Grownup Money Tips to Manage Inflation with Jessi Fearon

 

Inflation is surging and we are all feeling the pinch from the grocery store to the gas pump and more. Jessi Fearon, author of Getting Good with Money shares her best tips to manage and protect money when prices are on the rise. 

Money Tips

  • When it comes to groceries, think about the things that you really need and find find foods, such as cabbage, that can be filler foods.

  • This food should be considered “the sidekick instead of the hero" at each meal."

  • What you can do with produce to help you save money and cut down on waste.

  • Why a Costco membership isn’t for every family.

  • Find apps that can help you save money or give you rewards that you can use later.

 
 

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Full Transcript:


Bobbi Rebell:
Hey, grownups. Before we start the podcast, I want to talk to you about keeping things in perspective and remembering sometimes we just have to laugh it off. We need that. Life is full of grownup choices and it can be a lot so it's important to keep things in perspective and have a sense of humor. That's why I created Grownup Gear. It is super fun merch to celebrate adulting. T-shirt, sweats, mugs, I even have kitchen aprons for cooking. It lets everyone know that you are a grownup, or at least a grownup in progress, or at least you know someone who's a grownup. We even have the cutest baby gear from onesies to bibs that say things like, "I can't believe you are the grownup." The best gifts for new parents, birthdays, engagements, graduation, pretty much any occasion. Even a great gift for yourself. Check it all out at grownupgear.com.

Jessi Fearon:
I'm a huge fan of, I call them fillers. A lot of the foods I grew up eating had a lot of cabbage in them, and cabbage is a fantastic filler because you can put it in tacos, you can put it in pasta or rice dishes or anything and just add it to any dish that you come up with, and it's just a great way of being able to stretch a meal without having to buy a whole bunch of meat and sink your budget that way. You can do it with carrots or other vegetables so just keep on paying attention to the way that you use protein. Make meat the sidekick instead of the hero.

Bobbi Rebell:
You're listening to Money Tips For financial Grownups with me, certified financial planner, Bobbi Rebell, author of How To Be A Financial Grownup. And you know what? When it comes to money, being a grownup is hard, but together we've got this. Hey, grownups. So if you have bought pretty much anything recently you have probably gotten sticker shock because, yes, prices are soaring, and this past week, we got official confirmation. Inflation at the consumer level is up 7% from a year ago. The most since 1982. Not fun. As if we weren't already dealing with supply chain shortages, it's really hard to bargain hunt when the store shelves are half empty and you can't exactly wait for a sale if you need something because, well, first of all, it's probably not going on sale anyway, and if it did, well, there probably wouldn't be what you need. It's a mess. Anyway, I asked my friend, Jessi Fearon, to come on with some tips for us to battle inflation.

Bobbi Rebell:
Her background is in accounting, but she is also a popular personal finance writer and coach and basically a great consumer advocate. She also has a book out called, Getting Good With Money: Pay Off Your Debt and Find a Life of Freedom Without Losing Your Mind. And I love that title because these days, with all those higher prices, I feel like we are all losing our mind. So it's a great title for all this bananas inflation going on. Yeah, we're all losing our minds. Anyway, this is the second time that Jesse's been on. I loved our conversation and I know you will too. Make sure to listen to the end. I have some big personal news I'm going to share on the other side. But first, here is Jesse Fearon. Jessi Fearon, you're a financial grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

Jessi Fearon:
Hi, thank you for having me again.

Bobbi Rebell:
Yes, welcome back. You were here in one of my favorite episodes and we've rerun it, I think, twice because I love it so much. It's about your husband buying fireworks that he was not supposed to be buying. So we'll leave a link to that in the show notes, as they say. But I wanted to have you back because I have, in my hand, your new book, Getting Good With Money: Pay Off Your Debt and Find a Life of Freedom Without Losing Your Mind. By the time this comes out, it will be available for purchase. So everyone should check it out. Tell us quickly about the book.

Jessi Fearon:
Well, the book details my family's story of becoming financially free. We are a family of five living in Metro Atlanta and we paid off all of our consumer debts as well as our mortgage on a salary of just over $47,000 a year. And so, in Getting Good With Money, I share my family's story as well as I share practical tips to help other families find their own version of financial freedom because personal finance is, in fact, personal and it's going to be different for every single person.

Bobbi Rebell:
Absolutely. And personal finance is very personal, but there's something happening with so many of us that we're all facing these days that is making our lives very complicated and very frustrating and you've agreed to give us some tips about it. And that is inflation. Inflation, I think the last report was that it was up 7% versus a year ago, which is really a shocking number. We haven't seen that in many decades and it has a lot of people freaking out because we're hearing these news reports and then also we are seeing it with our own eyes. My husband went to the supermarket yesterday and he could not believe the prices. And he actually made some very different choices in terms of the things that he purchased. Even though we're not on the tightest budget these days, he just couldn't bring himself to pay the prices that he was seeing. So it's something that we're all facing. So what are your thoughts, first of all, in general, about what's going on with inflation as a money expert?

Jessi Fearon:
I mean, inflation is totally real, so if you think you're going crazy and going, "Man, why can I no longer feed my family on this grocery budget? Why is it so tough to fill up my car? Why does my budget feel so out of whack or things feel so strapped?" A lot of it has to do with inflation. So you're totally not crazy if you're feeling that way. I definitely just want to reiterate that because my husband can't even fill up his truck all the way anymore because the pumps cuts you off at a $100 now. He drives a huge diesel for his construction company and so it actually cuts him off now out because they don't want the pumps to go past Getting Good With Money: Pay Off Your Debt and Find a Life of Freedom Without Losing Your Mind. It's definitely real and it's affecting all aspects of our life and the grocery store is definitely a huge one.

Jessi Fearon:
I actually just got our groceries today so I saw it there at the grocery store as well. The prices, some have slowly crept up, but others are just quickly increasing. This past weekend, we had my oldest child, he just turned 10, so we had his little birthday party get together with friends, and whenever we do a big birthday party for my kids, I always order Little Caesar's pizzas because they have the $5 pizzas, the basic cheese and pepperoni pizza, but they actually have increased their prices to now $5.55. Inflation is just real and it's everywhere that we look, so if you are feeling that strain on your budget, it's not just you.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay, so what can we be doing?

Jessi Fearon:
Well, the first thing to do is to get real with what you need, especially at the grocery store. As you were saying, your husband and decided not to buy certain things just because he couldn't bring himself to spend the money for those items. And I think that it's just time to get real with what you actually need and to maybe tailor some of those wants, but also to tailor the way that you eat. So I'm a huge fan of, I call them fillers. Growing up, my great grandparents immigrated from Germany, so a lot of the foods I grew up eating had a lot of cabbage in them, and cabbage is a fantastic filler because you can put it in tacos, you can put it in pasta or rice dishes or anything and just add it to any dish that you come up with, and it's just a great way of being able to stretch a meal without having to buy a whole bunch of meat and cook a bunch of meat and sink your budget that way.

Jessi Fearon:
You could do it with carrot or other vegetables. So just keep on paying attention to the way that you use protein. Make meat the sidekick instead of the hero. That will absolutely impact your budget, especially if you're married to a carnivore like me who wants to have all the meats. But make it the sidekick and not the hero. Let go of all the convenience foods, all the snacks and all of those things. I know it's so hard because my kids, they love the snacks as well, but tailor it down with the fresh fruits and the veggies. Those are great snack options to give your kids. And if you go ahead and you wash them when you come home from the grocery store and you chop them up and make them easy for kids to just grab them and go, it really will help stretch your budget and keep you out of those convenience foods and keep you out of some of those foods that are going to see the higher inflation.

Bobbi Rebell:
With the produce, it's really hard to gauge how long it's going to last versus the amount of time it takes for your family to eat them. That's a place where you have some ideas.

Jessi Fearon:
Yes, so buy frozen as much as possible. I prefer frozen over canned, but canned is definitely an option there as well. But if you buy frozen vegetables in particular, if you buy them frozen, a lot of times you can buy them with the steamables in the bag, which saves you time as well as it saves you money because it's a very quick and easy way of preparing those vegetables and you don't have to worry about them sitting in your fridge and rotting.

Bobbi Rebell:
Yeah, definitely. And there can be a mix. I mean, you can do half and half, but just be careful with how much you have with the fresh fruit that goes bad. And also, you talk about just paying attention to what is going bad. See what your family actually consumes. Because I think sometimes when we buy food, we are aspirational. We think, "Oh, this would be something really good. Our family should be eating this." But then, when the actual meal times come and go, you're not eating the things that you think you should be eating and you're eating different things over and over again. And we don't really always take accurate inventory of what's actually going on.

Jessi Fearon:
Absolutely. Yeah, definitely start paying very close attention to what your family is consuming and what your family is not consuming. If you are constantly throwing out a pack of blueberries every single week because nobody really ate them and they're going bad, well then maybe your family really doesn't like to have blueberries. So maybe that is something that you just buy frozen instead of fresh. Same with any vegetables or any other produce that you notice that is just consistently going bad. If it's consistently going bad, consider either not buying it at all or buying it frozen instead of fresh.

Bobbi Rebell:
The other thing is, when you're in the grocery store these days, or even if you shop online, you see the price, but it's very hard to compare prices when you don't look at the cost per unit. And that's something that I often skip, which I know I shouldn't do, but you just see the big number. You don't always see way you're actually getting. Is that something? I mean, how do we do that? I shouldn't say, how do we do that? But it's a tricky thing the grocery stores are doing to us because we're not really seeing always the price hike.

Jessi Fearon:
Absolutely. I mean, if you get down to the nitty gritty of it and you start looking at, especially with snacks, when that big bag of chips that has the individual chips inside of them, think it's 18 in a pack, I just had to buy it for this party this past weekend, but if you actually paid attention to how much you were paying for each one of those individual chips, it helps you understand what the actual cost of that entire bag really is. And then it helps you make the decision on, would it be cheaper if I just bought the really big bag of chips instead of this bag that has all these other smaller bags in it? And usually the bigger bag of chips is actually going to be cheaper, but not always.

Jessi Fearon:
And it's important to know those kinds of things because, for my family, shopping at Costco, actually, it's not the best option for us because a lot of the stuff that's at Costco we don't consume enough to justify having to pay the membership fee and the price per unit there is too high for some of the items that we do consume where I can actually go to Aldi and buy a whole bunch of them and still save more money.

Bobbi Rebell:
That's such an interesting point because we have these stereotypes in our head that certain stores are going to be the best deal for us, but that's not always true because, again, it circles back to, what are you actually consuming? And we actually let our Costco membership go a couple years ago because, number one, we didn't have storage for a lot of stuff from Costco, but we also weren't going through it. And we also would get sick of things before we would go through it and we were buying things because it was available there that we would not necessarily have bought otherwise. So we didn't find it was the greatest value. I think that's also a good lesson, is to really think about where the best deal for your family is and don't assume it's the same as what this overall belief for everyone around you is. It may be different for you than for the people that you see in your community going. Beyond the grocery store, where else can people save money with inflation affecting prices? What else can people be doing?

Jessi Fearon:
Well, if you do any online shopping, which most people do today, I think more people shop online now than they do going into a store, one of the things that I love to do is I love to use cashback websites. Two of my favorite are Swagbucks and Rakuten. I love using both of those. With Rakuten, you earn actual cashback. With Swagbucks, you earn what's called SBs and you can cash those out for gift cards. But this is a great way of stretching your budget and earning something back on your online purchases in order to help offset some things. And I always love to cash them out for gift cards for little splurge things, taking my kids to Chick-fil-A or, or whatever it may be. And it's just a helpful way of being able to stretch your budget.

Jessi Fearon:
And one that's not just available online is called Fetch Rewards. It's just playing fetch with a dog, and that is one where you just scan in your receipts. It can be your grocery receipts. It can be your home improvement store receipts. It can be your Amazon receipts. You can scan in any receipt and earn points back on that, that you also can cash out for gift cards.

Bobbi Rebell:
You also talk in the book about redefining comfort.

Jessi Fearon:
Yes. Yes, I definitely think that this one has always been really hard for me. It's hard for me even now, because, especially for us Americans, we have so much available to us. Amazon Prime has made two day shipping the norm and so it's always weird whenever we have to wait a little while for something. And so if we really want to make solid changes to our life, we have to look at the current direction that we're going in and then we have to decide, okay, this is not where I want to be going. I need to change my course, but how do I do that? And it usually involves sacrifice. And so you have to be prepared to just get a little bit uncomfortable to say no to things that maybe you really want to say yes to but you know that if you say no to this you'll be able to say yes to the really big thing that you're actually wanting to build for your family.

Bobbi Rebell:
It all comes down to choices. So before we wrap up, tell us a little bit about where people can find out more about you and your new book, Getting Good With Money.

Jessi Fearon:
You can find me online at jessefearon.com and on social media at JesseFearon. And Getting Good With Money is available in all bookstores, including Target.

Bobbi Rebell:
Thank you so much.

Jessi Fearon:
Thank you, Bobbi.

Bobbi Rebell:
I hope you enjoyed that interview as much as I did. She's so real and relatable, and Jessi really shared a lot of great specific things that we can all be doing now. Look, I don't know about you, but I tend to do them and then I slack off. So it's good to have a reminder of things. Even if we know we should be doing them, we fall off the wagon sometimes. Now, my big news, this is something I've been working on for years. I've mentioned it from time to time here. So it's not a surprise for regular listeners, but it is now very real. And it sounds funny to say this, but I feel like a book is not real until you actually see it and people can buy it on Amazon. And that is what happened in the last week with my new book, Launching Financial Grownups: Live Your Richest Life By Helping Your Almost Adult Kids Become Everyday Money Smart.

Bobbi Rebell:
This book was inspired by my older kids. I have a story that I share on my website about a night in 2018 when it was a big deadline for Roth IRAs and they just wouldn't listen to me. It just gave me so much frustration. So the kids have been really generous in letting me talk about them in the book and share a lot of behind the scenes of what's going on in our family. It's not always so pretty. In fact, the real aha moment came from times like I just mentioned when they just weren't interested and I just kept failing them. I felt like such a failure as a parent because I knew all this stuff, I knew everything on paper, I knew what they should be doing, but I couldn't get them to do it and I really felt that I couldn't do it myself for them.

Bobbi Rebell:
And also, when kids, I'm calling them kids, but when they're of adult age, there's a lot of stuff you can't do for them because they aren't minors. So you have to help them do it themselves to some degree even if you're encouraging them and there to show them what to do. So, anyway, I figured if I was having so much trouble getting my kids to become financial grownups, I probably was not alone. The book was quite an experience. I tapped into an amazing resource of so many parenting and money experts and a lot of psychology going into this, a lot of therapists that helped me to write this book. So I'm really excited to share it with you. It is definitely part psychology and how to deal with the changing brains of older teens and young adults and what is going to work for them versus a little kid, because it is very different.

Bobbi Rebell:
So the book isn't officially out until March, but if you pre-order it, it helps me out so much. Places like Amazon, they use algorithms to decide which books to suggest to people. So if you guys place pre-orders, that's going to be huge because it'll bump it up. And Amazon, by the way, right now it's pretty expensive, but Amazon will adjust the price if it drops it when the book comes out and it almost always does discount the book pretty heavily. So please don't let that stop you from pre-ordering. Launching Financial Grownups, like I said, is on Amazon now, and if you go to my website and click on the Books tab, you can learn more about the book and more about the backstory as well. And, also, there are buttons that you can just press to order it from somewhere else if you don't want to order it from Amazon. For example, if you want to support independent bookstores, we can help link you up there.

Bobbi Rebell:
This topic is so important to pretty much everyone who cares about the phone financial future of members of their family, parents and kids, grandparents, aunts, uncles, family, friends. If you have a young person in your life that you care about, this is the book for you. So please tell your friends about the book. As well, I need your help getting the word out and I truly appreciate it. Big thanks to this week's guest, Jesse Fearon, author of Getting Good With Money, for helping us all be financial grownups. Money Tips For Financial Grownups is a production of BRK Media, LLC. Editing and production by Steve Stewart. Guest coordination, content creation, social media support, and show notes by Ashley Wall. You can find the podcast show notes, which include links to resources mentioned in the show, as well as show transcripts, by going to my website, bobbirebell.com. You can also find an incredible library of hundreds of previous episodes to help you on your journey as a financial grown up.

Bobbi Rebell:
The podcast and tons of complimentary resources associated with the podcast is brought to you for free, but I need to have your support in return. Here's how you can do that. First, connect with me on social media at bobbirebellone on Instagram and BobbiRebell on both Twitter and on Clubhouse, where you can join my Money Tips For Grownups Club. Second, share this podcast on social media and tag me so I can thank you. You can also leave a review on Apple Podcast. Reading each one means the world to me and, you know what? It really motivates others to subscribe. You can also support our Merch Shop, grownupgear.com, by picking up fun gifts for your grownup friends and treating yourself as well. And most of all, help your friends on their journey to being financial grownups by encouraging them to subscribe to the podcast. Together, we got this. Thank you for your time and for the kind word so many of you send my way. See you next time and thank you for supporting Money Tips For Financial Grownups.

 
Advice, Financial Grownup, Money, Women EntrepreneursBobbi Rebell KaufmanJessi Fearon, Inflation, Money Tips