Make Money by Playing The Game of Big Expenses

Let’s say you woke up at home in Chicagoland on an otherwise beautiful Sunday morning in early November only to discover that your heat wasn’t working.

You call the repairman to come take a look, not having a choice but to pay the extra weekend fee because your house is an ice box.

After arriving at your home, it doesn’t take the repairman long to diagnose the problem: your 20-year old furnace blew its motor.

Ahh, lovely.

You are presented with two options.

Option 1: Repair the furnace for a staggering cost of $2,247. Ouch.

Option 2: Replace the furnace (and the humidifier, surge protector, thermostat, etc.) for $13,000. Double ouch.

So, what do you do?

If it were me (spoiler alert: it was me), I would choose Option 3.

Option 3: Play The Game of Big Expenses

I wasn’t thrilled with either Option 1 or Option 2.

Both options would cost me a lot of money just to keep my home livable. It brought on the same negative feelings as paying taxes or a parking ticket.

Compare those negative feelings to the feelings associated with spending a lot of money on a vacation. Both expenses may cost the same, but with the vacation, your money turns into fun.

You get to experience something positive with your money.

Is there a way to turn a negative experience like replacing a furnace into something positive?

I came up with a solution that has worked incredibly well for me.

I call it The Game of Big Expenses.

What is The Game of Big Expenses?

We often talk in this space about how being good with money is not just about the numbers. Money is emotional. We are humans. We feel things.

For example, I feel not awesome about spending $10,500 on a furnace.

Because of these normal human feelings, I find that it helps to pretend like I’m playing a game. That’s why I came up with The Game of Big Expenses.

The Game of Big Expenses will help you turn a negative money experience into something positive. It will help you establish and maintain a positive relationship with money.

See, certain expenditures in life are unavoidable. Replacing my furnace in November in Chicagoland falls into that category. There’s nothing I can do about it except pay the money.

I guess I could complain about inflation and tariffs and supply chains and how expensive everything is.

Or, I could turn this bad news into a game.

With The Game of Big Expenses, you take an unpleasant experience (like replacing a furnace) and turn it into a positive experience.

Think of it as a lemons to lemonade thing.

Here are the rules to play The Game of Big Expenses.

OK, so how does playing a game turn a negative money experience into something positive?

Actually, it’s quite simple.

Let’s look at the rules of the game.

Rules of The Game of Big Expenses:

You have a big expense in front of you. See if you can pay less. Invest the difference. You win.

It’s as simple as that.

Negotiate the price. Then, invest the savings.

Negotiating the price and saving money is always a good thing. However, it’s that extra step of investing the difference that will turn this negative experience into a positive feeling.

Investing the difference is how you win the game.

Let’s see how it works using my furnace example.

Here’s how I played The Game of Big Expenses with my furnace.

In this instance, the company gave me an estimate for $13,000. I told the salesman that I would look it over and get back to him the next day.

I’ve never bought a new furnace before. What I learned is that it’s not really possible to find prices online to check if you’re overpaying. For example, doing your homework for a new furnace is much harder than shopping for a new car.

There are some blogs and review sites that give you a very broad idea on prices. However, so much of the price depends on your geographic area, home size, and preferences that this information is not very helpful.

I realized I was at a disadvantage in these negotiations with the furnace company. I didn’t even know where to begin in coming up with a better price.

So, what did I do?

I simply asked the company to work with me on the price.

I didn’t turn it into a hostile negotiation. And, I didn’t haggle with the salesman. I just gave him some reasons to consider lowering the price.

I pointed out that we are loyal customers who plan to be in our home for many years. We have a second furnace that is also 20 years old and will probably need to be replaced soon (knock on wood…)

I told him that we are already members of the company’s annual maintenance club and hope to be for many years to come. We have genuinely appreciated the level of service and professionalism of their technicians.

I also confessed to the salesman that I really didn’t want to shop around for another quote. I liked working with them.

Based on all of the above, I asked if he could work with me on the cost before I started calling other companies.

We had a very pleasant conversation that took all of 10 minutes.

After hanging up so he could speak to his boss, he called me back and we agreed on a price of $10,500.

That meant an instant savings of $2,500.

It’s worth repeating: $2,500 of after tax savings for a 10 minute phone call!

That’s the equivalent of a billable hour rate of more than $20,000!

So, I had successfully negotiated the price down. That was step 1 of the game.

Now, it was time to invest the difference.

Let’s see what $2,500 would be worth in 25 years.

Before investing the savings, I used a basic compound interest calculator, like this one from NerdWallet, to see how much that savings could be worth in the future.

In this example, I projected a $2,500 initial deposit with a 10% estimated rate of return over 25 years.

Why a 10% estimated rate of return?

Because the stock market has historically returned an average annual return of 10%.

Why 25 years?

That’s about how many years I have before reaching the standard retirement age. (Plus, I liked the results with a 25-year time horizon.)

OK, so how much does my $2,500 project to be worth in 25 years if it earned a 10% average annual return?

$30,142.36!

Think about that for a second:

My 10 minute phone call to save $2,500 projects to be worth more than $30,000 in retirement.

If you know of an easier way to make $30,000, please let me know!

Seeing these results turned this negative money experience into something positive.

Instead of fixating on the cost of the furnace, I was now excited about the opportunity to invest.

The Game of Big Expenses works for any big ticket item.

What are the most expensive things that most of us pay for?

Rent? A new car? Renovation projects?

Think about how much you can save and invest if you play this game whenever a big expense is in front of you.

Let’s look at another example of how the game works.

Say you have $100,000 in student loans remaining at 7.5% interest and nine years of payment left.

You are moving to a new apartment and successfully negotiate $100/month savings on your rent.

Saving $100 per month is very nice.

But, what if you used that savings to pay off your loans faster?

Look at what happens using Calculator.net with just $100/month in extra payments:

If you use that $100/mo to pay extra on your student loans, you will eliminate your loans 11 months faster.

That’s nearly a year of your life back for a simple negotiation on your rent!

Play the game. You won’t regret it.

Don’t play the game for every small purchase.

While the game could work for any small purchases, I don’t recommend you play it all the time. There’s no sense in driving yourself nuts by haggling over every small purchase.

Save the game for when it really matters. Otherwise, the effort’s not going to be worth the savings. The juice has to be worth the squeeze. (Man, I must be thirsty.)

Also, don’t get discouraged if you don’t always win the game. Sometimes, you may not be able to negotiate a better price. That’s OK. Not every game ends in a win.

In those rare instances, what have you really lost? 10 minutes of your time?

It’s still worth playing.

Playing a game like this is really the essence of what it means to think and talk money.

Games are supposed to be fun, right?

And, nothing that I wrote about today is hard to do.

You just have to keep the game of money somewhere near the front of your brain so you are aware of opportunities when they present themselves.

The result is that with just a little bit of effort, you can consistently make great money choices.

Playing this game is no different than playing The $500 Challenge game that my wife and I used to play when our spending got out of whack.

We played that game over and over again to help us achieve our money goals.

The best part of The $500 Challenge was more than getting our budget back on track.

The best part was how much fun we had thinking of fun things to do that didn’t cost a lot of money. We had some of our best date nights while playing the game.

Like in this situation of replacing my furnace, we took a negative situation (being way over budget) and played a game to turn it into a positive (fun date nights).

Games like this help bridge the money gap of numbers and emotions. You might be surprised at how much fun you can have.

You will certainly be happy with how much money you save.

What do you think of The Game for Big Purchases?

Maybe you’ve already been playing it?

What other money games do you play to help keep your finances in check?

Let us know in the comments below.