Every cookbook contains recipes. But how many cookbooks contain the recipe for retirement with one-to-two million more dollars in the bank?
That’s exactly what The Cash Flow Cookbook is designed to do. For the author, Gordon Stein, it started with a few simple, profound discoveries.
“I kind of stumbled into the idea of Cash Flow Cookbook,” Stein said to Ricci Truong of the CamaPlan Podcast. “I found a way to get car washes for free. You know, which saved $25 a month. Not really a big deal, but what was interesting was it was so easy.”
“And then not long after that,” he continued, “I discovered how to slash the cost of my home alarm monitoring system. Another $25 a month. And I got curious, and I built a list of these ideas and they all had to be minimal effort, minimal sacrifice.”
For Stein, a native Canadian, the minimal sacrifice component of his cash flow recipes is paramount. What’s the point of making it to retirement with an extra million dollars if the path to get there was a miserable slog?
“If you read all the personal finance books out there,” Stein said, “a lot of ’em are pretty similar. You know, you wanna save 10% of what you earn. You want to give up things you love, you wanna do some detailed budgeting, and if you do all that and you invest consistently over a long period of time, you’ll become wealthy.”
“If somebody says to me, ‘Give up the things that you love …’ Well, I’m not giving up my guitars. I’m not giving up my kayaks, my bikes, [going] out for nice meals. I want great concert tickets.”
Inspired by these early successes, Stein went on a two-year quest to build a massive list of often-overlooked opportunities for average households to cut their costs — without impacting their lifestyles or having any less fun.
He then did the math on what would happen if an average household invested that savings for their retirement. He found that at the pace most people grow their retirement nest egg, the extra savings added up over time to $2 million in extra retirement savings.
