Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again at Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to be talking about how to adjust short strangle option strategies. As a basis, short strangle option strategies are a strategy in which you are selling a call option and a put option out of the money from where the stock is trading. For example, if a stock is trading at $100, you might sell the 105 call option and the 95 strike put option and the idea is that the stock trades between your strike prices and you profit at expiration with a stock not breaching or breaking out of your strike price range. In our case, we want the stock to trade within a $10 range between now and expiration.

Now, the trouble comes in when the stock starts to challenge one side of your position. Instead of the stock staying exactly where it should be at $100, it starts to move higher towards 105 or starts to move lower towards the 95 strike. And so, the idea behind adjusting is that we first do not move the challenged or tested side. If a stock is moving against our call strike, we are not going to move or roll up our call strike and the idea behind this is that we don't want to give ourselves an opportunity to compound our losses by digging our hole deeper. If we are challenged on a position or if one side of the trade starts losing, we don't want to roll that side higher because what we've all seen before historically is that stocks have a tendency sometimes to have long moves in one direction that last many months in some cases. And so, if we keep moving our challenged side, let's say our call spread side and we roll our calls higher, we're going to do so for a debit and then we roll the calls higher again for another debit and again for another debit and what this does is it basically eats away all of our potential credit and it also digs us potentially into a hole where we are paying to maintain the strategy and that's not what we ultimately want to do. Again, the first thing is we don't move the challenged or tested side.

The second thing that we want to do is we want to then adjust or move closer the unchallenged or untested side. Again, let's assume that the stock is now rallying towards our 105 call strike. We do not touch the 105 short call option. Instead, we move up our short put options to a closer strike price. We might close out of our 95 strike short puts and we might then reopen a 100 strike short put and start to move up or adjust up our short put side of the trade. And the idea behind this is that we are being opportunistic about what the market is giving us. With the market rallying higher, that short put option that we sold at 95 is now going to show a mini profit. And so, we can close that profit, reopen a new put option closer for a higher price and increase our overall credit in the position and by doing this, we then widen our breakeven points by the additional credit that we take in. It's a very mechanical process that we go through. It's the exact same process that we use time and time again here at Option Alpha and it's what really works. That's the best way to adjust short strangle option strategies, is to roll up and adjust the unchallenged or untested side.

Now, if you want to see live examples of this, you can just search our website for short strangle adjustments. You can also check out a very nice podcast that we did on our weekly show, optionalpha.com/show72, so just the number, 72, optionalpha.com/show72 where we talked about what these adjustment triggers might be and how you can use Deltas as a trigger point to tell you when to adjust a trade when it's starting to go against you. As always, hopefully this helps out. If you guys have any questions at all, please let us know and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to be talking about avoiding false urgencies and why this is a learned skill. I will be the first in line to say that this is absolutely one of my biggest weaknesses as a person also running a business, father, everything. I am 100% the type of person where if I see something that needs to be done or I get pulled in a different direction, I immediately try to finish or complete whatever I get pulled into that direction of doing before I get back on track and start to get focused on I guess the bigger task of the day or the more important task of the day. You could say that in some respects, I very much act like a fire starter and fire put or outer. I like too, it seems like and I am retroactively looking at this or I'm looking at this in the rearview mirror now. I like to generally look at a lot of things during the day, I have a lot of applications open on my computer and if something comes up, even though it may not be extremely urgent, the fact that it actually popped up and I maybe got the red little dot on my phone for a new email message or a new text message, I have a tendency to want to clear that and that's just my, I guess type A personality, is that I hate when my phone looks like it has chickenpox and that's probably a good job on the designers and the app developers who developed all these tools to basically engage you and get you back into their platform. But it's a learned skill for me, so I'm saying totally publicly right now, I'm absolute horrible at this. My wife, on the other hand is really great at not looking at everything. She has 4,000 emails that are unread in her phone and that would drive me insane because again, I don't like my phone to have the red dots of chickenpox of all these unopened, unread messages.

But I think this idea of avoiding these false urgencies is really a learned skill. I mean, you can't just walk in and do it one day. You have to actually try to physically habit your way out of this with a new routine as we talked about in other podcast and I think it's important because what I've realize over the last couple of years as I've truly been dealing with this because it is something that I want to improve on, is that the bulk of what knocks us off track are these little things that can honestly be either A, avoided completely or can be pushed aside and deferred to a later time. And so, you just have to learn to look at the things that are really, really important drivers of success, things that you have to do, important dominos that you have to knock over and truly learn to tune out the rest of it. Again, that's my biggest weakness for sure as a person, is I don't have that ability yet to 100% tune it out and I have to really work at it to make sure that when I do a podcast like this in the morning or when I write a blog post or do a case study video that I honestly take everything else off of my desktop. I close down programs, I've now gone in and figured out how to remove the little notification icons everywhere. I mean, I'm really trying at the hardest level to avoid these false urgencies because they end up derailing me because I see somebody doing something and just because they're waving their hand or they've sent an email, I feel like I have a duty to get back to them immediately. And while speed it important, it's not necessarily as important as maybe the big task that I'm working on, developing a new course or helping out with the new auto-trading bots. That's the biggest, most important leverage area that I have. Everything else can wait for a couple of hours or the next day.

I think hopefully this helps out in just maybe honestly sharing where I'm at in this struggle because this is again, my biggest struggle for sure. If you have any ideas or you have any insight, anything that's worked for you if you struggle with this as well, please let me know. I'd love to know kind of what techniques you use, what tools you use maybe. Please share it with me, kirk@optionalpha or Tweet us at Option Alpha, Facebook, Option Alpha, etcetera. Hopefully this helps out. As always, if you guys enjoy these, let me know and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're answering the question, "Can option prices trade below their intrinsic value?" I think today's question is actually two parts. There's the first part which is – Can they trade below their intrinsic value? And the second part is – Should they trade below their intrinsic value? The first answer is they can actually trade below intrinsic value. Now, the second part is really, they should never trade below intrinsic value. And if they ever did trade below intrinsic value, those trading opportunities would be extremely short-lived and would probably be gobbled up by some algorithm that is looking for an arbitrage opportunity to buy the option contract or sell the option contract and deal with the stock and take a guaranteed profit in either case at expiration.

This typically happens, again, because option pricing should be generally perfect to intrinsic value or at least that is the threshold for in the money options, but sometimes the contracts can actually trade below that. If people are trying to dump the position or trying to get out of it, they can actually be willing to take less than the intrinsic value of the contract. We see this all the time in just real life with real estate or people buying or selling cars or items online. The thing might be worth X amount of dollars and they're willing to take X minus whatever that fraction is to get rid of the position.

When we talk about intrinsic value, what we're really talking about is the value of the contract if it were to be exercised and go through the assignment process. In the case of let's say if we're trading SPY and right now, SPY is trading at 208, if we were looking at the 279 call options on SPY and SPY is trading at 280, well, those 279 call options have intrinsic value of $1. At expiration, once the time decay and volatility have come out of the contracts, they should never really trade below $1 so long as the strike price is still 279 and the stock is still trading at 280 exactly. And so, if it ever traded below that $1, again, it would be an arbitrage opportunity to really take advantage of a potential free profit right before expiration.

Again, there's two parts to it. Can they trade below it? Yes, they can, but if they do, it's extremely short-lived, probably not going to last that long because it's a very quick arbitrage opportunity. Hopefully this helps out. As always, if you guys have any questions, let me know and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're answering the question, "Are brokers ripping you off with mini options commissions?" Really quick, mini options contracts are just a couple of ticker symbols that actually have mini contracts that actually trade in. The name sounds just like what they do. They trade a miniature sized number of underlying shares per contracts. Whereas most regular options would trade $100 or control 100 shares per contract, with mini options, you only control 10 shares per contract and therefore, the option price is generally 1/10th of what the regular standard price would be because you're controlling less shares. Now, on a few symbols, Apple, Google, Amazon, SPX, etcetera right now and I think it may expand into the future, but the idea behind minis has always been to give people a more cost advantage way to trade some of these higher underlying prices like Apple, Amazon, Google, etcetera which are multi-hundred dollar stocks. Instead of actually buying the actual shares or trading the contracts which could be very expensive on the option side, they wanted to get people an opportunity to trade them on a miniature basis or a smaller basis.

Now, the question is really – Are you getting ripped off by commissions because they don't actually charge a mini commission for these which would be actually very logical because you're not controlling or dealing with the same contract size. You're dealing with something that's wildly different. And the answer here, I think is that you're not really getting ripped off. I think there's a lot of talk about this right now about brokers ripping people off with commissions on mini contracts, but there's a lot of other contracts that are out there that also don't perform exactly the same as 100 shares per contract. A lot of the futures contracts and the options on futures have various degrees of multipliers that lead to values that are different and so, nothing out there is really standard. I think on the commission side, the brokers are not necessarily doing you a disservice because you still have to trade those contracts. They still have to manage those. They still have to be sent through the exchanges and still have to be potentially exercising or assigned. I think it could be logical that – Look. You want to get a smaller commission, but ultimately, I don't think they're necessarily doing you a disservice by charging the same commission for mini contracts.

I think you're better off, honestly just trying to negotiate with your broker and get all of your commissions down rather than try to fight them on this one point. We have a bunch of guides on Option Alpha. You can just search commissions on our website. We talked at nausea about how we've reduced our commissions at Thinkorswim down to just $.75 per contract at the time of this recording with no ticket charge. What they publicly post and what they will actually give you as a trader are two different things. You just have to ask and negotiate lower. Hopefully this helps out. As always, if you guys have any questions, let me know and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to be talking about why the "someday" disease plagues our goals and holds us back. Again, I'm a huge fan of putting together goals, writing out plans, having some sort of framework around where I want to go not only in business, but in life as a father, as a husband, with me and my wife and our real estate portfolio that we do. Everything that we do here at Option Alpha, all of it has goals and plans and a framework and we don't always hit all of our goals, we don't always do everything, but it's that framework that kind of guides us and leads us forward. And I think what some people suffer from unfortunately and I truly mean suffer from is this "someday" disease that they assume that someday in the future, things will come true, the stars will be perfectly aligned. But we know as rational humans hopefully that timing is never going to be right to do what we want to do. In fact, it's probably never going to be right. I'm not even going to say it's maybe never going to be right. It's probably never going to be right. The stars will never align. All the traffic lights will never turn green at the same time. It will never ever happen. "Someday" is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. And so, if you've been wanting to do something and you know that you need to make a decision, a change, a movement in that direction, you have to start now because things are never going to be perfect. I hear people all the time and I talk to people, not only families and relatives, but just people in coaching and online that I've met over the last let's say 10, 15 years and what I hear people say all the time is like, "I wish I could do this, but I have to do this first." or "Until this happens, then I can't do this." And the reality is that some of that may be true to half a degree. Maybe you do need to figure out paying down your student loans before you start doing something. That might be a thing that you have to do. You can't get around that. But it's probably not as much as you think. Maybe you can consolidate your student loans and have a lower payment and then start moving towards your goal.

But this idea of just waiting or choosing unhappiness right now over uncertainty I think is ridiculous. I'm sad that a lot of people go through this because it's something that holds people back and makes them regret decisions later on, assuming that someday in the future it's going to get a lot better. But if you choose happiness over uncertainty right now, you're making the wrong decision because you shouldn't be scared to make a change or a move. You should be willing and excited to increase your capacity to learn and to grow and to develop and that only comes through change and challenge and struggle and some people are really afraid of that. I don't know why they are or what they think the social or financial consequences of that are going to be, but generally, it's never as bad as we think. I mean, it even comes down I guess to options trading like people always assume stocks are going to move more than they do, but I guess in the real world, people always assume things are going to be worse or better than they actually are, so why not make a change, why not challenge yourself, why not try to grow and develop and learn right now versus trying to someday hopefully make the stars align and everything will happen perfectly and you'll slide into the perfect job that you want, you'll find the perfect person that you want. But we know it's never going to happen that way. We know it's never going to happen exactly as we planned it out. Start making those decisions now. Don't let it hold you back. Start using your goals and your action items and your framework to move you forward. Hopefully this helps out. As always, if you guys have any questions or want to share what you're doing, let me know and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to be talking about how you can adjust iron condor option strategies. As a basis, iron condor strategies as many of you know are neutral option selling strategies whereby you are selling a call spread and a put spread around a stock's price. For example, if a stock is trading at $100, you might sell the 105/106 call spread and the 95/95 put spread, so creating a call spread above the market and a put spread below the market, taking in a net credit on the sale of those option contracts. Now, once you start getting challenged on an iron condor assuming that the stock either moving against your call side position or against your put side position, the rules of adjusting iron condor option strategies are that we first do not adjust the challenged or tested side of the strategy. This means that if the stock is moving up against your call spread side, let's say the stock is moving from $100 where it initially started up to around 105 and is now starting to challenge your call spread side, we are not going to move or adjust the call spread side of the position. The reason that we don't do this is because we don't want to dig ourselves into a deeper hole. We've already defined our risk on the position. If we've done our position sizing appropriately, we know how much money we're willing to lose on each individual trade that we make and as a result, if we move or adjust the call spread side, we start giving ourselves an opportunity to dig ourselves deeper and deeper into a hole. Now, although it might seem counterintuitive that we don't touch the challenged or tested side, we don't want to give the market an opportunity to continuously move against our position, backing up our strike prices higher and higher and paying a debit to do so and if we pay that debit to increase or backup our strike prices, then it allows the market to continuously move against us and it gives us less and less of an opportunity to turn the trade around.

Now, what we want to do besides not adjusting the call spread side is we want to move up or roll the unchallenged or untested side closer. In this example, if we are being challenged on the top side of our iron condor where the stock is moving higher, we would want to close our put spread and roll it up to a closer put spread based on where the stock is trading. In our original example, we sold the 95/94 put spread. If the stock starts trading up to around 104 from 100, then we would want to potentially roll up our put spread up to around say the 100 put and the 99 put. We'd sell the 100 put, buy the 99 put, having closed out of our 95/94 put spread. Now, the reason that we do this is because this is the opportunistic way to adjust iron condors. We're basically taking what the market is giving us in the sense that our put spread side is going to lose value as the market starts to move higher against our call spread side. We're going to take a little profit or a mini profit by closing out of the put spread side and reopening a closer put spread for a higher credit. This higher credit increases our overall credit in the position and then widens our breakeven points on both sides. It's an opportunistic way to not increase the risk in the position, but actually to favorably adjust the position based on where the market moves. And as the market continues to move against our call spread side, we can continue to roll up our put spreads until the point at which we turn the entire position into an iron butterfly. If the market continues to move up, let's say it moves up to 106, now we can roll up our put spread again if we want to up to the 105 puts and the 104 puts, basically creating the 105 iron butterfly. At that point, we probably adjusted most of the iron condors about as far as we want to. Again, this is a very simple concept to talk about. I probably explained it in four minutes, but probably a little bit harder to go through than you might be normally used to if you're new to options trading, so we do have a bunch of video tutorials, tons of live examples on the website at Option Alpha. You can just search iron condor adjustments and you'll find a ton of resources there to get you started. As always, if you guys have any questions, let me know and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to be answering yet another member question which is, "Can option Deltas ever be greater than 1?" If you go back and think about what option Deltas refer to when it comes to single option contracts, is it refers to the change in price of the option contract or a potential change in price of the option contract as a result of a $1 increase or decrease in the underlying security. Generally, call options have positive Deltas and put options have negative Deltas. And so, when we see a dollar increase in the underlying stock, that's positive for call options, that's negative for put options. But the question is – Can these Deltas ever go above 1? And the short answer to this is no and the reason that they can't ever go above 1 is because all that single option contract could do is trade at parity with the stock and this Delta of 1 means that for every $1 movement up in the stock, there's a $1 movement up or if it's a –1, I guess for put a option, there's a $1 movement down in the underlying put option, so it starts trading more and more like the underlying stock.

This is actually pretty interesting because what I talk about often is that when we do get assigned and the rare chances that we do and it's usually less than half a percent of the time historically have we been assigned on contracts. But when we do get assigned on contracts that are deep in the money, I tell people that the Deltas of those contracts are probably closer to one and so, therefore, the assignment starts acting like stock anyway before it even happens. By being deep in the money on say a short option, whether it's a call or a put, that short option contract is going to start acting more and more like stock, so being assigned stock is not really any dramatic difference in the underlying position and how it behaves in the market other than the fact that we have to cover the stock position now versus just the option contracts. It's a really interesting question, but again, the Deltas can never go above 1 on call options, can never go below –1 on put options because at that point, it's going to start trading at parity with the stock. As always, if you guys have any questions, let me know and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to be answering a member question which is, "Isn't trading in the money call options risky?" This is a question somebody sent in and they said, "Kirk, I'd love to have this on the daily call." And again, if you guys have questions, send them into me. Just email them over or go to optionalpha.com/ask and leave me a voicemail there. But this question I think really came out of the questioning around iron butterflies, so why would we trade in the money call options or at the money call options when building out iron butterflies and iron condors. The question of riskiness is very subjective because I think when you're trading an at the money or slightly in the money call option and you take in a massive premium, it's not as risky as you would maybe have been led to believe initially because that premium that you take in widens your breakeven point much further beyond where the stock is trading and again, not that all options in the money get exercised immediately. It's much more likely that that option contract is going to be okay trading in the money all the way up until the last week of expiration.

Now, when you start getting into deeper and deeper in the money call options, then yes, it probably becomes more and more risky and the reason it becomes "more risky" is because the risk of assignment becomes greater and greater as the option starts trading in parity with the stock. The deeper you sell call options in the money or the deeper you sell put options in the money, the less time and volatility have an impact on that option's value and so, therefore, the option contract starts trading more based off of its intrinsic value and less off of its extrinsic value or time and volatility value. To give you some context, let's say that we have a stock trading at $100. If I were to sell a 100 strike call or a 99 strike call, it wouldn't necessarily be that bad. I'd probably take in a pretty big premium for doing it and by selling an option contract at or slightly in the money by $1, I'm not really increasing my risk of assignment dramatically. Now, if the stock is trading at $100 and I sell an 85 strike call option, not a put option, but an 85 strike call option, then yeah, I'm $15 in the money, I probably am in a much greater risk that either I have very little liquidity or that the option contract is going to be assigned closer or much earlier in the expiration cycle because it's deep in the money now and at that point, it's $15 away and there's very low impact on the option price based on time and volatility, so it starts trading more like just regular old long stock and so, that's where the difference comes in.

Hopefully this helps out. As always, if you guys have random questions like this or one-off questions that you just want to get us get answered on the show, just let me know. Like I said, email us, send a Tweet, send us a Facebook message, head on over to optionalpha.com/ask, leave us a voicemail, whatever you want to do to get your question answered here on the show and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to be talking about why even the smartest people in the world don't recognize optimistic denial. I wanted to start off with just a very quick story and the quick story is about some, let's say friends/relatives that we know that got married. In fact, it was actually the girl who married a guy. Really, really smart girl. In fact, probably one of the smartest people that I know. I mean, really, she's a chemist and a scientist and very, very smart. And she ended up marrying a guy who was just as smart as her, very smart guy, engineer and they had troubles early in their engagement. And they thought to themselves and I remember talking to them and my wife and I were talking to them about their engagement and their upcoming wedding and they thought to themselves that once they got married that everything would be better and for some reason that the act of marriage would then solve their problems which if you're listening to this now, you probably know or it's probably very intuitive that that didn't happen. In fact, they got divorced about four months after they got married. I mean, it was really that quick that things turned sour and they ended up in a divorce which is sad.

But I think what it really shows me is that there's a lot of people out there who dress up this fear of something and they call it optimistic denial and I think that's really debilitating because most people will avoid something out of some random belief that their course or their track or their trajectory will improve over time if they increase their effort or just give it more time or if it increases their income. You even see this in say jobs. People will avoid quitting their jobs in the belief that it's going to improve with a little bit more effort or if they increase their income, then they'll feel happier about being in their job. But the reality is that if it's really likely to improve, if they're that confident that it's likely to improve them, why are they questioning things? We know right now and we were all rational adults for the most part, I guess, right? We know that more money in a job that you hate does not make you hate the job less. It just makes you tolerate it a little bit longer until you reach the next threshold in which case, you need to make even more money at that job before you tolerate it a little bit more and that's really all it is. It's just the different steps of fear and toleration that we go through.

I went through this myself when I decided to leave, I guess the corporate world and at the time, I was working in REITs and so, I had a great job. I had left investment banking. Everyone said I was stupid to do that. I went into the REIT business which was great, but then I decided I wanted to leave that. Look. I was scared to leave that because I was so young in doing so, because I knew that that was the different path that most people took and so, that was a nightmare for me because I didn't know what was going to happen. But I knew that it wasn't where I was supposed to be, so I let it play off, I guess for a little bit, a couple of months before I just realized that I was in total optimistic denial. I just had this optimistic approach that everything would improve and get better, but like in my heart, I knew that's not what I wanted to do, that's not where I wanted to be, it's not the lifestyle that I wanted. And so, for me, I had to sit down and really define kind of what my worst fears were, my fears of being let go, my fears of the industry changing, my fears of losing that position, I mean, just everything. I wrote it out on a paper and tried to figure out – Okay. If that happens, what were the steps that I could take to kind of get back on my feet? What would I do mentally, financially, physically? Where would I go? Who would I see? What could I do? And I realized I had in that process, put together a game plan that allowed me (and thanks to my wife and her support too) to come home and actually trade from home. And so, that was a really big part of that. It was just laying out this game plan and recognizing that I was in this mode called optimistic denial, that I thought my course would improve over time with more effort or more income or more relationships, but it really wasn't going to. I think this is insanely important because I feel that we get stuck in ruts and modes of learning and working and dealing with relationships and it's only when we actually try as humans which is really the biggest ability that we have as humans over every other thing on the planet, is the ability to step back and take a look at our overall picture, our overall position and really define where we're at and where we're going and then make the conscious decision to potentially change it.

I think this also happens a lot with children. As I'm learning as a parent hopefully for the better, that people are optimistically denying how good or bad their children are. People say, "Oh, he's just going through a growth spurt." You know, like a different mode or change. Or this person is just whatever the case is for that child. But parents are guilty of this all the time, believing that their children are better or worse than they actually are and it's not until we actually take a step back and look at a child in the context of everyone else or independently as a unique individual that we realize how good or bad they are or what course corrections we can make as parents. I think it happens all over the place. I think it's something you need to realize and again, take one step back because if somebody like these two people I talked about in the beginning of the podcast, insanely smart people, very successful in what they do, if they didn't recognize right away that they were on the wrong path, they were on a collision course with divorce, then it's going to be really hard for everyone else to as well. And you just have to take a step back all the time and just kind of reassess the surrounding, reassess your situation and make sure you're doing what you want to do and you're really rationally looking at everything in your life, your job, your physical fitness, your health, your religion, I mean, everything. It's got to be constantly evolving and constantly improving. Hopefully this helps out. As always, if you guys have any questions, let me know and until next time, happy trading.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to talk about how me and my wife just recently went through and cut 15% out of our monthly expenses right now. This is a big one for me. I'm a big fan of budgeting. I'm a big fan of reducing your expenses at all cost. In fact, one of the major reasons why we were able to start trading for a living from home more than 10 years ago is because me and my wife sat down and decided that we wanted to do this and we knew that part of being successful in this business would mean that we have to cut back on expenses because expenses, although it may seem like they're not that important, actually can really creep up on you. We decided to do a lot of different things early on. We moved into a small condo, we had no car payments. I mean, we did all, honestly the right financial things early on that were tough decisions because everyone else was buying houses and they had sweet cars and we had very old crappy cars at the time, but that ultimately was a good decision. And so, every now and again, me and my wife continue to revisit our budget and figure out ways that we can cut back on expenses and I think it's interesting because no matter what we do, it seems like at all times, things just creep up on you and I think that's just life. I think you go through life, you have kids and you start shopping for groceries and you have utilities and all these old things and you don't really understand how much things just slowly creep up in price. But I'm a student of this game and I track everything religiously. Me and my wife do massive spreadsheets for our budgets and everything and we recently went through and cut about 15% out of our monthly expenses, I mean with a snap of a finger and it wasn't anything major, but we just kind of went line by line and figured out what things we could change.

Here are some of the things that we changed and it might help you out and I think it's something to revisit whether you do it by yourself or whether you do it with your spouse or your partner, etcetera. One, we changed from cable to Sling, so that saved us about $150 a month in just our cable and internet bills and stuff like that. We went from regular cable with Comcast to Sling which is like an online provider, app provider, I guess. I don't know what the right terminology is, but it's like a Netflix for regular TV. And so, my wife loves her morning shows and the today's show and all that stuff, so we went with them and it saved like I said, about $150 in our cable bill which was pretty significant and it was just really switching over. Most of the cable channels, we don't watch anyway. I barely watch TV anyway, so it's really hurting my mind, but that was a quick one. We also called around and just checked in on most of our insurance and saved a couple of hundred dollars there as well. I think this is an interesting one. Most insurance companies, I just feel like their insurance premiums just continuously climb just a little bit every year. I don't know why it is, but it seems like two years ago, it was one thing and now, it's $25, $30 higher for no reason. We renegotiated those and just got those down. We're good drivers, we're safe. We haven't had any accidents, nothing major has happened, so that was an easy one. Utilities. Where we live in Pennsylvania, we have natural gas as our heat source and what most people don't know is that you can actually choose… Even though you have a natural gas company that actually sources the gas to your house, you can actually choose who the provider of natural gas is. And so, again, most people don't actually go through and check this, but that's a really small difference that we can just choose which provider provides natural gas and we chose somebody who provides that at a little bit cheaper rate and then some of the other companies that we've been just, I guess defaulted to using. And so, that saved I don't know, $50 or so maybe a month over the next year or so.

The other thing that we've done is we've started shopping at different grocery stores. We've been really, really cognizant of the cost of groceries now that we have three kids. I think that's like more creeping up and we have a boy now, so the kid is just eating like a lot, obviously. And so, now, we're more cognizant of it than maybe we were before, so we're shopping at places like ALDI which if you guys don't have an ALDI, it's amazing, it's wonderful and it definitely saves us at least $100 a month in our grocery bill. And then the final thing is just gas and auto. Again, we sold one of our vehicles that we have not been using because we got a van now that we have three kids. And so, now I'm part of the minivan club which I actually love. I love our minivan that we got. And then we also are being really, really cognizant of the different gas stations that we actually go and get gas on. We're using the rewards that we have from grocery shopping and really leveraging those rewards to then save in some cases, $.30, $.40 on a gallon of gas every time that we go and fill up. It's just being really strategic about what we're doing and I think when we added up what we could save, it's about $750 this month in our budget than what we had before and that goes a long way. I mean, that's real money that's back in our pocket. I guess hopefully this helps out just to kind of get your brain wrapped around maybe potentially revisiting some of your things and really asking yourself either A, if you need it or B, if you can cut the expense and reduce it. As always, hopefully this helps out. If you guys have any questions, let me know. Until next time, happy trading.