FINDING MORE CASHFLOW

Finding More Cashflow

Al Zdenek

min read

Amin Boroomand

The Paperwork Raise

Shuffling paper: CakeClub’s way to find income without working extra hours for it.

Companies reprice you every year. Subscription prices rise on renewal. Insurance costs are jacked up annually, loan rates change all of the time, and nobody sends you a warning memo. The move is shopping your services around each year.

Our book, Master Your Cash Flow; Let Them Eat Cake and Grow Wealth Too! calls this whole category “shuffling paper”: filling out forms, making calls, and finding cash flow without working one hour, one week, one year longer in life.

The book’s test question is a good one: When did you last hear from your insurance agent?

We are betting never. If your coverage and costs haven’t been reviewed in the last year or two, a review is overdue, and reviews routinely find money. One client’s repricing recovered $2,800 a year on a single insurance policy, with better coverage after the switch than before.

The same logic runs through every fixed line. The elections you made during onboarding and never revisited on renewal. The rate you signed in a different lending market. The plan that renewed itself while you were too busy. Fixed costs feel like weather. It comes and goes. But most of these costs result from contracts, and reviewing contracts may take some phone calls.

One move this week: find the renewal date on your single biggest policy or plan, car or health insurance is a strong candidate, and book a full review for that week, with your current provider or a competing one. This is the annual pass that goes deeper: coverage levels, deductibles, the umbrella layer, and what the same protection costs in today’s market. No meeting with your boss required.

Then route the recovered money somewhere on purpose, like your savings account, the same week. Found cash flow that stays in checking has a way of unfinding itself.

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Shuffling Paper: The Money You Find And Earn By Reviewing, Renewing, And Renegotiating

Nina is 28 year old, a dental hygienist making $68,000, and is very good at her job. She was offered benefits when first hired, and selected the options during onboarding four years ago and has never revisited them.

Her car and renter’s insurance renew on autopay, up a little (sometimes a lot) every year. Her employer added a free group life coverage two years ago which she has yet to select which she learned from us.

What benefits are present from your employee that you do not know?

I have watched people leave this category of money on the table for thirty years, and it is the strangest category, because collecting it requires no new skills, no side hustle, and no sacrifice. In our book, Master Your Cash Flow: Let Them Eat Cake and Build Wealth Too!, we call it shuffling paper: reviewing, renewing, and renegotiating these types of expenses that most ignore. Forms and phone calls, cash flow without extra hours of having to work.

The Two Benefits Lines Your Sweep Missed

Chapter 9 of Master Your Cash Flow: Let Them Eat Cake and Build Wealth Too! returns to employer benefits. Run your own sweep first to see what’s gone unnoticed. For example, stock option plans go unclaimed, group life and disability coverage through an employer often costs less than the same protection bought alone, and the same can hold for long-term care.

Neither requires negotiating; both require reading.

Then have the forward conversation. Ask your employer what your position looks like in two, five, and ten years, what training exists, and what growth looks like in compensation and benefits, and ask what it may look like for you.

The book notes that some employees have restructured their roles as independent contractors and, in some cases, ended up with 30% to 40% more cash flow, because the employer no longer paid for benefits, while the contractor gained access to their own retirement plans and business deductions.

Discussing this with employers is something most people never touch. And sometimes the honest answer to the forward conversation is that the future opportunity is low, in which case the same skills may price higher at another employer, sometimes with better benefits attached.

The Rates You Signed In A Different Market

Every borrowed dollar has an interest rate, and rates change.

A client of ours had been too busy to send us her mortgage details; when she finally did, she was paying about 8%, well above what she should have been, and refinancing saved her thousands a year.

On the business side, we recently saved a company more than $10,000 a year in investable cash by renegotiating loan rates and term payouts.

The pattern is identical at every scale: the rate was fine when signed, the market moved, and nobody looked after that.

Insurance: The Review Nobody Schedules

Insurance is hiring a third party to carry risks you decline to carry yourself, and the pricing deserves the same review as any contract.

One of our clients, a young entrepreneur with a couple of rental properties, filed a claim after damage one year and never noticed the insurer raise that property’s premium from $1,200 to $4,000 a year. His partner handled the bills. Nobody was looking. We found a new carrier that enhanced the coverage and returned the rate to about $1,200, recovering $2,800 a year with one review.

When did you last hear from your property and casualty agent? We’re betting never.

If your coverage and costs haven’t been reviewed in the last year or two, schedule it. And while you’re there, ask about personal liability coverage, the umbrella layer above your home and auto limits.

While you may not need it now, it’s normally the least costly insurance you can buy, and it protects your savings from the lawsuit-sized accidents that arrive without warning.

One consulting client of ours added it after some procrastination and, two months later, a minor low-speed accident turned catastrophic for a frail passenger in the other car and produced a million-dollar suit.

The insurer handled everything, the legal fees and the damages, and his wealth survived intact. Nobody enjoys planning for that event. The coverage costs very little precisely because the day is unlikely, and the one client of ours who ever needed it is the reason we never skip the conversation.

Put On Your Oxygen Mask First

One more repricing decision involves generosity. Parents saving for children’s education often open custodial accounts, and our book applies the airline rule: secure your own mask first.

A custodial account under the Uniform Gifts to Minors Act becomes the child’s outright property at majority age, which means the education fund can legally become a few years of pondering life on the beaches of Malibu when they reach age 18.

Building your own wealth first keeps you in control of how education gets funded, keeps compounding centralized, and takes care of the child by taking care of the plan. Reasonable people differ here, so it is a personal decision on your part, but we want you to achieve financial freedom first, and then take care of the kids.

What The Money Is For: Sally

Sally owned a couple of restaurants and, at 50, wanted one answer: could she stop working by 60?

Her financial plan said sixty-five comfortably, sooner if she sold at a good price. So, we repriced her life instead, hunting cash flow across every fixed line, and we found enough that she reached the point of not needing to work by about fifty-seven. She kept the restaurants anyway.

The pressure the places disappeared, the business turned into a game. And she loved doing what she was doing. She did start a foundation to help others. The point of finding cash flow was never just building more wealth. It was giving Sally choices in life.

One client put the same principle in reverse: he funded a $5,000-a-year scholarship knowing it delayed his own retirement, because the difference along the way mattered more to him than the speed. Repricing exists to fund choices in both directions. Choose on purpose.

— Application Box —

The Repricing Review (Assembled From Chapter 9 of the Book)

Once a year, on a date you pick: review the benefits you have at work then check the language concerning stock options and the group pricing on life, disability, and long-term care.

Annually: check every borrowing rate, mortgage to cards, against today’s market, and ask the structure question at your compensation review.

Every year or two: schedule a full personal property and casualty review and confirm umbrella coverage fits your assets.

Ongoing: when a renewal letter raises a price, that week is review week, never a silent yes.

Back To Nina

Nina’s version took one email and two calls. The HR email confirmed free group life coverage at one times salary she never knew that she could have, along with employer-paid disability coverage she’d assumed came out of her own check. Calling HR at work, timed to her renewal, repriced her bundle down $310 a year with the same coverage. Small numbers, found in an afternoon, now routed to savings where the Tax Savings Savings Effect. The raise came from paperwork. So, watch out for it.