Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: It is Tuesday. That means it's Take Control Tuesday with my friend Mansa Musa. And Mansa, last week you struck a nerve with what do we do in hard times? From a biblical point of view. And it was very popular and I appreciate it. So now we're gonna dive into tangible things we can do.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Yeah, let's look at the pragmatic what you can do now. Now, based on last week, this is based on the assumption that hard times may be on the way. So what can you do? The first thing you can do is improve your safety net. Now how do you do that? Increase your emergency fund. An adequate emergency fund makes the unexpected inconvenient and not catastrophic. And what is an emergency fund? It's a liquid cash fund that you can get to, that can backstop you when the unexpected happens. As we all know, life happens while you're making other plans. The next thing you can do is get more credit. Strategically, one of the parts of a safety net for middle class family, working class families is your access to credit. What I'm suggesting is that you go out and strategically, smartly, and all the ways we've talked about in the past of how to do it, but open up the new lines of credit and things like that so that if you have to use them, you'll have access to.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: The best time to get credit is when you don't need it.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Amen.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: When you need it, nobody's going to give it to you.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: The next thing is because you have it doesn't mean you have to use it.
[00:01:52] Speaker A: Amen.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: You don't have to go out and get in debt. Once again, you have that as a reserve. Get more credit, don't use it, just have it. The other thing you can do in line with that is reduce and replace joint accounts with individual accounts with an authorized user.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: If you have a joint account with your spouse, let's say you both are sharing the same credit, whatever their credit limit is, what you should do is split that and each person get their own credit. That doubles the amount of available credit to the family. And if you want the other person to use your account, just make them authorized user, give them a card and it's just like a joint account. The next step is to reduce cost until it hurts.
Better you hurt you, then circumstances hurt you. Right, Randy, for some people, not having Netflix would be painful.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: Well, yeah, Right.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: But once again, if push comes to shove, you might get to the point where you have to give up your Netflix subscription.
[00:03:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I've done it.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: Next point make savings a priority and a passion. One of the best ways to save is to reduce waste. All of us are subject to wasting stuff, right? There's a list of stuff. The biggest source of waste in the American budget is food. Next, maximize credit card benefits in the gift cards, travel miles and discounts for essential services. If you maximize those and pay attention to those, you can help yourself. Randy, I recently redeemed credit card points for $200 of Instacart gift cards. Oh, that's food already paid for. Yeah, off of points accumulated on a credit card. If times get hard, if you focus your credit card spending on benefits like travel miles and things like that, you'll still be able to go see your people during the holiday or get bring them to you. Yeah, once again for essential purposes. I'm not talking about willy nilly spending.
[00:04:29] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:04:29] Speaker B: And the final one is increase your pantry storehouse. Start strategically adding food to your storehouse, rotating your stock and getting ready for once again. As Joseph said, we may be in the years of plenty, hard times are coming. Let's lay up now.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Absolutely. And if you missed any of this, it will be up on the website. Take control Tuesday.com make sure you like it and share it so that others can gain this knowledge. Mansa, as always, thank you.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: Thank you.
