I Will Teach You to Be Rich: No Guilt. No Excuses. No B.S. Just a 6-Week Program That Works.

by Ramit Sethi

The À La Carte Method takes advantage of psychology to cut our spending. Here’s how it works: Cancel all the discretionary subscriptions you can: your magazines, cable—even your gym. Then, buy what you need à la carte: Instead of paying for a ton of channels you never watch on cable, buy only the episodes you watch for $2.99 each from iTunes. Buy a day pass for the gym each time you go (around $10 or $20). The À La Carte Method works for three reasons: 1. You’re probably overpaying already. Most of us dramatically overestimate how much value we get from subscriptions. For example, if I asked you how many times a week you go to the gym, chances are you’d say, “Oh . . . two or three times a week.” That’s BS. In fact, one study showed gym members overestimate how much they’ll use their membership by more than 70 percent. Members who chose a monthly fee of about $70 attended an average of 4.3 times per month. That comes out to more than $17 per gym visit—when in reality they’d have been better off buying pay-as-you-go passes for $10 each. 2. You’re forced to be conscious about your spending. It’s one thing to passively look at your credit card bill and say, “Ah, yes, I remember that cable bill.” It’s quite another to spend $2.99 each time you want to buy a TV show—and when you actively think about each charge, your consumption will go down. 3. You value what you pay for. You place a higher premium on the things you pay for out-of-pocket than things via subscription. The Downsi...