Hi! I’m Josh Elledge, the Chief Executive Angel of SavingsAngel.com and welcome to the SavingsAngel show! I’m podcasting to you in late January on a cool day in Orlando, Florida.

I am an extremely busy consumer expert, money-saving advocate, syndicated newspaper columnist, and the guy that turns digital entrepreneurs into media celebrities with UpMyInfluence.com. I love what I do and can’t wait to get going on today’s episode.

In order to help you save more, earn more and live more abundantly on today’s show I’ll be covering:

• Save Money and Lose Weight by Eating Better
• Wholesome Meals Without Breaking the Bank
• Ways to Tighten Up Your Security and Privacy in 2021

LINKS FROM THE PODCAST:

HelloFresh.com/savingsangel10

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Save Money and Lose Weight by Eating Better

Losing weight and saving money seems like an oxymoron. Many of us have tried and failed to get onto better diets and lose those pesky extra pounds for good. For some of us, it’s because we didn’t pick a sustainable diet. For others, they never found the right way to buy affordable, healthy, and whole foods to keep their weight loss going. Either way, remember that you aren’t alone and there is hope. I lost 60 pounds on the couponing diet; I managed to lose weight, eat healthier, and keep the weight off, all on a budget. 

Save on Your Healthier Eats, Especially Produce

Don’t be fooled into thinking healthier foods must be more expensive. You may have to shop a little creatively, but if you love savings as much as I do, you already do that every time you go shopping. 

First of all, always try to cater your shopping list to what’s on sale or what you have coupons for. It’s easy to take a peek at your grocery store’s weekly ad to know what’ll be on sale in the coming days. The more produce, the better. Being healthier starts with what fuel you’re putting in the tank, so try to cut out as much processed foods as possible. In fact, spending money only on what you need for meals, and making sure those meals are simple and green will almost certainly reduce your grocery budget.

Take note of the quantities you’re buying and be realistic about what you’ll eat in a given week; don’t overbuy, especially when it comes to produce. Wasted produce means wasted money. If you do have produce that’s starting to ripen, see what you can still make with it. Get creative — can that ripe banana be turned into a smoothie? Can you juice any of your veggies or turn them into soups or stews? The possibilities are endless, just be willing and able to think outside the box. 

Accountability is Key

The first step to eating better and losing weight is to be committed and accountable. If you fall off the bandwagon because you really wanted that hot fudge sundae, don’t give up. Every challenge is about getting back up when you fall down. Don’t let one moment of indulgence turn back into an unhealthy, toxic lifestyle. 

Remember that it’s okay to have weak moments – we all have them, myself included. Just don’t let it completely overturn your progress. Allow for little moments of moderation every once in a while, just not every day. 

Remember, it takes dedication to hold yourself accountable and take responsibility for your diet and lifestyle. This also contributes to your shopping habits. Yes, you can save money by buying healthier foods, but you must be willing to put in the effort to shop smarter and you must be willing to let go of those excess comfort foods. This is both a physical and mental exercise of will. You have to let go of the physical habit of buying and eating those unhealthy snacks, but you also have to let go of the emotional attachment to them, too. 

Diet and lifestyle accountability starts at the grocery store; what you buy is almost certainly what you’ll eat. Don’t fool yourself into thinking your spouse or kids will be the only ones to eat those Little Debbie cakes. Now, I know you can’t force everyone to quit sweets and processed foods cold turkey, but you can and should encourage your loved ones to eat better along with you. When you’re able to stop buying all the extra snacks and processed stuff when you go shopping, you’ll see your grocery bill plummet. You’re only buying what you need, which is healthier for you and your wallet. Remember, we eat to live, we don’t live to eat. 

Push Yourself

There’s no single perfect answer to losing weight and keeping it off for good, but it all starts with a decision you have to make about changing your lifestyle for the better. 

Once you make that decision, be dedicated to it. Shop smarter and save money by reinvesting into healthier foods. Cut out the foods you don’t need and you’ll feel less and less tempted to eat them. Eventually, the cravings for those foods will be eliminated entirely because you didn’t bring them into your home to begin with. 

You’ll feel better in mind and body, and feel clarity you haven’t felt in a long time. It takes dedication and a shift in your mindset, but I promise your body and your bank account will thank you for it. 

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Wholesome Meals Without Breaking the Bank

Okay, I wanna talk about something important to me personally. I just talked about it — the food we eat. Many of us don’t eat the healthiest foods because it’s way more convenient to eat fast food or make those microwavable meals you can get from the grocery store for super cheap.

Well, I have some amazing news that has completely changed how I cook meals for my family. That’s right, I’m talking about HelloFresh, America’s #1 Meal Kit. HelloFresh brings you awesome, pre-measured ingredients to your door so you can put together delicious, healthy, and wholesome recipes in thirty minutes or less for every meal. HelloFresh eliminates the need for trips to the grocery store and figuring out recipes and weekly meals, and it makes home-cooking fun, healthy, easy, and affordable. They offer a great variety of 23 recipes each week featuring all sorts of flavor palettes, ingredient combinations, cuisines, diets, and more. 

You can actually enjoy cooking, love how your meals taste, and nourish your body at the same time with HelloFresh. You save on what you’re buying, so you aren’t overbuying, and HelloFresh helps out with portion control; no more leftovers being forgotten about and spoiling in the fridge. 

My family loves the fully-loaded pork taquitos. This recipe is in the HelloFresh Hall of Fame and my entire family devoured these taquitos up in record time. We had zero leftovers again, thanks to HelloFresh.We also didn’t overbuy on ingredients, we didn’t waste food, and every ingredient was healthy and wholesome, way better than anything you’d buy in the frozen section.

If you’ve liked what you’ve heard and want to hear more, go to HelloFresh.com/savingsangel10 and use code ‘savingsangel10’ for 10 free meals, including free shipping! Yeah, that’s right, I’m hooking you up, SavingsAngel friends. Give it a try and see what you think; I promise you’ll love it just as much as I did. That’s HelloFresh.com/savingsangel10, use code savingsangel10 for 10 free meals and free shipping.

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Ways to Tighten Up Your Security and Privacy in 2021

With 2020 finally in the rearview mirror, it’s time to take a look at changing some life fundamentals in 2021. So much has changed in the last year, so why not embrace a few more? One of the top things you should be looking to optimize during this age of heightened technological use is your security. Now more than ever, your data is being tracked and used by companies for all sorts of things. Here are some ways to better secure your data this year.

Reduce Your Cloud Usage

Using the cloud is both quick and convenient, but it comes with some caveats. The more you use the cloud, the more you need to invest in cybersecurity.

If possible, reduce this usage by investing in things like external hard drives and docking bays to keep your data out of the cloud and inaccessible through the web. While this may seem like a pain, when it comes to sensitive or proprietary data, you’ll be at a significantly reduced risk of data breaches and theft. 

Ultimately, it’s a choice between investments; do you want to invest in more security for the data you store in the cloud, or would you rather invest in ways to keep that data out of the cloud? At the end of the day, data stored in the cloud will always carry data breach risks. 

Pay Close Attention to Cookies

While cookies aren’t inherently bad, they can go too far and track all of your browsing activity. They do this so they can better track and market to your browsing behavior. Notice how all of your Instagram ads feature items you’ve been searching for on the web? You can thank cookies for that. 

Be mindful of what you’re agreeing to when you accept cookies on a new site. If you aren’t sure what the cookies will be used for and can’t find what the website will use them for, try to find an alternative site that details their use of cookies and data. 

Cookies are some of the easiest ways websites and companies track our data, and most of the time we are manually agreeing to their usage. With various browsers, you can clear your cookies, cache, and site data. Do this often if you have concerns about cookies. 

Other brands are getting on board with consumer calls for better privacy and security, too. Apple is offering an iOS update that gives users the option to opt-out of being tracked on the web. Take a look at what tech brands are offering in the way of security settings to better optimize and protect your web privacy. 

Keep Track of Passwords in a More Secure Way

If you’re using different passwords for each site and app, as any cybersecurity expert would recommend, it’s hard to keep track of them all. Chances are, you’ve written them down or stored them in your notes someplace. 

This isn’t bad necessarily – there’s no way anybody would remember all of those different passwords. However, there is a more secure way. 

Write your password down, but leave off a single character at the end that you know you will remember. Perhaps it’s the same number or punctuation mark for every password; just make sure you’ll always recall which symbol, letter, or number it is. This is a great way to store your passwords without the risk of someone breaching your accounts if they were to get a hold of your list.

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Transcription of Today's Episode

 I'm Josh Elledge, the chief executive Angel at SavingsAngel.com. And welcome to the SavingsAngel show. I'm broadcasting to you in late January on a cool day here in Orlando, Florida. Now I'm an extremely busy consumer expert, money-saving advocate, syndicated newspaper columnist, and that guy that helps consultants go from six figures to seven-figure rock stars over at UpMyInfluence.com. If you know someone who sells to business owners, send them my way. Now, I love what I do, and can't wait to get going on today's episode. So in order to help you save more, earn more, and live more abundantly on today's show, I'm going to be covering ways to save money and lose weight by eating better. Listen, I'm going to share some stories, my experience on how I've been able to successfully do both at the same time. Hopefully, you got a friend that you might want to share this with who's maybe struggling in one of those two areas love to help out, we're going to talk about more wholesome meal ideas without breaking the bank. And then finally, we'll talk about ways to tighten up your security and privacy in the year 2021. All that more. So let's get going.

Losing weight and saving money seems to be an oxymoron. Most of us have tried and failed to get on to better diets and lose those pesky extra pounds for good. For some of us. It's because we didn't pick a sustainable diet. And for others, they never found the right way to buy affordable, healthy and Whole Foods to keep their weight loss going. Now either way, remember that you aren't alone. And there is hope. I lost 60 pounds in what I call the couponing diet, I managed to lose weight, eat healthier, and keep the weight off all on a budget. Now I'm going to break this down into kind of three areas. Number one is produce. Don't be fooled into thinking healthier foods must be more expensive. You may have to shop a little creatively. But if you love savings, as much as I do, you already do that every time you go shopping. Now first of all, always try to cater your shopping list to what's on sale, or what you have coupons for, it's easy to take a peek at your grocery stores weekly add to note what's on sale in the coming days. Consider, I'm just saying consider going to an additional store or two. If the sales on the things you need are bigger, it is absolutely worth driving a few miles down the road to go to an extra store if you can end up saving 1020 $30 or more. Now, here's my secret tip, I learned this. Okay, the more Pro, this is what worked for me, the more produce, the better. Being healthier for me starts with what fuel you're putting in the tank. And I've learned this before. And I've actually had some really good interviews I've done with people have kind of figured this out. So as much as we want to cut out the junk, what I have found is that cutting out the junk is a lot easier if you start with a foundation of healthy Whole Foods. So if you can do that, and you ultimately you end up cutting out all the stuff, you know what's watch, right? The junk food, the processed foods, all that sort of stuff, right? If you can fuel up with salads, and again, stuff you normally find in the produce section, maybe healthy lean meats, I'm not going to get into any controversial diet advice here. If you want that you can go to find your favorite fitness, wellness and diet and weight loss and nutrition podcast. But I'm just going to talk about what worked for me spending money on what you need for meals, you got to do that and make sure that those meals for me what I found was simple green. And if you could do that, it will almost certainly reduce your grocery budget. Why? Because again, if you're shopping very consciously, what you're going to end up doing is saving a lot of money. If you just shop willy nilly and you just stroll into the store, buy the things that you need. I want to get you away from that. But let's think about for example like things like laundry detergent and paper towels and toilet paper when you can get it. You know those sorts of things. You absolutely need to save your money. Now what I want you to do with your savings is I want you to re invest that into healthier Whole Foods produce. Alright, and I've done some work on this. I know people listen I'm not going to debate you if you are an organic food aficionado. What I can tell you is what I've heard from the Environmental Working Group. What I've heard from the USDA, is that a diet rich in nutritious, nutrient-dense produce items, fruits and vegetables, right? is absolute like it is some people say, Well, I'm not going to buy that stuff, because it's sprayed with pesticides and stuff. And I get that you do want to look at the Environmental Working Groups, Dirty Dozen, and clean 15 to kind of help you kind of navigate this but what they'll both tell you is they don't want you to stop eating produce, just because you can't afford organic. Does that make sense? All right. So also, some more ways that you can get way more fruits and veggies is there often aren't coupons for fresh produce is just the reality, okay, but you can absolutely find coupons for frozen and canned products, you can find tons of them. And the price fluctuations week to week on frozen and produce items varies wildly, and you want to use that to your advantage. So when you find a really good deal on the frozen food section, or in the canned food aisle, you want to stock up on those items, so that you don't need to buy them down the road. And the other advantage. And again, I could spend a lot of time on this. And if you search through SavingsAngel, you'll see a lot of great work that we've done in this. I've talked about this a lot in the podcast, you could search through our podcast episodes in the past. But sometimes people say well, I don't want frozen, because that's not as healthy as produce from the produce aisle. And that is absolutely not always true. And for frequently not true. In fact, because and I'll tell you, I got to keep moving, I gotta keep moving on, I got so much I can share here. This is a myth because it all comes down to when that produce item is picked in it's growing cycle. What you normally see for produce that ends up in the frozen food section is that those produce items are typically picked much later in the ripening season. So what that allows them to do is develop a full spectrum of nutrients. Many times if we're talking about produce that, say, shipped from South America or shipped from far away, those items are actually picked very early in the ripening season. They're sprayed with gases to keep them from ripening and during shipment. And then they're sprayed again or treated again so that they can continue. And so do your own research. Don't take my word for it, you know, make decisions for your family that feels right for you. But I do want you to be mindful of the quantities you're buying and be realistic about what you'll eat in a given week. Because I don't want you to overbuy on things that will spoil, especially produce. We have all come together today. Produce wasters anonymous like it's just happened. Okay, but wasted produce means wasted money. If you do have produce that's starting to ripen, see what you can immediately make with it do an inventory every couple days in the produce, you know in your fruits and vegetable drawer, get creative. Can that right banana be turned into a smoothie? Can you juice any of your vegetable vegetables and turn them into soups or stews? Really the possibilities are endless. With you know with your resources, you're very smart at what you do little bit of googling would probably help to also you can freeze almost any produce items. There are very few exceptions. Lettuce is about it. Just about everything else. And here's if you want to know what can I freeze or not. Just think to yourself, hmm, have I ever seen this item in the frozen food section? If you haven't, then you probably can't freeze it. If you have, then you totally can freeze it. So again, we just don't want to waste stuff. Alright, so just again, be willing to be crafty and think outside the box. Alright, let's get to number two because number two is a really, really, really big one for me, and I this is going to get into our brains. The first step to eating better and losing weight in my opinion, is to be committed and accountable if you fall off the bandwagon, because you really wanted that hodgepodge hot fudge sundae, don't give up. It's okay. every challenge is about getting back up when you fall down. Don't let one moment of indulgence turn back into an unhealthy toxic life. style, right? Remember that it's okay to have weak moments, we all have them, myself included, just don't let it completely overturn your progress. allow for little moments of moderation every once in a while, just not every day. Remember, it takes dedication to hold yourself accountable and take responsibility for your diet and lifestyle. This also contributes to your shopping habits. Yeah, you can save money by buying healthier foods, but you must be willing to put in the effort to shop smarter, and you must be willing to let go of those excess comfort foods. For me, if I have ice cream in the house, I'm much more inclined to eat it. If, if I haven't noticed, if I don't have it in the house, I'm not going to eat ice cream because I just don't have easy access to ice cream. So I make the decision in the grocery store, which is a little easier. Sometimes it's not. But most of the time, I say, Man, I'm not going to buy the ice cream because I know that cookies and cream ice cream is going to be calling my name. You know, on a maybe a harder day at work or longer day or some stressful situation or an incident you know some situation where I want to reward myself. Okay, so all of this is both a physical and mental exercise of will, you have to let go of the physical habit of buying and eating those unhealthy snacks. But you also have to let go of the emotional attachment to them to a diet and lifestyle accountability starts at the grocery store, as I was just saying what you buy is almost certainly what you'll eat. Don't fool yourself into thinking your spouse or kids will be the only ones to eat those Little Debbie cakes. I mean, if you're really into Little Debbie cakes. Now, I know you can't force everyone to quit sweets and processed foods cold turkey by you can and should encourage your loved ones to eat better along with you. When you're able to stop buying all the extra snacks and processed stuff. When you go shopping, you will see your grocery bill plummet. You're only buying what you need, which is healthier for you in that need based sense. And it's what your wallet needs. Remember, we eat to live, we don't live to eat. Think of food. A great analogy I've seen recently again, food as fuel, we are what we eat very literally. And so just decide what it is that you want in your life. For me. One big habit is almost every single day is I have a large salad for lunch. It's the same thing. It's every single day, maybe you can maybe you can't do that. But I know that that step alone really helps me, particularly in a lunch break, which I usually have very short windows of time, I have to just kind of find something really quick. And oftentimes, if I don't have good options available to me, I end up eating something that's probably not as filling. Certainly not as nutritious. So I have to plan for that in advance. I have all the ingredients ready to go. I love the little bag salads, and then I add more stuff to it. I add a lot of chicken, tuna, other seafood like other stuff, I just throw it in there. Avocado, that sort of thing. Again, you make your own rules, okay? Finally, there's no single perfect answer to losing weight and keeping it off for good. But it starts with a decision you have to make about changing your lifestyle for the better. Once you have that decision, be dedicated to it. Just make a checklist for yourself. Maybe you remember, like one of your kids, and you count down the days to Christmas, and you'd create a little paper rings. And every day, you take off a little ring until you got to Christmas. Maybe for you. It's you know what I want 30 days of not eating sugar, for example, extra sugar. And you know, you find a way that you can just be accountable and you set a 30 day goal for yourself. You can absolutely do it. I have quit some very hard things. I have done some very hard things for short windows of time. Most of us when we eat healthier, and then we receive a plateau or a setback or something like that. That's where, you know, almost always that's where people kind of throw in the towel and I don't want that for you. Like I really, really want for you to say it's okay. plateaus are normal. But what's most important for me is the day to day activity. If you're doing the day to day activity, and you know that you're feeding your body what it needs, you ultimately will get results even if you have a one week or two week plateau. Right? Those are frustrating.
I know I get them. Just like Everybody else. But you just have to trust the process, that your body's weight is just going to fluctuate like crazy. Again, I got to remind you, I'm not speaking as your doctor, I'm just talking as your friendly neighborhood savings Angel. I'm really interested in you shopping smarter, saving money by reinvesting into healthier foods, cutting out the foods you don't need, and you'll feel less and less tempted to eat them. And eventually, by the way on that the cravings for those foods will be eliminated entirely, because you didn't bring them into your home to begin with. I have friends that are doing dry January, which means they're abstaining from no alcohol during the month of January, and the first handful of days, or if especially if someone's drinking on the regular, it's a little tough to deal with, again, not speaking as a doctor, just relaying what I'm hearing. Now, do these things. You make your plan, though you don't have to use my plan. But you work out what works for you, you will feel better in mind and body, you will feel clarity, you may have not felt in a long time. It does take dedication, it does take a shift in your mindset. But I promise your body and bank account will thank you for it.

Okay, I want to continue talking about this to a degree. I just talked about the food we eat. Now many of us don't eat the healthiest foods, because it's just way more convenient to eat fast food or make those microwave meals you can get from the grocery store for super cheap. Well, I have some amazing news that it is really been fun for my dear wife and i this month on how we're able to enjoy the process of making food together. And it's HelloFresh which is America's number one meal kit. We got it this month. It was so much fun. It's like taking a cooking class together. We have fun, we enjoy it. We're working together. And then we get to enjoy the spoils of our of our hard work. And it's really quite easy. It's like you don't like when you watch the cooking shows. And like everything is all prepared in those little dishes. And it's everything's all measured out for you already. It's like Well, yeah, it would be a great cook to if I had a sous chef to prepare everything for me. Well, that's what HelloFresh is. They're pre-measured ingredients. They're brought to your door you could enjoy delicious, healthy and wholesome recipes in 30 minutes or less for every meal. HelloFresh eliminates the need for trips to the grocery store, figuring out the recipes, the weekly meals, and it makes home cooking fun, healthy, easy and affordable. They offer a great variety of 23 recipes each week featuring all sorts of flavor palettes, ingredient combinations, cuisines, eating lifestyles, and more. And you can actually enjoy cooking like I said Mrs. SavingsAngel and I had a great time together. All right, you're gonna love the meals tastes. You're gonna nourish your body at the same time with HelloFresh you save on what you're buying, so you aren't overbuying and you're not wasting food, right HelloFresh helps out with portion control. There's no more leftovers being forgotten about and spoiling in the fridge. My family loved the fully loaded pork taquitos. This recipe is in the HelloFresh Hall of Fame. And my entire family devoured these taquitos up in record time. We had zero leftovers again thanks to HelloFresh and we didn't overbuy ingredients, we didn't waste food. Every ingredient was healthy and wholesome – way better than anything you might find elsewhere. Right? So if you like what you heard, you want to give it a shot. Right now January is the time to do this because of this hookup. You go to HelloFresh.com/savingsangel10 .You're going to get the best deal that I've seen it's HelloFresh.com/savingsangel10 And if you use the coupon code savingsangel10 and they give you 10 free meals This is the best deal that I've seen on HelloFresh. Go get it they also aren't going to charge you for shipping on this deal. Definitely, if you've never tried it before, try it out. I'm hooking you up my SavingsAngel friends. Give it a try. Let me know what you think. I would love to read your reviews. Mrs. SavingsAngel and I are big fans and we've actually tried a lot and HelloFresh is our favorite I promise you're gonna love it as much as I did HelloFresh.com/savingsangel10 . Thank you to our dear friends at HelloFresh for sponsoring this segment.

All right, finally, with 2020 in the rearview mirror, it's time to take a look at changing some other life fundamentals in 2021. So much change in the last year, so why not embrace a few more. And one of the top things you should be looking to optimize, during this age of heightened technological use is your security. As a consumer expert, as a consumer advocate, I want you and your family to be safe. I don't wanna I don't want you losing valuable photos and, and data and documents and things that you really, really need. And I also just, again, I don't want you to get inundated with creepy ads. So I got some tips for you, right? Your data, I mean, more than ever, you know, this, I know this, your data is being tracked and used by companies for all sorts of things. Now, here are some ways to better secure your data this year. Okay, first, using the cloud is both quick and convenient. But it does come with some caveats. The more you use the cloud, the more you depend upon the cloud, the more you need to invest in their cybersecurity, which may be good, may not we've heard of big hacks happening. And so this might be an area where you might want to be a little bit more proactive yourself. So if possible, you can reduce this usage by investing like external hard drives and docking bays to keep your data out of the cloud, and inaccessible through the web. Now, while this might seem like a pain, when it comes to sensitive or proprietary data, you'll be at a significantly reduced risk of data breaches and theft. Now, I can't wait tomorrow, I've got an order. I ordered a Synology RAID array. So what I'm about to say right now, your eyes may glaze over and some people listening device head. Oh, yeah, Josh. Yeah, it sounds good. Depending on like how much technical you are, but we're actually getting so imagine like, for 16 terabytes? No, no sit for not that much for six terabyte hard drives. And then they're all kind of in a box together. And then what ends up happening when you do it in this box. Synology is the brand name of the product that I'm getting. And so what it'll do is if one drive goes bad, no problem, because it has saved your data. It has backups across the array of all of the drives. So you might want to look into that again, just in case you're like, What did he say? What was that brand? Go on Amazon? That's where I bought mine. Synology is SYNOL. Oh, gee, why not sponsored by them? I did a lot of research on this talk to a lot of friends. And it seemed that that was a brand that got a lot of great reviews. Now, ultimately, just getting back to our discussion here about cloud versus local, it's a choice between investments, do you want to invest in more security for your data you store in the cloud? Or would you rather invest in ways to keep that data out of the cloud? One thing you want to do, when you do you want to make sure that all of your family members have an account on your local device, right? So you want them saving their photos, saving the things that are important to them from all of their devices. So that again, you can just have backup, if you have a very, very old, external device, even old compact discs with photos on them, my recommendation is to make an additional backup drives can fail. So if you have one that's I grew, that one's kind of like eight years old, and it might be about the time you want to say just to be safe, I'm gonna make an extra copy of that on my new external hard drive, or if you again, if you can afford the array, great. Now, at the end of the day, data stored in the cloud. Again, if you're just relying on somebody else, it might be a good, you know, a secondary backup if you don't mind the risk there. But again, just things to talk about next, let's talk about cookies. Because though the world is changing when it comes to your data, but not fast enough, and marketers have been having a heyday with you, you know, they have, right, we have all done that thing, where we're just casually talking about something, then all of a sudden, it shows up in our these ads that are being showed to us on social media and on Google and so forth.
I don't I've seen I'm not the one to explain that fully to you that phenomenon. But when you Google it, and you research what's going on. It's actually a little bit creepier than if they were actually just listening to you. It's all it's it's really like as I understand it, it is just a He's kind of a weird, marketers just really, really are very aggressive. So let's talk about cookies. Oh, cookies aren't inherently bad, okay, but they can go too far and track all of your browsing activity. And then there's now cross sharing and selling your information. And they do this so they can better track and market to your browsing behavior. And again, we've all seen those Instagram ads that feature items that you just search for on the web, well, you can thank cookies for that. Now be mindful of what you're agreeing to when you accept cookies on a new site, if you aren't sure what the cookies will be used for, and can't find what the website will use them for, try to find an alternative site or an alternate site that that details their use of cookies, and data. And by the way, good luck reading that terms and conditions. If you ever look at it on a website, they are ridiculous. No cookies are some of the easiest ways of websites and companies track your data. And most of the time, we are manually agreeing to their usage with various browsers, you can clear your cookies, clear your cache and site data. If you do this often, you can also do this often, if you have concerns about being tracked everywhere you go. A couple of other ideas, right. Other brands are getting on board with consumer calls for better privacy and security to Apple is offering an iOS upgrade. And it gives users the option of opting out of being tracked on the web, take a look at what tech brands are offering in the way of security settings to better optimize and protect your web privacy. You can look at alternatives to Chrome and Google, for example. So currently, I'm using brave browser, which is basically just It's exactly like Chrome. It's built on chrome. But it does, it does secure your privacy a lot better, right? Also, an alternative to Google would be DuckDuckGo. And again, it's limited in how they are going to sell and share your personal private information. So do give that some consideration. Now finally, I could spend a whole episode all about this passwords, if you are using different passwords for each site and an app as such as a cybersecurity expert, or I would recommend is hard to keep track of them. All right. So what I don't want you to do would be the opposite of that. And that would be using the same password for multiple sites. Listen to me, let me be very, very clear with you, as your consumer protector as your consumer advocate, friend, you no longer have the luxury of doing that. Because of how many sites have been hacked into. And the public, there are the database of your email, and your password has already been shared on the internet. And if you don't believe me, here's a website you can go to, you might have to Google this because it's a weird spelling. But it's Have I been pawned.com. I may be off on that. Go do a Google search for that. But that's what it I think pond is like spelled like p w n e d. It's weird spelling. But you can enter in your email address, and it will let you know exactly how many different websites have already given up the ghost on your name and password. If you share that name and password with other services and other websites like Google and so forth, it's just a matter if it's not a question of if it's, it's just a matter of when that so that website will be hacked into with that same name and password. This is really important that you – that you heed my advice on this. Okay. And again, if you don't want to take my word for it, go do your own research. Okay. Now let's talk about ways that you can secure all these individual passwords. Okay, maybe you've written them down, maybe you've stored them in a in a note someplace. This isn't bad, necessarily. There's no way anybody would remember all those different passwords, especially if they're cryptic. However, there's a main more secure way, write your password down. But leave off a single care like if you are going to go to the old school route and you would just want to write your password down and you keep them locally or whatever. And you don't have a problem with that, you know, worried about other members of the household having access to that or whatever. Here's just again, this old timey method right, write down your password, but leave off a single character at the end that you know we You'll remember, perhaps it's the same number of punctuation mark for every password. Maybe it has to do with maybe the first letter of the website that you're accessing. But you can come up with your own formula, just make sure you always recall which symbol letter or number it is. Now, this is a great way to store your passwords without the risk of someone breaching your accounts, if they were to get ahold of that list. Of course, I am a big fan of using a secure password system. There's many out there one, password LastPass are two very, very popular ones. Here's the thing with those though, you need to have a ridiculously cryptic password for either of those services. And I would also recommend changing that password every six months. I know you're probably listening to me, and you're going, Oh, my gosh, Josh, you're giving me way too much to do, brother. I'm just looking out for you have to understand what my position is in your life, I am looking out for you, I want you to be safe. I don't want you have to go through the horror of realizing that your bank account was hacked, or you know, something very sensitive, like your email account with lots of personal information that someone can easily export very, very quickly. When websites allow you to do two factor authentication, always do it. What that means is if somebody tries to log in, you always have to verify it with your phone as well. I'm sure you've encountered that with maybe like your bank or credit card or whatever you've logged into before. I'm a huge fan. I know it's a hassle. Do it anyway. ounce of prevention. pound of cure. No. All right. So all of that said, we stay safe. You know, we keep our don't allow ourselves to be solicited to so aggressively by marketers.

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