How to Save Money
In this solo episode of the Sister Circle Podcast, Chrystal Evans Hurst addresses the stress caused by soaring gas prices and offers a comprehensive, tactical guide to reducing household expenses. She explains how higher oil prices ripple through utilities, groceries, and everyday costs, then focuses on three primary levers of discretionary spending—electricity, food, and entertainment. For electricity, she recommends unplugging idle devices and being mindful of standby power. For food, she outlines a pantry‑first approach, detailed meal‑planning, bulk buying, stretching meat with beans, making homemade staples (stock, applesauce), and buying on sale or in bulk. She also advises smarter shopping habits such as avoiding the store when possible, using online ordering to curb impulse buys, and checking unit costs. Regarding transportation, she suggests limiting trips, batching errands, car‑pooling, using public transit, and consolidating routes to cut gasoline use. Entertainment savings include cutting cable, switching to low‑cost streaming services or individual sports apps, and using streaming sticks. Throughout, Chrystal emphasizes the importance of creating and reviewing a budget, tracking all expenses, setting a concrete savings goal (e.g., offsetting a $200 monthly gas increase), and only considering a side hustle after expenses are trimmed. The episode ends with an empowering message that listeners have more control over their finances than they think and can apply these strategies now and in future cost‑of‑living spikes.
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Are these gas prices stressing you out? They stressing me out, y'all. Let's talk about it. Hi, my name is Chrystal Evans Hurst. I'm so grateful that you're joining me for the Sister Circle Podcast. This is Coffee with Chrystal. It is a solo episode of this podcast that you can watch on YouTube on video or listen on audio on the podcast. I'm glad you're joining me today. If you're not already subscribed to YouTube where you can watch on video, on Facebook where you can watch on video or on your favorite podcast player so that you will be notified whenever a podcast is released. You need to do all of that today because I don't want you to miss any of the things that I jump on audio and video to tell you about. Y'all listen, these gas prices are going up. They are skyrocketing everywhere. And everybody who has two shoes and two feet is walking around or tempted to walk around more because the gas prices are getting Insane. Now listen, while there may not be much that we can do to control the gas prices, there is so much that we can do to control how much we are spending to make room for the increase in gas prices or to control the amount of gas that we need to pay for. So what I wanted to do is talk to you about how you can better manage your money during this season where we are not always able to manage the amount of money that we have to put in our cars. Listen, gas is discretionary, except not. Like, if you have to go to work, you have to spend money on gas. If you're responsible for anything in your community, to get there, you have to spend gas. If you have children, you have to spend money on gas so that you are able to take them to school. If you drop them off at school, gas costs money in your car. But oil doesn't just affect the amount of money that you put in your car. Oil affects the amount of money that everybody else is spending in their vehicles, in their cars, in their trucks to bring products to you. So what happens when oil prices goes up? That everything goes up because the price of gas, the price of oil impacts the cost of delivery. So what you are buying in Target, it had to get there, probably on a truck. That truck runs on gas. Your electric bill, your gas bill, all of these things are influenced by the cost of gasoline in vehicles. But also oil is a commodity on the world stage, regardless of what the price of gas is in your city. On the world stage, oil a commodity being traded at higher prices is going to impact the cost of everything worldwide. So this is— we're at the beginning right now of the increase in our gas prices. And I wanted to be very tactical and practical today about some things that you can do to save money, even if you can't control the amount of money that has to go in your tank, or at least the price per gallon. First of all, because we have control over our budgets only in certain things. For example, if you have a mortgage, you don't get to change what you're paying for your mortgage just because The cost of gas has gone up. But there are other line items in your budget that you can control. They are discretionary items. You decide how much you spend. Now, it goes without saying that you should pay attention to what you're using in terms of electricity. Turn off the lights. Don't let your electric bill or your gas bill be higher than what it needs to be. But one of the things that is like a secret trick that you can do to making sure that you're spending as little electricity, as little money as you need to on electricity, is to unplug stuff, y'all. Unplug it. Let me give you an example. At night when you go to bed, there are things that stay on that need to stay on. Your refrigerator, your freezer, they need to stay on. The TV does not. Your stereo system does not. Your Wi-Fi does not. So think about the things that are electricity draws, because even when you're not using them, they're still pulling electricity. And if, listen, if you're trying to make adjustments because you need to make major adjustments, start unplugging stuff, turn it off and unplug it, and you'll notice your electricity bill go down. There are areas, though, that are even more discretionary than that. Food, for example. For most of us, food, our grocery bill, eating in home or eating out of the home, is the area where we have the largest amount of discretionary spending. It is also the place where it is easiest to have a runaway bill because we have to eat 3 times a day. And if you don't feel like cooking or if there's something that you feel like eating, then it's super easy to drive through and pick it up. It's super easy, especially in this post-COVID land that we're living in, to call DoorDash or Uber Eats and have delivered to you whatever it is that you want to eat. Or you go to the grocery store and you are shopping while you are hungry— one of the worst things that you can ever do— and you are seeing all the things that you've ever wanted to try and you put them in your basket to try them. Okay, this is a season where all of these things that we have been doing to stretch our discretionary budget for to look at those things with an eagle eye and to say, what do I actually need to eat? What do I actually need in order to have decent nutrition and in order to survive? You can do so many things to, to crush your grocery bill, to totally change how much you're spending on food just by taking a look at what you're eating. So let me talk first of all about this grocery bill. Number one, the The fastest way to cut your spending on your grocery budget is to not go to the store. Like, just don't go to the store. Look at what you have in your pantry, look at what you already have in your refrigerator, look at what you already have in your freezer, and cook what you already have. Like, literally don't spend any money. And if you have to spend money, then only spend money on the things that are perishable, that you keep in your refrigerator, and that expire. For example, milk, bread and eggs. Why? I remember growing up, sometimes my mom would send my dad to the store and she would say, we don't need anything other than milk, bread, and eggs. And every now and then we'd throw in produce, bananas, fresh fruit, that kind of thing. But if it's not going to go bad and it's sitting in your pantry, cook from that. Make your menu plan from what you already have. Again, the fastest way to lower your food budget is not to spend money on food and to greatly eliminate the things that you would typically buy by using what you already have in your home. For most of us, for most of us, not everyone, I realize this, but for many of us, y'all, we have food in our houses already. And the reason why we keep going to the store is because we've run out of the stuff we like, the stuff we want, or the stuff we enjoy. We need to refresh produce or things that go bad, or we need to refresh things that are refrigerated that got old. And that's fine. Thing is, you need to be shopping mostly around the edge of the stores anyway. That's where the good stuff is. Once you start shopping in the middle of the store, you are buying prefabricated food that is designed for long shelf life. You know what that means? It's not designed to give you abundant life. So shopping in the middle of the store is not what you typically need anyway. So here's what you need to do in order to prepare to go to the grocery store. Shop your own pantry, shop your own refrigerator and your own freezer. Just— you don't have to even meal plan. Just write down what you have. Then from what you have, then meal plan. It's like a puzzle. Put this meat together with these starches and these vegetables. Then figure out where the holes are, and if you have to shop, shop for that. The other thing is you can go to a recipe site like Allrecipes and put in what you have, and then Allrecipes will give you recipes that will work from the things that you already own in your refrigerator. So I wanna tell you that staying out of the store is the first way to cut that grocery bill. The second thing, I kind of have mentioned it already, it's to plan your meals. Do not go to the grocery store without a plan and without knowing what you actually need that week to live off of. Don't go walk in the aisles for sure when you're not hungry, but also without a list. And your list should come from the meals that you've planned to eat, okay? Once you plan your meals, you only shop for the things that are on your list. Now at this point, I would tell you, if you wanna shop and you wanna shop online and have the groceries delivered to you, then great, 'cause that actually keeps you out of the store and keeps you from buying those last-minute impulse buying purchases that you see when you walk up to the front of the store. Listen, in the store, everything is put strategically for you to purchase, that the marketers are thinking about you. The thing that's the most expensive is probably at your eye level. The thing that is probably the most marked up is probably on your way out the store. Like, it's like the world is looking at— the marketing world is always looking at how can we get you to spend money. Amazon does the same thing, right? You go on Amazon, you, you get the one thing you need, and then Amazon says, here's what else we'd like to recommend based on what you've searched in the past. Everybody's interested in your buying behavior. So at this point, if you have a, a list for the store and you want to stay out of the store so you don't spend your gas going to the store, then by all means, order what's on your list. But, but after shopping your pantry, the third thing that I want to challenge you to do is to eat it differently. To eat it differently. For example, meat is expensive. So if you're going to make spaghetti, mix it in with some kidney beans. Half and half. So instead of, instead of using 1 whole pound of ground beef to make spaghetti, maybe you use— you cook up the whole pound, only use a half, rinse off some kidney beans and throw it in there. Your family will never know that, that they're missing it, and then you have effectively cut the cost of your groceries in two. Okay, so I want you to think about what can I do to prepare. Don't throw anything away if you can help it. Anytime that I'm cutting up vegetables, any part of the vegetables I don't use go in a Ziploc bag for the freezer. They go into my freezer. Why? Because I don't want to buy vegetable stock when I can make vegetable stock. Anytime I make a whole chicken in a Crock-Pot, I save the bones. And as soon as my chicken is done, I take off the meat, I put all the bones back in there, cover them with water, add some onions and celery, let that cook all night. There you go, my own chicken stock. So I want you to start thinking about what you can make and not buy. So the first thing is stay out of the store as much as possible. Shop from what you already have. The second thing is, after you've assessed what you have, make a meal plan so when you shop, you're only buying what you need. And the third thing is, as you cook, look for ways that you can make what you would otherwise buy. Now, I know that all of a sudden you may not turn into the Pioneer Woman, and that's okay. But what I am saying is you can learn little by little how to use what you have to make what you need. If you are buying it, the question that you should be asking yourself is, can I make this? For example, applesauce. Listen, if you have never made applesauce, the applesauce isn't the most expensive thing in the market. But what I would do is say, can I, instead of buying the individually packed applesauces for my kids who have to go to school, Can I make individually packaged applesauces? So maybe you still buy the big kahuna thing of applesauce from Walmart or Target or Kroger or Albertsons or Aldi's or whatever. But maybe you package it, or better yet, maybe your kids do. Buy little Ziploc containers or maybe little Tupperware containers and let them put it in there themselves. They will not die. And then when they get to school, they can just pinch off the edge of that plastic and suck it the same way. It is called homemade applesauce containers, and you can do that. Or You could put it in little plastic containers with a spoon and they can eat it. And then tell your children, you better not throw that plastic container away. 'Cause they will. And then I'll be mad. So, but yes, you can even make applesauce, especially one of my kids' favorite things is cinnamon apples, y'all. We take the apples that they don't want to eat because they've gotten a little soft because I buy apples in bulk, usually at Costco. And then all we do is just skin them. The kids have learned to do that. We quarter them and then we sauté them or with a, We cook them down with some butter and cinnamon and a little bit of sugar and some water, and it's amazing. And then we serve that with pancakes, or we put it on top of oatmeal. And again, I'm using what I already have. Look at what you have. My kids are always like, "Mom, this is expired." And I'm like, "Honey, the expiration date is for the store. That is not for me. Does it look bad? Does it smell bad? Does it taste bad?" If the answer to all those questions are no, honey, it's not expired for us. My kids hate me. I don't care. I'm saving money. I'm saving money. So I want you to think about staying out of the store, going to the store for only what you actually need, making your meal plans from what's in the pantry. And then I want you to think, when I buy this, can I make this? Okay, when I buy this, can I make this, or can I buy this another way? So nuts— I can't make nuts. I mean, technically I could buy nuts, I could, you know, grow nuts and whatever. That— we ain't doing all that. Let's just be real, I'm not doing that. But instead of buying the cutesy little packages of nuts, can I go and buy nuts in bulk? Even Walmart has an aisle where it's like the family section, right? And the chips are humongous, and the oatmeal is humongous, and the nuts are humongous. So I go to that aisle, buy a tub o' nuts, and then break that down into little bags every day. Okay, so the question is, can I make this or can I get it cheaper? Pay attention to the unit cost on your food. Now I'm talking a lot about food because food is a huge area, a huge area where many of us can exercise discretionary income. And those are like 4 sub-points for food. Look at your food. You can change so many things by changing the way you buy food. Another idea is shopping. When you do have to shop, shop the sales. If it ain't on sale, it does not get bought. Because why would you pay $2.99 or $3.99 for grapes when you can get them for $1.99 or 99 cents a pound? Summer is coming. So think about what you're buying. Even if you say, okay, we need fruit in the house, decide to buy the fruit that's on sale, okay? Not what you feel like eating, but what's on sale. Manage your money wisely. Okay, food is a big way that you can adjust your discretionary income. The same thing applies, the same principle applies to being in your car with gasoline. If you don't have to go out, don't. Like, just don't go out. We spent so much time at home, y'all, in COVID, staying home. And a lot of us back then when COVID first got going cut our gas bills in half simply because we were staying home. So if you don't have to go out or on the days you don't need to go out, stay home. When you do have to go out, batch process your going out. So think about where you already have to drive and organize your stops accordingly. Okay. So on the day when you have to go to work, on the days when you have to go to work, I know a lot of people are even working, um, uh, split shifts where you're going in on a Monday, Tuesday, and a Thursday and not a Wednesday and a Friday. Okay, you don't go out on Wednesday and Friday then. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, those are the days when you drop off and pick up at the dry cleaner. Those are the days when you stop by the grocery store if you absolutely have to go. Those are the days when you run the errands that you need to run, and you do them on the path that you're already on whenever possible. Okay, this is the time where you get to know your neighbors, right? If you have kids that are going to school, maybe you've never carpooled before. This is a good time to do that, y'all. This is a good time to think about when you go to church on Sunday, who can I ride with, or who can ride with me? This is a great time to think about how can we conserve the amount of money that we're spending in our gas by looking at how much we're in our cars and what we're doing. Is where I'm going and where, where I am headed to, is it absolutely, absolutely necessary, or is it absolutely necessary today? Okay, today. All right, even if you, um, have errands that you need to run, try to consolidate those. If you don't leave the house, maybe you're a stay-at-home mom, maybe you're retired, consolidate those on one day and then organize them where they all make sense. Okay, um, so I want you to think about spending less money on gas because for many of us it is discretionary and we run our cars way more than what we need to. If you live on a bus line or you live on a train line, maybe you normally drive, but maybe This is a good time for you to try public transportation. Listen, I love riding the DART in Dallas. I could read, I could sleep, I could listen to music, and I would drive my car to the Park and Ride and take the express bus downtown. I was doing this as a teenager. Loved it. Maybe you have been afraid before to try public transportation. Well, now's a good time. It's gonna cost you less money than your own gas will. So stay out of the store, Stay out of your car as much as possible and get creative with what you can do to maximize the time that you're in your car and maximize the opportunity to be in the car with other people. Often my husband and I, we drive separate cars to church. I'll go earlier and stay later because that's one of my million jobs. I work at the church with my dad too. We ride in the same car now. We have had conversations about what we're going to do to be kind to each other and our time investment. And can you leave a little early with me and can I— come home a little sooner for you. But we, oh, we riding in one car. Oh, we, oh yeah, we riding in one car. In one car. My kids asked me the other day to run out and do something. And I was like, yeah, sure. But when you come back, make sure you stop and put $5 in the tank. They were like, for real? I said, for real. They didn't go. It's discretionary. The other, the last thing, food, gas, and entertainment. Y'all, if you have not cut the cable cord, now's a good time to do it. We love DirecTV. I miss DirecTV. I still know the numbers of all of my DirecTV channels. But you know what? DirecTV, a couple of years ago, we decided was just ridiculously more expensive than what YouTube TV was going to cost us. So we're now YouTube TV people. And that might be about to get cut because now, honestly, my— the problem is sports, y'all. My husband loves sports and I'm about to look at him. And I'm gonna say, babe, listen, we can keep paying for all these sports if you really need them, but you really need them? Like, you could buy the app, the NFL app or the NBA app. It would cost us less than YouTube TV. Now, Discovery Plus, I'm not giving that up. I need more of Joanna and Chip in my life, and it's cheap. But in all seriousness, you really can look at the things that you're spending. Look at the recurring amounts of money that are coming out of your bank account and decide which of these things you can live without. And then the other thing is you can totally just get a stick, an Amazon Stick, a Roku Stick, and stick those inside of your TV and access lots of entertainment that way without an ongoing cost. So think about your cable bill. Think about the entertainment, you know, going to the movies. Think about— and I know many of us haven't even started doing that yet, but some of us have. Think about what you're spending in the store because you like shopping Shopping is therapy for you, okay? But you don't need that. So when you think about entertainment, the things that I enjoy that I don't need, how can you make adjustments? I'm not saying you have to cut them out, but how can you make the adjustments? We do not give ourselves enough credit for how much we can actually control our budgets. Budget, budget, budget, budget, budget. Have you realized how many times in this episode that I have talked about budget? If you don't have a budget, you need a budget. So your first order of business is to look back at what you've been spending for the last month on your mortgage, on your rent, on your gas bill, on your utilities, on food, on entertainment, on your student loans, and write it down. Okay? And then looking at it objectively, because numbers don't lie, decide where you are going to make changes. Okay? Set yourself a goal. Okay? Gas is now costing me $200 more a month than it had before. Where can I find $200? Make it a game. If you can't find 2, to find one. And I've given you 3 ways that you can do that: your gas, your groceries, and your entertainment. And honestly, y'all, if you just would make the budget— half of us, whether you have one and don't look at it, or if you've never made one— looking at the budget is honestly the 4th secret weapon. Most of us overspend because we don't know what we're spending. We know that this was $6, and oh, that was a deal. But if you spend 6 extra dollars every day of the month, Guess what you've done? You spend an extra $200 a month, and that adds up. Don't ask me how I know that. Cane's chicken. Anyway, the point is, I want you to pay attention to what's happening at the grocery store. Pay attention to where you're in your car. When do you not have to be in it? How can you share the load? Lower your gas bill. The third thing is look at your discretionary income as far as it relates to entertainment. And then the secret weapon: make a budget. And if you make it, Look at your budget and pay attention to the money that's going out the doors that you have control of. What I know is that you don't need to worry. What I know is that you don't need to fret. I know that this money thing is super, super stressful, but you have to give yourself credit because you have more control than what you think. All right? And if there's nothing else that we've ever learned, uh, in the last 2 years, it's that a side hustle can be a good hustle. If you absolutely positively need to generate more income to cover the hit to your pocket from the gas bill and rising prices as a result, then yes, look for something else to do. But before you do that, I can almost guarantee you, almost guarantee you. In fact, I am 99% sure that the majority of us can increase our income simply by reducing our expenses. And if gas prices, the crisis at the pump is what's going to make you do that, well then, So be it. What I want to tell you is that you are powerful, that you have more control than you think that you do. And that when you have the power to cut and that power runs out and you need to figure out a way to free up more income, you have the power to make wealth. You are powerful enough, smart enough, able enough to make it through this crisis. You are not the first person that's had to experience a crazy increase in a discretionary expense. However, you won't be the last, and what you learn now in this season will help you to be stronger and less worried in future seasons, and it will help you to teach someone else to do the same. That's why we're here, y'all. We're better together. And even when we have to be better together at the pump, we can do that too. I hope these tips have helped you. And if you need more, listen, I'll tell you what I'm doing. What I'm going to do more of is Googling how to combat rising gas prices. How to save money, rising gas prices. Like, Google is your friend. And there are so many ways, so many ways that specifically you can jump into your budget, budget, budget, and look at what you're spending to save money. So I hope these ideas have been helpful to you. But let me also say this one last thing: still choose to live. Right now I'm in this crazy looking hotel room because this is not my normal setup, because I'm on spring break trip with my family. Mm-hmm. Yes, and we drove. Lord Jesus. And yes, the prices at the pump bout killed me. But you want to know what else we did to combat those prices? We put a cooler in the back of the car. We always do, but we put a cooler that was filled with more stuff than normal. Can we stop? No. Get back in the cooler. Can I have something to drink? No, not on the side of the road you can't. You better reach your hand in that cooler. Mom, I'm getting hungry. Great. Open up that cooler, get out that bread, that peanut butter and jelly, and/or that turkey and cheese with the mayo and the mustard. Melt mustard and enjoy yourself. You wanna know what we did? We still took our trip, but we took it smarter. And that's what I wanna tell you about your life. You can still live right now. You just need to put on your thinking cap and live a little bit smarter. I hope that this episode has been helpful to you, and if it has, please be sure and share it. And then again, make sure that you're subscribed everywhere that you wanna watch or listen so that when I share another video or audio, you will be sure to know. All right, y'all, I will see you next week. Special thanks to our 2022 interns who are not only editing the videos that you see and the audios that you hear, but are also scouring the world for B-roll, the extra video shots that you see when you're watching my videos on YouTube or Facebook. That is B-roll, and I'm not doing all of those shots by myself. So just wanted to say thanks to interns who make what we do possible.
