Don’t Let Others Try To Define Your Success

Speaker 1 Live from the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, it's the Ramsey Show, where we help people build wealth, do work that they love, and create actual, amazing relationships. Dr.

Speaker 1 John Deloney, Ramsey personality, PhD in counseling, number one best-selling author and host of the very popular Ramsey Network production, the Dr. John Deloney Show.
He's my co-host today.

Speaker 1 Open phones at 888-825-5225.

Speaker 1 You jump in and call. The call is free, and some say the advice is worth exactly what you pay for it.
Which, John, we are going to prove. what this is worth after all.

Speaker 1 Because announcing today to you guys in the public, a few of you have heard about it over the last week on some download stuff, but announcing today, John and I are going on tour.

Speaker 1 We're going to do the money and relationship tour. No guitars will be killed in the producing of these shows.
No music will be said at all. It's not that kind of tour.

Speaker 1 It's Dave and John talking about money and about relationships and about anything else we want to talk about or you want to talk about because we're going to do the weirdest live events I've ever done.

Speaker 2 I think this is pretty cool. I've not seen this done anywhere, and I think it's going to be rad.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we might have made it up. We might have found someplace obscure to steal it from.
I don't know, but it's very different.

Speaker 1 So, we basically, this morning we came out of a meeting, we had 27 different 10-minute talks listed.

Speaker 1 We're going to post them when you come into the audience, and you guys are going to vote which ones we're going to do that night in Louisville, Kentucky, April the 21st, Durham, North Carolina, April 23rd.

Speaker 1 Atlanta, April 25th. Phoenix, May 5th.
Fort Worth, May 7th. Kansas City, May 9th.
Now, you can pretty much be assured that the list of talks is ones that we approve.

Speaker 1 So they're things that we actually know something about. And so we will talk about things that we know something about.

Speaker 1 So it might be a little bit in there about money, might be in there a little bit about relationships or mental health or anxiety or whatever.

Speaker 2 My wife tells me that I'm always talking about things that I don't know what I'm talking about. So I don't mind doing that either.

Speaker 1 But people won't pay for that, so we're not doing that. They won't buy a ticket to that.
So we're not going to do that.

Speaker 1 But John and I, and we're going to just have some free-for-all discussion on the stage as well. We're both just going to be up there the whole time.

Speaker 1 It's a little different, not a little, completely different format than I've ever done. I'm excited to try this.
I think it's going to be fun. The Money and Relationship Tour.

Speaker 1 So you want to check it out.

Speaker 1 It's going to be about money, about relationships, about mental health, about wealth building, and how all these things, marriage, how all these things intersect and interweave to cause each other to happen.

Speaker 1 Limited amount of tickets. These cities, we are not huge venues.
We're not doing arenas or something like that.

Speaker 2 They're amazing theaters.

Speaker 1 They're fabulous.

Speaker 2 Most amazing theaters I've ever seen.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the absolutely cool. And tickets, put them on sale today.
They're going to go up pretty regularly as we go through the sellout process. But the initial out the door today, only $49.

Speaker 1 So you can get your tickets at ramseysolutions.com slash tour. And if you're tuning in on YouTube or podcast, click the link in the show notes.

Speaker 1 Again, Louisville, Durham, Atlanta, Phoenix, Fort Worth, Kansas City, all April and May of next year on sale now.

Speaker 1 I mean, based on our initial pre-sale stuff, we'll probably sell these things out in just a few weeks. It'll be a blast.
So I'm looking forward to it.

Speaker 2 It's going to be wild, wild in the streets.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You and I stirring up trouble in all these different cities, and then we get to come home. That's good.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right. Matt is with us to start off this hour in Sacramento.
Hey, Matt, welcome to the Ramsey Show.

Speaker 3 Hey, Dave, big fan. Appreciate you taking my call.

Speaker 1 I'm honored, sir. How can we help?

Speaker 3 Well, I am pretty much on the edge of bankruptcy, I think.

Speaker 3 I don't know whether I should go through with that or not.

Speaker 3 I'm in quite a bit of credit card debt, which is pretty embarrassing because I've worked your debt snowball before. I've read your books.

Speaker 3 And I still find myself in this predicament. So

Speaker 3 I've got about $100,000. Well, I started a business and I've used my personal credit basically to fund the business.
So

Speaker 3 I'm in about $120,000 in debt total. About $100,000 of that is credit card debt and $20,000 is an SBA loan from my first business that didn't go too well during COVID.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 3 I'm kind of at the point where I'm trying to decide whether or not to throw the towel in on my business and, you know, get a regular job.

Speaker 3 Maybe probably declare bankruptcy because I don't think the payments are doable for me.

Speaker 1 Or,

Speaker 3 you know, I'm kind of just lost at this point.

Speaker 1 Scary. How old are you?

Speaker 3 Very.

Speaker 3 I am 37.

Speaker 1 You married?

Speaker 3 No. Okay.

Speaker 4 Single.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 1 Don't have any kids. What kind of money is the business making? What kind of money is your business making?

Speaker 3 Well, you know, we started off bringing in about,

Speaker 3 it actually grew pretty quickly. I had a team and everything.

Speaker 3 I started it with a friend of mine,

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 we were doing up to about $20,000, $30,000 a month. And now I'm down to pretty much $5,000, $6,000 a month.

Speaker 1 Gross.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 1 gross revenue.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's

Speaker 1 expenses.

Speaker 3 I'd say

Speaker 3 before expenses, 5, 6,000.

Speaker 1 Okay. So after expenses, what are you netting?

Speaker 3 The business is actually profitable now. It's netting like $3,000, $4,000 a month.

Speaker 1 So I've got my team. So what happened? Why did it go from, what did you say, $20,000 to $5,000?

Speaker 3 Well, I had a team at first.

Speaker 3 Oh, no.

Speaker 1 Why'd you get rid of them if it was working?

Speaker 1 What happened?

Speaker 3 Well, so

Speaker 3 my partner and I had a falling out. He, long story short, had a drug problem and I had to buy him out.

Speaker 3 So that's where the first start of the credit card debt started piling on because I kind of used the credit card money to buy him out.

Speaker 1 That should have caused your business to prosper. Why is your business failing?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 inflation has killed us. So all the.

Speaker 1 No, it doesn't. You raise your prices with inflation.
Why is your business failing?

Speaker 3 Right now it's failing because I'm just spread too thin. I'm doing everything myself right now.

Speaker 1 Why did you go from 20,000 down to 5,000?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 our cost went up. They kept going up.

Speaker 1 The cost doesn't cause your revenue to come down.

Speaker 3 The revenue is down because the leads are down. I'm not able to.
I was buying leads at that point.

Speaker 3 The lead cost doubled.

Speaker 3 Now they're pretty much tripled. So I had to kind of stop doing that.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 you were buying paid leads on social.

Speaker 3 No, I was actually buying from a lead generation company.

Speaker 1 So, that was kind of only

Speaker 1 them and they tripled back to you because all your paid socials have gone up three and four X with Facebook and Apple 13. And yeah, it's jacked.
It's jacked a bunch of us. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Well, so what is it you're selling?

Speaker 3 Car shipping.

Speaker 3 So we are auto transport brokers.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 All right. Well,

Speaker 1 the reason I'm asking all these questions is you've got to get to an income.

Speaker 1 When you get to an income, then you've got the way out of this. Until you get to an income, you don't have the way out of this.
And so far, all I'm hearing is a race to the bottom.

Speaker 1 So if you need to close it, close it and go get a job, or if you need to work it on the side and go get three jobs, that's fine. But you're not bankrupt.
You just don't have an income.

Speaker 1 I mean, what if you went and got a job making $200,000? You could pay it off in no time. So your problem is your income, not your debt.

Speaker 1 And this business is running you. You're not running it.
So you need to get some income coming in, dude. When you do that, we can walk you right out of this credit card debt.
This is the Ramsey Show.

Speaker 1 Thank you for joining us, America. We're glad you're here.
Open phones at 888-825-5225. Dr.
John Deloney, Ramsey personality, is my co-host today. Shauna is in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Hi, Shauna.

Speaker 1 How are you?

Speaker 4 Good. How are you?

Speaker 1 Better than I deserve. What's up?

Speaker 4 Hey, so I sent in a question to you guys,

Speaker 4 and I had said that in the six years me and my husband have been together, he hasn't wanted to work.

Speaker 1 Yikes.

Speaker 2 What's his excuse?

Speaker 1 Um

Speaker 4 so it's kind of a long story, but make it short.

Speaker 2 I bet it distills all the way down to p something pretty simple, huh?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I I just feel like he has no motivation.

Speaker 2 But what when he doesn't work, what does he tell you the reason he's not working?

Speaker 1 Um

Speaker 4 well, he's streaming on Twitch. I'm not sure if y'all know what that is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I do.

Speaker 4 Okay. Well, he's streaming on Twitch and doesn't even make enough money to get a payout every month.
So you have to make a minimum of $50 to get a payout. And he calls that his job.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's not a job. So

Speaker 1 why are you put up with this for six years?

Speaker 2 What are you going to do? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I got about six minutes and I'm done. How do you get to six years?

Speaker 4 That's the part I don't know. I'm not sure.

Speaker 2 So, how have you approached this with him in the past?

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 red flag number one is when I first met him, he wasn't working.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 Sean, you do a lot, and this is me walking with you. I'm not poking at you.
You do a lot of should-haves in the past. So, like, let's bring it to right now.
Okay. How have you communicated to him

Speaker 2 that him rotting his life away playing video games for no money

Speaker 2 is not okay with you?

Speaker 4 Well, I've left him twice over it.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 Why'd you come back?

Speaker 4 He begged me to come back and said he would get a job, and he actually started putting applications in and even had interviews, but always had an excuse as to why he couldn't take the job. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So you came back too quick before he actually got the job. Yeah.
Instead of just more mouth promise.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 1 Well, I

Speaker 2 people can disagree with me on this, but I look at this as a matter of

Speaker 2 fidelity, as a matter of immorality. And some people can cheat on their spouse with somebody else, with another person.

Speaker 2 And some people can cheat with their video games and their lack of seeing the person they're married to and saying, I don't really care what you need. I don't care about our family.

Speaker 2 I don't care about any future we're trying to build. What I care about is sitting in my butt and playing video games.
So you go on about your

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 2 as far as I'm concerned, that's a violation of the marriage contract y'all made.

Speaker 1 He abandoned you at the point.

Speaker 2 He's left you. The problem is, he's left you in his own living room.

Speaker 1 And his body didn't go. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Unfortunately, the only path forward is some really firm boundaries. And

Speaker 2 most of the time, they're hard because you've been holding up every spin and plate in that family for a long time. Being very clear about what you

Speaker 2 require, what you need, need, what you want.

Speaker 2 And you've been burned twice.

Speaker 2 And so I think the next round is to be very clear.

Speaker 2 Or here's the deal. Make peace with it.
This is the guy you married. He didn't have a job when you were engaged to him.
He didn't have a job when you married him. It's kind of what you signed up for.

Speaker 2 If that's the road you want to take and you're not going to move on

Speaker 2 and not hold him accountable, then stop beating yourself up every day. Make peace with it.
Move on. I hope that's not the path you take, but you're welcome to take that path.

Speaker 1 It's not good for you or him. Right.

Speaker 1 But you could take that route. There's nothing wrong with that route other than it's not good for you, not good for him.

Speaker 1 I think if I were in your shoes, hon, I'd sit down with a good pastor, a good marriage counselor, and have someone guide me through setting the boundaries very firmly and very clearly and say, this is what I need to be in a marriage.

Speaker 1 I need a husband that participates in the marriage. And that involves you getting a job and keeping a job.
And it does not involve youth applications. It does not involve you going on interviews.

Speaker 1 It does not involve in you taking a job. It involves in you taking a job and it works.

Speaker 2 And let's flip it around because what he's going to do is going to say, oh, you did this. You left me.
And I think by being very clear about what Dave just said,

Speaker 1 you chose.

Speaker 2 He is making the affirmative choice to end your marriage. Because he's not participating.

Speaker 1 If you do not go get a job, you are choosing to end our marriage.

Speaker 2 Behavior is a language. You're choosing choosing to.

Speaker 2 And I hope that you don't make that choice.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I hope you go get a job.

Speaker 2 Please don't leave me.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 if he doesn't, then you don't come. If you leave on this basis, you don't come back.

Speaker 4 Right. Okay.

Speaker 1 That's it.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Pretend like

Speaker 1 if you changed what was going on to something that you really can't, that makes you kind of throw up. Let's pretend he was doing cocaine.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 1 How long would you sit there?

Speaker 4 Not long. Not long.

Speaker 1 Okay. Right.
But what it is, it's an unacceptable cray-cray behavior.

Speaker 2 And it's unsafe.

Speaker 1 It's not safe. It's not good for anyone involved.
Right.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 if you're going to do cocaine, I'm gone. And it's not like a little bit of cocaine.
It's not like I sort of might stop someday. It's not like I went to a meeting to talk about stopping.

Speaker 1 It's like no cocaine in this house if I'm in the house. Period.
That's what you would do.

Speaker 1 But this one is a little bit different because this doesn't feel in the same category.

Speaker 1 But if you kind of think it through in your brain, the way your brain works around it as if it was something more bizarre,

Speaker 1 then you would go, no, I'm tapping out. You're done.

Speaker 2 It's a slow growth cancer.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this one's more socially acceptable, so to speak. Being lazy is not as big a deal as doing cocaine in most people's minds, and I accept that.

Speaker 1 But I always, if I, you know, if they're just overspending, overspending, you know, or lying to me about money, that's way less than doing cocaine.

Speaker 1 But if I put cocaine in my head, in my brain, and the way I'm thinking about it, okay, if they were doing cocaine, what would I do? Clarify.

Speaker 1 Bottom line is it's a behavior that I'm not willing to accept. So I'm going to, in those situations, put my foot down because I don't want to be in that situation.
It helps me to kind of

Speaker 1 almost go off the deep end in my head, in the, in the decision-making paradigm. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 And I think it's hard to wrap your head around because he's not doing the typical things. He's not hitting anybody.
He is.

Speaker 1 Oh, that would require energy.

Speaker 2 Exactly, right? He's not doing anything.

Speaker 2 And the challenge is somebody can wreck your boat or they can slowly pull the whole thing underwater. At the end of the day, the whole thing's still underwater.

Speaker 1 Drill eight-inch holes in it.

Speaker 2 I've just got a

Speaker 2 broad picture of what fidelity is, and I'm just... I'm sick of it.

Speaker 1 And abandonment.

Speaker 2 That's right. Abandonment, but you're going to pay for me to continue to live here.
Like, I've left you. I'm just going to stay in the house.
And it breaks my heart, man.

Speaker 2 Because people go to the mirror and they say, what did I do? What am I doing? What's wrong with me? And it can be cruel. It can just be cruel.

Speaker 1 And you haven't done anything wrong, except put up with it. It's the only thing wrong you've done.

Speaker 1 For your sake, really for his sake.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 Shauna, we had a guy working here

Speaker 5 that we found out.

Speaker 1 after he was here a while, had a pretty serious alcohol problem.

Speaker 1 And he was out of town calling on a customer for us and showed up at the situation drunk after we'd had a couple discussions about this. So we fired him

Speaker 1 because we love him and that we're not going to participate in his crazy because it's not helping him. And

Speaker 1 that was several years ago, many, many years ago. And I got the coolest email from him the other day.
Completely changed his life.

Speaker 1 He's completely dry, he's sober. His wife stayed with him because he got clean.
But the thing that did it was we fired him.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Consequences.

Speaker 1 It woke him up, and he goes, thank you for loving me

Speaker 1 enough

Speaker 1 to not participate in this wicked script I had written for my life. You know, that wasn't exactly how he said it, but I mean, that's what's going on, right? And sometimes the most graceful thing.

Speaker 1 It's not something you usually get from somebody you fire, right?

Speaker 2 Well, sometimes the most graceful thing we can do for other folks that we care about is to say no more.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm not going to

Speaker 2 love you enough to say stop.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to be right here while you're doing that. Yeah.
I'm not going to be here while you act that way or do that thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's what and you also mentioned like y'all had walked with him and walked with him and talked to him and met with him and offered him resources.

Speaker 1 And yeah, what wasn't a singular thing, of course. And then he shows up at the client drunk.
You know, that you know, that that's pretty singular right there.

Speaker 1 That one alone, I get you, but it was kind of the straw, right? Yeah, but gosh, man, he's doing so good. I'm so proud of him.
This is the Ramsey Show.

Speaker 1 Dr. John Deloney, Ramsey personality, is my co-host today on the debt-free stage.

Speaker 1 In the middle of the Ramsey Solutions lobby is Troy and Laura. Hi, guys.
How are you? Doing good. How you doing? Doing better than I deserve.
Where do y'all live?

Speaker 5 Norfolk, Virginia.

Speaker 1 Cool, cool. I got to tell you guys, those of you not watching on YouTube, if you look deeply into your radio, these have matching t-shirts, matching outfits, matching everything.

Speaker 1 T-shirts say legacy changer.

Speaker 1 I like it. I like it a bunch.
Very cool. How much debt have you two paid off?

Speaker 5 $157,056.

Speaker 1 Love it. And how long did that take?

Speaker 5 60 months.

Speaker 1 Good for you. And your range of income during that five years?

Speaker 5 Started at $95,000, and we're looking to, or we're projecting to hit $185,000

Speaker 1 this year. Double in five years.
What do you guys do for a living?

Speaker 5 I'm a quality assurance supervisor for the Department of Defense.

Speaker 6 And I'm an educator. For the entire journey, I was a school counselor, and I just transitioned transitioned out of that working in our testing department at a local high school.

Speaker 1 All right. Very cool.
What kind of debt was this $157,000?

Speaker 5 A little bit of everything.

Speaker 6 Yes. Student loans.
Half of it was student loans. So about $78,000 in student loans.
And the other $78,000 was a timeshare, a personal loan.

Speaker 1 Credit card debt. Credit card debt.

Speaker 5 Retirement loans. Yes.

Speaker 1 They were kind of normal. Too normal.
You had all the kind of debt that you don't want. Yeah.
Yeah. Wow.
Look at you guys. So how long have you been married?

Speaker 5 17 years.

Speaker 6 17 years.

Speaker 1 And five years, 12 years into the marriage, five years ago, something happened. Yes.

Speaker 1 What? Yeah.

Speaker 6 So our journey actually started back in 2013. So in 2013, as a Christmas present, my aunt Lisa, shout out to Aunt Lisa, gifted all of her younger nieces and nephews the Total Money Makeover audiobook.

Speaker 6 And I'm going to be honest, when she gave it to

Speaker 6 I looked at it and I said, who is this old man? I don't know what this is, but we're good.

Speaker 1 It's like my Aunt Lisa gave me socks for Christmas.

Speaker 6 It's like, we don't need this. We're good.
And so we did not, or I did not listen to it. And so from 28.
2013 until about 2018, we went on living our lives financially separate.

Speaker 6 And 2018, beginning of 2018, we had our son, our second child, and we purchased a house all within four days of each other. A house we couldn't afford.
Correct. All within four days of each other.

Speaker 1 That's what we did when we have babies. We always buy a house we can't afford.
Because they need a home, yes.

Speaker 6 And so from 2018 to 2019, we could really start to feel the weight and the pressure of those poor financial decisions. And we started to struggle.
We paid utilities with credit cards,

Speaker 6 gas.

Speaker 6 And we just really started to feel that weight. And spring of 2019 is when everything came to a head, honestly.

Speaker 5 Yeah, myself, I had started having car issues, didn't have any money, no emergency fund to take care of the automobile. Ended up taking out a personal loan to do that.

Speaker 5 A couple of weeks after that, the car broke down again,

Speaker 5 which is how we ended up getting a car loan to actually get a full car.

Speaker 5 And during that time, you know, not unbeknownst to me, my wife was having her own struggles with dealing with our financial situation. Like she said, prior to, we were financially independent.

Speaker 5 You know, we didn't really.

Speaker 1 What was the thing that you finally go, okay,

Speaker 1 what happened? Y'all were coming to,

Speaker 1 I can feel this this boil coming up. Yeah, yeah.
So when did it boil over? It was the thing.

Speaker 6 It was the summer of 2019. His car went out.
I finally looked at my student loan balance. I had avoided it for years.
And literally all of this happened around the same time.

Speaker 6 And I saw that big balance. And I was in my...

Speaker 1 Oh, my Lisa, where's that audio book?

Speaker 6 In my office, and I pulled up the balance, $78,000, literally could not breathe, felt just this weight on my chest. And it was at that moment I googled how to get out of debt fast.

Speaker 6 Of course, your information popped up. We had a conversation and we said, if we're ever going to accomplish these goals that we have for ourselves and our family, we have to do something radical.

Speaker 6 That was the word that we used that night.

Speaker 6 And we sat down and started the journey.

Speaker 5 We got the EverDollar budget, budgeting app. We joined Financial Peace University at a local church in Portsmouth.
Shout out to Brian and April, who were our coordinators. Yay.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 6 And realized that this was the exact same information that Elisa had tried to give us six years prior.

Speaker 1 Of course,

Speaker 1 but when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

Speaker 2 Did you ever look at her and be like,

Speaker 2 you knew about this?

Speaker 1 She said, I'll try to tell you.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 All right, y'all make it sound all easy.

Speaker 2 How hard was it? Because, I mean, y'all are making good money. Both of y'all have really respectable, like, y'all have positions that in your community,

Speaker 2 you're proud to say what y'all do at parties, right? Absolutely.

Speaker 2 I'm an educator. I work with children who are struggling.
I work at the Department of Defense. Everyone goes, ooh.

Speaker 2 And so when they see what other car you drove up in, they're like, wait a minute, right? So

Speaker 1 that had to be hard over the course of five years.

Speaker 5 Yeah, over the course of the five years, it was. In the beginning, we were so focused

Speaker 5 that we were locked in.

Speaker 5 It wasn't difficult starting out the first, I want to say maybe a couple of years, sticking to the plan and, you know, knocking out those small amounts and working our way, working the debt snowball.

Speaker 6 Yeah, we were just so tired of, you know, where we were and all the debt that it was easy to get started. It was easy to keep going.

Speaker 6 And then I think we started to feel that fatigue right around three years, three years in.

Speaker 6 And we had been so laser focused and had paid off so much debt, we had started to find more margin, way more margin in our budget. Oh yeah.

Speaker 6 And so that's where it became a little bit more challenging because we wanted to.

Speaker 1 How did you push through that?

Speaker 6 We stayed, well, for me, focusing on being content with where we were and what we had.

Speaker 6 We relied on each other a lot. And truthfully, we did take a little pause.
We still lived by the principles,

Speaker 6 but we knew we just needed a small short break.

Speaker 6 And so we paused.

Speaker 1 So you've been married 12 years when you start this and now 17.

Speaker 1 Talk about the marriage before this and after this.

Speaker 5 So before this, our marriage was always happy.

Speaker 5 Not always the best communication. I really think starting this journey and going going on this journey helped our communication a lot because we didn't discuss finances.

Speaker 5 We made a lot of separate financial decisions

Speaker 5 from taking out. I took out a loan to start a network marketing business.

Speaker 5 She took out

Speaker 6 a loan to get the driveway repaired at our first home.

Speaker 5 Yeah. So there was a lot of, you know, we're high school sweethearts.
So this is my best friend.

Speaker 5 So that part was always there.

Speaker 1 So you kind of went from happy roommates to being married. Correct.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 Because our financial conversations, you know, prior to starting this journey were very tense.

Speaker 6 Lots of arguments when it came to paying bills. And

Speaker 6 so I think that was one of the things that

Speaker 6 drove us, that connected us to this program. We were so excited.
We finally found a system.

Speaker 6 I love checking boxes. I love processes as an educator and systems.

Speaker 6 And so we finally got our hands on something that allowed us to be able to accomplish and work towards all the goals that we have for ourselves and our family. A simple process.

Speaker 6 That's what drew us to the program.

Speaker 2 How does the energy or electricity in your home differ for those two kids in the home y'all grew up in?

Speaker 5 Way different.

Speaker 5 I grew up with, you know, lights getting cut off, water getting cut off, not really having enough food. And throughout our,

Speaker 5 since we've had our, since we've been parents, they haven't had to worry about that. But where we are now,

Speaker 5 we can build on that. And there's more of a future for them

Speaker 5 to not only will they never experience that, but their children won't won't experience that and they will experience like abundance and preparation for the world growing up legacy changer

Speaker 1 that's your why I'm proud of you thank you very well done you guys what do you tell people the key to getting out of debt is

Speaker 5 so for me

Speaker 5 we're married so I say shared vision

Speaker 5 and having a shared vision like I said living separately

Speaker 5 She didn't really know the stress that I felt as the husband. And I knew my financial situation, right? But,

Speaker 5 you know, there's vacations and things like that that, you know, we all want to do. And her not really understanding

Speaker 5 my anxiety and stress when it comes to our finances,

Speaker 5 that was a big thing. So having a shared vision, a common goal,

Speaker 5 a common person.

Speaker 1 Let's bring the kiddos up and get their names and ages. They're going to participate in the screen, right? Yes.
Let's get them up there. All right.
Very cool. How old are they? We've got a hustle.

Speaker 2 We're coming up to the clock here.

Speaker 6 We have Nanaya and Troy Jr., 10 and 6.

Speaker 1 Perfect. All right.
157,000 paid off in 60 months, making 95 to 185. Count it down.
Let's hear a debt-free scream. Three, two, one.
We're a debt-free!

Speaker 1 Yay!

Speaker 3 That's how it's done.

Speaker 1 I love it.

Speaker 1 This is the Ramsey Show.

Speaker 1 If you haven't heard, we have the Ramsey Network app you can download and use for free. It has the last segment of this show every day.
It has

Speaker 1 a lot of the special things that we do. You get them a day or two early on the Ramsey app.

Speaker 1 For instance, the interview I did with President Trump last week posted on there a day before we posted it on everything else. So you can get access to things early.

Speaker 1 And you can ask questions on the Ramsey Network app. This one's from Amy.
Before the new rules went into place, our home home listing agreement included a 6% realtor fee.

Speaker 1 With the new regulations, should we ask to change our listing agreement? Yeah, can you clarify all that?

Speaker 2 There's been so much drama around it.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 my personal opinion is it's a bunch of crap.

Speaker 1 I mean, the idea that basically the real estate business, the realtors, the National Association of Realtors and some of the larger businesses were sued for price fixing.

Speaker 2 Because Because they held the MLS number. No listener.

Speaker 1 No, because they said, you know, you got to pay 6%.

Speaker 1 But it wasn't. Gotcha.
It's always been negotiable. Right.

Speaker 1 But it's not any more or less negotiable now that they've been sued, other than they've had to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars because,

Speaker 1 you know, that's the world we live in today. So

Speaker 1 somebody was a victim, apparently, of signing up for something. So, Amy, you could do whatever you want to do,

Speaker 1 but you're allowed and have always been allowed to negotiate the fees for anything that you buy.

Speaker 1 The person selling the thing that you buy, the service or the good, can make a decision to lower to your price or you can make a decision to walk away and not do business with them because we can't come to terms on the price.

Speaker 1 When you walk in and buy a loaf of bread, You accepted the price.

Speaker 1 If you didn't like the price, you went and bought a different loaf of bread or didn't buy that loaf of of bread. So you're accepting a price anytime you work with something.

Speaker 1 If your real estate agent says, I want to charge 6% to sell the home,

Speaker 1 if you say,

Speaker 1 okay,

Speaker 1 then you accepted the price.

Speaker 2 I did not know that's what this was. I thought this was something about holding the MLS number and you couldn't list the house without them.

Speaker 2 I've always done 2.5% or

Speaker 2 2.75 if within 30 days. I've always had some sort of negotiation around it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 the only, the multiple listing service or real tracks, depending on where you are in the country,

Speaker 1 is available to anyone that is in the board of realtors. Right.
I thought that was a good thing. And they're allowed to charge whatever they want to charge.

Speaker 2 I had no idea it was over this.

Speaker 1 By the way, in commercial real estate, we typically charge a 10% commission.

Speaker 1 If you're doing a lease, you often charge 4%

Speaker 1 on a long-term lease. like a commercial real estate lease.
Like if you do a 10-year lease, you might charge 4%. If you do a 3-year lease, you might charge 7%.

Speaker 2 Would it be on the the entirety? On the entire thing.

Speaker 1 But I mean, bottom line is, it's a negotiated rate. If you go to

Speaker 1 get your hair cut and you don't like the price of it, you go somewhere else. Right.
That's how.

Speaker 2 Oh, I didn't know that's what this suit was about.

Speaker 1 It's price fixing.

Speaker 1 They claimed that

Speaker 1 they were price fixing. It's absolute bullcrap.
But anyway, so Amy, no, you don't need to change anything unless you You know, you could go back to them and say,

Speaker 1 I think I want to cancel my listing agreement. If you you don't drop your rate, you could do that.
But it has nothing to do with the suit.

Speaker 1 It just has to do with you're now suddenly dissatisfied with the agreement that you made.

Speaker 2 And as a non-realter, I would suggest you signed a contract.

Speaker 2 Uphold your integrity there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's that. And here's the thing.

Speaker 1 If you're going to sell a house right now, you're probably going to pay around that to list a house with almost anyone. It's about what it is.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's the going rate, but it is not a fixed price.

Speaker 1 That's the thing.

Speaker 1 You technically can argue about it, and you can technically argue about any price. I like arguing about prices.

Speaker 1 I grew up hillbilly. We negotiate everything, call it horse trading, even though there was never a horse involved.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 this would be three and three, wouldn't it?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Typically. The buyer's agent is getting three.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, you could put it on for four.

Speaker 1 And your house might not get shown because the guy doesn't want to take his buyer over there.

Speaker 1 Yeah. He'd rather get three instead of of two.
And so, you know, this is how life works. So, yeah, nah, nah, nah, nah.

Speaker 1 I, Rick, listen, if I was a real estate agent that was a professional and was one of our Ramsey trusted real estate agents and I sell 100 houses, 200 houses a year, which most of them do.

Speaker 1 And you wanted to negotiate with me, I would say, you know what, you're going to get what you pay for. You probably ought to go to somebody else.
Because I'm a pro and this is what I charge.

Speaker 1 And, and, you know,

Speaker 1 there's a reason some attorneys charge $1,000 an hour and some charge $100 an hour. There's a reason.
And so

Speaker 1 that's what we're doing. So anyway, it's up to you, but there's no additional rights that you have now that you didn't have before and bull crap like that.
All right.

Speaker 1 Let's see. Kristen is in Austin, Texas.
Hi, Kristen. How are you?

Speaker 4 Hi. How are you?

Speaker 1 Better than I deserve. What's up?

Speaker 4 Well, I think I know the answer, but it's so, I'm so honored to have both of you online today because I listen to both of you daily.

Speaker 4 So I'm recently divorced. I have a domestic,

Speaker 4 it was domestic violence.

Speaker 4 I am out,

Speaker 4 but I currently have the vehicle.

Speaker 4 I try to, you know, make our marriage work with marriage counseling, and I'm a Christian, and we tried everything.

Speaker 4 You hit me for the last time.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, the first time will be the last time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you.
So, I have two disabled children. Okay, so what's your question today, hon?

Speaker 4 My question is:

Speaker 4 I'm getting the car and the divorce, which our car payment is $488.

Speaker 4 I gross, I just got a raise. I grossed $40 over 46,000.

Speaker 4 I was doing the math and I was wondering, should I get rid of the car?

Speaker 1 And you said you already knew the answer, right?

Speaker 4 Yeah, should I get rid of the car?

Speaker 1 What's the answer? I'm afraid.

Speaker 4 Get rid of the car.

Speaker 1 Is that the answer?

Speaker 4 I don't know because I was just afraid to be carless.

Speaker 1 I didn't want you to be carless.

Speaker 1 I didn't want you to be in a car, though, you can't afford. This car's eating your lunch.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it is. I 100% agree.

Speaker 1 Yeah. The punching bag boy signed you up for this, and we got rid of him.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I have to file bankruptcy too because, like, before I started listening to you, I pretty much did everything.

Speaker 1 When did you file bankruptcy?

Speaker 4 I haven't yet. I have the money on retainer.
I haven't done it yet.

Speaker 1 Why are you filing? What are you filing bankruptcy on, other than the car?

Speaker 4 A mobile home.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 4 Because we need to.

Speaker 1 Have they foreclosed on you?

Speaker 4 I think they're in the process.

Speaker 4 I've been working with them.

Speaker 1 Is that the only thing you have other than this car?

Speaker 4 Some debt,

Speaker 4 with personal debt and everything

Speaker 4 between me and my soon-to-be-ex-husband, the divorce will be final pretty soon.

Speaker 1 How much is the personal debt, huh?

Speaker 4 Altogether, it's like $100,000.

Speaker 1 Counting the car and counting the mobile home.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 4 Well, count, wait, I'm sorry. It's 136 with the oh no, the mobile home.
I'm sorry. It's 196 with the mobile home.
I'm sorry. I'm trying to do math really quick.

Speaker 1 And I'm not that great at it. All right.
You're not living in the mobile home, right?

Speaker 4 No, I live in an apartment.

Speaker 1 Okay, good. All right.
I would not file bankruptcy until they force you to. I don't think you're bankrupt.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Okay. After they foreclose on this mobile home,

Speaker 1 I'll be a little shocked if they even come after you. You'll just have the foreclosure.

Speaker 1 And after you sell the car, now we got rid of the car and the mobile home and we get us a cheap car, then whatever debts are left, I would go and try to negotiate with those and pay them pennies on the dollar.

Speaker 1 And I think you can probably walk away from this.

Speaker 4 I can, cause okay, yeah,'cause I

Speaker 1 your divorce attorney told you to file bankruptcy, didn't they?

Speaker 4 Um, no, I was gonna file I talked to three realtors trying to get out of the mobile home and it made me sick'cause I'm highly allergic to formaldehyde. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But you're out of the mobile home. It's just a matter of how what it ends up looking like after the foreclosure.

Speaker 1 I I think you sell the car and you just mess with the other debt and try to settle it and just wait and see if the mobile home forces you to file bankruptcy five years from now.

Speaker 1 But I don't think they will. I think they're going to walk away from you because you don't look like you're somebody that can get money from to me.
You're what we call judgment proof in the business.

Speaker 1 Broke, no money for them to get. That's what that means.
And I think you can get out of this.

Speaker 1 Live from the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, it's the Ramsey Show, where we help people build wealth, do work that they love, and create actual, amazing relationships. Dr.

Speaker 1 John Deloney, Ramsey personality, number one best-selling author and host of the Dr. John Deloney Show, PhD in counseling.
He's my co-host today. Thanks for hanging out with us.

Speaker 1 The phone number is 888-825-5225.

Speaker 1 John, I don't know if it's because I'm getting old or it is just our culture, but it's probably both. Probably both.
Probably both. I know it's both.

Speaker 1 It is amazing to me how quickly my mind moves on to the next thing.

Speaker 1 Tell me about that. So a week ago, tomorrow, we posted the Trump

Speaker 1 interview I did with President Trump.

Speaker 1 And for those of you who don't know, we reached out to Vice President Harris's camp and to President Donald Trump's camp and offered to do a long-form sit-down interview, talk about ideas, not name-calling and not stump speeches, because I really am sick of all that crap.

Speaker 1 I just want to hear what's really good. What are you really going to do? Not what have you done?

Speaker 1 Not what you like about yourself or any of that. Just what are you going to do? I want to know.
And Trump's team responded.

Speaker 1 We were up in New York, filmed it, and we posted it a week ago tomorrow on the Ramsey Network app, and it's a week ago on Wednesday, two more days. So not even a whole week, it goes on YouTube.

Speaker 1 So we've had over three, almost three million full views, over 16 million people have interacted with it in one way or another, but completely watched it all the way through, almost 3 million.

Speaker 1 And it's not even a week, and I've already moved on.

Speaker 1 I mean, it was a huge splash hit on our YouTube channel, huge splash hit on the app and those kind of things. A lot of people wanted to see it.

Speaker 1 I've gotten lots of comments from my friend group, that kind of junk over the years. People I hadn't talked to in five years sent me an email, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 Because what I do here every day is the same thing over and over. So that was something different.
So they went, oh, you did something different. Who knew? And so,

Speaker 1 but it, and, and I'm already over it. It's done.
You know, but anyway, you guys, you don't have to be over it. If you hadn't seen it, you can still go watch.
We're going to leave it up.

Speaker 1 It's all completely free. And if you don't like it, turn it off.
It's okay. And if you're mad at me, then turn me off.

Speaker 1 it's okay we'll get through all that but yeah it's how fast we move on to the next thing yeah

Speaker 1 megan is in las vegas hi megan welcome to the ramsey show

Speaker 4 hey hi um speaking of youtube i actually feel like it was such a blessing i saw you recently on the george janko show really um which was yes and it was like so amazing because it was the first time i've heard somebody that I've related to so much of building something amazing so quickly and then falling into almost, well, going into bankruptcy and losing it.

Speaker 2 And I feel like that's the situation I'm in.

Speaker 4 So I have spent like the past six years creating a seven-figure business. I made over $5 million.
I'm full owner equity. I haven't made stupid decisions as far as cars and stupid things like that.

Speaker 4 I've really, I pay myself like $68,000 a year.

Speaker 4 I basically, between our current state, what's happening is the fast funding that I've got, that, you know, quick capital that you have access to, they take 17% of daily sales.

Speaker 4 I've racked up a bit of like a credit card too

Speaker 4 between the ad spend that we do because we're primarily D to C. But what's really great is our D to C is still, I mean, it's hard.
It's hard out there with ad spend, people buying less and everything.

Speaker 4 My biggest challenge is the debt seems to be taking more than obviously what's coming in.

Speaker 1 So are you saying you factored your receivables?

Speaker 4 Yeah, so my cash flow is like running down. Well, we have B2B that's now really coming around being like, hey, look at you guys.

Speaker 1 This is amazing. Have you got receivables on a B2C?

Speaker 4 No, B2B, well, B2B, but it's not fully through yet. And my problem is my cash flow is running out that I'm not sure if I can hang on to that new momentum.

Speaker 1 Okay, wait a minute. I thought, let me stop a second.
Sure.

Speaker 1 You can't do factoring when it's cash on the barrel head B2C. Factoring is when you have a B2B.
And I thought you said your business was B2C.

Speaker 4 No, we're D to C, B to C, primarily. That's like 90% of the business.

Speaker 1 So why is there a cash flow problem in to C? They pay you for the good.

Speaker 4 Well, we have all this interest, but not actually payment yet.

Speaker 1 You don't have interest on B to C.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 4 No, I'm sorry, not interest like physically. I mean like people emailing us and being a business.

Speaker 1 Okay, you have people wanting to buy from you

Speaker 1 on your B to C.

Speaker 1 All right, let me correct. All right.
What percentage,

Speaker 1 what is your top line on this company right now?

Speaker 1 Sorry, what do you mean by that?

Speaker 1 Total revenues annually.

Speaker 4 Oh, so annually we do at least a million.

Speaker 1 $1 million annual revenues.

Speaker 1 What percentage of that is direct to consumer B to C?

Speaker 4 Oh my gosh, like 98%.

Speaker 1 Okay, so you're doing $900,000 top line. There is no cash flow problem with that at all.

Speaker 1 They're paying you when they buy it.

Speaker 4 Right. Oh, correct.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So that's not a cash flow problem. Correct.
So where in the flip did you get interest on $100,000? that's killing you?

Speaker 4 Not interest per se. I mean, so my problem is, is like I keep my cash flow.

Speaker 4 We've had two net negative years because our advertising cost has been significant between all of our overhead, which in this 2024 I've slashed.

Speaker 1 That's not cash flow. That's you lost money.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 1 That means you didn't make you weren't profitable.

Speaker 4 No, no, uh-uh, no.

Speaker 4 And then this 2024, we've been getting even less sales coming in and not profitable.

Speaker 1 So you've never been profitable on a million dollars gross revenue.

Speaker 4 We were for the first two years and then not the last and no, not this.

Speaker 1 Because of SEO cost?

Speaker 4 I guess because of all the.

Speaker 1 Your ad spend went 5X.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, we're spending like anywhere from $400 to $6 sometimes and ad spend $400 to $600.

Speaker 1 Okay, I think I've got the picture. I'm a little fuzzy on the edges, but I think I got the general idea.
And what is your question? What are you planning to do with this?

Speaker 4 So because the cash flow is like a money.

Speaker 1 It's not cash flow money. It's profit.
You're not profitable.

Speaker 4 Right. So because the money in the bank is becoming to the point where that is going down so much.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you're burning your lack of profit. You're losing money and you're burning up your savings.

Speaker 4 Right, correct. Yeah, okay.
And so that's where like, I don't know, like, I've been trying to hang on every single day, but I don't know. Like, I've looked into chapter 11.

Speaker 1 You're not chapter 11.

Speaker 1 You could just close it you don't have to bankrupt it what kind of debt have you run up

Speaker 4 so i have the 500 covid uh eid alone so half a million and then i have about a hundred in credit card to chief bank and i have about 40 000 to like my dad

Speaker 1 most of that's not bankruptable

Speaker 1 okay Your dad and the EIB aren't. They're going to come get you anyway.

Speaker 1 The government's not going to bankrupt the COVID stuff.

Speaker 1 So you've really never, really made any money.

Speaker 1 So we were. No.

Speaker 1 No. No.

Speaker 1 You propped it up with these loans and made yourself think you were.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah.
Essentially, that's right. I mean, what I did notice is like I finally got to a point where I didn't need that fast funding.
Oh, I'm sorry. I do have another like 80K.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry. Are you married?

Speaker 4 Yes, sir.

Speaker 1 What does he make?

Speaker 4 105. Okay.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 I would talk to an attorney about where you stand with the government loan. That's the only one I'm concerned about here.
The rest of them can be worked through.

Speaker 1 And it's okay to put an end to something that's over. And I don't hear anything right now except you're continually making less and less and less money and

Speaker 1 you're burning up your savings. So it's fine to end that.
It doesn't sound like you're turning the corner on it.

Speaker 1 And that's very hard to do emotionally. I'm so sorry.
But it does sound like you need to put a stake in this thing and move on. I'm so sorry.

Speaker 1 Dr. John Deloney Ramsey personality is my co-host today.
Hey, Christian, grab that last caller.

Speaker 1 that is in that business mess and put her on the entree leadership podcast with me.

Speaker 1 I can take more more time there and get down into the nuance of her business and unpack it and see if i can give her a little better answer and um uh because

Speaker 1 i could i was fishing around trying to get the actual numbers out before

Speaker 1 and it used up the whole segment so i i do want to help her and i feel like i dumped her and so let's get her let's get her on the entree and i'll see if i can pick her back up and help her the ramsey show question of the day is brought to you by why refi hey we've all made money mistakes so if you have defaulted private student loans,

Speaker 1 not judging you, but we are saying you can do something about it. Contact YReFi.
They were created for people in your exact situation. Go to yrefi.com slash Ramsey.

Speaker 1 That's why, the letter Y, R-E-F-Y.com slash Ramsey. Might not be in all states.

Speaker 2 All right, today's question comes from Bobby in North Carolina. Bobby writes,

Speaker 2 My wife spins like a drunken sailor.

Speaker 1 Hey, we don't allow people to talk about sailors around here.

Speaker 2 That's right. About 40 to 50 percent of our income goes to her shopping and restaurants.
Her spending habits have always been poor, but they have escalated in recent months.

Speaker 2 She gets mad when I ask to discuss this and even more upset when I talk about the baby steps. She's taken out credit cards in my name and maxed them all out.

Speaker 2 And today we're behind four mortgage payments, owe the IRS several thousand bucks, and we're slipping on a few other smaller bills.

Speaker 2 She recently got a job where she makes about $25K a year, year and I earn $150,000 a year.

Speaker 2 Should I lock her out of the primary account, which should go to paying bills and provide her with a spending account?

Speaker 2 I know this is financially what needs to happen, but how do I address the concerns in our marriage?

Speaker 2 Whew, man.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Dave, when I hear something like this,

Speaker 2 I'm always thinking about

Speaker 2 a group of EMS men and women on the back of an ambulance, and the first thing you got to do is stop the bleeding. Like,

Speaker 2 this this is rough.

Speaker 2 She's spinning them into the hole, like the IRS, mortgage, they're about to lose their house. The government's going to start taking money.

Speaker 2 This is a big, big, scary deal.

Speaker 1 There's only one way that could be, though.

Speaker 1 She's currently doing all the bill paying. He's not.

Speaker 2 Or she's spending so much. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 He could have just at me.

Speaker 1 If I'm controlling the check writing, the mortgage is not behind.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Unless there's no money in the account.

Speaker 1 Well, there would be money in the account. There'd be no money in the account for her to do spending.
There you go. Because the mortgage would be current.

Speaker 1 So he's not paying the bill. She is.
Okay. Mechanically, tactically, that has to be.
It's the only way this is happening. So he dumped all this on her, and then he's bitching about how she's doing it.

Speaker 2 Yep.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, I think everybody's got to stop.

Speaker 1 Everybody's got to stop. We've got to turn the lights on.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Music off, lights on. No more dancing.
No more pretending this isn't real. You're about to lose your house, and the IRS is about to come take their pound of flesh, too.

Speaker 1 And it's not Dave Ramsey, and it's not baby steps. Quit saying baby steps.
Yeah. Baby steps is code word for she doesn't get what she wants and she's a spoiled child.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So quit trying to, quit giving her words to latch on to.
Just go, enough. We're done.

Speaker 1 I don't want to be homeless. Yeah.
We're not going to do sixth grader stuff anymore. We're not four years old.

Speaker 1 We're not a kid that's on the cereal aisle that stomps his foot and throws a fit and lays in the floor and foams at the mouth until they get lucky charms. You're a freaking grown-butt woman.

Speaker 1 You have to do math to exist in this world. This would be the fight that I would be having.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 And if I'm married to somebody and she is about to get us homeless and in debt to the government,

Speaker 2 I would go change my direct deposit. If I'm making $150,000 a year.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm just going to open up an account and I'm going to handle everything and I'm going to put you on. I'm not even giving her a spending account.

Speaker 1 I'm just going, you get nothing until I get the house current. Right.

Speaker 1 We're going to eat and we're going to have lights on, and you can eat here.

Speaker 1 If you want to eat somewhere else, you're going to have to figure that out.

Speaker 1 And then we can talk to the divorce attorney about all that. That's right.

Speaker 1 But this is stopping. And here's the thing: it's gone on too long.

Speaker 1 The thing is, how do you get four months behind?

Speaker 1 18 months of doing this bullcrap. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And you stood by and watched it.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it was okay okay until it wasn't. I mean, dude,

Speaker 1 this guy,

Speaker 1 his passivity is unbelievable until he wasn't.

Speaker 2 And, Dave, maybe I'm crazy, but it does. It absolutely does, but not very often.
It rarely, this type of behavior happens in a vacuum.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 This is a world they've co-created.

Speaker 1 It's not a sudden thing, is my point. That's right.
There's nothing suddenly. Yeah.
She's just suddenly. No.
I mean, the only way she suddenly is you had nothing to do with it up until now.

Speaker 1 And then you look down and start calling her names, you know, and well, you know, what name are we going to apply to you? So,

Speaker 1 you know, yeah, she's spending like a four-year-old and she's acting like a butt. I don't have any question about that.

Speaker 1 But you've tolerated that for 18 months in order to be four months behind on your mortgage. This didn't just suddenly occur.
And so, and now you want to go, boom.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, you need to sit down with the marriage counselor and you need to turn off all the money until we come to agreement, like two adults, that the money first goes to food, second to water and lights, third towards the house payment, fourth towards taxes and transportation.

Speaker 1 And until we take care of those things, we don't eat out and we don't buy anything.

Speaker 1 And until we're in agreement on that, you get no money of any kind of mine. And we're going to start talking to the marriage counselor about that and see if we can save this marriage.

Speaker 2 How long before, how many mortgage payments can you miss before they sue you? I thought it would be before that.

Speaker 1 No, they'll foreclose at six to 12 months. Okay.

Speaker 2 So if I'm in this situation, I'm stopping everything and everything.

Speaker 1 And get current on the house. You get current on the house.
Yeah, you're about to lose your home. You're about to be homeless.
Yeah. Because you won't address these negative behaviors.

Speaker 1 And you waited so long that now it's going to be

Speaker 1 anytime you've, here's the thing. Anytime you've got a mess, count on it taking

Speaker 1 almost as long to fix the mess as it did to get into it.

Speaker 1 So if you're four months behind on your mortgage, count on it to be four to six months before you're current and everything starts to smile again. Yeah.

Speaker 1 As far as the math smiling, I don't think anybody's going to be smiling here for a while.

Speaker 2 Well, and there's an old psychology maxim that is conflict deferred is conflict amplified. That's what we got.
If you think it's going to just go away, it's going to come back.

Speaker 2 It's going to be way worse. It's going to be 4x worse, right?

Speaker 1 And it's not

Speaker 1 going to simply all be okay when you take away her ability to handle the money. No.
No. It's all still there.
It's all still there. And for God's sakes, don't blame it on me.

Speaker 1 It's not the baby steps, and it's not Ramsey and Dave Ramsey.

Speaker 1 It's you. You need to fix it.

Speaker 1 And just go sixth-grade math. Blame it on math.
You know, we pissed at something. This math thing is a problem for all of us adults.

Speaker 1 So, yeah. Blame it on the math.

Speaker 1 Now I got John singing over here. This is really scary.

Speaker 2 I lip synced to that. That was a deep cut right there.

Speaker 1 Was it? Okay. Yeah.
All right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So seriously, sit down with a marriage counselor. Yes, turn off the spending until we can come into agreement with a marriage counselor.

Speaker 1 I'm a little bit afraid that this cow's gotten out of the barn. I don't know if you can get it back in the barn.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 In terms of your marriage, I'm not sure you can turn this one.

Speaker 2 If somebody, let's say there was a couple and they were working really hard, they both got laid off and scrambling, scrambling, and they woke up and they were behind four mortgage payments and they owed the IRS several grand, what would their order of importance be?

Speaker 2 Like, would you run down to a credit union and take out a loan to pay up, get caught up on your house and get the IRS knocked off?

Speaker 1 If you have that ability, you probably don't. Yeah.
You probably don't. Okay.
So usually what happens is you can probably get this mortgage caught up before they foreclose.

Speaker 1 You know, it might go five months, but then by then you've saved up two or three.

Speaker 1 And then it might go the six months and by then you've saved up the other. So you can work a payment plan to get caught up with a mortgage company.
They will work with you.

Speaker 1 The problem here here is the cause of this mess has not been fixed. That's right.
So that couple you describe there,

Speaker 1 he lost his job, but we're together in this and we're identifying, okay, we're not going out to eat. We're not going on vacation.
We're not spending like a drunken congressman.

Speaker 1 I'll quit calling Sailor's name.

Speaker 1 And we're not doing nothing until we get food on the table, lights and water, and the house payments current and we get the IRS out of our house.

Speaker 1 And, you know, we're going to walk down the most force rank, the most important things. Eating out and vacations aren't even on the list until those things are done.

Speaker 1 We don't even have a discussion about those things. So,

Speaker 1 and shopping and restaurants, we don't need to go shopping. You have enough crap.
There's nothing to go shopping for unless it's food. You already own enough clothes.

Speaker 1 You have way too dead gummy shoes and definitely enough purses. You do not need to go shopping.
Your house is four months behind. This is really not rocket surgery here.
This is the Ramsey Show.

Speaker 1 Dr. John Deloney Ramsey personality is my co-host today.
Jonathan and Ashlyn are on the debt-free stage. Hey guys, how are you? Doing well, Dave.
How are you? Welcome. Where do you live?

Speaker 1 We're just outside of Manchester, New Hampshire in Deering. Ah, fun.
Welcome to Nashville. And how much debt have you two paid off? $238,000.
I love it. And how long did that take? 45 months.

Speaker 1 Good for you. And your range of income during that time? Started at $103,000 and ended at $363,000.
Cool. What do y'all do for a living?

Speaker 1 I'm a medical coder. Mm-hmm.
And I'm now self-employed. I do well pumps and water filtration.
Ah, very good. Good for you.
And what kind of debt was this $238,000? A lot of everything.

Speaker 1 Credit cards, student loans, cars, and the house. Yay!

Speaker 1 You are normal and now you're completely weird. You're weird.
Way to go, you guys. I'm so proud of you.
What's this house worth? About $350,000 to $375. I love it.
How old are you two? 37. And I'm 34.

Speaker 1 And you have a paid-for house in New Hampshire that's worth $350. Thereabouts, yep.
Wow. How much in your nest egg in your 401ks and stuff? Just over 500.
Wow.

Speaker 1 Not including the business. I'm now self-employed.
Okay. And with the valuation of the business, you're probably easily millionaires.

Speaker 1 Way to go, you guys. And you're not even 40.
I love it. Yes, sir.

Speaker 1 Well done. Well done.
All right. Four years ago, 48 months ago, this is a 45-month journey.
So four years ago, things weren't like this. No.
You were normal.

Speaker 1 You had debt coming out your ears like everybody else in America. And you woke up.
Tell us how you woke up and how you got connected to us. Well, it started just before COVID.

Speaker 1 I was on a job with a contractor I work with regularly talking about trucks. I was just an employee at the time for a family business.

Speaker 1 talking about trucks. And he says, well, make sure you do what Ramsey does.
Shout out to Peewee. He's who turned us on to you.

Speaker 1 And I said, pay cash for a truck. And I just said, okay, whatever.
Well, then the pandemic hits, and I'm tired of listening to the radio telling me the sky's falling.

Speaker 1 So I turned on the podcast, heard you guys talking, and brought it home to Ash, and we looked at the baby steps, and away we went. Wow.
Just like that. Just like that.
So

Speaker 1 water pumps and home filtration. So you probably had an increase in business.
Big time. Because everybody's sitting at home going, oh, I really want this fixed.

Speaker 1 Yep, take them out of the the schools and their work and put them in their house. They're using a lot more water.
Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we were both deemed essential during that time frame. Sure.
Water is kind of essential. And medical, yeah.
Medical. And medical is obviously essential.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh, I bet you got some great coding stories, don't you?

Speaker 1 Oh, that came later.

Speaker 1 We won't talk about them because we'll get shadow banned, but I bet they're awesome. Oh, they're great.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's a thing. All right, cool, you guys.
So

Speaker 1 the podcast, this podcast, you started listening to it. That's what got us to it.
And then, like I said, brought it home to Ashlyn, and it was game on.

Speaker 1 Really,

Speaker 1 you talk about a why, and we never really had our why until we came out of baby step two. So during baby step two, Ashlyn's father was diagnosed with a terminal cancer.

Speaker 1 We get into baby step three, and we're working through that, and Joe took his turn for the end.

Speaker 1 Being debt-free at that point afforded us the ability for Ashlyn to be with her father as she needed to be for as long as she needed to be.

Speaker 1 So that really exposed, you know, this is the freedom's real, you know. And then the freedom matters.
It matters 100%. That's right.
We didn't owe anybody anything.

Speaker 1 We didn't have to get her back to work right away. She was there for as long as she needed to be.
And then a year to the day after Joe passed, suddenly my dad, who was my partner, passed as well.

Speaker 1 Oh my.

Speaker 1 That was now the big income bump.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So y'all have had a lot of loss.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It was a hard process, yeah.

Speaker 2 But because of the work y'all started four or five years ago,

Speaker 1 man. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Y'all get what I think is one of life's greatest privileges is the opportunity to grieve.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we definitely did.

Speaker 1 Man.

Speaker 1 I was afforded a lot of opportunity to spend the time that I had with my dad over the last two and a half weeks of his life. And I had a lot of closure, which was really nice.

Speaker 2 Those are minutes and hours that you can't put a price tag.

Speaker 1 Absolutely not.

Speaker 2 It's amazing.

Speaker 1 And a lot of people don't have a choice. But that's right.
Because they're strapped to some stinking debt payment.

Speaker 2 Good for you guys.

Speaker 2 I'm curious.

Speaker 2 When we were the only voices, and I was brand new at the time, we were the only voices saying,

Speaker 2 hey, the only thing you can do is the next right thing. Go do the next right thing.
And everyone else is screaming that the end of time is here.

Speaker 2 What was it like on the other end? Did we sound crazy?

Speaker 1 No, it sounded, it was a light in the dark, really. You know, it gave us something to focus on, and it was the perfect timing, as odd as that might be, where everything was on pause.

Speaker 1 I mean, we took full advantage of all those things. So it really, you guys were instrumental in us getting through the pandemic, really.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we hired John to help us with mental health, and we thought, okay, we'll move him in gradually, and, you know, it'll take two or three, four years. And, and

Speaker 1 then we went, uh, all of America's crazy. John, we're getting on the air right now.
And there was no gradual on-ramp. We just dropped him in through the ceiling, and here we go.
Great timer.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he worked great for us.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, thanks.

Speaker 1 Wow. Congratulations, you two.
I'm so proud of you. Thank you.
Thank you. Wow.
How does it feel to be completely free and millionaires before you're 40? Free's the word. I mean, it really is.

Speaker 1 I don't even know. You know, it's just free.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 What do y'all tell people the key to getting out of debt is?

Speaker 1 Well, communication. It's really helped our relationship.
We were good at the beginning, but now it's just, we're so much more solid. Nothing stops us.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Nothing.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Very cool.

Speaker 2 I think sometimes people, they, I think freedom is in many ways become a slogan.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the way I hope people who are listening to this will just go watch this on YouTube to watch how you two just described Nothing Can Stop Us. That's right.

Speaker 2 And watch y'all describe the word, the only word that keeps coming to mind here is, in the worst moments of our life, we had peace. That's right.
Right?

Speaker 2 And so when you think freedom, it's not just something you stitch into a pillow, it's peace.

Speaker 2 It is this understanding that we are unhitched and we are unhinged from any restraints and you cannot stop us. That, like, y'all put meat and bone and muscle and skin to freedom.

Speaker 1 That's amazing. It's cool.
It's awesome. Thank you.
Thank you. What's the next big thing? What are you going to do now?

Speaker 1 Well, we're going to do some stuff to the house, but we really want to get out to Greece. We want to go.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we really want to go to Greece.

Speaker 2 How many of you New Hampshire neighbors

Speaker 2 got Greece on the whiteboard?

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 I guess we'll find out.

Speaker 1 Anything in particular, any reason, or just you just like it? Just beautiful country. We want to go for the food.
I mean, everything, you know, the culture, yeah. We'll definitely hit the islands.

Speaker 1 Go to Santorini and Mikonos. Thank you.
Been there several times, and

Speaker 1 they're as good as the pictures. Yeah.
And the food. Yeah, the food.
That's what I'm looking for.

Speaker 1 at the views and the food and my mouth's kind of watering right now i think i may catch a plane yeah well done you guys see that's what happens when you don't have any dead gum payments and you're 37 years old we're just gonna go to santorini man have some have a have a greek salad no when i was 37 we were like all right we can do arby's this month this month

Speaker 1 you guys are going to greece wow that's it let's live like no one else later you can live and give like no one else and your business is going to prosper and grow you'll make different decisions now than if you were desperate in the business.

Speaker 2 And when somebody calls and says, can you be here?

Speaker 1 You say, yep, I'll be right there. That's right.
And you can go. That's amazing.
Good for you. That's the great part of this story.
Wow. So proud of you two.
Very well done.

Speaker 1 Jonathan and Ashland from New Hampshire, $238,000 paid off. That's house and everything.

Speaker 1 You guys are listening to and looking at a couple of weirdos. They're millionaires.
They're not even 40 baby steps millionaires.

Speaker 1 Did it in 45 months making 103 up to now 363 on the way to Greece count it down let's hear a debt-free scream three

Speaker 1 two one

Speaker 1 we're debt free

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 wow you gotta love it gotta love it man

Speaker 1 Go visit the Parthenon in Athens. Yeah, Mars Hill where Paul preached.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I love people explaining, like, with their facial expressions and their clinched fists. This is what freedom feels like.
This is what it feels like. It's not a slogan.

Speaker 2 It's an actual thing that you can go get.

Speaker 1 This is the Ramsey Show.

Speaker 1 The best way to make the most of your money is by creating and sticking to a plan. No one wins by accident.

Speaker 1 Ready, fire, aim has never hit anything. Ready, Ready,

Speaker 1 aim,

Speaker 1 fire.

Speaker 1 That's how you do it. You do the same thing with your money.
Tell your money what to do. Don't wonder where it went.
That's how people win with money. It's magical.
You'll feel like you got a raise.

Speaker 1 Give every dollar an assignment. That's why we named the world's best budgeting app, Every Dollar.
Because you give every dollar a name, and it's absolutely an incredible app.

Speaker 1 We've got about almost a whole floor here at Ramsey full of software engineer nerds that work on it and make it better every day. And they don't mind me calling them nerds.

Speaker 1 They're kind of proud of the moniker actually up there. And so,

Speaker 1 yeah, they're brilliant, is what they are. And they're making this thing better every time, every week.
Tens of millions of people are using every dollar.

Speaker 1 You can download it for free in the App Store or at Google Play. Click on the link in the description if you're listening on YouTube or the podcast.

Speaker 1 Hey, reminder that the next segment of the show is going to only be available on the Ramsey

Speaker 1 Network app.

Speaker 1 So go to, again, Google Player Apple and download the Ramsey Network app for free. You get the last segment of the show, the last portion of the show for free every day.

Speaker 1 Matter of fact, you get the whole show there. You get all of our shows there.
And we'll do early releases like we did with the President Donald Trump interview at the Ramsey Network app.

Speaker 1 So this section we're getting ready to do right here is the last portion before we jump over to the app with the rest of it, those of you on talk radio, you're going to get the same show you've always gotten, no change at all.

Speaker 1 It's all completely free, by the way. Be sure and check out the Ramsey Network app, download it for your phone

Speaker 1 from Google Play or from Apple. Sarah is in Los Angeles.
Hi, Sarah. Welcome to the Ramsey Show.

Speaker 4 Hello, gentlemen. Thank you so much for taking my call.

Speaker 1 Sure. What's up?

Speaker 4 My husband and I are in baby step two, and we are dealing with a lot of

Speaker 4 resentment and jealousy.

Speaker 4 I'm an only child, so I've never dealt with any of this. My husband has a stepbrother that

Speaker 4 is just that quick,

Speaker 4 get rich quick guy.

Speaker 4 And I recently found out that my in-laws have invested quite a lot of money.

Speaker 4 They know that we are working through it. And I mean, I'm struggling to buy my kids Halloween costumes this year.

Speaker 4 And I'm trying to make sure that we're paying off all of our debt and doing everything.

Speaker 4 And I just feel like it's a total kick in the gut of like, you're donating millions of dollars or investing millions of dollars to

Speaker 4 this family member that has lost everyone's money. And you see that we're trying, we're working really hard, we're doing all these things.

Speaker 4 And we're doing it all on our own. And it's always the compare game when it comes to my in-laws.

Speaker 1 Who's comparing

Speaker 1 you? My in-laws.

Speaker 4 No, no, no, my in-laws.

Speaker 1 They're comparing you to Get Rich Quick Boy.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 4 Because he lives in this mansion and

Speaker 4 has a gorgeous wife and all these kids in his open marriage and very un-Christian values.

Speaker 2 And hey, Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, Sarah.

Speaker 1 You don't want to be him.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you're going to bury yourself.

Speaker 4 No, I don't.

Speaker 1 Here's what I want you to do.

Speaker 4 I don't want to be any of that.

Speaker 2 I know, I know. Here's what I want you to do.
Yeah, but there's a sense of injustice and a sense of loss and a sense of disgust.

Speaker 2 And you're caught in an age-old trap of you are just chugging poison every morning, hoping that he pays the penalty for it.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 2 And I just refuse.

Speaker 2 Maybe it's because I'm old now. I just refuse to drink poison and hope other people die.
I'm not going to let them cost me my marriage and my joy, even in tough moments.

Speaker 2 I'm just not going to give that away anymore.

Speaker 2 Can I tell you that

Speaker 2 the action that healed me

Speaker 2 is going to sound like a childhood camp game? And it came from one of my grad school colleagues who is a multi-decade therapist. She's brilliant.
Here's the exercise.

Speaker 2 I want you and your husband to go home and get like a, if you're just at your house, you can get a bowl or if you have a box or something like that.

Speaker 2 And I want you all to sit across the table from each other and ask this magic question.

Speaker 2 From this point forward, who gets a vote?

Speaker 2 And I want you to write down on a card and drop it in the bowl. And there should be no more than five or six people.

Speaker 2 And what you're going to do is you're going to quickly distill down who are the people in our lives that get a vote into how we act, how we talk, how we buy, how we raise our kids. Who gets a vote?

Speaker 2 And by the way, our parents, we love them. We're going to be honorable and respect them.
They don't get a vote anymore. Our brother-in-law, God help him when it all falls apart.

Speaker 1 He didn't get a vote.

Speaker 2 And when I did this, I ended up with about six people.

Speaker 2 And then I was challenged to do an even harder thing. I called him and let him know.
You want to talk about weird?

Speaker 2 That's weird. Calling your buddy who's an HVAC guy in Texas and being like, hey, I just want you to know you get a vote.

Speaker 1 And he's like.

Speaker 2 I think you have the wrong number.

Speaker 1 It was auto felon. I already had a vote.

Speaker 1 Are you in jail?

Speaker 2 So here's the thing.

Speaker 2 Then from that point forward, anytime those things come up when you start to say like, I can't believe,

Speaker 2 they don't get a vote.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 let me give you a hardcore example of that that's kind of fun. Okay.

Speaker 1 The sweetest people

Speaker 1 in my life were my grandma and Grandpa Ramsey.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 They had zero entrepreneurial zeal. Zero.
He was an accountant, 38 years at alcohol, aluminum. She was a second grade teacher, whole life.

Speaker 1 So I opened a business, and so my grandmother's definition of success is, do you have a paycheck that's steady from a steady organization, like a big company like Alcoa or the government if you're a teacher, right?

Speaker 1 That's her definition of success.

Speaker 1 The day...

Speaker 1 And I love her, and she was sweet, and she was precious, and there's a lot of things I would give her a vote on, but my career, she got zero votes in because she's wired different than me, okay?

Speaker 1 She was not in the bowl. You follow me? The day I got word that we had sold the millionth book on the first book, Financial Piece, she called

Speaker 1 that day and asked me when I was going to get a real job.

Speaker 1 David, when you're in the middle of the day, that's why she doesn't have a vote. Okay.
Isn't that sweet? That's so sweet.

Speaker 1 But if she had a vote, you know what? I would have been pissed off for seven weeks.

Speaker 1 Insulted.

Speaker 1 How dare her

Speaker 1 question

Speaker 1 my

Speaker 1 acumen, my business acumen. I've sold a million bucks.
Instead, my wife and I had a really cute laugh over it because she didn't get a vote.

Speaker 2 So, will you do me a favor?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 And no one's going to tell you this in any of the blogs or anything. Okay, this is just your friend.
This is just your big brother John. Cut yourself some slack.

Speaker 1 You're doing good.

Speaker 2 You've never, yeah, you're an only child. You didn't see this thing done at home.
You're off in the woods, you and your husband with machetes trying to carve your own path.

Speaker 2 You have the picture of everything this show stands against, which is integrity, honesty, doing things slow in the right way, just laughing at you, right?

Speaker 2 Cut yourself some slack on those mornings you're mad, those mornings you're frustrated when you go to buy Halloween costumes and you and your kids have to make them from home.

Speaker 2 By the way, they will remember those costumes.

Speaker 1 They will. Oh, and what's your household income?

Speaker 4 $140,000.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 It's not a true statement to say I can barely afford Halloween costumes. It is a true statement to say we have chosen to allocate most of our money to things other than Halloween costumes.

Speaker 1 But if you make $140,000, you can buy the Halloween costumes. You can buy every one of them on Amazon tomorrow.
I mean, like seven per kid. You can afford it.

Speaker 1 It's just you making, you're making like adult choices and stuff.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Because you're like a grown-up in the land of immaturity, right? I'm trying to be.
No, you are. You are.
You are.

Speaker 1 You're completely doing good, but you're just letting the wrong people have a vote. John nailed it.

Speaker 2 And by the way,

Speaker 2 don't arrest yourself for thought crimes.

Speaker 1 When you're driving to work and you're like, why won't my in-law, it's okay to be mad.

Speaker 2 And then you got to go do the next right thing, which is turn on some good music and sing real loud and say a prayer and exhale. And remember, me and my husband are planning this.

Speaker 1 And go, aren't my in-laws foolish? They've made the wrong investment. What a goofball.

Speaker 2 What a goofball. And then I'm on to the next.
And by the way, you're probably beautiful too. Stop judging yourself against your brother-in-law's wife.
Good lord. You're good to go, man.

Speaker 1 Don't need that one. This is the Ramsey Show.