Aligned Cost-Cutting Tactics - How to Save Money Wisely

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Ep. 189: Aligned Cost-Cutting Tactics – How to Save Money Wisely

In this episode of Your Money Your Life, I will guide you on how to cut expenses the smart way—without succumbing to scarcity or lack mentality. Using my own journey from Kajabi to OptimizePress as an example, I’ll show you how setting intentions and remaining open can lead to better, cost-effective solutions.

Learn practical tips on lowering various expenses, from business costs to everyday bills, while maintaining quality of life. Plus, I’ll talk about the mindset shift needed to see opportunities for savings and invite listeners to share their own money-saving challenges with me. Tune in and transform your finances!

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Podcast Key Points

0:00 – Episode Overview

0:22 – Cutting Expenses From A Space of Alignment

3:42 – Setting An Intention

7:50 – Better Solution at Lower Price

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Welcome to the Your Money, Your Life Podcast – Episode 189

Cutting expenses can be a good idea, but there’s a smart way to do this and an aligned way to do this to make sure that you are not approaching these choices from scarcity and lack, which long term lead to problems. And that’s what we’re going to dive into today. So you can avoid all the problems, the frustration, and save money in a smart way. So let’s get to it. This is the Your Money, Your Life podcast. I’m your host, Aimee Cerka, a money confidence coach for female entrepreneurs on the path to six figures.

Simplify, Solidify and Scale Your Money

After over 10 years in the personal finance industry and multiple personal, financial and medical crises, I was fed up with the lies that are being shouted from the rooftops by the gurus and the media. So now I help you simplify, solidify and scale your money. By blending tactile money strategies with mindset work, you can create unstoppable finances. Together, you’ll finally figure out the money thing so you can make more money in less time without living off of beans and rice or sacrificing your lifestyle.

Smart Cutting of Expenses

The episodes here on the podcast are short and sweet. Being married, having four kids at home, homeschooling, being a CEO, running the household. I’m kind of busy and I know you are too. So let’s keep it simple and get to the point. Welcome. I’m so glad you’re welcome back to the Your Money, Your Life podcast.

Finding Better Solutions for Expenses

I’m your host, Aimee Cerka. Today we are talking about cutting expenses and ways to save money, but doing it in a smart, aligned way, not from a space of scarcity and just pinching pennies and cutting back because that does not serve you long term. All right, so let’s get to it. And of course, you know, I’ve got a story example to give you here. So, if you are a client customer, you have one of my programs when this is going live January 2025.

Switching from Kajabi to ThriveCart

We just finished migrating everybody’s course access into the new platform and I’m going to use my course hosting platform as the example. So, for years I’ve used Kajabi and Kajabi is very popular all-in-one platform. I love them for a lot of different reasons. There’s a lot of things that work really, really well within the platform.

There were a couple things that I had to figure out like a workaround that didn’t really quite work. So we had a limited number of what they call products, so actual courses that showed up in your main course library. And you know, I had the workaround. We had bought the password-protected pages. So I had built the training vault, was what we called it for.

Confusion in Accessing Programs

If you had one of these programs, you knew a lot of the smaller programs lived inside the training vault. So there was a little bit of an extra step for you to be able to access your program. Sometimes people were a little confused because they bought this item, they got their password, but then like they couldn’t find it in the library. So it was a little bit of an extra headache on our end for customer service.

Kajabi’s High Cost

And it wasn’t as great of a user experience on your end as the client customer. But other than that, I really enjoyed it. But we paid $200 a month for Kajabi. It’s one of the biggest operating expenses that we had at the time in the business, right. And I knew when I’m looking at my ability, prosperity, simplified system, my ability to keep more profit, right.

Exploring ThriveCart

I knew that was the operating expense, like the biggest operating expense that we had to cut. Look at different options and there is a popular option out there. It’s a one-time purchase, one-time price point product. It’s called ThriveCart. You are in the industry, you’ve probably heard of ThriveCart, okay.

ThriveCart’s One-Time Payment

And people either love it or hate it, which, you know, there’s a lot of things like that out there, right? Either love it or hate it. One-time price point. I wouldn’t have the ongoing monthly fees, all of those things, right? And I looked at it many times.

Making the Right Decision

I have Multiple coaches use ThriveCart, love it, even like have bonuses thrown in if you buy through their affiliate program. So I was gonna have set up the way it needed to be if I bought ThriveCart. And from a “let’s cut expenses perspective,” it was a no-brainer, right? One-time $500 payment versus $200 a month. Like that was gonna pay for itself so fast, right?

Setting Intentions for Cutting Costs

Like it was gonna be no-brainer switch. But it didn’t feel right. I was not, I was not at peace about it. I knew that it wasn’t the right decision for me. So I was not buying it. But what I did was I set the intention that the course hosting platform was the expense that I was looking to find a lower cost, better solution wasn’t just about just cutting the cost.

Finding the Right Platform

I wanted to find a better solution, something that was going to work better for myself and for my customers at a lower price point. Just set that intention out there. I don’t know that I wrote it down. I mean I talked to several different people about the ThriveCart, asking different experiences, but just kind of put the intention out there, right. And tucked it away, didn’t think anything more about it.

Discovering OptimizePress

I wasn’t like stressing, obsessing over it, googling 50 million things all the time. I had just set that intention. And within a couple weeks, I don’t even think it was a month, a couple weeks. The theme that I use for my WordPress site is called OptimizePress. And they sent an email that was about updates that they had released for their, what they call their Mentor Pro level.

Creating a Better User Experience

It’s actually not what they call the level, but whatever the higher tier level about their mentor plugin, which is the one that they use for memberships and course hosting, totally had forgotten that was something that they did. So when I started pulling it up, looking like, hey, okay, maybe this is a viable solution. What does this look like? Can we do this? What type of program will we be able to customize?

Big Savings and Better Service

Does it have a limit on how many people we have? Does it limit on how many products, what’s the user experience going to be like, etc. Right. Looking into it with what I was already paying for the theme, the difference that I needed to upgrade was $100 a year. So we were paying $200 a month versus an extra $100 a year. But not only that was there the cost savings.

Improved Course Library

I was able to build the library and have the function the way that I wanted. This my, the library, the user experience that I wanted you to be able to have, that everything was there. It was, we were able to have sections within the library. Now that you can jump right to whether it’s a course that you bought or a workshop or one of the smaller tools or templates or you’ve got one of the signature programs, all of that was customizable, built in.

Being Open to Change

Plus now we only have the one website that we’re sending people to, the one login page. It was all done there. So we’re saving $2,300 a year and it’s a better user experience. And that was a no-brainer, but it was because we set the intention that we were looking for. So being open, the first thing that you have to do, if you’re looking or wanting and really we, we should always do this right?

Loyalty vs. Savings

We should always be open to the idea that we can cut expenses. I was having a conversation a couple months back about my car insurance and if you don’t know, my background is in insurance. I worked for State Farm for years and there’s a lot of loyalty there to State Farm because I worked there for so. And I know there was part of me that was like, I can’t. Like, I can’t switch that because I wouldn’t look at anything else because of the loyalty there.

But taking that step and bringing the open, like, being open to another solution is like the first step there. So if it’s something that you were really sold on, you really love, you’re really passionate about, I’m a huge proponent of being loyal to people, but within reason, right? Like, as long as there’s a give and take there a little bit. But having loyalty, yes, is an important thing.

Setting Intentions to Save

But it’s also like, you have to take care of you and you have to do that in alignment. You have to do it with integrity and you have to prioritize yourself. You cannot let your loyalty to other people be costing you a significant amount of money. Like, if you’re still in somebody’s coaching program because they’re a friend, like, are you really helping them out? Reevaluate that.

Looking for Smart Solutions

The first thing I want you to do, if you have an expense that you are looking to lower that you know, that you want to lower, set the intention out there that you want to find a better solution at a lower price. Again, when we do it from that perspective, that we’re looking for something that’s going to work better or at least the same. Like something like your electricity bill. Here in Texas, I use one of those.

Open to Possibilities

I don’t know what they’re called, but like shops, the rates will be like a broker for your car insurance, but it gives you different options. Like, I don’t necessarily need to have a loyalty to a specific electric company. Right. Like customer service. Yes. Is important. And I’m going to use my purchasing power to buy from brands that I align with and believe in.

Making Intentional Choices

But again, hopefully that makes sense. Being open to the possibility, if it’s something that you don’t feel like there’s any possibility that it could be lower, just ask yourself, like, “What if?” Or sit with it for a little bit. Like, okay, this would be something that would save us so much money if we could switch this. If we could change this, if we could change this expense, it would be so much better off.

Trusting Yourself in Spending

Let me think about what that would look like. Let me see if I can become open to the possibility. But learning to trust yourself and not just making these purchases from a “I need to cut everything.” I need to cut expenses. I need to. I know a lot of people do this even with food. Like, we’re trying to cut our food budget so we go and eat crap food.

Food and Health Choices

Well then your health is compromised and then you’re spending more money on your health, which means you’re not really saving anything. Okay, intentional smart choices. We can do this with gas. So like I have the Walmart plus subscription and it pays for itself alone with the gas savings. And then I’m able to have an added benefit.

Programs to Help Save

But there are so many programs out there that’ll help you save by being intentional about it, whether I know Gas Buddy is one of them. I saw a billboard earlier today that was talking about QTpay and they had 25 cents off, like when you’re using the QT pay. So there are different solutions out there for different things. We just have to be open to it and looking so we’re not obsessing over it.

Setting the Intention

But by setting the intention like, hey, I’m open to that, and then going about your life, you’ll be amazed how things show up. There’s like an energetic proponent to this and then there’s also like a mindset, scientific portion of this. You know how before you buy a vehicle, like, you’re like, I’ve never seen that. And then you go and buy a mustard yellow vehicle and all of a sudden you see them everywhere, right?

Seeing Opportunities Everywhere

They were there before. You just weren’t picking. Your brain wasn’t picking it up. Because we take in so many things, we don’t always process what we’re actually seeing. But when you buy the mustard yellow car or whatever it might be, all of a sudden you start seeing it show up everywhere. Okay, that’s it.

Checking Out New Library

I think for today. If you’ve migrated, you have a course program, something for me and you are checking out the new library. I would love to hear how the user experience has been. I know I had a couple of tech glitches with the migration portion, but I think, fingers crossed, we’ve worked all of that out. So I’d love to hear from you how it’s been as a user perspective.

Let’s Talk About Saving Money

And then let’s talk about what you want to save money on. Maybe I’ve got a resource for you for something that you are looking to. Hey, I’ve got this expense. I’d love to cut that. Do you have any ideas? Type of question. Send me a message on Instagram. Let’s talk about it. That’s it for now. We’ll see you next time.