Cancel your credit card. All of it. Today.
THE IRS CHARGES 7% INTEREST, COMPOUNDED DAILY, ON MONEY YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOU OWED
Every year in the wrong entity, the IRS keeps money that should be yours. Tens of thousands at $250K profit, six figures at $500K and up. On August 19, join Evan and me for a webinar where we break down the math, the income level where QBI stops working in your favor, and the fix if you're already on the wrong side of it.
YOU DON'T HAVE A SPENDING PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A VALUE PROBLEM.
I grew up listening to Dave Ramsey and reading Mr. Money Mustache.
Dave is your crazy uncle who tells you to clean your room and stop spending more than you make.
Mr. Money Mustache is your misfit friend who took Millionaire Next Door to the extreme and reuses his plastic bags.
I listened to the Ramsey podcast studying for the CPA exam. I checked the MMM site daily.
They built the foundation I stand on. They're right about most of it, for most of the people they're talking to.
They're not talking to you and me anymore.
You make good money. You're busy. You know you're leaking cash. The only tool either of them hands you is SPEND LESS.
Spending is one leak. There are at least five that matter, and spending has the worst Return on Hassle of all of them.
Return on Hassle: money saved divided by brain damage to get there.
Skip a $6 latte 250 times a year and you save $1,500. It costs you 250 small moments of deprivation.
Reshop your home and auto insurance once and you save $1,800. It costs you 15 minutes with a broker.
Same money. Wildly different price. This series ranks everything by that ratio.
This week: five moves, one verb each. Cancel. Call. Collect. Borrow. Calibrate.
Next week is the five-figure decisions you make one time. Week three is the "free money" the internet sells you. It's a part-time job.
Move 1: Cancel the card
Great businesses sell for huge multiples because buyers understand recurring revenue. Recurring spending is the same thing in reverse. Somebody else's MRR, and you're the sticky customer.
I don't log into 14 accounts and click through 14 retention offers. I cancel the credit card. The whole card.
Every recurring charge dies at once. No cancellation flows, no "wait, here's 40% off."
New card, virtual cards, one per service, resubscribe only to what you miss over the next 30 days. A month decides for you.
Most households find $500 to $1,500 a year of stuff they forgot they agreed to. Twenty minutes of work. A $3,000-an-hour job.
Business owners, run it twice. Kill $500 a month of dead software and you found $6,000 of EBITDA. At a 4x multiple, that's $24,000 more if you sold tomorrow. For an afternoon of clicking.
Move 2: Call the list
Half the prices you pay every month aren't real. They're the price for people who don't ask.
SiriusXM's sticker is $25 a month. The cancel line sells it to you for $8.
Crossed 20% equity on your house? One call removes PMI, if you're on a conventional loan. Nobody makes that call.
FHA loan? Different animal. PMI doesn't drop on equity alone. Refinancing out is the only way off it.
Business owners: 2.9% on your merchant processing is the sticker price. One email with a competitor quote attached can be worth thousands a year on real volume.
Pick two off this list and make the calls this week.
Move 3: Collect the interest
Look at your business checking account right now.
I've worked with hundreds of business owners. The pattern: six or seven figures sitting in an account earning nothing, because that's where the money landed and nobody moved it.
$300,000 idle at today's rates is ~$12,000 a year you're choosing not to collect.
The fix is one afternoon. A treasury sweep or a business money market account next to your checking. Money moves when the balance crosses a line you set.
No risk change. No behavior change. Interest you were owed.
Move 4: Borrow at the bank
Refis are sitting above 7% and rates are drifting down, not crashing. This move isn't "get a lower rate." It's don't take dumb debt when cheap debt is sitting right there.
Business owners take Stripe Capital and Shopify advances because the button was on the dashboard. Convenience money running north of 20%, dressed up as a "fee" so it never looks like a rate.
Meanwhile the bank line they qualify for sits untouched at prime plus a point.
One meeting with your banker before you need the money. Then you draw at 9% instead of clicking a button that costs 24%.
The difference on $100K of working capital is $15,000 a year. It took you a lunch.
Move 5: Calibrate the estimates
Estimated tax payments. Nobody's favorite subject, everybody's leak.
Guess high, you've made an interest-free loan to the federal government. Guess low, you're paying penalties running about 7% right now.
Neither is a spending decision. Both cost cash.
The fix: safe harbor math once a year with someone who knows your numbers, then quarterly payments calibrated to what you're making.
If your quarterly number keeps climbing every year, check the entity underneath it. Evan and I break down the math in a webinar on August 19. Grab your spot.
Now go find yours
You don't need software. You need one afternoon and a robot.
Export the last 12 months of bank and credit card transactions as a CSV, not the PDF statement. Delete the account number column. Merchant, date, amount is all this needs.
Upload it to Claude and paste this:
I'm uploading 12 months of bank and credit card transactions as a CSV. Use code to do all arithmetic. Do not estimate totals by reading. Find every recurring charge, even if the amount moves a little. For each one give me the merchant, the annual total, how many times it hit, and whether the amount went up during the year. Sort into three buckets: cancel today, renegotiate, keep. Flag anything I paid for twice under different merchant names.
Then:
Same file. Use code. For every recurring merchant, compare what I paid in the first 3 months to the last 3 months. Show me only the ones that went up, with the dollar increase and what it costs me per year if it keeps going. Sort by annual dollar impact.
The first prompt feeds Move 1. The second feeds Move 2. Price creep is where the renewals and the subscriptions hide.
Run them once. Make your calls. Done.
The honest part
This whole letter is the small money. A good afternoon here is worth a few thousand a year, and you should go get it. Next week is decisions worth $40,000 a year, made ONE TIME. This week builds the habit of looking. Next week is where looking pays.
And the reason you couldn't see these leaks: nobody can see money they haven't categorized. If you own a business, your personal cash and your business cash are one pool. The half you audited is the small half.
The big half is in your business books. If those books are three months behind, you're flying a plane where the instruments show you where you were in April.
If you're a $200K to $2M business owner doing your own books or waiting on a bookkeeper who's always a month behind, that's the leak worth closing before next week's letter. Book a call with Visor this week. Thirty minutes, and you'll know whether current books would have caught this year's leaks.
P.S. Before you torch the card, move your must-not-lapse payments to one you keep. Insurance, utilities, the mortgage. Then burn the other one down.