets Money Podcast - 48: Breaking the Impulse Shopping Twitch to Embrace Minimalism with Anthony Ongaro

Episode Date: November 26, 2018

Anthony Ongaro had a habit. Every time he had a bad day, every time life wasn’t amazing, he opened up his online shopping site, and One-Click purchased something. Anything. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need it, it didn’t matter what it was, but... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast show number 48, where we interview Anthony Ongaro from Break the Twitch. Because that's what the Twitch is. It is a temporary, unproductive solution to discomfort. That discomfort might be the desire of wanting something, feeling a lack of self-confidence in that moment, feeling insecure. Whatever it may be, it's some form of discomfort. And the Twitch temporarily solves it because it gives you that dopamine burst. It feels good. Again, but you're stepping a... away from the things you actually want, the things you actually that will make you feel better over the long term and fill that space. It's time for a new American dream, one that doesn't involve working in a cubicle for

40 years, barely scraping by. Whether you're looking to get your financial house in order, invest the money you already have, or discover new paths for wealth creation, you're in the right place. This show is for anyone who has money or wants more. This is the Bigger Pocket's Money Podcast. How's it going, everybody? I'm Scott Trench. I'm here with my co-host, Miss Mindy Janssen. How are you doing today, Mindy? Scott, I am doing fantastic. I am really excited about today's show. It's a little different than our normal shows. We don't talk to somebody who is on the path to financial independence, but we do talk to Anthony, who embodies the spirit of minimalism and getting rid of things that distract you and keep you from your true purpose, your true life, your true job.

And he's got a bit of an interesting story with his money situation in that he used to, what is it, placate himself? Placade is not the right word. What word about it? I think it was more of an addiction to shopping. Yeah, online shopping. And it was so easy to shop online. He had the one-click purchase set up on Amazon and would just buy whenever he felt like it when he saw a new thing or needed a new dopamine hit or whatever. I keep saying dopamine.

I'm not sure if that's the right internal drug. I think that's a fair way to talk about it. It's like, hey, this was the reward mechanism that he'd set up for himself. And it was very difficult for him to break that cycle. Yeah. And, you know, once he did break that cycle, he embraced this concept of minimalism, which is something that I want to do but have not yet done. And this show was really helpful for me.

Some of his answers, especially in the famous four, were so spot on and just really, I really connected with that. And I really. can't wait to, like, it's the morning right now and I want to go home and start putting some of these things into practice, but I have to work. No, I think that the great thing about this is, one, there's a real emotional story behind why he needed to make all this changes to improve his life. You know, he just needed to happen for his personal life in a situation to change. But then there's so many practical benefits that he

realized, not just like saving money from Amazon, you know, by not spending that $12,000 through Amazon shopping, but the act of decluttering and how that enabled him to turn his home into an asset, how it enabled him to go and travel around the country. I mean, these are all just incredible benefits of the practice of minimalism in a different spin on it, not the go live like a hermit spin that I think some extreme minimalists follow, but the more day-to-day tangible freeing aspects that you can get with an introductory approach. You know, I think you hit that right on the head with explaining the concept behind You hear all these people say, oh, just get rid of all your stuff.

But what he said is more helpful to me personally. Get rid of the distractions. It is distracting to come home and see all of this stuff on the island in the kitchen. So you get rid of it. And then more stuff kind of brings itself into the space. Get rid of the stuff in general. Get rid of the distractions. And you can live the life that you want to live.

And that was he really put it into words in a way that I haven't heard anybody else put it into words. Yeah, I thought it was fantastic. And the concept of minimalism for some is very spiritual. I guess you could sort of say I'm a minimalist. I'm not spiritual about it. I'm practical about it. Having lots of items distracts me from whatever I'm trying to work on, right? Having lots of stuff prevents me from being able to move and continue house hacking regularly and building a position of financial freedom and a position where I am in control of my life, not somebody else. And that's the power of this practice in practical terms of. in terms of your ability to produce results. Yes, and I think I've heard it all as like the spiritualism aspect of it. I'm not spiritual about it either, but being practical, I think that was what was very helpful to me. We should not rehash the whole episode, though.

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Hiring, Indeed is all you need. We are going to bring in Anthony now and let him tell his story. Okay, Anthony from Break the Twitch. Welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. How's it going today? It's going great. Thanks for having me. Ah, thanks for coming on. So before we get started with where your money journey begins, I want to talk about this

Break the Twitch name. Yeah. Where does that come from? Break the Twitch was something that evolved out of an experience that I had, many experiences over and over and over. And basically, I had a little Amazon thing where I was buying a lot of small little purchases on Amazon, wasn't really thinking about it. it, you know, 10, 20 bucks maybe here and there and it wasn't a big deal and kept clicking that

one-click purchase button. And eventually when I one day tabulated the total spending on Amazon that I had done over the previous four years, I realized that those little clicks were adding up to be a huge impact. And it was a big reason why I wasn't able to do a lot of the things that I actually talked about wanting to do, traveling or spending more time with family, going to weddings, different things like that, that there were a few that I couldn't make. And it really became that I realized that it was more of a physical twitch of my finger than an actual intentional choice, like an action. It was almost like an addiction of that movement.

And that's where the idea of the Twitch came into play. And it expanded into that feeling we get when we need to check our phone or flipping through social media, pull down to refresh that motion. And so that's where break the Twitch was born. It's the idea of choosing intention over the Twitch. I love that. Choosing intention over the Twitch. I was out to dinner last night with my family.

And my daughter and I went to the bathroom. She said, Mom, did you see that table over there? Every kid is on their phones. They're not even talking to the parents. And you keep asking me for a phone. Why do you think I keep saying no? Because I already have that Twitch and I purposely have to put it down. And it's like a conscious thing.

I have to intentionally not check my phone because, you know, you don't want to be bored. And it's not really boring to talk to your family. You know, when there's a lull in conversation, start up another conversation. Right. The art of conversation is being challenged. And it's also that this stuff is designed to be this way. It's not something we're all bad at. It's that these products, these things have been designed to become addictive.

And that's exactly what happens. So it's not a lack in the human sense. It's that we're being given a thing that's addictive. And now, fortunately, there's not really a regulating body of what types of manipulative practices can be used to gather that addiction to get it going. So we have to do it ourselves. And that's a lot about what I write about, how to utilize these things that are in a lot of ways necessary in our modern lives.

Amazon is really convenient in a lot of ways. It's really great. but we have to find a balance and make sure that we're using it in a way that actually helps us instead of hurts us and puts us further away from our values. So can you tell us a little bit about like the application of what you're talking about in terms of helping people save money and get started on their financial journeys? Absolutely. So the context for Break the Twitch, for my own personal journey through this stuff, is spending with intention.

I mean, everyone's going to have different goals. everyone's going to have different financial goals, whether it's early retirement, financial independence, or if it's simply being able to pay for a kid's college, whatever it may be, that simply comes down to aligning action with your values. So break the twitch is all about aligning action with value, and in this case, the action is spending. So there's the element of taking your spending, making sure that the small things that repeat over time are actually aligning with the big goals that are far in the future. And that's where this comes into play. So what's an application of this that you kind of, like what's the moment where you kind of discovered this? It sounds like this is a

behavior you're noticing over time. When did you kind of have that aha moment and make a big change and begin redirecting how you were doing things? Yeah. It was with a particular event that I just didn't seem to be able to go to the financially like the plane ticket, the hotel, all the stuff, right? And it was an important thing that I wanted to be able to go to. And I was working. My wife and I were earning good money in an affordable city. Like it should have been easy. Should have been fine. And then you notice, you know, we have a package on our front port just about every other day, just about several times a week. It's constant. And then you start looking in and, For me, the big moment was pulling four years.

You can go into your Amazon history and put on a spreadsheet. And we charted it out. My wife was a financial analyst for six years. And so we like charted it out. And the curve was amazing where 90% of the over 350 purchases in four years and 90% of them were like under $40. So there were very few things of significance of. like a nice laptop for editing video or whatever.

Like there's a computer at one end, but most of it was just little impulsive. Yeah, it's not that much. Don't worry about it. And so seeing that total made me realize that it wasn't just those things in the list, but it was the lack of the things that I actually cared about. It was the lack of the things in that list that I didn't see.

It was the things I didn't see that really made me realize what was going wrong. Did you check out other parts of your, budget as well, or was this just kind of obviously the place where all where the biggest chunk of controllable spending was, was leaving? It was an obvious place that. Okay. Yeah, it was the obvious place that needed attention. Because the thing was, we were earning pretty good living, like you said. And so, it wasn't like we were going into debt, right? I was paying off my credit card every month. Like, it was fine. But each month, it was just kind of like, uh, you know, that much, this much, however much. and it just felt okay, okay, fine, we're passing by, right? It's okay. And looking at that,

realizing that that was pulling away from so many of the other goals we had was what did it. So yeah, that was really the place of attention, I guess, yeah. Okay. What were you, what were the items you're purchasing? You've kind of described them as less than $40, you know, but what were they? Yeah, it was just like cables, accessories, like different gadgets. Big thing was like workout, like, equipment or different things, like I didn't go crazy on workout outfits, but, you know, just like different little things like that. There's this idea that hit me called the false first step, and this is probably the number one thing that I was doing, these false first steps where I would

want to do something, a lot of books, for example, and I love books and I still advocate buying books, but just buying books that you're going to read and only buying as many as you're going to read at a time, I would buy a book, look at it, put it on the shelf, and, you know, this idea of the false first step was we try to buy the person we want to become instead of doing the work. We buy the yoga mat before we attend a yoga gym or even pull up a YouTube video to even check it out. And we just end up with having one more thing in our house and less money in our bank account and nothing else. And so that was like the primary example of these things that I was just wanting. I was chasing. I wasn't kidding anywhere because you know, you'd buy it and

you move on to the next thing because the feeling goes away as soon as the same as. nothing leaves. Okay, I think this is really important to talk about this little, like, hit of dopamine or, you know, whatever it is that you get when you buy something. Ooh, I just bought something. I'm excited. And when you're chasing that, especially if you're in like a job that you hate or a life that isn't, you know, really super exciting, sometimes life is really boring. And that's actually a really good life is when it's kind of boring and not that much stuff is exciting and happening because that means that not that much bad stuff is happening either. But, you know, you get bored. So you're like, oh, okay, this looks like a cool new.

cable or accessory or gadget or workout stuff. I love that quote. We buy the person we're trying to become. I'm totally not guilty of that every single day of my life. Maybe not every day, but really, really a lot. And you said earlier, you're earning a good living. You're not going into debt. You're paying off your credit card every month, so you must be doing it right. And well, you're not really doing it wrong. You're just not really, you know, you're not saving for anything. You're not living intentionally is another comment that you said. Let's look a little bit at your financial situation. You said you were earning a good living. like what sort of money were you making and what sort of purchases were you like were you spending

everything were you saving anything yeah i mean so when my wife and i were both working full time we were earning a very comfortable living over six figures in terms of just our annual income and we're living in a very affordable city i mean Minneapolis is increasingly less affordable now but we own a home so we're both saving we are contributing to our retirement plans getting matches from our employers, like doing the things, right? It came a lot more down to the discretionary income, which is a funny word too, right? The discretionary or the extra income, which almost makes it like it should be spent. But breaking the torture, the removal of that spending started with a shopping ban, essentially. It's just like any other repetitive behavior where you have to

step away from it completely. Some people are moderators in terms of being able to just do something and they'll have candy in the house, but they'll just eat a piece of it and then walk away, right? Not me. Right. Me neither. And so we don't keep that stuff in the house. So that we did the same equivalent thing with spending where I turned off Amazon. I did a complete Amazon ban for 90 days and wanted to really address, like, what were the feelings that were coming up when I wanted to spend money? Like you said, life is comfortable. We were, you know, I guess boring is a way to put it, but reliable, right? It was consistent and reliable.

And there are all these human feelings around wanting to be more, wanting to have some levels of excitement in different places, areas. And so those are the things that we need to address in a way that is actually helpful. And so that's what it started as for me. Amazon is a problem. It's too convenient. It's too easy. It's just one click. You get the dopamine when you click it.

And then you get the dopamine again when it arrives. When you start ordering a lot of stuff on Amazon, it's like even better because you don't even know what it is that arrives. You just get a box and it's like Christmas every day and it's exciting. You're like, cool. And that's, you know, that's an easy to repeat behavior. So completely getting rid of it for 90 days. really allowed me to step back and go, okay, this is clearly a habit, like a bad habit.

And I need to cleanse myself of doing this thing. And you said, I broke the Twitch. And I would say that this is a consistent and constant breaking of the Twitch. It's like always there will be new different things introduced in our lives in terms of tech, spending, marketing, different ways that we're interacting with our world, that we're going to need to moderate and figure out how we want to interact with it instead of just allowing it to interact with us. So how much did you spend the 90 days preceding this ban? And how much did you spend? And what we know?

What was the difference there? How much did you save? I actually don't know the exact number of how much it was in that 90 day period. But I can tell you that it was shocking to see my credit card bill at the end of each of those months. it was like $300. Like those groceries, I guess, you know, and all of a sudden it became abundantly clear that that was the biggest impact instead of $800 or $900 and having a couple hundred bucks left, it was the inverse, right?

And that was the biggest impact that I saw. That's probably about the difference of what it would have been months a month. So how hard was it to walk away? like day one of your day 90 Amazon ban, was that like, were you Jones in for it? Were you like an addict like that? And because it can't be addicting to, you know, this hit. Yeah. So what was it like and how hard was it to walk away this first week?

And, you know, does it get easier? Super hard. And yes, it does get easier. It's just like sugar for me. Like removing sugar for my diet is like you get grumpy and it's terrible for the first couple days. And after a week or two, the cravings start to go away. You feel better.

And it's just like pretty easy from that point until you go to the holiday party. And then everyone else is eating and you have it there and you're like, uh, but within your controlled environment, it gets easier. Same thing with Amazon with the Twitch. When you're used to feeling a level of discomfort, because that's what the Twitch is. It is a temporary, unproductive solution to discomfort. That discomfort might be the desire of wanting something, feeling. a lack of self-confidence in that moment, feeling insecure, whatever it may be, it's some form

of discomfort. And the Twitch temporarily solves it because it gives you that dopamine burst. It feels good. Again, but you're stepping away from the things you actually want, the things you actually that will make you feel better over the long term and fill that space. It just kind of keeps us coasting along. Social media check. So just keeps us coasting, keeps his coasting, just skipping along instead of actually kind of taking off, right, and being able to grow. So yes, it was hard. I remember it's like your immediate reaction to solve a feeling, even though if it's not a conscious feeling, your immediate reaction is to like just open Amazon or like go on or in a step feeling of want, right? Where do I get

it? Amazon. So it's just a Twitch thing. Like it goes straight from gut to finger of just wanting to get that thing and then going on. So it does get easier. I highly recommend creating this thing. I call intentional friction. So you have to give yourself a fighting chance to make this easier on you by increasing the friction between your want and the ability to fulfill it. And so you can do that using like an app or a browser extension on your browser that will just block particular sites completely. So at least you have to go into the settings and disable that thing and then sign back into

Amazon. That's what I call intentional friction. because in marketing, it's easier to reduce the amount of work it takes for someone to do the thing you want them to do than it is to increase their desire to do it. So the goal has been to reduce friction in the purchasing process, in the social media checking process, so that it just becomes a seamless part of daily life. And so we have to make it difficult again. And so that's how we can really at least that first week or two, you have to reintroduce some friction. Yeah, that's interesting. Oh, sorry, Scott. Go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say, over time, as you stopped this habit, cold turkey after that 90 days,

how did you see the financial benefits kind of come through over time? You know, how did that kind of impact your ability to create wealth? Yeah, the major difference that I saw was, one, being able to increase my 401K contributions at work immediately. That was huge. The other one was, well, I got into travel hacking. So that was kind of part of it too. But I found myself able to go. I traveled every single month for the next two years.

So I flew somewhere and still spent less money than I had been on these little things. So I was able to visit friends that I hadn't seen in years. I was able to go visit them and see the people that I cared about and do these things that really mattered to me and fulfilled me in a major way just by making this shift. And the difference also in just doing the match on my 401k and then literally doubling it so that it's like three times as much, right, as opposed to just two times as much as I was putting in was a huge impact. And I saw that over the course of two years as well. So it was amazing. And it was a great market at the time too. So, you know, it was pretty impactful.

But those were just some of the immediate things. I mean, it was literally like flipping a switch, making this choice. drawing a line in the sand and stepping past it saying like, okay, we're not going to do that. You know, I hear this so many times from so many guests on the show is be intentional with your money, be intentional with your spending, track your spending and see where your money's going and all of that. After you decided, well, it seems like you tracked your Amazon spending. Do you track your overall spending or was just cutting out the Amazon so much of a huge impact that you didn't need to really track the rest of it?

Yeah, this isn't a super helpful answer because that is the answer like, yeah, it was pretty much just Amazon because that's where I would always go to just get the thing that I felt like I wanted, right? I worked for a bike company. So I was very into bikes. At one point, I had five bikes. And I know a lot of people with a lot more bikes than that. Some people that are cyclists, their hardcore cyclists are going to laugh because that's maybe not that many. But I am down to one bike now. It's just like the parts, the accessories, like, oh, we can upgrade. the wheels or we can do this brake lever instead and it just keeps going forever. There will never be not something to upgrade or buy or improve. And so really it was that. It really did help though to take a larger picture overall. Like using now that we're running a business and doing this kind of stuff full time, it's like using fresh books or using our business software to track business expenses and income outcome, making sure that things are lining up. We're still in, we're in your three or four of blogging now and running a YouTube channel and doing all this stuff.

So we're still in the growth phase of the business of what we're doing now. But I will say that the changes we made through minimalism, through reducing our spending are what made this possible now. And that was another one of the realized major changes that we made it possible for us to pursue our dreams of my wife and I working together, of building something of doing work we're really passionate about. And so that was another major benefit of this too. It's not just like, well, we saved a little more money. We reduced our expenses substantially. And that sort of led to a continuous, well, this is less now. Like how else can we shape our lives in a way that gives us more freedom to do this? So let's talk a little bit about minimalism. I actually struggle with

personally, I am more on the maximalism spectrum right now, and I don't want to be. But it is hard to, it's hard for me at least to give things up, especially like things that I've already paid for. I'm a frugal person. So I paid money for this. I am not using it, but I could do something with it, you know, maybe. But in the discussion we had before this, you talked about how it's so freeing in your head to have all this space cleared up. And this is kind of a comment about minimalism in general. Let's talk about minimalism. How has that helped you on your journey? Yeah. As you can see, even if you're watching the video version of this right now, I have stuff behind me. I have a bunch of filmmaking equipment, microphone, different things behind me that I use.

I don't have a blank white wall with ambient light surrounding me. I think there's often this picture of minimalism of what it needs to be. And often that comes from magazines like kinful magazine and things that show these amazing brick lofts with huge windows and somehow a perfectly balanced cup of tea on a white bed spread that isn't falling over and someone with effortlessly tussled hair. You know, this image of what it needs to be or should be to me is very wrong. It's a version of what minimalism can look like in terms of an aesthetic. But at the core of it, For us, for my wife, Amy and I, we focus on a minimalism that means removing distractions and owning the things that allow us to do more of what matters. And that's a very broad thing. But to me, removing distractions means clearing off the desk so that the computer is front and center.

And if you're a writer, you write. You don't have a bunch of other stuff in the way they prevent you from doing it. If the things in your life are not preventing you from doing what matters to you, it's probably not a big deal. But it's when you have an Amazon habit like I had, the consumption of bringing things into the house, bringing things into the house. And then it was like constantly organizing stuff. Why is there stuff everywhere? Our storage is full. Our closets are full. It was the process of decluttering, removing thousands of things over two, three years from our home that allowed us to house hack.

while we traveled because we literally emptied out half of our 1,300 square foot house after doing this. And I still have a lot of stuff, but we still only live in half of our house. And in that, again, goes back to the whole thing of aligning our space, our assets with what we actually want. We were able to go house sit and help my in-laws for the winter. We live in Minnesota. Their houses in Phoenix is an ideal time. to do that. And we were able to do that. And because of this situation we've created, because of the space, both literally and figuratively, that we created in our lives with minimalism. So I don't

want it to be ever a thing that people feel bad about, oh, I have so much stuff, or like, I don't want to go stuff. There is inherent value in the things that you've bought. Sometimes you can return those things to cash. If you sell some of them, you can sort of re-energize those items by giving them to another person who will bring it back to life and appreciate it and love it more than you need it. There are a lot of ways to approach this stuff. I think this is awesome. The concept of describing minimalism as a practice that involves removing distractions, not as living like a hermit without any items or anything like that. I mean, that's actually really resonates with me a lot because that's kind of how I've lived my life the last several years. I just do not accumulate a lot

of possessions, not because necessarily it's an expense, but it's a distraction. It's just like, now I got to put them somewhere. You know, with these five nice items, goes the sixth. With, you know, you wear a fancy watch. You got to have a fancy shirt to go. It's like this whole practice of maintenance and distracting you from your goals and what you want in life as an accumulation of items, I guess, around your house. I feel like that's, I think that's a really good way to put it and a different spin on this topic that I've thought about before. Good. That's. That's, That's how I feel about it as well. And I obviously went in one very different direction for a long time. And that's how I'm viewing it now and for the last several years and how it's become this

part of my daily practice. Basically, it's like a daily practice. You talk about you never break the Twitch. You just practice intentionality. And it's just like building a muscle doing anything else. You get better at it. But you're still working out every day. You're still doing it. So I'm going to pull a Brandon Turner and Brandon is the host of the Bigger Pockets real estate investing podcast and he always uses the show to ask questions that he wants answers to. So do you have any suggestions for someone like me who would like to have less stuff, but I'm having a hard time parting with things? And I think one of my biggest problems is while I paid for that, I spent money on that,

I can't just throw it away. And I don't just throw it away. I give it to the goodwill or whatever, but it's still leaving my house without being used fully or whatever. How do you start down this path without feeling overwhelmed? That's a legitimate feeling. First of all, I want to say that that's a totally normal and perfectly healthy thing to feel. So that's let's start there. But second, there are a couple ways that I think mentally you can approach this where I know a lot of

of this stuff is mindset-based. It feels like a lot of the stuff comes down to action, but what leads action is mindset is one believing that it's possible to get to a certain place or believing that it's possible to do. So that's for me the foundation of a lot of this stuff. There are a couple ways to approach that. One is the idea of giving something new life. I briefly mentioned it earlier. And it's a perspective of if something is in your space, taking up space that could otherwise be used or otherwise be left blank for all intents and purposes, you can essentially bring that thing back to life. If you're not using it, if it's collecting dust, that thing is sitting in like potential energy. It's just sort of existing there, not doing anything. And you can bring that to life.

You can turn it back into kinetic energy when you might sell it. You might get some money back from it, depending on what it is. If it's old, old tech, it's probably not going to be much. But you can also give that thing to someone else who will appreciate and you use it. And it literally turns that potential energy back into kinetic energy. It's kind of like woo-woo, but I, but I, believe that people that get a new thing love and appreciate it more. It adds more value to their life than it does our own if it's just sitting and it's taking up space. And so that's one mental

approach. Now a very practical approach and a very action-oriented approach to this is that you basically play a game called the minimalist game, which is something that was created by the minimalists, the guys that documentary about this stuff, and they're doing a lot of stuff around this. But the minimalist game, really simple. First day of the month, you find one thing in your house to get rid of. Second day the month, two things. Third day of the month, three things, fourth day, four, so on and so forth.

And by the time you get to the end of the month, it's like a 30-day month, right? So you have to find 30 things. And you play it as long as possible. Usually you might challenge a friend to do this with you so that you both. just challenge each other to see how far you can go. But there's something really magical about this game that I don't think is really talked about enough in why it works so well. And that's because getting rid of stuff is, again, going back to it's a muscle.

It's a decision muscle. And what I found when I played this game for the first time, which is how we got started, actually, was that day one is easy. It's like, all right, here's a little SD card converter. I have four of them. so I don't need this one. Boom. Recycle it.

And that's a small decision. It doesn't take much effort because, sure, I have four of them. And if you're in filmmaking, you know that these things are important to have, you know, multiple copies of in case one doesn't work on set or something. But so, yeah, I have four. I really only need three. You get rid of one. And that's easy.

But what happens over the course of the week or two that you're doing this is that you build your confidence. Like it's so woo-woo. and I swear I'm really into the practical stuff, but this is so true that you build your confidence in your ability to make that decision about what you want in your life and what you don't want in your life. And the more confident you are in that decision, the easier it is as you then get rid of 14 things, 15 things. It's just quick. You just got to make that decision. Just go. You don't have the opportunity to really dwell on something, you know, longer than you need to.

And so your muscle gets stronger. And in a lot of ways, this affects your life massively overall because all of a sudden you're every day making this choice over and over and over about what you want and what you don't. You have to check. Does this align with what I want in my life? No. Does this help me create things?

Does this help me make videos? Does this help me bring an additional income into my life? Spend more time with my family? No. Get it out of here. And that's how it works. It's amazing. Yeah.

I have a, so the way I've done it is I just simply moved every year or two. So I'm just like, all right, this is a huge box of stuff. I got to figure out what I put this in a new place. You know, like, all right, this is all trash. Boom. Done. And, you know, if it's got sentiment, there's like, like over the time, you collect items that have sentimental value that you attach to them.

And I think for me, at least, they just sit in a box at the back corner of the closet. And that's fine. You know, I can't really throw away some of these items. And I feel like everyone is going to go through their life and accumulate more of those types of things, you know, cards, you know, a nice watch, this kind of stuff, like whatever it is, like gifts that were given to you at various poets in life. But all the other stuff is junk. And yeah, it costs me hundreds of dollars, maybe thousands of dollars to accumulate over a two-year period. But the fact of the matter is I don't use it. And now I got to pay or inconvenience

myself or, you know, otherwise just have to deal with increasing mound of stuff like t-shirts. I get a new t-shirt probably every month from some event or other. and I have two choices. I can either throw out a bunch of t-shirts or I can buy a whole new dresser to put my slowly accumulating t-shirt pile. You know, it's easy choice. Just throw them out.

Or would I move? For now, my t-shirt drawer is starting to get very swollen. So maybe I'll go home and do exactly what you just said, though, and go through this process because it has been a couple years since I last moved and went through that exercise for me. I am going to throw my husband under the bus and say that every time we go to FinCon, he picks up like 100 more T-shirts. And his, he's got this weird.

IKEA dresser where there's like a couple of drawers are regular size and then one of them is super jumbo and that's his t-shirt drawer. But he even has to go into his t-shirt drawer in the summer and take out all of the black t-shirts that are too hot to wear and put in all the white ones from the storage in the garage. So maybe it's not just me, honey. That's a good point. But yeah, You know, I have stuff that I don't want to get rid of, but I'm not using it either. And it's just, I think it's the money that's really hard to reconcile. Well, I spent money on this so I can't just throw it away. But it takes up a lot of mental space.

Not only that, you spend money on two, to hire the items. And you have to spend more money to get rid of the items. Like, I got a bed that is just sitting in my garage. And I'm like, oh, somebody will want this bed. No one's ever going to want the bed. I got to pay the 50 to $100 or whatever. have some guy on Craigslist to pick up the thing and just take it away and do whatever, you know, third way.

There's a way to think about those things that is helpful to. Another mindset thing. I'm sure familiar with the sunk cost fallacy, right? The idea of sunk cost. This I actually heard from Seth Godin, who wasn't talking about minimalism at all, but I heard him at a conference and I've been a huge fan of his work. And I heard him at a conference answer a question from a guest that really blew my mind. He said, everything in your life is a gift from your

past self. It is up to you today to choose whether you would like to accept it. And so all the work you've done on a project, all the things you've spent money on in your life, the situations you've created, you can walk away from because today you has not done any work or spent any money or done anything to get it. It was all past you. And so you need to think about today you and future you and what is going to best serve that you. And so that's kind of this space that we need to be in when we're thinking about this stuff. Because you spent money on it,

but that money is already gone. And unless you sell it or something, it's not going to come back. So it doesn't change the situation that you still have it or not. That's the biggest kind of catalyst of this stuff is like, is it serving you now? It's just a gift. Like if I gave that to you today,

would you reluctantly take it and go, well, I'm not going to use it, but thank you. Right. Another perspective on it is like for Mindy, I've been to your house, right? And I think that some of the things that you have accumulated may prevent you from, for example, repeating your experience where you can't go travel and rent out your house on Airbnb very easily. That's true. And like, so if you kind of approach from that perspective of like, hey, this stuff that I've accumulated over the years is actually preventing me from financial opportunity, from travel opportunity,

from all these other things. Like, you're able to go and rent out your house because you went through the exercise of decluttering and removing all of the items that you just didn't use or didn't want or had accumulated over the years. That's a huge, that's a direct, like, that's an easy way to tie financial results to the practice of decluttering and minimalism. You know, but that's, that's, that's an idea that I think is very difficult for a lot of people to, to grasp, hey, I got to get rid of five $10,000 a lifetime of accumulated items that each one at the time was an important purchase but is no longer relevant to my life. That's a difficult exercise, but it has real results. There's another thing that's important with this is that when you let go of something,

you tangibly experience loss. You know what you're losing. You're losing that thing. What you're creating is empty space that is an infinite void of. possibility, right? So that's another reason why it's hard. I spent $500 on this thing. I'm losing the $500 that I spent and I'm losing this thing. But what I'm creating is intangible. You don't know. But that's sort of the beauty of it. It's open to possibility. And that's what happens is all of a sudden when you create that space, you start seeing the opportunities for that space to be used effectively, our house became an asset instead of just being a place that we lived. The things in our life became this gear like I rent it out now and I rent it to other filmmakers

in the Twin Cities here and things like that. As soon as you start thinking about the things in your life as assets instead of belongings, it transforms how you use this stuff, how you experience it. And the space you make becomes infinite possibilities. for change and for growth instead of this stagnant thing. So you know what you're losing, but you never are going to know what you gain until you actually do. And then that's what's exciting. Yeah, I mean, the middle class trap in this country is you get a job.

It's reasonably high paying, right? You buy the house, which sucks out your cash flow out. You fill it up with stuff, which continues to suck your cash flow out. And then you buy the nice car. And then you have basically less than a few months of liquidity, side of your 401k, you're spending basically paycheck to paycheck, right? When you go through this exercise of saying, hmm, I'm not renouncing, I'm not like minimalism has a, a ring to it that some people, I think, may not, you know, it makes less approachable, right? But what you're saying is,

no, get rid of all the stuff you're not using. Turn your space into an asset and then embrace the freedom that comes with that, right? When you do that and you just don't have these possessions to look after. It gives you access to your house as an asset as you have used it. Your space, you're renting out your space as a video recording room. You're renting out your space when you go out of town and house sit for your in-laws. You're able to access all of that and go and travel and do a lot of things that other people can't do because they've tied themselves into their trap. They've bought the house, the car, the accumulate, you know, failed to accumulate liquidity and passive cash flow outside of that and therefore have no options. They can't do these things.

All right. Any other topics that we should cover before we move on to our famous four? I think we've probably hit on a lot of the things. There's a lot more, but I don't want to go down a rabbit hole here. No, this is good. We'll have to have you back to go down a little bit more of a rabbit hole. Yeah, I'd love to. Okay. Now it is time for the famous four questions. These are the same five questions that we ask all of our guests or four questions in a demand command. that we ask at the end. We demand of you at the end. Number one, what is your favorite finance book? Your money or your life was a big one, just the tracking of it. If I get a second, I would say Tim Ferriss's book, the four-hour work week, which I consider a finance book, even though it's not, it's kind of a lifestyle hacking book. But your money or your life, even though a lot of the concepts of only invest in

buns are bad. The book conceptually of tracking and aligning spending with value was a huge impact. Well, this is your show you can have too. You can do your money or your life by Vicki Robbins and Tim Ferriss's four hour work week. Okay. I love both those books and I will revisit the four hour work week in particular once a year basically. I'm just kind of because I think the concepts are so applicable. And like people have a lot of grief with hey, this specific approach that he took is not repeatable for me. Maybe not, but the concept of working more efficiently, working more intelligently, and built using passive income to fund the lifestyle that you're going for and monetize that and put that into a spreadsheet and figured out. I mean, they're just so applicable

across so many different aspects of what we're trying to do here. What was your biggest money mistake? I think we may have covered that already. Fair enough. Yeah, I think the biggest one was spending $12,000 in four years on Amazon. I think that was my biggest money mistake. There haven't really been too many other ones other than that. And that was one that was drawn out over a long period of time. So it's not like, oops, I made a mistake. It's like, wow, I made a lot of mistakes over this period of time. Did you buy any Amazon stock while you doing that? I did actually. Did that upset any of you that? Most of it at this point, actually. Nice.

Yeah. What is your best piece of advice for people who are just starting out? Ooh, that's great. Take some time to write about what you actually want. Just journal, write or think about it, make a video of yourself talking about the things that you actually want in life. And look at the small things you're doing on a day-to-day basis. Just acknowledge them. Don't feel shame about them.

But look to see, just like Vicky Robbins, see that those small things are lining up with what you want. And that's where it starts. That's where you can start making changes when you know that certain things are not aligning. You can work to change them. You can work to redirect your life. Start small. Go from there. That's awesome.

What is your favorite joke to tell at parties? I'm terrible at telling jokes. Yeah, I knew this one was going to be hard. I really should have prepared a joke. But I usually go off the cuff, which is a terrible, terrible thing. And I usually just make fun of myself in these situations. So that's probably the best answer that I have for that. Scott, what is your favorite joke of the minute?

Favorite joke of the minute? I feel like I've told all of my jokes at this point. We're like, what, like 50 jokes in now? I really wish you would have told all of you. of jokes. I know you haven't. You know who's really good at jokes? My daughter Claire is amazing at jokes. She keeps coming up with that. Well, I needed to write them down for me because I don't remember them. That's why I'm bad at telling jokes because I can never, I'll hear one. It'll be hilarious. And I'll never be able to pull it up in the moment and recall it when I need to. So I usually just

make fun of myself, like I said. All right. Here's one that was sent in by a listener. A clown held the door open for me when I walked into the office this morning. It was such a nice gesture. I don't get that. All right. From episode of 48 of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. No, we have to ask where can people find out more about you? Where can people find out more?

Tell us, this is the command here, tell us where people can find out more about you. Everything I do is at break the twitch.com. And you can find me at at Break the Twitch. on just about the major social media networks, YouTube, et cetera. Podcast is called Break the Twitch. So really, if you just Google, Break the Twitch, you'll find just about everything. Awesome. Okay.

Anthony from Break the Twitch, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate this. This is going to change my life once I get this actually implemented. But, you know, I like the tip to just write about it. You know, what I actually want is not the life that I'm living right. I mean, the life that I'm living right now is amazing and wonderful and don't get me wrong. But it's, you know, some of those things aren't what I'm actually wanting to do. I don't need 47 T-shirts in my husband's drawer.

I don't have that many in my own. But that's not, yeah, Carl, that's not what I want my life to look. My daughter's room is a disgusting pigsty. She's not going to notice that, you know, I took away some of the crayons because she has 9,000 crayons. She's not going to notice that some of them are gone, some of the, you know, copies or whatever. and just starting small, do something I have to do. So I really, really, really enjoyed our conversation today. Thank you for having me.

It was a true pleasure. We asked great questions. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So we will talk to you again soon. Cool. All right.

That was Anthony from Break the Twitch. Mindy, what did you think? Oh, my goodness. Like I said before, just the practicality of his comments and the suggestions. I love the one at the very end. where he talks about writing down what you actually want. You know, that is going to be hugely helpful for me in about six hours when I go home and I can write down exactly what I want and the life that I want to lead.

And, you know, this was personally very eye-opening this episode. No, I think it's great. I think it touches on a lot of the patterns we've heard from other stories, right? Hey, here's a situation that is holding them back from financial life, personal goals, right? let's track it and put it on a spreadsheet and see where the money's going. Then let's make a change. And then here's the benefits that pile up over the ensuing years, not just financially, but other aspects of your life as well. And I think that that is very powerful. And like we mentioned earlier, minimalism, you know, whatever you want to call it, applied intelligently and thoughtfully to your life

can have a big impact in allowing you to save more money and free you up to opportunities and point you towards the things that you actually want out of life, whether that's travel, whether that's early retirement, whether that's the ability to go start a business a few years from now on your own terms. All those things are practical, real results that come from the practice of minimalism to some degree or other. Yeah. Yeah. I can't add to that at all, Scott. So I'm not going to. I'm going to say from episode 48 of the Bigger Pockets of Money podcast, this is Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench. and as suggested by Mark on Twitter, FI for now.

Should you ever find that joke, by the way? For the joke, Scott Trench, I have a funny joke for you. Mindy, you will like this too. Why does a duck have feathers so they can hide his butt quack? Oh, man. I said, okay, I smiled.

Okay, really for sure. Fine for now.