 Hey everybody, welcome, welcome and happy Saturday morning. It is the 23rd of October. Man, we're almost finished with 2021. Can you believe that? We are almost finished with 2021. And today I wanna talk about inflation, but how you can benefit from it, right? Everybody's telling you, oh my gosh, inflation's terrible and you're not gonna have as much money and you're not gonna make as much money and the prices are gonna be ridiculous. And I'm here to tell you there are things you can do. There are things you can do. So stick with me to the end. I'm gonna give you some real good pointers today. A lot of it has to do with online stuff. Go figure, right? Don't forget to subscribe. Hit that big subscribe button down there. If it's red, you gotta click it, turn it gray. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live. I've got my little iPad over here so I can converse with you. I want you to put your comments in there. Tell me what's going on, tell me what's happening in your part of the town. Ask me any questions you want about starting running and growing online businesses. Cause that's what we talk about on this channel. When I go live, I talk about starting running and growing online businesses, but you keeping some money in your pocket is important too. So that's what I'm gonna kind of talk about today. I am live on Facebook and YouTube. So you could be watching me on Facebook. You could be watching me on YouTube. Either way, I wanna welcome you and I thank you for your attention. I thank you for showing up, but I am requesting that you put comments in that chat box. Now, this is live right now. Of course, if you watch this later on and it was a recording and I said it was live, that would not be true. But it is true right now. But if I said that, then that wouldn't be true, right? Because later on, nevermind. If it's live for you right now, don't forget to put something in the chat box. If nothing else, say hi to me. Let me know what your weather is. Let me know what's going on. The key I'm trying to get you to do is to participate. If I can get you to participate in this, then your chances of being successful online are increased greatly, okay? So I wanna make sure that you're participating. Super important. I'm gonna be monitoring that. I'm gonna be watching you. Okay. So we wanna spend, let me get my throat clear here. Let me get a little sip. Hang on. Hang on. Ah, that's better. So we want to spend less and we wanna make more, right? And we wanna do this during inflationary times. And I don't think anybody in the world right now could argue that there's not inflation. It's everywhere. It's craziness, right? There's so much inflation going on. But let's talk about it first. What caused all this stuff? How did all this happen? How did we get this? Well, it was the illness that did it. The illness changed a lot of things, okay? Consumer prices are rising. And if you're the like the type of person who's living paycheck to paycheck, this means you're gonna have a harder time paying for food, gas, and utilities, all these things. So that's why this training this morning is so important because you can apply this. Now some of you are gonna take this today. You're actually gonna increase your income, which is really cool. Inflation hit a 13 year high in September, okay? Prices, consumer prices went up 5.4% in the US compared to last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So that's pretty big, okay? Inflation has been a surprising and unwelcome participant, I guess, seeming to persist at elevated levels at a time and we're all hoping to put that devastating economic impacts of that illness behind us, but it's not working that way, okay? Pandemic caused downturn itself. It kinda exasperated wealth and income inequality. The wealth it can adjust, okay? Obviously they don't have a problem, but those on the lower end of the incomes, not so much, okay? So that's why I wanna do this training today to kinda help you guys out. And I want you to think about what changes should you make in your budget to beat inflation? Because there are some definite changes you can make. Is there anything you can do to reduce your food costs? Because there are things you can do to reduce your food costs. Should you change how you invest for retirement? You know, that's up to you. Is there anything that you can do to take advantage? Here's the key, to take advantage of the rise in inflation. Everybody says, oh my gosh, it's bad things happening and I'm gonna be a victim to it. Don't be a victim to it, benefit from it. I know I'm benefiting from it. And I'm gonna tell you one way I'm benefiting right now. I am doing a video right now. And this video is about inflation, okay? Now, since I'm doing a video on inflation and helping you guys out, guess what? This video will play over and over again and they'll put ads on this video and those ads will make me money. So right there I'm making money on inflation. And I want you to also think, is there any good news about rising inflation? Because there's always good news about everything guys. We gotta just sometimes search for it. So what can you do with your budget? This is a time when you should review how you spend your paycheck, your income, whatever it is. I know you're cutting and some people say, well I'm cutting till it hurts JR, it's so difficult. But there's obvious places to cut, like eating out or let's say streaming services. You know, what are you paying for? What services are you paying for? You don't even use. I can tell you, we don't pay for, gosh, the only thing I think we pay for is Netflix right now. We got rid of YouTube TV and cable and satellite dishes and all that stuff. We don't need it. If I'm watching that stuff, I'm probably not working. So when was the last time you looked at your mobile plan? Is your mobile plan matching up to what you do? I think that's super important. And I checked mine out, I look at it, okay? So online you can use apps and the internet to find lower prices when they're available. Let's say for gasoline, there's gasoline apps out there. There's a way to earn money back on gasoline. So there's things out there. When prices aren't changing that much, people tend to be inclined to invest less of their income or less of their time actually shopping and thinking it may not make that much of a difference. But right now it makes a big difference. So shopping online, taking advantage of deals. I just this morning did a deal with, I think it was Hello Fresh and they gave you like half your meals for free. And I said, well, I'm gonna give it a shot. I'm gonna see what it is. And I think I spent 29.95, I got six meals for two people. So that's a pretty good deal, okay? That's a pretty good deal. So right now think about shopping right now as investing time to find better deals. And you can put in that chat section, what have you done? You know, what have you done to save some money? Supply change disruptions may continue to push consumer prices up. So you're gonna want to get an early start when you're holiday shopping. Now would be the time to do it. Cause if you wait and there's the shortages, you know, at the holiday time, they're probably gonna be more expensive. So you're gonna pay more. So do things a little bit sooner now. Put off unnecessary purchase until supply issues are reasonable and prices go down. You know, I've been looking at big screen TVs for probably about five years. My big screen TV that we have in the family room is probably about nine or 10 years old. It's truth be told. And I'm telling myself, well, gee, you deserve a new TV. I have the money to buy a new TV. But my wife says, you know what? You have a TV. What difference is it gonna make if you have better pixelation in the pictures a little bit better? You don't even watch that much TV. And she's right, okay? So are there things that you're trying to buy or you want to buy that you don't even need to buy? Is there anything you can do about food costs? Yes, there's stuff you can do about food costs. In an inflationary environment, substitutions can be your financial way out. Think about substitutions. So I want you to think about this. Food and shelter costs rose in September and put together accounted for more than one half of the monthly increase of all items measured in the consumer pricing index, okay? So that's according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Prices for meat. Now we sell canned meat, okay? So I'm terribly sensitive to this, but prices for meats, poultry, fish, eggs rose 2.2%. Over just a month period of time. That's over one month. And get this, beef prices. Beef went up 4.8% in a single month. So if we round that up to 5% times 12, that's a 60% increase. That's huge. So what can you substitute? What can you do? What can you change in your diet? Food prices have largely been rising because of weather-related shortages, okay? Transportation issues, lack of staffing. Meat and fish prices are going up faster than vegetable prices. Think about that. So what could you do? You could eat four vegetables, okay? You don't have to have quite as much meat. That's something you could do. Take that in your planning and your consideration. And guys, if you have ways of saving money, I want to see them. You're gonna help people out with that in the chat section. So if you go shopping, let's say for crab cakes, okay? There's been a 50% price hike for crab meat in the menu. I mean, I used to buy these Alaskan king crab legs at Costco and they were like $28 a pound, which was really expensive. It was hard for me to handle that because when I first got to California, they were like $19.99. And then they went to $32 a pound. And right now at Costco, they're I think $38 or $39 a pound for Alaskan crab legs. I haven't bought them in a long time. Why should I? At my grocery store at HEV, they're $49 a pound. I am not spending $49 a pound. And a lot of us will say, well, JR, you got the money, you can spend it. No, that's stupidity. Just because you have money doesn't mean you spend money. Think about it, guys. You gotta be sensible about this. Now investments, okay? What are you doing as far as investments? That's a great hedge against inflation because if inflation is incurring and you have some extra money, stocks are also gonna be going up, okay? So this is the time you may want to buy some stocks. A lot of people say, well, I don't have any money to buy stocks. It doesn't take much. It can be $50 or $100 a month. But that $50 or $100 a month can turn into two or three or 400. During inflationary time, it's a great time to buy some stocks. Check it out, look at stocks. This is the time, I gotta tell you that I'm really buying stocks is during inflationary time. Let me get another sip here. Guys, put where you're from here. Let me put something here in this chat box to get you guys going. You're just not going. I want you to go. Where is my, I'm trying to find all my stuff here. That's not the one. That's not the one. I'm looking for all my tabs up here. I got so many tabs open on my computer that it's crazy. Oh, there it is. Tabs right there, right there next to me. Let's see here. Put the ways that you're gonna save money or make money during inflationary times in the chat box. I gotta get you guys started. I gotta get you started, okay? I wanna have you guys talk. Normally you guys are talking a lot. You're not talking that much today. So make sure you're talking. I want you to participate. I love hearing from you guys. I really do. So, you know, this is how I'm gonna hear from you right now. Now, if you're an ultra conservative saver, you know, who shied away from stocks because you're scared of the stock market, you may wanna consider that inflation is also a risk. Okay, so you're risking stuff anyhow. If you don't keep pace with inflation, you're losing your purchasing power over money. So in other words, if inflation is 5% and your pay is only going up one or 2%, you're falling behind, okay? You're falling behind. And I'm gonna give you a great way to make more money with inflation in just a second. So hang on, I wanna get that to you. Where interest rates are right now, investors need to take a slightly more risk on return than to beat inflation. You know, we recently bought a house, built a house in Texas, and I put a mortgage on it. Not a big mortgage, but a mortgage on it. So this is, why would you put a mortgage on it? Why don't you just pay cash? And I say, well, because I can take that same money, put it in the stock market and earn 10%, and interest rates are like 2%, 3%, okay? On mortgages, it would make no sense to pay all cash for a house right now, not with the way the stock market is. So now we're down to, is there anything you can do to take advantage of a rise in inflation? And of course there is. There's all these advantages to stuff, okay? If you have some cash that you don't think you're gonna need for a while, maybe you could buy bonds if you wanna do that. Bonds are actually doing pretty good. So that may be something you wanna look at. Is there any good news about rising inflation? There's always good news, always good news. Sometimes you gotta look for good news, but there's always good news. You know, if you're receiving any type of benefits, you're gonna see your benefits go up, okay? The Social Security Administration announced a 5.9% benefit increase for 2022. That's the biggest increase that they've ever done, okay? So if inflation relits next year, which some believe it possibly can because of the supply chain fixes and all that, so security recipients will continue to get the higher payments anyway. So that's pretty cool, right? Additionally, one of the few potentially beneficial effects of rising inflation will be that the Federal Reserve may well lift the benchmark rates sooner rather than later and more than previously believed. So that's some welcome news for people, okay? Previously, bad returns on savings should start to rise, okay, so maybe you put some money in savings. It's hard not to panic. I get it about inflation. When your paycheck doesn't go as far as you need, still keep things in perspective. It's not the 1970s when prices skyrocketed and I was alive during the 70s. I was a kid, a very small kid, barely a kid, okay? But recent headlines about increasing inflation had been alarming, but inflation itself is not abnormal, it happens, okay? It's not out of your control. Now, what can you do, let me just send you a message. What can you do to increase your income? Ask yourself this question. What can you do to increase your income? And I'm here to tell you, make yourself more valuable. How are you gonna do that? Digital marketing, okay? There are so many things you can do with digital marketing. There are so many projects you could take on. And some of you may say, well, I don't know how to digital marketing. I don't know how to build webpages. I don't know how to do SEO. Then learn, that's all you gotta do is learn. Go to my channel. I've got tons of videos on how to make money online. There's so many ways out there now that weren't there before. Take this time. Take this time you have. Quit worrying about inflation and improve your skills. Go out there and learn how to build a website and then go to Upwork. Go to Fiverr and start building websites for people. You can get really good at that. You could do a templated one. And you could say, hey, I can do a templated website for $195. And you know, do a cheat website. But if you wanna upgrade one, I can do one for $5.95 or I can do one for $15.95. The point is, take this time when everybody is crying and moaning and all that and go out and learn new stuff, do new stuff, utilize the internet. We have the internet now. Previously, my throat really had today. Sorry about that, guys. Previously, when we had these really high inflationary times like the 70s, there was no internet. There's nothing you could do. You would just stop. At least now you can go check prices, okay? I do a lot of price shopping. And I'll share a quick story with you. We have these really nice, I had the same windows in my office that's what I'm looking for. But we have these really nice big tall box windows in our bedroom. We have three sets of them, okay? And we wanted to put a curtain right across the top with just strips of material coming down between them, okay? So I went online and I started looking around. And I had these, we have really high ceilings. We have about 11 and 12 foot ceilings in this house. So I had to have a curtain or at least a strip of material because it's not a curtain, it's not gonna cover the window. That was at least 105 feet long, 105 feet. That's pretty long. And all of the panels I saw online that were reasonable, you know, 30, 40, 50 bucks, whatever were 50 inches wide and we need ones just for the post area between the windows, we needed something that was 24 inches. So we couldn't find a 24 inch by 105 inches. So we went to a website and they do custom drapes. And these custom drapes, hang on, were $890 for four strips of material, $890. And then you had it by the curtain round which was 160 or something like that. So we were $1,000 for these four strips of decorative material. And I was just like out of my mind. I'm like, I'm not spending that, I'm not doing that. So we looked at like Amazon had some material in there, excuse me, some of these drapes that were 105 inches long but they were 50 or 60 inches wide. And it was just too wide. It was just too wide. And I said to my wife, I said, we could bunch it up more. She says, no, it's not gonna look good. I said, but these are $30, $40 a week. And you know, get these panels. She says, it's not gonna look good, not gonna look good. So I said, okay. So she goes outside, she's walking the dog. I'm in the bedroom. I'm looking at these, you know, windows. I'm like, what do we do? Because I don't want to spend $1,000 for four pieces of material. And she walks inside and she looks at me and she says, we need to hire a tailor. I said, what do you mean? She said, well, you can get these panels that are 50 inches, we need 24. What if we cut it half and had it fixed that way? I'm like, holy crap. So I go online, I find some on Amazon for 30 some odd bucks. I finally found a curtain rod for like 60 some odd dollars. So we're up to about a hundred bucks. We call an alteration place and the lady wants a hundred, which she wanted, she wanted $88 for each panel, which would have been 160, 170 some odd dollars, which was a pretty good deal. And I said, well, let's do that. But then I thought, well, why don't I call a few more alteration places? So I found another lady who does custom draperies and she does wedding dresses, all this thing. She wanted 80 bucks for both of them, 80 bucks. So for under $200, the $80 plus the roughly $100 on the spend for the supplies, I got those panels. So 200 bucks. So I saved, you know, what was it, $1,000 initially. So I saved 800 bucks guys and it's because I went online and I shopped around and I looked around and we, you know, she got her head together and figured out a way of doing stuff. And then I did the shopping part, found the seamstress. If you'd spend a little time on this stuff, okay, just a little bit of time, you can save a tremendous amount of money. And then if you couple that with improving your skills during these times, when was the last time you improved your skills? Watch some of my videos on my channel. You know, I've got 1,000 videos on my channel, 1,000 videos. I'm checking the time here to make sure I don't go over. I got 1,000 videos on my channel. Check them out. I have some courses. If you wanna invest in yourself, you know, look at the description after this video has been uploaded and it's not live anymore, you're gonna find links. I even have a free course on there. It's $97, you can click and learn on that one. Do something to improve your value because there are people that are taking advantage of inflation right now. They're making money off inflation. I am, by doing this video, I told you that just a minute ago, right? I said, look, I'm doing a video on inflation to show you guys how you can save some money, you know, by using these apps and shopping and doing all these different things. But this video is gonna be viewed over and over again. They're gonna put ads on this video. Right now my CPM is like $28 per 1,000 views. So for every 1,000 views, they give me 28 bucks. So this video on inflation will make me money off inflation. Is that crazy or what? I think that's pretty crazy. So anyhow, apply some of these things, guys. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel. Really easy to do. If that button down there is red, it's telling you you haven't subscribed. So click and subscribe to the channel. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live. You don't miss out on anything. Why would you wanna miss out? You wouldn't want to, would you? That'd be just crazy. You just don't miss out. And I really thank you for watching. I really do apologize for my throat today. It's probably because I'm like all tense and up my throat and all that. Put your comments in there. Let me know what you thought of this training. If you have ideas for other training that you would like to learn always, always, always put that in the chat section. Put it in the comment section if this is not live anymore. If you have questions, put that in the comment section. Please, I love to get your questions. I love to hear what you're thinking about. What is it that you want? What do you wanna learn? So put that also in the comment section. Guys, you're awesome. You really are. You're supporting me on this channel. You show up all the time. You listen to me. You give me good comments, good questions. I gotta tell you, people say, well, there's so many trolls out there and so many bad people and I don't see it. I see you guys who are really awesome to me, who are really fair with me, who give me positive feedback all the time. Now, if you've got something negative, that's fine too, you're welcome to post that. But I just gotta tell you overwhelmingly, 99.9% of the comments, the suggestions, the things I get from you guys are positive. So I really appreciate that. I will be going live more and more probably next week. I've gotten back to my recordings. So you should see three videos a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. You're gonna see new videos come out and I'm gonna try to increase that because you guys deserve it. I wanna put more out there. We're approaching 6,000 subscribers. So if you haven't subscribed, please be that person that helps me get to 6,000. I would really appreciate that. And then we're gonna go for 10,000. Then we're gonna go for 100,000. And I'm gonna keep doing this because you guys can give me good feedback. Now, let me put a comment in here for you guys. Let's see here. I appreciate each and every one of you and love you very much, period. Thank you so much for showing up and listening, period. Please provide me with questions. So how easy was it for me to type that in there, right? And give you guys some gratitude. You deserve the gratitude. Thank you so much. If you got something out of this, give me a thumbs up. Don't forget to subscribe. Don't forget to ring the bell and turn on all bell notifications. Thank you so much for listening. Probably see you guys Monday. I'll send you an email this weekend. Thanks.