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Formal is broken common sense is weird, so we're here to help you transform your life. From the Ramsi Network and the Fairwins Credit Union Studio, this is the Ramsi Show. I'm George Campbell joined by Dr. John Deloni, we're taking your calls at Triple 8 8 2 5 5 2 2 5. Patrick is in Detroit, what's going on Patrick? So in 2012 I bought my family's home for $80,000 at about 3% interest and worked on it, put

in sweat equity, and about 10 years ago I was a child bankruptcy because I was buried in student loans, and I kind of got that in order of course I couldn't get rid of the student loans, but got rid of other debt and structured things. Well, after COVID I saw that I could sell the home I was living in, which I loved and I'm sick about right now to pay off those loans.

So I did pay off those loans and I was debt free and I subsequently rented for four years.

The rentals are pretty high in my area, I rented for about $2400 a month for three to four years and wanted to get back into owning a house. So I bought a house last January for $230,000 with no money down, which I'm sick about that too. I'm raising my son alone, he's going into the senior year, and I have more debt now than

I've had before. I have a car loan, I have $230,000 in mortgage, I'm paying $6.25 on that mortgage, I make a $100,000 a year, I'm 59 years old, and I'm looking at retirement, you know, I'm breathing down the barrel of retirement, and I have only about $150,000 and a 401k, and I'm, I'll tell you guys, and that's, I'm not sleeping well.

Yeah, thanks for calling, man. Thanks for calling. Thanks.

That was a hard call to make, and I'm proud of you for doing that, man.

Cool? Yeah. And we'll give you a pass. We'll give you a path here, but we're not going to beat you up, we're on the same team.

Okay. What if we're going to do it? We got a great one thing. We're not going to beat past Patrick up for his mistakes. It's right.

You've been, you've got to trick in your neck from looking backwards of all the things you

“wish you could have done, things you should have done, regrets, shouldn't have sold that,”

shouldn't have taken on that debt. So can we agree that this is a new chapter for Patrick, 59 is going to look different. Yeah. Good. What if your homework assignments this weekend is going to be to write 2014 Patrick a letter and let that guy go?

Set him free. Okay? Yeah. And then we're going to write 65-year-old Patrick a letter about who you decided to become at H59 so that he could have a different life.

Okay? Yeah. All right. We're going to the math here. So you're 59-year-old, like, in a hundred-year-old.

Yeah, before we get into the math or less now, I do have $30,000 that is in my bank account right now. Great. Great. You're doing better than most of America if it gives you any consolation.

It's a low bar. You're doing better. So what is left on the car loan? 26. Man, sounds like you could be debt-free today.

It's a few mortgage? Well, and there's a $7,000 loan that I had to take out to get some repairs done on the house. They had to be done. Okay. But that's all the debt.

“So you knock out the $7,000 is that one loan, the $7,000 repairs?”

Yeah. Okay. So if you knock that out, you're down to 23,000. You're still owed the 26 on the car. You could knock most of the car out and keep that $1,000 starter emergency fund.

What's the car payment? That's the payment on that other loan. The other loan is about $175 a month. It's got like a $10,000. It's a $7,000 loan with 10.5% interest.

That's zero percent interest.

Yeah. Congratulations. So you freed up $175 today. What about the car loan? What's the payment?

It's about $0,5 to $0,575. Okay. So $5,75. We're talking $750. Freed up in the next couple of months if you do this.

So you just got about a $9,000 a year raise of take home pay. Got it? That leads me to get it and I would love to do it. But I am scared to death that I'll lose my job or something like that will happen and I'll have nothing and I have my son with me.

Gotcha. We got you. But here's what I know.

“If you lost your job, which every single one of us that can happen to us, right?”

You have your son with you.

You're under the squat rack of fatherhood of life, of responsibility and you know that would be a big kick in the gut and you would owe nobody anything except for your mortgage. And then the very next day you'd be at Home Depot at Lowe's, at wherever else, applying for jobs. And you'd make enough money to pay your bills and you would show your son.

You'd give him a ring-side seat as to what a grown man with responsibilities does when he gets kicked in the gut, right? You're projecting all the negative into future Patrick's life, but you're not projecting the reality into future Patrick's life, which is you're a good man and you work your butt off and you love your son and you love yourself.

Right? Yeah. And so you're going to have 750 bucks on top of whatever else you have in margin and you're going to rebuild that emergency fund right away. Are you taking home about six grand a month right now, seven grand a month?

Yeah. I think so. I think that's about right. I'm in the other room so he can't hear me. I'm sorry for my budget, but yeah, it's not about it.

I'm taking home now, yeah, you think so. Okay, and then what are your monthly expenses? What does it take to just cover the bills? We're not living luxuriously, but we're just four walls, food, utility, shelter, transportation, insurance, debt payments.

I think we're five.

“Okay, so Napkin Math says you should have, if you do a right, one or two grand left over”

every month and that's without freeing up the 750. Right? Yeah, you might want to update a little bit, maybe more than five. Well, let's get it down to five. If 50 would be mine, I think the 750 probably had about a margin of about eight, eight,

hundred, nine. But if we sat down together, we did your budget. You think I could find that much room if we went, you could probably cut that. We could do better here. There's two of you guys.

You cleaned that up. Probably. Yeah, of course you could. If your future dependent on it, your retirement dependent on it, could you do it? Well, yes.

Good. Because it depends on it. Part of the letter you're writing to 65-year-old you, we stop spending on x, y, and z, so that, so that my son wouldn't have to take care of me when I was 70. Right.

Yeah. You are way better off than you think you are and George nailed it. You spend so much energy beating up past Patrick that you're not giving him any chance to be successful in the present and forward moving forward moving forward moving on. And by the way, sit down with your son.

There is, I just looked it up. There's the community college guarantee, the promise there in Michigan. You might sit down and say, because of my situation because of choices I've made. I can't afford for you to go to college, but luckily we live in a state where community college is free and I'm going to keep saving, work on myself, get myself completely out

of debt and I might be able to help you if you transfer to a second year to a four-year

college moving on.

“If that's what you want to do, there's so many options for you.”

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Call 800-356-4282 or go to zander.com for a quick and easy quote. That's zander.com. Justin is up next and date no higher. What's going on, Justin? Hey, how you guys doing?

Doing well. Taking my call. Absolutely. What's going on?

“So, me and my wife are moving married for about three years in pretty diligent”

about saving. I'll follow you from the emergency fund and close to a 40 grand save for a down payment, but she's wanting to quit soon, so I'm trying to change jobs to make enough that she can quit to take the stay at home with our baby, and just wondering if it's, like, if it's ever advisable to just get a 30-year mortgage in order to get into the market sooner

and start building equity instead of just renting. Man, I feel you're paying on this one for houses. I do be expensive, and you're, like, the 15 years going to be $600 more for the payment, and that's going to take this much more than a down payment to get there. So, what is the house you're looking about?

How much is it? I really don't know where in the market store. I mean, I would love to be under about a, like, $200,000 house. Do those exist in your area?

“I mean, if we can, they exist, but, you know, I'm, I think I'm willing to sacrifice on kind”

of the quality of the house or what the house has more than my wife is. So, she wants to stay home, living alone, I would not make that sacrifice, brother. And have the dream home. Yeah, I mean, I think she's willing to compromise on some things, just, you know, the things

that make a house more expensive, she really wants, usually have, here's what you're, here's

the trade you're looking to make, okay? And this is just putting all the cards on the table. You have three different pressures on you right now. One, your wife wants to stay at home with baby, that's a great thing, okay? Number two, y'all want to buy a house, you had a picture of what your life would be, your

wife, especially did of, we're going to be a small family, we're going to own a home. That's a great thing. The three houses are incredibly expensive and the interest rates on houses are really high right now, especially on a 30 or no, they're really high. And so you have three pressure points here and where I see people get themselves into crazy

trouble is when they don't recognize that we have to prioritize these things and each prioritizing each one of those things is going to come with some sort of, I mean, I hate to use this work because it sounds so dramatic, but it's going to come with consequences. I really want to stay with baby in that means we're going to have to rent for two more years while we save up.

We're going to, I'm going to stay in the workforce for one more year longer than I have to. I'm going to make one of those construction paper chains and hang it in my bedroom and a tariff one every day, but that's going to accelerate us being able to get into a house

“so fast so that we have the rest of our lot right, you know what I'm saying?”

But it's when people try to do everything all at the same time and then they start moving values around, they start moving their principles around, they find themselves just buying a brand new car because it seems easier. Just buying a kind of a lesser house than either of us want just to say we have a house. By the way, that feeling will last less than one week and you'll go, oh no, we need to fix

the count.

Fix the kitchen, do this in the bath, always the leak in the roof and now you're stuck

in a pretty ugly situation, so it's just recognizing we have three amazing choices, three great things that we all want in front of us, but we can't do all of them right now. And so we have to make some choices on what we want more. Yeah, make sense. What are you making every year?

You think it's, um, between the two of us right now are about 75, um, she's the bigger half of that and I've been working for the same guys in high school and it's just not grown into what I was expecting, so I'm moving jobs in the winter, um, just to finish out the year with it, it's a landscape business. So I'm okay.

Because here's, here's the same that it's not the housing markets fall right now. It's an income problem. There's just a math equation here. If we go down to 35, 40 grand an income, we're not going to be able to eat. This is not like a rent versus mortgage thing.

So either way, we've got to get the income up if this dream is going to come true and I hope it does. I mean, you guys are, how old are you, too? I'm 22 in my life, 23.

Okay, average average homeowner is now about 40 years old getting to their first home.

And by the way, like for real, dude, like this is just two dads talking to another brand

“new dad, do not buy a house until you've got secure employment.”

Yeah. Okay. Like the last thing on earth, you need us to be making 40 grand or 30 grand at a job that may or may not this or that or could be, dude, don't do that to yourself, but don't do that to your wife, don't do that to your kid, don't do that to the temperature in your

home. And that means, like, cool, I'm going to look for a job that I need to make 75 grand. I might have to go get some new training. I might have to. So it's just put in the cart before the horse and a lot of stuff, man.

But do we, like, I can't tell you, George and I, how big of a fan, George and I are of all the things you all are trying to do, right? Yeah. Thank you. It's just slow and down and not letting your dream become a nightmare right

underneath you because you want to do it all right this second.

Yeah. And I will say, I'm making like 35 right now and I have an interview next week for a job doing HBAC in which I'll start at about 40 and I've got friends at that business that are making north of 90 doing that. So like fantastic.

I, I'm going to go and make it work so that, I mean, I want my wife to say home, that's

“like priority one and I think I just need to be here something more concrete and that it”

is going to be worth it to save up and get, you know, how our feet on the hologram first. And in the math isn't in your favor, the rates are significantly higher on a 30 year to 15 year, the amount of money you would pay over that 30 years. You wouldn't stay in the sales for 30 years anyway, but yeah, it's just, it's just, I'm doing a get-it-man.

I get it that desperation. I got to get my family a house, I got to get in a house, I got to, this kid's got to have a get-it-man. I get it. It's just not there for you yet.

And by the way, it's important that you and your wife have the conversation about, she wants to stay home, she wants to own a home, and that means you're going to be working seven days a week. They're sacrificing on either way. And so she may come back and say, I actually want my husband to, what does this look like?

What does the season of our life look like? We're one or both of us is grinding like this. So it's just asking ourselves, what kind of life do we want, and then what's the path to get there? But I love your hustle, man.

You're a good man, dude. You know, when I was 23, I started this company Justin, I was 40 grand in debt. So the fact that you guys have an emergency fund, you have 40 grand save for the down payment

at this age is so incredible.

Yeah, you're so smart. You are not behind at all. And if you buy house at 25, you will still be an incredible human being who is crushing it financially. There's no law that says if you don't have a house by 25, your terrible dad and husband.

I'd rather you be 27 have rented for several years, save up a big chunk of a down payment.

“And you'll go by the house you actually want, not the one that you have to suffer through”

because like you were so desperate to be a homeowner. Both George and I rented for a long time as married men. I had roommates all the way up until I was married. Both of my kids and he lived in rented houses and they've worked out just fine. Yeah.

So what is your rent right now? It's 1200 a month. Okay. Now, if we go down a long time, that's still going to be very cool. It's not important.

It's not a bad situation, but we're actually renting from her parents. So that's another thing that it's not a bad situation at all, but I'm definitely excited to not have that anymore. Sure. Forever your in-laws be your landlord?

Yeah. That's a fair wish. But if you're in-laws are great and they're giving you a good deal, then come up with a plan for in one year we want to be out, or in 18 months we want to be out on a six months we want to be out.

And it is the biggest pain is moving from rental to rental before you buy a house. You feel like it's a waste of time energy on my gosh, it's the worst. But, man, if it sets you up, if it sets 28 year old you up, 30 year old you up, man, it's a pain in the butt now, but I promise you when you're 30, you're going to be glad that you slowed down and did it with the right way.

It's just like a safe shot. This is a slingshot. You're pulling it back. And you're like, wait, I'm going backwards. I want to go forward.

It's going to hold on, but hold on, we're pulling it back, we're pulling it back. And when you release that thing with a strong down payment, she gets to stay home, you live on one income. There's no stress, dude, you are going to skyrocket ahead of everyone that you know, that's going to home, doing so good ahead of house five years ago.

Where are they now? Might be selling that house because they did it before they were ready. We don't want that to be you, man. So, do it the right way. I'm going to send you a link to our free home buying course that I did.

So hang on the line, we'll get you a link to that.

And for the rest of you, we'll put a link in the description to that course for first-time

home buyers completely free.

It's Jade Warshot.

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So go to RamsySolutions.com/coverage to find the type of insurance you're looking for and connect with a Ramsy trusted agent. Lee isn't Seattle up next. What's going on, Lee? Are you there?

Hello, so you're sorry about that. I have a good question for you guys. I have, I make 120 grand a year, but I'm sitting on about 100 grand a year. To break it down, I've got $25,000 on our single car loan. Gosh, 45 grand in credit cards and 25 grand in student loans.

I've also got about five grand left on a couch. I found it for my wife, Cheryl. Oh, wow. We're driving Cheryl now into this. May.

She comes in. Cheryl in the couch. She's not even here, brother. Exactly. I agree.

“Yeah, I think it leads to this couch too, you might be sleeping on it after this call,”

brother. Hope it's comfortable. Yeah, I might be. Yeah, it's definitely been a tough one for me. I'm just, I just think I'm, I'm just spending yields here.

I feel terrible about all this. Lee, Lee, what, what is $45,000 in credit cards? Oh, let's see, I mean, is that all my debt? It doesn't matter understand. What did you use them?

Yeah, what? Yeah, is this you trying to prop up a lifestyle that you simply can't afford? Is it? Exactly. Yeah.

I just, let's see. So, I've got my car payment that I'm paying, which the car payments expensive as well. No, we're asking what's the cost on the credit card? Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to get to the root of, um, like, how does somebody

make an 120 grand a year, um, and does your wife work? Ah, yes, she does. How much does she make? She makes about a little under, then I make, probably around $110 grand.

Okay, so you all make a quarter million dollars together.

Little less. That's not that. A little less. Okay. Okay.

And what I'm trying to get to is how do you all owe $100,000 in consumer debt, half of which is credit card spending? Well, that's the thing, I don't know, I mean, I, I, I, I tracked all these subscriptions that we have for like our, um, TV services and everything, and it seems like they're coming out automatically.

And, um, I mean, this is not something that was Netflix. Yeah, Netflix is not causing 50 grand in credit card debt. This is, this is a guy who, this is a couple who finances a couch. Yes. This is our card payment, but this is, we're trying to show you the math on this.

You probably, you guys take home like 15 grand a month and that's not enough for you. You went to credit cards on top of that because you couldn't afford your bills. Yes, that's the problem. Is that a close? Is that vacations?

“That's what I'm trying to get to is they're spending a dinner house.”

Our house had to be remodeled and yes, my wife does have a small, I wouldn't say, small spending addiction. Oh, gosh, let's see, our house had to be remodeled. We had a huge water leak about all of it when it's to our house remodeled. Okay, that's what I was trying to get to.

That's, it's different than our house exploded. You put house repairs on the credit cards versus I just have to get new clothes every week

Those are two different things for me.

Just trying to help get to the bottom of how we can help you best. Okay. Okay. Yes, I understand.

“Is there one car payment and one that's paid off or do you guys just share one car?”

We share one car, the car payment, she bought a car, she finances it. We are about, I'm trying to break down it. We have our car payment. The loan that we have for it was 25 brand and now we every week or every time we need to pay the car payment, we keep on setting it back because we aren't able to pay that.

So I'm wondering if it would just be better to sell the car, I don't know, it's hard to explain. But like, I'm wondering, can't make the car payment. Why can't you make the car payment, brother? We have not enough money to pay it. Okay.

We've got bigger problems here than we can solve on a single call.

But you guys need to have a come to Jesus conversation tonight. So look at your paychecks that showed up in that bank statement and then go find out where the heck all that money went. Do y'all share a single check in account that both of your checks deposit into? No, well, actually, she has her own, I have my own, okay, she will not stop spending it.

I'm in the other room right now. I don't want her to hear any of that. Here's something. I respect that. You're a good husband who wants to protect his wife's honor.

I get that. But brother, there's a, George and I have been trying to dig at and is becoming incredibly apparent to us is you have a huge situation on your hands. Yeah. The money, as you know it, as it's coming in, as it's being spent, there are tens of

thousands of dollars on account it for. That happens and I don't want to put things out in the universe, brother. But that happens when somebody's struggling with addiction, somebody's got having an affair, somebody's just wildly out of control. So here me say, as serious as I can and as lovingly as I can, you've got a huge mess on

“your hands and the only way forward is for you and your wife to get in a room and y'all”

to put everything on the table and say, we are about to lose our home in our car and we make $225,000 a year. Yes, I definitely think I should have a talk with her. And you know, I've been struggling to figure out if she's been cheating on me because she's been hanging out with one of her coworkers that she will not tell me anything

about. Yes, your gut is, is, I hate to tell you, brother, your gut is probably directionally right. Okay. Yeah.

And it's terrible because she's the one that telling me that I have the spending problem when she's, she's out here buying couches and, you know, and I don't know how to do with any of it. I need to put all this on the table like you said, I like your idea. Do you have a mirror nearby?

A mirror? Yeah. Yes, I do. I want you to take a look in that mirror and say, it's not all my fault, but it's my responsibility. Because so far, nothing in this conversation has been leased fault.

At every turn. Okay. And she bought the couch and she has her own money. I don't know what she's doing over there. But man, if she could just get her act together, we'd be doing great.

I don't believe that's the case. I think you both have some serious work to do on yourselves and on your marriage.

Here's what I would request at this meeting.

Both of you pull your credit reports. And you can do that for free. What's the website, George? Annual credit report.com and you will credit reports.com. Here's the next thing.

When there's a whole bunch of credit cards, because brother, you don't know what she's opened in her name. Exactly. And so I want to know as a married couple, where are we spending our money? And if there are certain credit cards, you can't look at that. I'm never going to tell you that.

I'm not pulling my credit report. You need to know that.

“Then you need to go sit with a marriage counselor or you need to go see somebody.”

And you might have been sitting with an attorney. Because you've got a big mess on your hand. Exactly. But George is right. You have to own what you do next.

How you show up and treat her with kindness and dignity, even though she's not giving you that back. How you say, here's exactly what I want us to do together. Give her a clear plan. Here's the numbers I want to see for us. Because you'll simply make way too much money to not to be in the situation.

And George and I talked to people all the time who have a lot of debt and who make a lot of money. But dude, you've got a whole in the bottom of your account somewhere that y'all are just shedding money. There's zero reason why y'all shouldn't be able to make your payments even owned 100 grand.

Unless you all live in a $5 million house and your payment is $7,000 a month.

Is that true? No, it's about, I would say our payments to the housing around 5 grand. Oh, that's a lot. But it's still a fraction of what you guys are taking home every month. Exactly.

And that's just one tiny piece. You know what? That's a lot. But it's not out of whack. Yeah, that's a tiny piece. You've got a big, big problem when your hand brother.

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That's SL-A-C-E. Solacehealth.com/ramsy must be 18 or older. Advocates do not provide medical or legal advice. [Music] Up next, we've got Michael and Fort Wayne in Indiana.

Michael, welcome to The Ramsey Show. Hey, thanks for taking that call. Absolutely. I just want your opinion on something. My wife and I and our family were in baby step four, five and six.

And then just thank you for all the principles you guys teach. It's put us here, it's such a blessing. And we just had our youngest kid go to kindergarten. So that enabled my wife to go back to a full-time teaching after being out for 11 years. So thankful for her and just all she's sacrificed and to do that.

Kind of our motivation as a family for her to go back was we're super close to pan-off our mortgage. How close? Like 42,000 I think. I had two. We're almost at the finish line.

That's a car loan for some people. You got this. Exactly. Exactly. So we're almost there.

So I want you to take out taxes and giving them the 15% on my income. It makes the shovel a little smaller to get it done, you know. And so we're wondering if we can get it paid off in like 11 months or a year.

“What would you guys think of still doing the 15% towards retirement from my income?”

Just like we've always done, but hold mouth on it on hers till we get that house paid off.

And after that, just bump it all up about 15%. Just to get it done. I'm interested to know Georgian I may disagree on this, but I want to be as honest as I can here. Okay. I did that exact thing.

Did you? My wife and I circled up and said, hey, we're going to pause this for one year and get this thing done forever. And for me, who's got a psychosis about oing people money, it was the right thing. But man, going on more than a year, going more than 18 months, it's really in trust me from lived experience.

Right. To start pulling because man that feels like free money and the discipline it takes to go back to investing. I've lived it. It's really hard. What do you think, what's the principle, George?

Well, I'm wondering, what is your wife make a year as a teacher now? She's bringing in 52, 52 a year now. And that was got an automatic deduction, doesn't it, for a teacher retirement system of some sort? So, so they've got an automatic deduction, it goes towards the, and yeah, a teacher retirement. And they've got like a 401k on top of it.

“And that's what we were considering it, you know, we'll do the 15% either now.”

And how are you guys? How old are we? I'm 42, she's 36. Okay, 36. So let me just do some math here. I'll pull up our investment calculator because what I like to do is go, okay, what do all the sides look like of this equation?

So what you guys are saying we're going to give up is 650 a month for a year. So $70, $100, right? Yep. So let's say that we just, we had that $7800 and it was growing for us for the next 20 years. Now you're 62, she's still a young, sprightly 56, right?

So I'm going to give it 20 years to grow. I'm going to say 10% average annual rate of return, no monthly contribution. Just that pile of money growing for 20 years, that's really what we're giving up. That's the opportunity cost we're talking about in order to pay off the mortgage a little earlier. So I'm going to calculate, it's $57,000.

Yeah. So that's the, the actual numbers we want to compare not just, well, it's 650 a month. We're just giving that up. We're actually giving up close to 60 grand to make this happen a little bit sooner. So what I, I would do is say, all right, let's say that she did invest 15%.

How much does that slow down the mortgage payment? When would you guys pay off the house? So from what I'm seeing, we'd, without doing this routine, it'd be 11 or 12 months. We're doing it. It'd be like maybe 16.

So it's not that much longer. I know it's not a huge, huge deal. So we're talking four months apart. And then here's my other thing and this is where my brain goes. I go, okay, how do we make up the gap?

“How do we put that much extra while she invest to still pay this often under a year?”

What am I willing to do? Side hustles, work harder, cut expenses, make other sacrifices to not derail our financial plan. Because you guys have worked so hard to get here into unplug investing for a year. Just as a muscle, you're going to atrophy a little bit. Yeah, that's what I was saying.

It's hard to come back, dude. Yeah. No, I get that. I get that.

First of all, 50% to 20, 30, 40%.

Once you guys have that mortgage paid off, it's going to feel easy. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's just like you're just adding a little more. Yeah. Can she tut her over next summer?

Can you do commit to doing something else? Because that's really what we're talking about. It's a couple of grand. Less than 10 grand difference here. Yeah, we can look into that.

That's what we're talking about. Yeah, that's probably a good way to look at it is. If we want to accelerate this, there's going to be some pain. Do we want that pain to be 20 years from now? We're like, man, we can have 60,000 more dollars in retirement.

Do we want that pain to be? We're going to skip a vacation. And we're going to go camping somewhere in Indiana instead of going on a big trip this year.

“What pain are we willing to endure short term so that we never have a house payment?”

We want to accelerate that thing. And you might land on. It's four more months. Let's just stay the course. And hopefully also we gave you a good like ring side seat to I'm an over emotional guy.

I know that, right? And so I'm a super nerd who's like one of the numbers. Yeah, exactly. George is like, well, future me is going to really be sad. And so the.

It's just knowing man, I wish I wish with all of my heart I had with George has.

Which is the ability to feel uncomfortable and then always do the next right thing.

I've been practicing that for a long time. I'm trying. I'm trying. Right. He's trying.

And I'm hopefully he wishes he had a little more fun like I do. 100%. Right. So I'll try to hobbies like John does. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. He wishes he had joy and laughter in his life like I do. So like all I have to say is I couldn't sit here and say you can't do that. Because I did it.

That's exactly what me and my wife did. And she knew she's married to a person who's quasi-insane about owing people money. It's a lived. It's like it melts me. And so for her she's like, oh, I get my husband back in a year.

Yes, whatever we got to do. That's like John is the little devil on your shoulder and then I have Dave Ramsey on the other side going. You move from intensity to intentionality and maybe set four through six. So that's what I'm here to is. And I was intentionally intense.

Right. You're going to be 43 and 37 with a paid for house. Like that's insane. So if it's four months beyond that, we're still going to cheer you on and go. That is incredible.

And the fact that you invested the whole time is even more incredible.

So that would be my personal plan would be let's invest.

And see how we can still hit our goal of knocking the sound less in a year. And I almost can guarantee it. Now I can't say it for sure. You guys will pay this house off in a year while investing.

“And can I completely do an owing idea of what I've been saying?”

I want to throw a third option on the table.

What if you and your wife sat down and said we're not going to do it in 10 months. We're not going to do it in 14 months. We're actually going to do it in 16 months. And we're going to take a little bit of money each month. Now that you're back in the workforce full time and we still have kids.

We're going to hire a house cleaner. I want to take you to a nice meal once a week. I'm going to take the kids out and let you just exhale because you're now your surrounded by kids all day. And you come home to work at like you all begin to build in. What kind of life do we want to have?

Because in the same way in your home. Like in my house I'm psychotic about a couple of things. Your wife may be feeling the weight of I'm back full time. But I also feel this pressure to keep my old identity and and and and. You all ask yourselves what kind of home.

What do you want your home to feel like? And I would say even being in part of like George or same being intentional is. We're going to actually do something great. We're going to slow it down a little bit. And we're going to go out to eat.

Yeah. We're going to give each other a room to breathe.

She deserves it. She's she's amazing.

Just the fact that she makes these first couple weeks of school. So it's awesome. Yeah. And going to classroom is different than it was ten years ago, brother. It's different.

And so yeah, she'll give her the love and care and support. She needs ask her every morning of your of your life. How can I love you today? And man, be all about supporting you. So like a really good husband.

So we've given you a pretty much no answer. Right. I gave you the right one. John gave an alternative.

“So I think we're both, you know, we're both.”

Yeah. George gave you the right answer. And I gave you the two alternatives. The one I did and the one I probably wish I would have done. There are no sins being committed here.

But the plan works if you work it. And so we say four five six are done simultaneously.

And 15 percent is forever.

In fact, once you pay off the mortgage, you just increase investing. But even if you had it, you're like, hey, we're good on retirement. We still tell people to invest because there's more impact to be made for your family, for community, for the things that you want to do.

It's a good problem if you had too much money in retirement. You can come back and yell at me later, even if you paid off the mortgage for months later on. Way to go, man. Thank you.

Okay, George. We hear from so many people that are trying to live out to the Ramsay plan. Right, they're getting out of debt and everything. But the hard thing is there's not many banks out there that actually support the way we teach you to handle money.

“Yeah, most banks, they don't want you to win with money.”

So they charge a bunch of nuisance fees. There's all this fine print and worst of all. They are pushing debt products at you nonstop. Yes. But the good thing is is that fair winds isn't like most banks.

They're not like the other guys. They're not like the other guys. Yeah, they are not pushing debt and they actually want you to win with the baby steps. And so what's great too is they created the smart bundle for Ramsay fans, which includes a high yield savings account and no monthly fee checking.

Which is huge because it's rare to have a checking account tied to a high yield savings account. You can get all that with fair winds and for the nerds out there, you can have a 10 different high yield savings accounts for different goals. So you got your emergency fund, the car upgrade fund, the vacation fund, the world is your oyster. So beautiful.

And check out the debit card, the new one, the live like no one else. That's beautiful. Oh, that's beautiful. It's so beautiful. That's a conversation starter.

It's so good. Well, and when you swipe or you tap, you know, every time you take out your wallet, you're remembering that you are living like no one else and you're being intentional with your money. I've been using fair winds for months and months now. I love their features, the app, the customer service.

It is all so good and so aligned with the Ramsay principles. Absolutely. So y'all, we both bank at fair winds and we love their commitment to Ramsay values. So check it out. You can get that smart bundle.

We're going to drop a link in the description or you can go to fairwinds.org/Ramsie today. That's right. That's fairwinds.org/Ramsie and shared by the NCUA. Welcome back to The Ramsay Show. The Fairwinds Credit Union Studio.

I'm George Campbell here with John Delone taking your calls. I'm Triple 8, 825, 5225. Thomas is in New York City up next. What's going on, Thomas? Hey, how you doing?

Doing great. How can John and I help? So I currently am health hacking. I'm trying to move. I don't want to come up with my current situation because I'm in a low income area.

I feel like my two options right now is in one move out to an apartment in the rent. But I would rent out my current unit. Or two, which I would lean towards is to find another property in a better area.

So Thomas, I'm an old old man. What is house hacking? John hasn't been on TikTok ever. He doesn't know. I would not know how to log in to TikTok.

Yeah. What is house hacking? So I live in one unit and I rent out my other two units. And I get rent for the mortgage. Is that what the kids call out these days?

House hacking. Yes. All right. That sounds miserable. It's pretty miserable.

I actually hit it. So let me ask you this. So I was an early adopter back in 2000, like nine, ten into this thing called biohacking. And I used to-- There was no continuous glucose monitor.

So I'd put my finger every morning.

And I was always peein' on ketone strips.

And I was keeping these detailed cell spreadsheets. And then one day I was like, I'm biohacking myself into a life that I hate living. Yeah. Right?

And so then I quit biohacking. You don't know what I mean. But I don't know. I don't know. George knows more about this TikTok conversation.

What caused you to get into this? House hacking, sexual. I'm assuming you're a guy in your 20s. How old are you? I'm 27.

Okay. I mean, I just want to become financially stable. But like did someone tell you about this? Did you see a video? And it sounded alluring?

And you started looking for multi-family homes?

“I think I was going into a few years back.”

Yeah.

I didn't like how expensive rent was depending on what was very bad.

It's better to buy them through rent. So you're going to highly combine. Okay. What I want you to understand is that a lot of times, the things that seem really cool on the internet

are often going to destroy your life. Now, you're not quite there yet. But you're getting a little bit of that taste in your mouth. The reality of this was not what was sold to me. When I bought the course or whatever.

And so I want you to realize that it's okay to opt out. And you know what? I'm going to go rent for a while and just sort of reset. I can sell this multi-family because I don't really want to be a landlord by default. Just because I thought House hacking was going to be the move.

And both George and I have both rented both married. I've rented both of my kids have lived in rented homes at certain times. And we kept plugging away. And our life is changed now. You go to what I'm saying.

Like the fact that you're thinking about future you and you're trying these things. Tells me you've got what it takes to become financially secure. You're not scared of doing hard stuff. You're not scared of putting yourself in uncomfortable situations. You're not scared of like doing the next right hard thing.

So man, all you need is a clear path. That's actually going to get you where you want to go.

“And not get a bunch of clicks on some social media site, right?”

Yeah. So what are you making right now? What's your income and what is the income you're actually netting from this multi-family? If any. My income like gross is 300.

What do you do? Uh, what's all point in there? A $300,000. Yeah. You know who doesn't need to house hack.

Guys who make $300,000. Talk to someone. You can pay your own mortgage. Like a grown adult. You don't need to do it for you.

That live next door. That also knock on your door in the toilet breaks. That throw parties. I'm trying to like, you know, I'm not helping it back to position. Thomas, you're in it.

Do you have any debt right now? Yeah. I like $4,000 to the loan. Okay. You can pay that off today.

You have that money in savings. Yeah. Okay. Today. How much will you have left in savings after that?

A good amount. Like, uh, all 90. Amazing. So think about this. Two day, you will be consumer debt free with $90,000 in the bank.

What is owed on the mortgage on this multi-family? I just bought it, um, like, 18 months ago. Um, almost not all of it. Like, 60. 60 is what is owed and it's about worth.

60. 70. I bought it at like, 69. Right now. If I have to get 30, 50.

Okay. So you can probably walk away after fees with a little bit of pocket change. If you sold it. Maybe. Maybe.

Okay. Because right now they're just paying the mortgage.

Like, basically you're, you're staying there with rent free.

Yeah. What's the cash flow like? Because you have a big old mortgage on. Yeah. I mean, I'm like, negative 100 after rent is collected.

So you owe a hundred? Like, like, after I get one, my rent has to put like $100. Of your own money. Okay. So you basically have a very low rent right now.

“But you have to do work as a landlord and deal with all the risk and liability.”

And all that fun stuff. Yeah. And somebody else regularly flushing your toilets.

So what is your actual dream?

If I could erase this whole house hacking thing, we restarted today. What does Tom is really want?

“Do you want to live in a single family home in a decent neighborhood and start a family?”

Like, what's on the other end of this? Yeah. I might send a family home in my neighborhood. So buy that. Say yourself up for the life you actually want.

What's your, what was growing up? Like, what was money like growing up for you? Oh, money was in. I wasn't, I wasn't funny. Like, yeah.

Money wasn't there. I wasn't broke. You know, money wasn't. Was it a source of tension? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, we didn't.

My mother did a good job.

So we didn't feel like I was a child. No. I might say this as a character in anything, any shade on anybody. I'm just trying to get to it. Yeah.

“Like, because we're, we're Georgia and I are sitting.”

You're 25 years old. You make 300 grand. Yeah. When you're 27, you'll have banked $900,000. After taxes.

You know what I'm saying? Like, bro, you're doing really, really well. Yeah. Now you're in the uncomfortable adult seat of slow and steady. So imagine you go rent for a year, even if it costs you.

I don't know. Two or three grand. I don't know what it's going to cost in your area for a place that you like. And you just live fairly frugal. Live on less than you make.

Should be easy on 300 grand with no debt. You bank 150 grand on top of your 90. Now you got some serious money. You got 240,000 to put down on a house that you actually want. You think I should like you buy this nice single phone.

They might never have. Buy the home that you want. Because you don't need somebody to pay your mortgage. That's not the issue. Yeah.

If you buy the house you want and you start building the life you want. And a few years from now, you want to get into real estate. That's awesome, man. You'll be able to do that with cash by going to buy the place. Yeah.

And then put two different families on either side of each other. Give them a great deal on rent to support them and man. Everybody wins. You have a girlfriend right now. You're going to find out.

Yeah, I do. Okay. What does she want for your future? Together. Oh, yeah.

She wants that duplex life. I think you know what to do, man. And you're in a great position to do it. But it all takes us putting this house on the market and going, well, try that. Wasn't for me.

Wasn't for me. That's why the way out loud.

“You should get into radio because your voice is way better than noise.”

No, it's smooth. God, Leah would love to have a voice like that. [Music] This show is sponsored by Better Help. A lot of you are just trying to keep it together all the time.

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trust a Better Help therapist to help you carry the load. Go to betterhelp.com/Ramsie for 10% off your first month. That's Better Help, H-E-O-P.com/Ramsie. James is in Rawling North Carolina. Next James, welcome to the show.

What's going on, guys? We're doing great. How can we help today? Let me just start by saying I'm a little bit relieved. A little bit disappointed that I'm not talking with Dave today. Because I knew Dave was going to whip my tail.

We can do it. We'll die a little bit for you, man. We take our tail with my Dave too, so we know. Look, John, I listen to you all the time, bro.

And man, I'm going to learn a lot of, even...

I don't want to say tactics, but techniques, how to stick with people from you. I appreciate you, bro.

“You got it, man. Thanks for calling. How can we help, man?”

Yeah. So my wife and I've been married 14 years. My wife is amazing. We have six kiddos, 10 down to one. I am a pastor of a growing church,

and I also run a small business. And in a spot, we've allowed ourselves to get back into a spot where we're going to got a good bit of debt. And we have an income issue, but at the same time, I also have just a time issue.

So anyway, we're trying to get started back on the baby steps and get out of debt. And so we're just in looking for maybe a little bit of help

with us, because we're trying to get started.

What kind of debt is this? And how much? Yeah, so we've got about 70,000 consumer debt. It's about 30k and a personal loan. Two grand Rio to the local county. We're paying on taxes for our land.

We have about five grand over two different credit cards. And then, 16,000 in a truck, I bought last year. When I was starting the business, and then also a $8,000 for a enclosed trailer, I bought as well. For business? What's a small business?

Yeah, I thought I'd do a light remodel in handyman, that kind of stuff. What did you report last year? Yeah, how much did you make? Yeah, how much did you make?

Yeah, about 65. And it was about half a year. I was doing it full time, about half a year. One really, not even another half. In November, I actually stepped to really back in month of the year.

I was going to full time in November. I stepped in as a lead pastor at church. And so I cut back to about two or three days a week with the business.

“And I'm honestly not sure right now if it's worth it.”

What is your salary as a minister? About 60,000. Okay. So, you were making 125. Are you making a grander month doing this now?

With the side business? Yeah. It depends, honestly, to be certain, I'm like July, June, July. Was maybe a grand.

August will be about seven grand. Because you're, yeah, on the months that are bad, you're bleeding money from this thing, just trying to make payments on the truck and trailer. And was the 30K person alone for the business?

No, that was, we moved about two years ago and purchased a piece of land. What was the land moment? And just where we live. We sold our house and just lifestyle. We moved out of city, moved out into the country

to raise the kids that way. Okay. Yeah, so we ended up. We thought we could cash for it off the cell of our other house. And it just once we got in it.

We could. So we ended up getting a personal loan to finish drilling the whale. And that kind of stuff. Does your wife want out of this debt?

Are you guys ready to go back to debt freedom? Like how far in on your debt? Yeah, we're locked in. We're locked in, but like I posted my truck yesterday. Wow.

Well, here's the other side of it. Well, here's the other side of it. You can't get through this without sacrifice, not really sacrifice. All right.

It seems to me, and push back on me, man, and George, you're telling if I'm wrong, you happen to have a key in your back pocket, which is I can go turn a key. And I will collapse at the end of one calendar year,

but I can make another $65,000 on top of being a pastor here, and get my family cleared out of this mess. Potentially. This is, I think, this is where I'm struggling. I've got the church in the last year has doubled.

The Lord's doing is to cool work, and it doubled. And in the last nine months, I've done five funeral, and walked with folks after there. Become widows, because the spouse can then suicide. And sure, sure, sure.

The church is demanding more time from you now, so you don't have time for the business,

“which is producing the income that you need to pay off the debt.”

Is that what we're getting at? And I have six, right, and I have six kids.

So here, this is my kids, or my first ministry.

This is one of my wrestling with all of that. Well, this is one of my top five hard conversations I have to have. This is one of the hardest, okay? This is up there in the top five. You want to be a pastor.

And by all accounts, like all, well, I would call an a hate, hey, using these, but by earthly metrics, you're pretty good at it. You're creating a world that people want to be a part of.

“You're not creating your help facilitating a world, right?”

You're good at it. And you and your wife dug a $70,000 whole. Yep. And so at some point, you're going to either have to pause this dream in this calling because to clean up decisions that passed you has made

or you're going to have to look at your wife and say, I've got six kids and this is my priority. And I'm going to show give them a ring side seat. I'm going to show them what it's like to clean up a mess you've made. And like I say, you will be spent.

You will be a wrong out rag at the end of a year. Or you get with your church leaders and say, here's the situation I've found myself in. Right, but like I hate that you're in this position, but you've got a math problem in front of you.

You give them a saying. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

And one million percent like we put ourselves in this position.

I'm going to where they are. Oh, I hear you. I hear you. You've taken full responsibility.

“So that's why I'm not going to beat up on you because.”

And Dave wouldn't either because you're not a guy who is not seeing it for what it is. You know what you did. You know the way out. And you're going, how do we do this? And we're giving you the road map.

It's just not a fun one to say, hey, man, you got six kids. And you're going to miss out on some things over the next year as you clean this up. But the other side of this is you do nothing. You go into deeper debt. Now you got kids who are two through 11.

And you got a bigger pile of debt. And so kicking the can down the road is also not going to solve it. So the best way to get out of this debt is just go through it. And go, all right, if I can make 70 grand doing this side business, plus our income, we can knock out this dead in 12 months.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, there's more work. Works definitely not the issue. I mean, I can.

Sure. You can draw much more work out there.

“Or you and your wife say, hey, this is a two-year project.”

And I'm going to make 30 grand a year. And every penny in the side business is going to go to Torchard debt. Every penny, which means we got to learn to live off our, my $60,000 ministry income. Yeah.

Well, and and something we did last year, which I'm, or this year, which I was the right decision, but just kind of added a complication is during COVID, because I've been in ministry for a while, but what's kind of associate pastor.

But during COVID, we got food stamps,

which, you know, of course I would never want to be all

or even tell anybody else on. But we were. And so, man, with as many kids as we have, we were getting 900 bucks a month. And we, we killed that as year.

We're like, we're done. I started the business now. We no longer eligible. And we're doing, yeah, we're going to turn everything in. We're walking on the up and up.

And we're going to sacrifice that. We've also got like a 10,000 dollar pay. In some sense, this year. From as you're covering that now. But, bro, yeah, but it, and it was worth it.

My wife and I talked about it all the time. Like, thank God, we are not. But now you're in control. Yeah. And can I add permission to Jesus' cue, James?

Okay, here it is. Proverbs 227. You know about 1,000 more verses than I do. The borrower is slave to the lender. And you knew that.

But now it's a stark reminder that that lender owns your time that you could have been spending with your kids. So, it's not the side jobs fault. It's not the church's fault. It is man.

I'm so mad at the citizens I made and the lenders I have to pay.

And I'm going to get out once and for all and never go back in.

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So don't live normal, live like now and else, start every dollar for free in the App Store or Google Play. Sarah is in DC up next. Sarah, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me guys. Absolutely. How can John and I help?

So I have a timeline question for you all today. So I'm certainly newly engaged, and my fiance and I are, you know, sitting down for the numbers, and we're keeping things up for now, but planning on combining, which kind of planning for all of that. And we are currently in a more rental apartment, and want to know about saving for a wedding,

and a down payment for a house with kind of a few little aftrics to the grand scheme of things. So I, one of the, like, major sacrifices that we've made to try to pay off, all of our debt is staying in fairly formal apartment that's not super conducive to raising children in my fiance's in police department, so we actually live in a, a not so very area that I wouldn't feel comfortable,

bringing a, you know, small child into the home, but in return for his presence as a police officer, and what he does on the side for them, we don't pay rent. So obviously that is a huge blessing, and it has allowed us to pay an on our debt, but I don't want to have children here.

I'm about to be 31, and so we would like to start on children, shortly after getting married. Once the wedding? Yeah, that's, so we haven't set a date yet, the part of doing that is setting out our financial goals, like it's setting up for the wedding is sort of part of this timeline question.

“Okay, and how much debt do you guys have left separately?”

So he is almost done. He has about 3,000 left in student loan. That's it. Pay it off the credit card, pay it off the car. Awesome.

So he's set, he'll have that done in like a month or two. Right. I have 11,000 in my car loan, and then I have 214 left in my student loan, which sounds scary, but I started it over 300,000 total. So it made a lot of progress.

Are you a physician? I am an overnight emergency veterinarian. Okay.

So kind of the second caveat to that is the longevity of my job.

You know, I love what I do, and I wish I could do it for forever, but my body tells me that I cannot do overnight forever, especially in emergency. And I'm worried about probably needing to take a pay cut when we start having kids. I could work as a regular veterinarian and probably still make 160 to 180 in this area, but it would be a substantial pay cut, obviously.

So I'll let George speak. I have some ideas, but we'll wait.

“So the overall question we're asking is when do we make the move?”

Where do we go? Should we rent? Should we buy? So I would love to buy. That's the preference, but yes, if you have thoughts on that would be great.

My question is when do you stop aggressively paying down the debt? Which, I mean, I'm putting, like, close to $8,000 every month into my student loan. Right now, so when do I divert from baby steps to try to, you know, do the things that are needed for the next steps of our life without putting it up too much on hold? Next step, being wedding, down payment, all that? Yeah.

Well, I'll give you the simplest answer, which is you are not going to stop being aggressive on the debt,

“but you should pause and save up for the wedding and do something reasonable.”

Now is it just on YouTube to cover all things wedding or is family helping? It's probably just on us. Okay. Then I'm going to do the smallest Sweden, make it, it's just called an intimate wedding. It's cozy.

You don't need 150 people there because you're basically paying for them to party at a hundred bucks ahead. Yeah. We talked about that. We're planning on doing some things small and reasonable. Okay. And the reason I'm not like you got to get married tomorrow, it's just that once you guys are married,

you're going to have a superpower, which is combining your finances and your goal and your vision, which is going to move everything faster. Because if you had all of his income and now he's debt free, throwing at your debt, well, now we can make some progress fast. It's not going to take you as long.

You're going to get done in less than half the time. And so that's where the focus should be, which means we are renting for the foreseeable future until we are completely consumer debt free. We have an emergency fund. We have a solid down payment.

“Because what happens for people in your shoes, you guys make great money.”

You have the baby and all of a sudden you want to cut back and you can't. Because you have a huge pile of debt. You have a huge mortgage. You have nothing in savings. And now you're frustrated. Yeah.

And you're scared.

And so I would much rather do this with peace and just rent for a while with your incredible incomes.

Even if it's for three or four years, that's okay. I guess it does that. I'm nervous and very hesitant to put off our family planning and children. Oh, I'm not saying that. Have a listen. I'm telling you to have a baby. And when it that time comes, you guys should move and go rent somewhere even if it costs you money.

Or every single apartment or condo I've ever rented had some police presence. Is there a possibility that there's nicer apartments, nicer places. Somewhere within a 30 or 45 minute radius that we all both work. That that would be a possibility. So probably not like, I mean, yes, we could move in like rent somewhere different.

Like that doesn't mean obviously things, but not in the same set up where we would not pay rent. Or a subsidized rent. So if they do exist, it's a program like through the department, but the way we got this one, and it was essentially like handed down to us from a cash fund. So we'll rent costs if you didn't have any subsidies.

“If you just had to pay for rent somewhere reasonable a nicer place, what would it cost?”

Um, probably like 2,500 to 3 grand. We live in a pretty terrible housing area. The housing market is also okay. And if you guys are married at that point, you guys are bringing home my guess is maybe 12 to 15 grand. So our take home combined is about 16,000 a month.

Amazing. So think about that, 2,500 at a 16. That's not the thing that's going to hold you back from paying off debt. And you have a higher quality of life, which means when you come back from a long day at work, you can rest your head somewhere and feel good about it and sleep better.

Yeah. Yeah. I know this feels like I'm climbing around, or you're sleeping under it currently. Well, can I say some hard things? Because I love you.

And I want you and your husband have an amazing life and have 50 kids and have everything you want.

Is that cool? Yeah, of course. It would be really advantageous to you. And it's a psychological exercise as much as it's a spiritual exercise. Right down all of the things.

Not need. All of the things you want. And what you're going to find is you want to hold a bunch of things. And everything you've said so far you wanted. You want a nice house.

You want a safe place for your kid. You want to have kids right away. You want to get married. All those things are amazing. They're all awesome.

I support each one of those a million percent.

But you also wanted to take out 300 grand to go to school. Yeah. And so that particular want that you gave into is now holding you back from all these new things that you want. And so let's sever ties with that old want as fast as humanly possible so we can get to the life that we want now. But trying trying to cram the things that you want now into

the world. And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun.

And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun.

And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun.

So we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun.

And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun.

And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we're going to have a lot of fun. Hey guys, it's Rachel Cruz.

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Today's question of the days brought to you by Y-Refi. If you fall in behind on your private student loans, you don't need more shame you need a plan. Y-Refi helps borrowers explore refinancing options with a low fixed rate and payments based on what you can afford.

Go to yrefi.com/RAMsey, may not be available in all states. Today's question comes from Antonio in Florida. Antonio writes, "My wife and I have been on separate pages regarding credit cards. She uses them to play the points in Miles' game, but I'd like to get rid of them. She's recently started realizing how much work it is to manage all the things that come with

the credit cards and also wants to get rid of them, but is worried about destroying her credit score. Is that something we should be concerned about?" No. Thanks for the question Antonio. That was fine.

Oh, see, here's the thing.

I don't think our answer is going to be satisfactory because it needs to be a lived experience. Us just telling her you're going to be fine, probably won't be enough. And I wrote about this extensively in my book, "Breaking Free from Broke." A whole chapter on credit cards, a whole chapter about what I call the perfect spender, the points for Deamer, the people who are like, "I'm playing the game perfectly, why would I stop?"

And now, not only that, but why would I stop when it could then hurt me to stop because of my credit score?

“So what you need to remind her is that a credit score allows you to get more debt at good terms.”

So what else are you trying to go into debt towards? And how does a credit card actually help you move forward financially? And once you realize that it is a game that it is amazing at the end, you're like, "Where's the cheese?" And like, "Oh, no, there's no cheese." They expired. You just keep, there's another maze now.

You just keep doing this until you die. And so I'm glad that you're realizing that this is a game, and that she's realizing hopefully that this is a game, and it's just, this was fun, but you're saying she wants to get rid of them.

So here's the thing, you just get rid of them.

Your credit score might take a temporary dip, and then you move on with your life. And you pay cash for things, using your own money. And that is where you get so much freedom that you can't, I can't explain to someone how good it feels to not use someone else's money. Well, let me, let me, because I was going to say,

Antonio, your wife's right, it will destroy her credit score. It'll go to zero, it'll implode it. I would say it doesn't matter, but you're saying you just see a little dip. Yeah, I mean, if you immediately like, you pay it all off and close the account. You'll see a dip in the credit score.

Now, the question is, it's not going to be like that forever. Six to 12 months after you have no accounts open, it becomes indeterminable. So if I went to check my credit score right now, it would just say, "A, nothing here, bud. We don't got any records of you." Right.

I'm off the grid, basically.

“That's like me looking up like what is my score on like a dating website?”

I'm not on them. That's it. So the only major thing people get worried about at his legitimate is, "Well, how am I going to get a house?" And there's something called manual underwriting.

We've talked about it a lot in the show, and it's like the old times. You know, the late 90s when credit scores were all the rage. You just went into the bank or the lender and said, "Hey, here's my income. I don't have any debt. Here's my down payment. Here's my rent payments that were on time.

And again, it's not theory. I've done it. I've done it too.

“And before every human became commoditized and reduced to three digits.”

A number, right, that some computer spit out and said, "This is your risk profile to us as a big entity." Yeah, man, man, you're unwriting. They actually look at you and your actual situation. And Antonio, I'll tell you the two things that we're

Convicting to me about credit scores. Thing number one is, it has zero, not a no bearing on your financial position. Meaning, I could give you, I don't have this, but if I found it, and I gave you five million dollars, it would affect your credit score in zero ways. And so we've suddenly over time, this extrinsic metric called a credit score.

We've allowed it to infiltrate not only our borrowing and lending world, but our self-worth as some sort of proxy for how are we doing financially. I hear so many of my friends and even family members say, "Well, I want to keep my credit score because it's this."

And they never say, "Here's how much money I have in the bank."

Or here's my net worth, even, financial net worth. They just want to keep this credit score up. It's not a proxy for how well you're doing financially at all. It's simply a proxy for how much of you borrowed in the past and how good did you manage that relationship?

That's it. The second thing is, and this is me getting all high in mighty. And George, you know, I've talked about this privately. I mean, I was big on having a credit card using it for the free points. I had a lot of trouble a lot, and I didn't want to pay for flights.

And I paid off every month, and I lived like that for a long time. I remember the aha moment when I got a bunch of points for a huge purchase that I got reimbursed for that I thought, "Wait a minute, they're not my friend. They're not just hooking me up. They're not a charity."

Who's paying for these flights? And as I dug into that, that's when I said, "I'm out of this game." Because the people who pay for that flight are the folks who are struggling to pay their bills every month, who are paying over draft fees,

“that's what's funding my free hotel rooms and flights.”

And I don't want to get a free flight on the back of somebody who's struggling like that. So I'm out. I'm out. If I want to go somewhere, I'm going to pay for it.

And if the airline I use or the hotel I use, they have their own point system. Like, if you use my airline system, my airline will give you free flights over time. Great. That's between me and them.

But somebody who's struggling isn't funding my good times. I don't want any part of that kind of gross system. I got the numbers for you here, John. This is in the book in this chapter on credit scores and credit cards.

Lower income card holders paid 4.14 billion in fees.

Just that year. Those with higher incomes raked in 1.26 billion in rewards. That's pretty wild. So lower income people are paying 4 billion in fees and the rich do get richer because they're raken in those rewards.

The credit card company is not blessing you.

“They're just simply redistributing that money.”

Right from inside my head, there's a single mom who just husband just or whoever the guy just walked out and she's got to get groceries. And she puts them on there and that same month, her hours get cut. And they charge her $35.75. Late fee.

That's what just bought my flight. I'm not put in a way, dude. No way. I don't want to be a part of a system like that. So I'm just going to opt out.

Man. Oh, I'm riled up. So Antonio. Cut him up. You don't want to move on your life.

Bell is in Sacramento, up next. What's going on, Bell? How can we help? Hi guys. I am so excited to talk to you guys.

I have listened. You guys are like celebrities in our house. We don't get a celebrity somewhere. We're not celebrities in our own house or on the internet. So thank you so much.

So yeah.

I never thought I would be calling about my dad.

Some of that, who's always been very meticulous with money. Like it's checkbook, but he's old school. So he does, you know, have a credit card with pointy as multiple credit cards. And now we're in the position of having to make decisions for him. Because he's starting to suffer from dementia.

And so he's had this serious card for, I don't know, how many years, um, racked up like six figures of reward points. And I guess recently, city bank brought out fears. And so when they begins sending him statements, he didn't see his reward points. That helps so much value to him.

Now he's suffering from dementia. So he doesn't understand now that it's not money. It's reward points. And so he's thinking city bank stole like $120,000 from him. I'm like that.

You can't even have that much on the credit card. But I like it. How much does he owe his card? So now he owes about $4,000. I tried to talk to them.

He stopped paying it because he thought they were stealing his money.

I tried to talk to them and tell them, hey, we're trying to figure out a way to help us all this. He doesn't have an income any longer. They're just not moving.

“And so now they just start to him with a thumb and poor court,”

which doesn't have a court need on it. So I don't know if they're threatening him. But I just don't know as a daughter. Like what options I have to help him out of the situation.

I've never been here before or so.

I'm guessing you don't have financial power of attorney. Yeah. Not yet. We're all in the process. Like now that we're starting to really obviously see that our dad,

who we've looked at up to was like suffering from dementia. We're like, oh, wow, we need to start getting things in place. Yeah, get financial power of attorney as soon as possible. Okay. And you can try to settle with them, explaining the situation.

And I don't know how much the court's care about his health. The credit card companies just want their money. He's just an account number to them. And so you're going to have to fight this and explain what's going on. You could settle.

You could just let it go and they try to sue him and

“the debt stays on and whatever at that point.”

Or you can go to court with your father who's got dementia and say, here's who they're beating up on, Judge. I don't know what that would get you. Or if you look and say, hey, he actually owes you 3,000 bucks.

You and your brothers are going to come up with that money and help get it clear that debt because he did take that money from them. We're going to clear it. We're going to close this account. That might be the path forward.

Now it contact our friends at guardian litigation. You can go to guardian.com/Ramsi. They help with exact situations like this. Good luck, Bella.

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Welcome back to the Ramsey Show, and the Fairwins Credit Union Studio. I'm George Kamel here with John Deloni, taking your calls at Triple 8-825-5225. Dan is in Minneapolis up next.

Dan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. What's going on with you? Oh, struggling a little bit here. Talk to you.

Talk to you. Talk to you through it. So currently, I have a newborn baby ten months old. My wife just found out she's losing her job, and I just started a new business.

Perfect storm. Yes. Was there severance with her job? What happened? She actually is an online telehealth nurse, and they had a meeting one day with 200 employees on the Zoom call.

They see the company hopped on and said, "Hey, if you're on the Zoom call, you're all going to be losing your job." And if you have any questions, take it up with HR and hung up the phone call.

Wow. What a coward. I hate that for her. And then after that, I guess they had an employee group chat, whatever everybody was on their talking. And three minutes after the call, they shut down the group chat for them all to talk to each other.

And what do you do for work? So I actually, I just started a concrete and asphalt paving business. Is that full time?

“Or do you have a different job while you have the side business happen running?”

Yep. I do have my full time job as well, that I do like heavy equipment operating. All right. I'm going to cross my fingers here. Please tell me, as you started this new business, you didn't go also leverage a big truck,

and a dump truck also and a frontloader as well. No. Luckily, I just started listening to you guys a little bit of background about me. I grew up on a Native American reservation as a kid.

My first memories, my dad was ill-beezing my mom.

And then when I joined the military, she was ended up actually stealing money from me.

Well grown up. So then I kind of ran off, did my life lived lavishly, enjoyed our time and stuff like that. Well, after her and I got married, my wife and I should say got married. I found you guys on YouTube, started watching the smart money happy hour and the John Deloni show, became big fans of you guys.

So then when I started my company this summer, I told my wife, I said, I'm just going to cash flow the business. Awesome. As of right now, my business has no debt, but we still have consumer and personal debt. Dude, I know it's a tough season you're in.

But you didn't make it worse, so I'm proud of you for that, man. Like, I have my fingers crossed, because almost everybody in your situation does the opposite.

“So well done for literally just this moment, right?”

Yes, just this moment. Awesome, dude. Awesome. So how much are you bringing in from your full-time job and this side business right now? Every month. So my full-time job every month.

Well, I make about $100,000,

what I actually pulled in on taxes last year.

That was before the new job. And I'm just kind of getting the balls rolling, getting some jobs coming in. And for September here, it's looking like the concrete side job. That's going to be bringing in probably about $12 to $20,000. Wow.

Profit. That's fantastic. How reliable is that? Can you consistently make a certain amount of a month doing this? In Minnesota, pretty much just a summer time.

So I have maybe some jobs in October and then after freezes up, I'm pretty much on standby until next spring. So we've got two more months to really hustle. Yes. Okay.

And they tell us you got ten month old, right? Yes. Okay. What, um, I guess nothing is good about what happened with Tier wife. The complete lack of humanity, her employer showed.

The way that was done, all of that.

Cutting off her like human connection with her colleagues.

“Like all of that was disgusting and gross at every level, right?”

And. And. That's getting. There's going to be a season of grief for that. Your wife and you are going to be right to be like,

"Oh, that's a gift. I'm going to be a gift." And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift.

And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift.

And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift.

And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift.

And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift.

And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift. And I'm going to be a gift. A camper we lived on the road while she was a travel nurse. My pickup truck, toys, and her student loans.

Over the last two years, we've been buckling down trying to pay it off. And we're at $143,000, $143,000 in debt right now. Okay. What's left? I'm selling.

Go ahead. What's left in that is the. We have three credit cards. A car or two cars technically. And then my truck and camper.

Okay.

“Do we still need the truck on camper at this point?”

Are you using the truck for the business? No. You guys might like this. I actually just shook hands with the guy. And I'm selling the truck and camper tonight when I get off the phone here.

Oh, a boy. I'm married to lead, man. Yeah. So I mean, I'll be about $10,000 upside down on it. But we can attack that pretty quickly.

I feel like so that will leave us after that sale. I think we'll be about 67,000 left in debt. Dude. That's great. Well, the car's worth.

Yeah. You're awesome, man. Did you continue this with the car? Like, just do the snowball of selling all the things with wheels and motors in your life. Yeah.

So with that deal, actually. I got to work truck for my company. I'm actually going from a $40,000 truck down to a $2500 truck with rust on it. But it's like, I'll make more of that. And it should be.

I had a boy to him. And then my wife's car. We created her. She had a 2024 car. We just created it in for a 2018 to make it more affordable.

So she can get around as well. Okay. So look, rather. Like, if you go down to $60,000 in debt, that's literally her work. That's take home for her if she goes all in for one year.

Plus Chuck here. Yep. And if you all make if if if she doesn't want to do that, you don't want that.

Is is 10 months old for God six?

Um, doesn't know what day it is, right? Like, doing it. If you all, if you all shake hands on one year of hell. One year of it, not looking like you thought it was going to look. You are free forever.

Yeah.

“You'll do the business because you want to, not because you have to.”

Your wife could stay home if she wants to. Or she can keep, keep working full time as a nurse because she loves it. And y'all y'all y'all get on with it, man. But you're talking one year of sacrifice. One, when you're left, dude, and y'all free.

You're free.

And kid, I got to tell you, Dan, I got to tell you.

You grew up in black hole hell. Right? Yep. And you as a man have turned and faced that hell. And your kids, I'm getting goosebumps.

Your grandkids are not going to know what that's like, because you turned and stared it down. It's an absolute honor to talk to men and your wife is involved in this. Men, women who are saying this trauma ends with me.

“And from now on, my family's going to be free.”

Hey, George Kamel here. So you're thinking about buying or selling your home. It's exciting, but there's a lot to think about. And all those decisions can feel overwhelming. Well, here's the good news.

You don't have to tackle the process alone. Ramsey's real estate home base is the place to find all of your free tools and resources for help to get prepared to buy or sell your home with confidence. You'll find calculators, start to finish guides, a podcast, and even an in-depth video course hosted by yours truly.

What's not to love? So if you're ready to take the next steps towards your home goals, go to RamseySolutions.com/realestate. That's RamseySolutions.com/realestate. Well, come back to the Ramsey show. I'm George here with Dr. John taking your questions at Triple 8-825-5225.

Ron is in Denver up next. Ron, welcome to the show. Hello, Dr. John Deloni. And George, how are you doing today? We're good, Ron. How are you, man?

I'm doing great. Thank you so much. Just want to give you a shout out, Dr. John,

because without your advice and wisdom, I would have never moved with my wife because she is out of my league.

So thank you. Wow. John gave you the confidence. Well, I'm so far out of my league dude that welcome to the club. It's awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time.

You better. I'll just get straight in to my question. So she wanted to do a little debate between my wife and I. Who see, I guess, which way we should go. So I'm 30. She's 32.

And we have a condo that we're about to sell. She should be netting around 162 170. Our only debt is about 34,000 on our 401(k) loan. And everything else is paid. And then we have on our home as well.

We're about to last year. We have a 321-by-down rate to buy down. And it returns back to 56% and about two years. And so what she's we can comfortably afford the payment today. But my wife worries about what happens if we lose our job.

Her family lost their home a while back due to debt. So it is a real fear for her and I totally understand that. And so what I want to do with it is build a basement. But she wants to recast the home. So we're just a little.

So just to make sure I'm on the same page. You'll have a home and you have a condo and you're selling the condo. Correct. Yep. Okay. And you're going to net 160 and you're going to immediately pay off this 401(k) loan. So you'll have about 125 left, right?

Yes. Okay.

“And so how much is your mortgage on your current home?”

Right now with the, with the, by-down it's about 3500 with HOA. That's going to go up a percent every year so that payment will increase. Correct. So that's the very end that 6% should be around 4,500. How much do you owe on your current home? Uh, five around 580 and then it's worth around 750.

And what's your household income did I miss that? Uh, yes. So right now our base salaries around 330. And then with bonuses were around 4, 450-ish. Wow. Incredible income.

Okay. So what's the ultimate goal here?

“Like when you guys sit down, what, like a year from now, where do you guys want to be?”

What does your life look like? Oh, we've done a year from now. Uh, I think it definitely have the 4K taking down half some piece, I guess. Uh, but, you know, I feel like we could have peace in the basement and set off the 4K load. So paying off the 4K loan costs you what out of your net profits?

37. Yeah. Okay. So you get your 170 out of the condo. You pay down 37. You still got a nice pile left.

What is the basement going to cost? Uh, around 15 to 16. Okay. You pay that and now you still got money left. Then what? And then she wants because the thing is she's really scared about, you know, just in case

we never know what's going to happen with our jobs.

And I don't feel as though we don't. There's, there's some good job security and what we do. You'll have six months of expenses saved, right? We do. We have about 40,000. So why don't you get on, you'll make 400 grand a year. Why don't you'll get on to two year plan?

And I don't know how y'all are going to do this. It's going to be tough, but you'll just live on $200,000 a year. And take the other 200 grand and pay your house off in 24 months and give your wife feed freedom and peace. Like I do like that.

You're 24 months away from this, not this being a nothing burger. The recast makes you feel better, but it didn't really do anything. It's going to lower the payment, but it does nothing for the balance. Okay. So recast, you're going to take a lump sum, throw it at the mortgage,

and then you can recast it and it'll just re-amortize. Okay. And by the way, if you did that today, your recast would be at today's rates, which are going to be the penalty point of the rate you have in three to five years or whatever it is. Hmm.

Okay. I guess I never thought about that.

But what if we just said screw all of that thinking and you look at your wife and say, I want to take $200,000 a year and pay our house off in two years. After we put a basement in it, we take the other 60 grand, we put it towards the mortgage directly, bring it down, and then we're going to pay the sucker off. And then we're going to get no one can ever take our house from us.

Hmm. That is, I mean, yeah, it sounds great. I think it's, you know, it sounds very easy no brain. It's just, you know, two years from now on. Here's what your wife is saying.

I have the lived experience of not being safe, and I want to feel safe. And the way she's trying to achieve safety is moving money around, which is completely understandable. If you look at her and say, I'll show you safety.

I'm going to be disciplined and safe, and I'm going to propose a plan that I want you to speak into. And together, you and me, right or die, we'll get this thing paid off in 24 months, which means I'm going to not do all of my crazy whatever is,

and I'm not going to spend on this and blah, blah, blah. I'm all in because I want you to walk into our home that nobody else has a stake to and just laugh because it's ours. That's what she's truly saying to you. I've been unsafe before I've lost my house

and I never want that feeling again.

And she's just getting on YouTube or going to a local place and they're telling her what you could do this. And you've got a wife who is, who's in deep water and she's saying, well, somebody reached down and grabbed me what she wants is stability and a plan and a guy who says,

I'm all in unhelping you, feel safe in this home. Through action, not through feeling. You got what I'm saying? I do. And thank you for that advice.

“That's why I very, very, very, very, very, very.”

Thanks for advice again. I was glad you're, because you listened to this as well, so. Did you guys do a monthly budget together where you sit down and she has full awareness of what's going on with finances? Yes, we do it.

A little more than we like to. We do it once a week. Oh, wow. Is that her for you? Yes.

It's using for me. Okay, stop. Stop. You're bearing her. Hmm.

You're bearing her. Your love for numbers is gasoline on her anxiety fire around numbers. Hmm. I never thought about that. You go and I'm saying, you'll make a plan every month and stick to it.

Okay.

“And then if you want to play with spreadsheets in the middle of the night,”

like I do, like I know George does. Oh, my God. My favorite guy in Somnia spreadsheet in Somnia. So you've got the plan. Yeah, and this is more, it's more emotional than reality, because you're income is so high.

Even if one of you lost your jobs, you're going to be okay.

The chances of both of you going without work for years is that's paranoia at that point.

Right. So you can decide, do you want to give your wife a gift of putting a hundred and thirty grand down on your principle of your mortgage and bringing it down really low and put off getting your basement for three years or two and a half years. Or do you want to say, hey, this basement's going to cost sixty grand.

The other sixty's going to go directly to the principle. And here's a two-year plan to pay off this mortgage. We're going to do this together. You also don't have that conversation, because that's more George. That's the actual issue here.

There's no real clear plan about what we're doing and why we're doing it. Yeah. It's just that every week she gets dragged to the table to re-a-look at numbers and what about this and what if this happens, which for her is just, oh, it's more of her body's like, I told you, we're not safe.

I told you, this could happen.

I told you, I told you, I told you, and she's lived it. Man, and that's a very, yeah. Man, that's a real experience. Good for you, Ron, for caring about her and for asking questions. In my house, my wife has full, you know, transparency to the finances.

She has the accounts on her phone, but I just become like a human version of that. And every once in a while, she just goes, how much we have in savings? I got here so much and she goes, okay, that's it.

“It's just that's what you want your finances to be.”

Well, it was funny. In my house, it's the opposite. Occasionally, I'll be like, I'll tell my wife, hey, we have this much in savings. And she'll be like, have you not been sleeping again? And I'll be like, yeah, no, I haven't.

So it's, it's me trying to make myself feel better by acting like I'm a tough, great husband communicating. She's like, I know we're good. You can't save your way out of psychosis, John. Listen, I don't want to be the one to harass me.

But you're, I'm chair therapist. I don't know, that's what my real therapist said. (upbeat music) Dave Ramsie here, for more than 30 years, I've been talking to folks on the air,

and I can tell you that most people are broke. Not because they don't make enough money, but because they don't have a plan.

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if you're on YouTube or podcast. Heath is in Columbus, Ohio up next. Heath, what's going on? Hey guys, appreciate you taking my call. Absolutely.

What's your question today? So I've got a situation with my in laws. They are in their mid 70s and during COVID, my father-in-law gambled away all their savings. How much was it?

Yeah, so they, you know, I don't know exactly. They've worked their whole lives and my mother-in-law. She got some inheritance from her parents when they passed away. Her parents were very well off. So I'm assuming he was several hundreds, thousands of dollars.

But, you know, I don't know, for certain how much it was. And they've been working full-time, you know, for the last couple of years. But they're getting older and, you know, my life and I are trying to figure out, like, well, what's the future and what's our role going to be in all this? I've got five small kids at home and we're person at the scenes in our place.

So, you know, unless we move or add on to our house, like, then staying with us is not an option. But, you know, their other kids are not really involved. So it's going to fall on us. The burden is going to fall on us.

Are the other siblings there strange when you say they're not involved?

But they're really not in the picture as far as orange in the place to take care of them.

Okay, so your wife is the closest, you know, child they have. That's actually still communicating with them. What is your wife want to do? Um, I don't know. It's stuff.

I mean, we're probably about four hours away from them. So it's not like we can get over there once a week to go help them out with stuff. Right.

“But, you know, I think if my in-laws would be open to it,”

I'm sure my wife would want them to move closer to us or in with us.

I don't know if that would be something acceptable for my in-laws that pretty stubborn. Do they have a mortgage? They do not. What's their house worth?

Um, I mean, they're in the middle of nowhere. It's probably, if they could get a hundred grand for it, that would be, that would be a lot. So I think the, I mean, you got two big challenges in front of you. One, will they even accept your help? Yeah.

Right. And maybe they won't now. Maybe they'll be forced to in five years, like who knows.

“But I think that's a, that is a thing that's really hard to metabolize when we want to help people that we love.”

And they are either too prideful or too scared or there he goes too big or any number of reasons, but they won't accept our support and love as we can give it, right? And so that's number one. Number two is you and your wife have to just be flat out honest about what we can and can't do. Like, and like, because what happens a lot of times especially in big emotional situations like this is we just spend all of our energy on what we can't do.

Or what we should do versus what we, and you all need to have a honest come to Jesus conversation about here's what we could do even if they would allow it.

Could we have could we come up with a thousand bucks to subsidize a one bedroom apartment in our neighborhood? That's all we can do. That's all we have and we're not going to get the money to you. We're going to give it directly to the place. Can we support grocery like you go to him saying? Yeah idea and that's kind of, you know, part of the reason that it's, it's difficult for us is that, you know, I do, I do very well in my job and I've got a pretty significant amount of savings. And so, you know, if we were to add an addition on to our house or something, we could do that, but you know, I struggle with, well, okay, I mean, I've got again, I've got a bunch of small kids like I want to think about their future.

Sure, and I want to plan to be able to not put my kids in the situation that they're putting us in. That's exactly right. That should be your priority. And so, you know, but, but at the same time, like, okay, yeah, we could, I could write a check tomorrow and we could put it, you know, an in-law sweet addition on our house. So, that's just where, you know, I'm struggling with the right thing to do and if, and if we, I don't think if we told them, hey, we want, this is our plan, we want you to come live with us.

They probably would not accept it, but knowing what's probably going to happen in the future is that they're not going to be able to work at some point in the future.

“Right. If we had a place for them, then I think it would just be a natural choice for them to come against their will.”

Yeah, we'll just do it. Well, that's where y'all said, well, they wouldn't have any other option. Well, so that's where, I mean, you kind of giving us a very clear path for you and your wife, which is you'll let them know when and if y'all need support. We're ready to sit down and have that conversation. And that conversation ends right there, because they'll probably respond with, well, we're fine. You don't need to worry about it.

Great. Cool. And then you and your wife have to live in the reality that probably at some point you will be responsible for some sort of care. And, and so we'll start putting a little money aside over here. We might start looking at a different house down the, down the road. We might look at one bedroom apartments in the neighborhood.

And by the way, a picture for your kids, it's easy for me to wrap my head around the only legacy I can leave to my kids as money. There are also as a huge legacy towards, I watched my parents care and love well their aging parents. Right, like that's also part of legacy. It's also part of care. And so all of that is a tricky balance, right? And none of that comes in any sort of thing that y'all wanted or asked for, right?

For sure. How much are they letting you into their own finances? Oh, very little. I mean, when they, ironically, a doctor, the only, I call it a couple of years ago when everything kind of hit the fan when they lost everything. And you and Dave gave me some great advice. But, and so, you know, we're back now because, you know, if they had, if they were to tell me they had $10,000 in their bank account,

Is he still getting there?

I don't think it's gambling anymore. But, I mean, they're working between the two of them. They're each working at least 40 hours a week if not more, and they're almost 75 each. Are they taking so security? Oh, they're not.

My father-in-law held a cash-paying job as an entire life. So, probably did not report most of his income. So, they're, they're, if they're taking social security, it's minimal. So, okay.

“So, y'all, you and your wife have to have the conversation of, what is taking care of me?”

Yeah. Is that going to be $3,000 in a nursing home? Is that going to be, like, are we going to help them sell everything so they can get on? Medicaid? Like, what is that going to look like for us? And you'll, as, as her writer die, you as her husband are going to say, like, you're going to have to work to not have that calculator running in your head of,

well, if we had taken that money and invested it, we could have given this to our kids. Right?

Because if y'all agree on a number, like, do your best to say, I was a part of this decision.

I'm a guy who's not going to let two elderly people just, like, get stuck in the system, especially if I'm being successful. Like, I'm going to grieve that and then I'm going to go on and take care of folks in the amount and to the degree that me and my wife agreed and then I'm going to go on about my life and go from there. And it could be, I'm not, I'm probably buying the sky here. It could be that, could it, could it be that they would be fun to have around your kids or is that a no-go? I think they, I think they would be, but I just, you know, outside of something drastic happening.

I can't see at least my father-in-law wanting to leave, you know, it's a county grew all of his born children. Yeah. But he may join us. He may not have a choice today, right? He did a lot of portraits as well.

Yeah, but he may not, he may not ultimately because of his past choices. He may not get a say in whether he stays or not. Yeah. Yeah, sure.

“Which, which stinks. Hey, let me tell you this brother, your anger's right.”

Your right to be mad at him for how he handled his finances, for how he did whatever it is he did. But that anger won't serve you loving your wife well and you're coming up with a plan together, moving forward. Here's the reality that we have in front of us. None of us wanted this, none of us planned this, but this is what it is. And we are people who take care of our family.

So here's what that's going to mean for us.

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