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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.

I'm Dave Ramsey, your host, Dr.

John Deloney, Ramsey personality, number one best-selling author, PhD in counseling, and host of the Dr.

John Deloney Show, a big hit on the Ramsey Networks.

He's my co-host.

Open phones at 888-825-5225.

Danny is in Orange County.

Hey, Danny, what's up?

Hey, Dave, big fan first and foremost.

Big fan of

Mel.

Thank you.

I just have a quick question here.

So I've been married with my wife for about 10 years at this point.

It's living up over 10 years, milestone.

Really happy about that.

But

I don't think we're on the same page on finances.

And so recently we had this hard conversation where I

told her I want to get

a different account so that I can manage the money a little better.

She's been

She's been managing the finances for the amount that we've been married.

But at this this point, we're earning a lot more than what we did when we first started.

You know, when we first started.

So how did the conversation go after you told your wife she sucks at this?

She didn't really say much.

I just

hope you don't take this.

Yeah, she's,

I said, I hope you don't take this into, you know, with any offense, but I think it's my step to take.

Right.

And she just stood quiet and we kind of went on with it.

And so I said, I'm going to look into it.

And I just, I've been looking for which would be the best bank to open a new account with, but I haven't really done it.

And yesterday I, you know,

going through

the different credit cards that we have and coming to find out that

one of our credit cards is back, you know, into the debt.

And so I guess to give you a little bit more context, we tried doing the second baby step, the snowball effect, and we were doing well.

No, we weren't, you were, and she was doing whatever she wanted.

That's true.

Yes.

I'll say.

What is she so bad at that brought you to a point where you sat down and said,

I need to, I feel so unsafe with our family finances, I need to get our own my own account.

So I'm earning now six figures, which, you know, she's been a great a big part of, you know, she supported me and now I'm earning 110K on a yearly basis.

I'm tempted to stop you right there and just say y'all are earning six figures.

Okay.

Yeah, that is correct.

We are earning 110, and she has a part-time, so she brings in about 20, 20K a year with the little part-time that she has.

And so we're doing a lot better than what we used to.

And

we're still kind of living paycheck to paycheck even with

you know our our rent i know i know but here's what i'm i'm asking what is what does she do

now that y'all are making a hundred and thirty grand a year together

what has she done that has

has told you you need to protect this family by getting money away from her and handling it all yourself

um

like i said so i trusted that the finances would go i guess good, but she's even

had to use a credit card to pay our rent.

That tells me y'all don't have a budget, dude.

Like, it tells me y'all have good ideas, but y'all aren't sitting down on the same when you stay on the same page, like y'all sit down at the beginning of every month and decide, here's what's important to us, here's what we have to do, and then here's the debts we're going to pay off in this order.

And if y'all aren't having that conversation,

we hear from people all the time who make way, way, way more money than you, but they're still in a mess financially.

So it's not fair to say, or it's not honest to say, quote unquote, we're doing better.

You're making more money, but if y'all are still spending like wild, you're not doing any better.

You're fixing the problem with the wrong tool, honey.

The tool of opening a separate account is not going to fix the problem.

It's going to make it worse.

So here's what we need to do instead, okay?

You called to ask, so we'll tell you, because we love you.

83% of the millionaires that we have surveyed, this is actual data, say that they work hand in hand as teamwork with a cooperative spouse towards our dreams.

Less than 50% of the general public say that, and they're not millionaires as a result.

So what we know is that couples that work together on their finances in detail,

one of them being more nerdy, one of them being more of a free spirit, one of them being a saver, one of them being a spender, but they have an agreement on the goal and an agreement before the month begins on the steps we're going to take with our money this month towards that goal.

Those couples that are aligned have end up with two things, longer, happier marriages and a higher probability of building wealth.

Separate accounts works against that, not with that.

And so you're harming your future relationship and you're harming your probability to build wealth if you go the route you're asking about.

So I'm going to beg you not to do that for your sake.

Now, what do we do instead?

Instead, we're going to put you on the every dollar budget and you're going to go and apologize to your wife for insulting her after she's been doing the bills for 10 years and now you woke up because you're making a little bit more money and decided you didn't like the way she's doing it.

Before that, she was fine.

She was on her own.

And, you know, no, that's not okay.

So I'm sorry I insulted you.

You were doing the best you could and I was trying to do something else and I was wrong where I was going.

So instead, honey, what we're going to do is we're going to sit down and we're going to do this together.

We're going to put in the Every Dollar app every dollar of our income before the month begins.

There will be no more credit cards.

There will be no more debt.

And we are going to use this wonderful income that we have to build a wonderful life and a wonderful future.

And so we're going to sit down together.

Every dollar is going to have an assignment before the month begins.

And then we're going to stick to that.

Both of us are going to pinky swear spit shake.

We have a marital contract that that's our game.

And we are going to do that.

Both of you have a vote.

And both of you have an agreement.

And both of you are grown-ups.

No fit throwing, no four-year-olds.

I work so hard.

Everybody works hard.

Please call me the Wambulance.

Instead, get together, work on this stuff together, and you will see a change.

John?

Yeah, that's it.

And the only other thing I would add is you can't put rent on the credit card if y'all have.

Gone that extra step and cut up all the credit cards.

If you have a backup plan in this situation, you're going to use it every time.

And so you've got to take that ability.

Y'all have proven to yourselves you can't get there if that's an off, if you have this off-ramp.

So you got to get rid of the off-ramp.

You got to cut up the credit cards.

Yeah.

Lobsters are the only things that survive going backwards.

That's it.

So we're going to cut them up and then we're going to, that's going to force us every month to sit at the table and figure this thing out.

Yeah, that's the deal, man.

Well, maybe shrimp.

Yeah.

Maybe crawdads, but crawds, too, too.

Crustaceans.

But let me say this.

And Dave said this the best, man.

It's easy when you've been struggling financially, when you cross that magic number, whether it's $75,000 or six figures or 500,000, it's to suddenly think you're better than

you're not.

And you said it when you started the call.

She's been a great support staff for you.

So

be conscience of your language.

This is y'all's money.

This is y'all's debt.

And this needs to be y'all's plan out of this mess.

And again, Dave, I don't know another way that it works.

No, you have to be together working this, not separate accounts.

It doesn't work.

I mean, everybody thinks that's some kind of individuality or something.

If you want individuality, don't get married, okay?

Jeez, Jeez, you're a horrible spouse when you do that.

Not you, but everybody that does it.

So, hang on, we're gonna sign you up for every dollar advanced version for free.

We'll pay for it.

Help you guys get on the right track.

You can do this, Danny.

Dave, we got a lot of calls on this show where life happens.

One day someone's healthy, they're working, providing for their family, and then a curveball hits.

You know, we hear it all the time: a car accident, a cancer diagnosis, a heart attack, and suddenly everything changes.

Yeah, and that's why you've always said that having term-life insurance from Xander is essential because it protects your family if the worst happens.

Yeah, that's right.

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But there's another piece that people often overlook, and that's long-term disability insurance.

Yeah, it's important to understand the difference between them.

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Karen is in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Hi, Karen.

How are you?

I am doing well.

Thank you, Dave and John, for taking my call.

Sure.

What's up?

Okay.

I have been unemployed since February, and I was in the process of doing baby step two.

And

I still have not gained employment.

Why?

And once I'm employed,

I haven't gained employment because the sector that was really affected had reduced funding, so it's been very hard to beat or get back into that industry.

So leave the sector, go to something else.

It's been February.

Yeah,

and I have been trying even for customer service.

How have you been eating since February?

Well,

when I was unemployed, I had 12 weeks of unemployment and my daughter got Social Security.

Her father passed.

and adoption and I had an adoption assistant.

So after that 12 weeks, my parents have been helping me tremendously.

And

I don't think that,

I don't think without my parents' assistance, that I would have gotten this far.

Wow.

Well, that's sweet that they're there.

What were you doing before you lost your job?

I was a project coordinator in clinical research industry.

Okay.

Do you have project management skills?

I do.

I supported project managers, and I am studying to get my project management certification.

Thankfully, I got a scholarship so that I could get the training and pay for my exam.

So that has been a blessing.

When will that be?

September the 6th.

Oh, good.

Next week.

Okay.

Good.

Yeah, September the 6th.

Okay, so

listen, I want you going crazy looking for a project manager job starting today.

And in the meantime, I want you to doing 42 things at the local mall, work in retail, customer service from Home,

Walmart, Target, anybody that'll put you in there.

And believe me, Target will put you in there if you're breathing.

So,

yeah, go get something at $20 an hour, get some money coming in to get the fear out of the back of your voice because that fear in the back of your voice, I don't want it there when you're interviewing for these project manager jobs.

Of course.

And

like I said, I was doing the baby steps and I had $1,000 in

the

emergency fund.

And I felt like that I wasn't even prepared for a layoff.

Of course you weren't.

You were in debt and broke.

When you're in debt and broke, you're not prepared for a layoff.

Of course you weren't.

But we don't spend our lives staying in debt getting ready for a layoff either.

So you were doing the right thing.

The only thing I would question is, I got to tell you, I'm back to work in about 48 hours after I leave a job.

I'm going to go crazy because it scares me to death not working and not making money.

I can't handle it.

The idea that the unemployment might be all I had, that would scare me to the point I'd be willing to do almost anything that was legal and moral immediately.

So

I want to light a fire under you, girl.

Go get something today.

I want you earning some money right this second.

And then I want you to go get this project manager job.

And I'm going to send you some of Ken Coleman's materials to help you do that.

But here's what happens when you get laid off sometimes.

It steals some of your

confidence, some of your swagger.

Steals a ton of it, yeah.

It makes you think it has something to do with you and it didn't have anything to do with you.

It wasn't your fault.

And then the second thing is while people are recovering, grieving that,

as if there was a death, because there kind of is,

it's easy to get paralyzed and drag this out

and have tunnel vision and think, I've got to go back doing the same kind of job exactly that I did before.

You need a new one.

And as you said, that sector is sick, so get out of that sector.

Yeah, I love the idea of professional identity being about who you help, knowing that how and who you help is going to change over time.

But I'm a person who helps.

And so that might be at Burger King for a season.

That might be at Home Depot for a season.

And that might be a full-time psychologist for a season.

It doesn't matter if that core identity.

So, finding out you're a person who helps people solve problems.

That might be a TJ Maxx, and that might be as a project manager for a highfalutin research.

Making a hundred grand, right?

But it's when our ego gets trapped in the job title, man, then you can stay unemployed for a long, long time.

You can't stay unemployed 10 more minutes, girl.

You got to go get it.

That's right.

And you said something real important, and I don't know how this works.

I don't know the biology or physiology of this, but a hiring manager, whenever I hired people, I could always tell who felt like I would be lucky to have them and who desperately needed me to have them.

And it just, it impacted how I hired.

There's a swagger you walk in when you are applying for a job.

It's like, hey, I want to be here and you'd be really lucky to have me versus please, please, please, please, please, please, please hire me.

And when you are able to eat and when you're able, when you've got another job in your back pocket, you can have a more honest, direct conversation than I'll take whatever you got.

Please, just, there's a desperation that just is in the air.

It's in in the air.

It's in your body language.

It's in your voice tone.

It's in the pauses in your sentences.

It's in everything.

And people can read it even if they don't know they're reading it.

Kelly, pick up.

Let's get her on Find the Work You're Wired to Do by Coleman and Proximity Principal.

And then I want you, Karen, to go to his website at kencoleman.com and download all the forms.

They're free to write the resume finders.

To get right in somebody's face and go get some positions right now.

That is the answer to the equation, is income.

and and looking in the mirror and saying karen's awesome there's nothing wrong with karen it's a thing that happened now karen's gonna get it get it courtney's in california hi courtney how are you

hey i'm doing well how are you better than i deserve how can i help

hey so um

really very recently um i just my husband came to me and told me that we had a significant amount of debt,

consumer debt,

consumer debt, credit cards.

It was about $50,000

that I didn't know about.

So we had some equity in our home.

I took out a HELOC loan to just get rid of it.

It was high interest credit cards.

And we have the HELOC loan now.

And those are all paid down or they're paid down.

And then through the HELOC loan, they canceled them all.

I thought we were kind of through the storm of it.

He came to me last night or just the other day and told me there was an additional $27,000 sofi loan that he took out to pay off the credit cards a year ago and then rent them back up.

So Courtney, what's he spending money?

Not the first time.

Well, I asked for statements.

I was going through some statements.

It's mostly food.

I only have statements from this year.

He hasn't sent me the statements from last couple of years.

Partially my fault.

I should have been more involved with the finances.

I had some complicated pregnancies.

and so I just asked him to handle it for the last few years because it's the pregnancies and just getting some stuff off of my plate.

I work a high-level camera.

So, is he, are you guys not making your ends meet?

And this is the way he's covering it, and he didn't want to burden you with it because you asked him to handle it?

Yes, that was what's happened.

Are you confident of that?

Yeah.

It's rare that somebody runs up $75,000 and there's not something else they're hiding.

Yeah, so I don't, I don't know yet.

I'm still waiting on statements.

I wouldn't wait another 24 hours.

I wouldn't wait another 24 hours.

It's all electronic.

You can log in right away.

Any pause on his account is hiding stuff.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah, that's scary.

It should be.

Yeah, let's get to the bottom of it.

There's two possible options.

There's something really scary going on that you still don't know about that's really bad.

Or it's simply he's ashamed that he wasn't able to handle everything for you during a time that you were hurting and he didn't want to tell you.

Okay?

And

that's the most innocuous of all, and that one's easy to fix.

It's now time for you to be a big girl and get involved.

The two of you together handle money together for the rest of your lives.

I don't care who's going through a tough season.

Both of you are grown-ups, for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health.

We're doing this together, and we both have full disclosure.

None of us is being cared for unless there's there's an extreme illness of some kind that is ongoing and chronic, in which case you accept the consequences of not knowing what's going on.

I would pull both credit reports tonight on both of you from the three credit reporting agencies so you get a clear picture.

We're going to log into the accounts tonight and go through them together.

And then

you're going to put a freeze on your credit report so y'all can't take out any more loans without the other person knowing.

And a promise that we're not going to do that anymore.

And a promise you're going to be involved and we're going to work on this together from this point forward.

If you were gone tomorrow, would your family know where your important stuff is?

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Well, you gotta have a month for everything, I guess.

August is make a will month.

Gross.

Okay, that's all right.

It's not gross to make a will, though.

It's kind of a grown-up thing to do because it's the admission that the people in your life you love are going to have a plan because you're going to be a grown-up and leave them a plan.

And that's called a will.

Grown-ups leave a will.

Period.

If you're 18 years old or older, you need a will.

I don't care if you have any assets.

I don't care.

You don't want the government deciding what happens to your pets or your kids.

Not necessarily in that order either.

So the deal is you want a will.

You need a will.

It's grown-up things to do.

What is it that millennials called it a few years ago?

Adulting.

Adulting.

As if that was a verb.

Okay.

Procrastination, 43% of adults without a will say they just hadn't gotten around to it.

Yeah.

Perfectionism.

I have to make some big decisions I don't want to make.

Well, then let's just put it off till you die.

That'll work.

Nope.

I think I need a certain amount of assets.

I covered that.

A belief that everything will automatically go to family.

It doesn't.

It goes to the lawyers.

That's who gets it if you don't do this.

Uncertainty about the process, well, you got to figure out where to start.

Go to ramseysolutions.com slash will quiz.

It's a free quiz, and we'll help you walk through this.

You need to get your will done.

Ramseysolutions.com slash wills quiz.

It's a grown-up thing, and we've done detailed research.

You're going to die.

No one gets out of this alive.

100%.

And there is no correlation between doing a will and the probability of death.

You're going to die anyway.

So you might as well.

And if you want to piss people off with your will, do it while you're alive.

John is here.

John's in Amarillo, Texas.

Hey, John, how are you?

I'm good.

How are you, Dave?

Better than I deserve.

What's up?

Hey, I was just calling.

I'm 20 years old and I'm a full-time student and full-time working outside of school.

And

what are you studying?

Business.

Good.

Okay.

Are you out there at WT?

Yes.

Good for you.

And then I was curious.

So I'm in the farm and ranch industry.

And I'm about, oh, I was about $100,000 in debt on vehicle loans.

And then I just recently took out $100,000 to start a cattle business.

Are you punking me?

Who gave a 20-year-old a $100,000 cow loan?

I know.

Who?

I don't know.

No, yeah, you know.

Did you really do it or not?

Are you punking us?

Yes, I did.

No, I really did it.

You're kidding me.

Who made the loan?

What's the company's name?

I want to make sure all of America hears who's stupid out there.

It's a local bank here.

What's the name of the local stupid bank?

The name of the bank.

Education.

Education is the name of a bank?

Yeah, education credit.

Education credit.

You pay for it with a student loan, education.

They gave a 20-year-old a $100,000 loan to buy cattle.

Yes, and I have a CD also.

How big is your CD?

$100,000.

Oh, so they didn't give you a loan.

You borrowed your own money.

Pretty much, yes, sir.

Where'd you get $100,000 in a CD?

It was

a partnership between me and a family member on some cattle that we've had for about 10 years, and then we sold those.

So you made a profit, and now you pledge the whole profit into another herd.

Yes.

All right.

What size cows do you get?

What size cat?

What size?

What size?

How many head?

I got 25 head.

And then how big are they?

They are

three to six years old, and they're going to be having calves in about two to three months.

Do you know how to calve

babies?

Yes.

He grew up on it.

He grew up in it.

The family member was his father, probably.

All right, honey.

You called the wrong show.

I'm sorry.

How can we try to help you?

I'm just trying to figure out really like what I can do and if I'd like made a good decision on trying to like take this loan out.

How long have you listened to this show, hon?

About two years, probably.

Have you ever heard me tell anyone to borrow money?

For anything?

No, I haven't.

Ever.

No, sir.

Okay.

And here's how I'm afraid that you're going to be.

So you kind of know you walked into the lion's den right

yes well and here's what i'm afraid you're about to do those cows right now beef is at an all-time high because there's been drought right

yes and you're gonna have babies and you might

maybe

you might be able to get away with this one

and then you're gonna go do it again and you're gonna you're gonna put more down on it and you're gonna take out a bigger loan

and then in 18 months or 24 months when everyone's got back into new cows because there's been some rain,

the beef prices are going to plummet.

And you're going to be up a creek.

You're going to have lost it all.

Yeah, your CD is what you lost.

The bank hasn't got any risk.

Well, I'm saying he's going to lose it.

The bank's not stupid at all.

They're begging for you to not pay this.

They're just going to scarf your CD.

I think you're going to make your money on this one.

I think

it's the $250,000 loan you take after this one.

I think, based on my math and everything, the market looks like it's going to stay where it's at for at least two years.

And I'm planning on being able to pay this note off the third year.

I think there's no chance.

As long as the market doesn't go 50% less than what it is right now, I should be able to get it done in three years.

Okay.

I would get it down in one year.

And here's why.

The only reason Dave and I have a job is because people like you say,

if this scheme I'm running just hangs on for three more years, I'm going to be all right.

And it doesn't.

right?

That's the problem, right?

So, um,

would you have done this if you just cashed out your CD and used your money?

Um,

yes, I believe so.

Okay, if you're gonna play, make a play like this, you should do it with real money, not borrowed money, okay?

Number one.

Number two, what year in business school are you?

First, second, third, fourth?

Um,

I will be a, I'm between my sophomore and junior year.

Okay.

I want you to start doing some reading on commodities

because beef is a commodity.

Okay.

And there's one thing that drives beef prices.

Supply and demand.

That's all.

And if there's a shortage of beef, the prices run up.

If there's an oversupply versus the demand, the prices go down.

So your math

was a wild

guess.

That's what your math was.

So anybody that's playing commodities, 100% of the time, you're guessing about what the future is going to do.

The track record, the history of it on beef, like a lot of commodities, has gone up.

But another commodity that you could study the volatility of, if you want to test my basic theory of economics here, is oil.

Look at the barrel of oil and see what it's done.

Okay?

It's up and down, up and down, up and down, based on guess what?

Whether the Middle East turns the spigot on or off.

Whether the local domestic policy for drill, baby, drill turns the spigot on or off.

If the spigots are off, oil prices go through the roof, and then so does the gas pump after that.

If the spigots are wide open, oil prices drop through the floor.

Okay?

Has nothing to do with the inherent value of oil.

It's the shortage or the oversupply versus demand.

And that's the game you're playing.

Meaning that from a business perspective or a investment perspective, you are gambling.

You are rolling the dice.

Because you are in the world of beef, because you grew up in it, because you know something about the actual cattle, you have talked yourself into believing that you can predict a commodities price.

That is unbelievably dangerous.

And it will end in your failure eventually if you keep doing this.

So the next time you get ready to make a gamble and you're going to put $100,000 on red or $100,000 on black,

make sure it's your money.

So when you lose it, at least it's just your money that's gone.

If it goes up, it was your money that went up.

If you're going to play this game, play it with cash, son.

But I wouldn't play it.

I wouldn't play it at the level you're playing it.

I wouldn't do it at 20 years old.

Period.

Switching banks can be a hassle, and I totally get that.

But when Wince and I opened up our Fairwinds account, we were shocked by how quick and easy it was.

It just took a few minutes online.

We didn't have to block off an entire afternoon or track down paperwork.

And the next day, we got a personal call from a Fairwinds specialist just checking in.

I couldn't believe it when I answered my phone and I was talking to them.

I was like, y'all are the nicest people.

Now, if you're working hard to save money, get out of debt and build a future, you should have a bank that supports that, not fights it.

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Gang, if you like what you hear, we could use your help.

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yeah, click the subscribe button, the follow button.

It helps with the algorithm big time and it causes the show to be pushed out over the various platforms in front of people who didn't know we were here previous because you liked it or you subscribed it or you followed it or you better than that you shared it tell people about us click the share button or cut the link and send it to somebody or just tell people about us either one we appreciate you thank you for that the listenership viewership of this this um ramsey show thing has exploded in the past five years the numbers are crazy thank you so much we appreciate you steve is with us in greensboro north carolina hi steve welcome to the show.

Thank you, Dave.

Thank you for taking my call.

Sure.

I am 78 years old, retired, divorced, and have no debt.

I have $300,000 in a Roth IRA all in mutual funds, $100,000 in a traditional IRA all in mutual funds, $1.2 million in an inherited IRA in individual stocks.

$3.7 million in a brokerage account in individual stocks.

About $100,000 in cash, giving me a net worth of about $5.4 million.

Way to go.

My issue today is that in that brokerage, the taxable brokerage account, I have stock in one company with a value of $1.8 million, which represents 34% of my net worth.

It's continuing to grow, and the outlook is good.

My tax basis on that stock is $58,000, which means we're all subject to capital gains, and I absolutely hate paying capital gains.

I don't blame you.

What would you do?

Wow.

Did you inherit any of this?

You said an inherited IRA was 1.2.

Do you have the rest of it other than that?

No,

I inherited

$250,000 in cash, put it in stocks.

I've taken $450,000 in RMDs, and it's still worth $1.2.

Yeah.

Wow.

The rest of it were just investments throughout the year.

You've done amazing, Steve.

No one can question what you're doing.

I've been extremely lucky.

Well, yeah, you were lucky, but you were blessed, and you were smart, and you were working, and you were saving money while everybody was spending it.

So I'm proud of you.

Good work.

Well, I think your analysis, and I don't know what your background is, but it's excellent.

Your analysis is excellent.

One-third of your net worth is tied up in one single company, and as it goes, so goes your net worth.

That's scary.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's standing on one leg and somebody's kicking at your knee.

I can add that I had some of that same stock in my inherited RA, about a half million, and sold that because of the percentage getting up.

But everything is in my taxable now.

So here's the thing.

You're going to trade

some taxes for some safety, diversification equals safety.

Or you're going to take the risk

because you don't want to pay the taxes.

It's a simple formula.

There's no way around it.

You're going to pay the taxes if you liquidate this because it's not in any kind of a protected account.

There's nothing you can do a roll on it.

There's nothing like that.

You just are just going to take the hit.

I would not do enough where the taxes activate me above $15,000.

Dad gum, your income may already be over $400K, though, is it?

No, no, it's actually not.

My taxable income this year is basically going to be RMD from that.

And, you know, I'm expecting about $160,000 taxable income this year.

Okay.

All right.

Well, if I remember correctly, and I'm trying to pull up a cheat sheet because I don't have it.

The max on the capital gains is $400,000 or somewhere right around there.

If they hadn't moved it up, it was $400,000 before you get kicked.

Have you looked that up yet?

I plugged in,

oh, just arbitrarily, about $600,000 capital gain in that, and it came out to about 25% federal and state tax, I would pay.

Well, okay.

Because if you go above $400, it goes from $15,000 to $20,000 on federal.

And I don't know what your state has, but it must be $5,000, apparently.

I'm not sure.

So if you keep it under $400,000 and you roll $400,000 of, keep your total income under $400,000 or whatever the number is, I'm not a tax guy, obviously.

But I'm I'm going to move up to the 400 mark, the 340,000 or whatever I can move,

or 240,000, whatever I can move to not get above 400.

And I'm going to start gradually moving this at 15%

because I don't like the risk of the lack of diversification.

It's painful to rebalance your accounts, but

you're going to take the risk if you don't.

And you're looking at that company going,

I'm really, really like you.

Because

I'm going to be over there eating in their lunchroom, seeing how people are doing.

I've heard you ask before if someone would, if their life would change, if maybe they lost a certain amount of money or whatever.

Yeah.

And if I

if you lost 1.8 million, you would feel that.

Yeah.

So.

I don't think you're going to lose it all.

all i just could go in half

um yeah well steve i've got i've steve i got i just get itchy because i grew up in houston when enron went away and i had friends and family that worked at enron and it just man that just makes me nervous or just thinking about what tesla was a year ago versus what it is right now everyone can it's just so easy to think uh this one's got a good upside to it And man,

my lived experience is sometimes these things are just a vapor, you know?

I understand.

I know nothing for sure.

And I don't know what they'd do you any good to know the company that I've no because it doesn't matter.

I don't want to, it sounds like I'm trashing just that individual company and I'm not.

I'm trashing the last

diversification.

Yeah.

And so,

yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

I'm going to start systematically moving out of this.

I'm not going to panic and pay the over 20%.

See, are you married filing jointly or single?

You said single, didn't you?

Single.

Divorced, single.

Okay, I just pulled it up while we were talking because I didn't know it's up to $566,000 now

that you can move.

And so if you've got $160,000, that leaves you $400,000 that you could move a year and still not be at accepted 15%.

Yeah.

Because you got a $58,000 basis, so it's pure gain, basically.

Right.

So, yeah,

I'm going to start moving about $400,000 a year

over and paying the 15%.

And the 15%

is not just tax.

It's the cost of safety due to diversification versus lack of diversification.

And that's the way I'm going to look at it.

I don't want to be that deep into one company.

And so good question, though.

Wow.

Congratulations still.

I mean, you've done a lot of obviously very smart things.

And at 78, you're calling to ask that question.

That's a pretty technical.

ticky-tacky question, and it shows you really know what the flip you're doing.

Congratulations.

Very neat.

Very neat.

That also shows to all the 26-year-old,

George calls them the Instagram bros, it's just dedicated time.

It's just time.

Small amount over time.

Bought that at 56K and it's at 1.8 million.

That is just getting in early and just set it and forget it.

Just go slow.

Yeah, I mean, there's not a

I can't think of a publicly traded company that's a household name.

Well, I don't know when he bought it at 58.

That's the other thing.

It would give you that in a short period of time.

Right.

It's not going to go to 1.8 in a short period of time.

I know there's not one on the big board on the New York Stock Exchange.

There's not one

in a short period of time.

I had a friend who worked at Navideo the day of or something.

I don't know if you could get it on that one.

You know, your wife was in Congress or something.

There you go.

That'd be helpful.

But yeah, that kind of stuff.

But yeah,

that's the only way you're going to,

I don't know if a stock has done that.

I don't buy single stocks, folks.

And the lack of diversification is one of the reasons.

All of the data,

even though Steve has done incredibly well, and I do congratulate him, all the data for the rest of us says we buy mutual funds because there's 90 to 200 different stocks in the average mutual fund.

If you had 1.8 million and 90 to 200 stocks, you'd be perfectly safe compared to you've bet 34% of a $5 million net worth on one singular company's behaviors.

They can make the decision to do anything stupid, and suddenly you could have a Budlight moment.

In half, yeah.

I mean, it could be a Tesla moment or any cracker barrel moment right now, like any of them.

You can see the stock just nosedive.

You can have all that.

And

I don't want that.

I don't have control over that.

So I'm going to put my money in that.

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Welcome back to the Ramsey Show.

Dr.

John Deloney, number one best-selling author, is my co-host today.

Anna is with us in Utah.

Hi, Anna.

How are you?

Good.

How are you doing, Nick?

Better than I deserve.

What's up?

Yeah, so my husband and I were 35 years old.

We both hold

master's degrees.

I work part-time.

We've got littles.

And we're in our second home that we've owned.

And I've found a lot in my dream area to build on, but it's very pricey and not...

not where we'd want for a mortgage.

It'd make it a high mortgage.

And I wondered if there's any time it'd be appropriate.

We both make good money,

to my parents have offered to help us out with about $100,000 to make it more of an affordable mortgage.

Any time that that'd be appropriate to take that kind of money or how

yeah, my husband, I mean, just my husband disagrees and doesn't think that that

we should do that.

So does that make sense, my question?

That you should not take the gift from your parents or you should not buy the lot?

I mean both.

It would require taking the gift from my parents to buy the lot.

But he doesn't want to buy the lot.

He doesn't want to take the money from my parents, so therefore not do the lot.

But I think what's the lot cost?

$4.25.

Really expensive lot.

It's in a really nice area.

So

I think it's a good opportunity.

I don't want to lose it.

And

my parents, it wouldn't be a loan, but I think that we'd be able to do it.

I think you told me three times indirectly you can't afford it.

Yes.

The words you're using say it's I can't chew this amount of food if I put it all in my mouth.

Yeah.

I mean with if we did do it, it'd be about

close to 50% of our income for the mortgage.

So you got a lot fever, girl.

You need to take a cold shower.

You also have not wanting to be in the life you live in right now fever.

Yeah, you're telling me about you cannot afford to live in that place.

You don't make enough money.

What's a hundred thousand dollar loan from your parents or a gift, whatever you want to call it?

What's that going to actually cost you?

Like emotionally weird.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What kind of strings are attached?

Yeah.

I have no problem with somebody getting a big gift from their parents.

I think it's amazing, and I hope I can do that with my kids.

But I'm going to have to make sure in my spirit there's no strings attached to it when I give it.

Yeah, I think that's my husband's concern.

That it'd be.

And it's based on the track record.

He didn't just dream this concern up.

Right.

So I'm asking you, what are the strings?

Not a lot of strings, but I mean, just,

yeah,

I think he'd just feel uncomfortable and just normal.

Are you an only child?

No.

Are you the oldest daughter?

No.

Are you the only daughter?

The youngest.

The youngest daughter.

The youngest daughter.

Are you the only daughter?

No.

Because I'm confused about why your parents want to participate in helping you be broke.

To live your little dream to live your dream that you can't afford because you told me six times you can't afford this i mean indirectly you know in your heart your brain is your brain is telling you you can't afford it

yeah

i'm more interested in time and if times change yeah and that kind of mortgage wouldn't be as crazy in a few years well then get it then we'll talk about it then but right now it's cray cray i i'm worried about what it is about your life you've you you both got the schooling that you wanted you have you have the family that you wanted what is it about that life that you're not at peace with?

Um, we're currently the home we're in is in a dream area, a wonderful area.

It's the same place the lot is at, but it's an older home and it's given us a lot of problems, including termites, which has been kind of traumatic for me.

We've gotten those taken care of.

I just don't want to deal with situations like that.

So, I don't know if that's a yeah.

So, what is your home?

What is your home?

Termites have been a

currently, we think we could make 600 off it.

We could make 600 off of it.

Okay, and the lot is 425.

Sorry, that wouldn't be make.

I'm sorry.

$425, but that's without the build.

I know, I know.

And the 100th gift.

And

you have 600 equity or the price would be 600?

The price.

How is a house in the same neighborhood as a $425,000 lot only selling for $600,000?

It ought to be a meat.

I mean, that's...

Maybe we could get more.

That's just...

Where did you get $600?

The area has no...

that was not appraised, but that's kind of what comparisons to around the area have been.

Okay.

All right.

Because

if you buy a lot, let me tell you, if you buy a lot for 400, that's why it's the rule of thumb in building is the lot should be around 20% of the total when you're done.

Okay.

All right.

And so that means you're building a $2 million house.

And you don't have that kind of money, do you?

What's your income?

About $200.

Yeah, you don't have that kind of money.

And

I could work full-time.

Not what I want to do with Willows right now.

Is that worth it?

It's not worth it.

I mean, you could kill termites.

You can't kill a big mortgage.

That's why I keep...

I don't think this is the house.

I think this is something about you not being in the skin you're in.

Yeah.

Well, it's the skin city.

I mean, it's on the mountain.

There's no more lots around here.

Everything's built out here.

You have to go out west if you want to to see it.

Yeah, but somebody's going to buy that lot and build on it.

And then

their

Nesteg's going to need to move somewhere.

They're going to have grandkids, and the house will come up on the market.

But there's a fever inside of you.

Listen, there's plenty of lots, and there's plenty of mountains, and there's the rest of your life to figure that out.

Yeah.

Dave, I hear this.

Listen, I am a spender, and I love real estate, and I'm running through my head the number of times I have sounded like her.

I'm telling you, man, she's about to do something.

I have gotten, I get the fever for something, and I get like a dog on a bone, and I'm just like a chasing a rabbit,

running through the forest, looking at, looking, I'm going to run this thing down.

And I can hear that

because I do it.

I have to catch myself and go, wait a minute, this is stupid.

I mean,

I can point to you a lot down by our lake house that I chased like this.

And it is a very unique property.

It's on a peninsula, and you own the whole peninsula.

Yeah.

And it would have been very, it's like she's talking about.

And I chased that thing and chased that thing.

And then a guy bought it and built a house on it.

And I actually tried to buy the house.

And we were sitting in the front porch of that house, and there were nine million boats going by.

And I felt like I was in the middle of the interstate.

And I went, Thank you, God, for protecting me from me and not letting me get this because I don't want to be out here in the middle of this

hell of a highway on the lake.

And so I, you know,

that's a 10-year story I just did right there.

Yeah.

But

I had the Jones for that stupid lot.

Yeah.

It's like,

I can totally relate to you.

Take a cold shower.

Don't buy the lot.

You can't afford it.

And there's something wrong about the way you're approaching this.

John's hearing it in your voice and your words.

I am too.

And

you're willing to sacrifice even

dealing with your parents to get it.

That's how bad you want this.

Or even you've done the math.

Like, okay, what if I gave up a core value, which is staying home with my kids, and I gave up that for this piece of dessert.

Yeah, there's something

on the grasses greener in your spirit right now.

Godliness with contentment is great gain.

And when I have violated that, and I have, I just told you a story when I was doing it, I didn't end up with a lot, but I swear to I think God just literally kept me from getting

stupidity.

Yeah, I didn't have good spirit.

That's right.

Yeah, and I just,

man, it's like going to an auction.

Man, you keep flicking your ear, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

touching your nose.

It's bad, y'all.

Oh, we all got it.

You know we do.

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Blake is in Arizona.

Hey, Blake, how are you?

Great, thanks.

How can we help?

So the background is: I'm 62.

My wife is 51.

We do not currently have any debt.

Our home is paid for.

I recently retired and started taking Social Security after I was let go from my job after 34 years.

And

we have

I still have my 401k just sitting left with my former employer.

I have about $1.1 million in that and another $100,000 in a Roth.

We have

approximately $500,000 in a

high-yield money market, earning about 3.5%.

We want to know

it's really not

you know, it's safe, but it's not returning the kind of money that we really need to.

Really don't we're living on

pretty much below our means.

My Social Security, and then I also picked up a part-time job working at a local golf course just for something more to do.

That covers our expenses.

We're looking, we're wondering what would be best to do with that approximately $500,000

for us for the future.

And then also we'd like to start putting we have a new baby grandchild and we'd like to start saving for them.

What would you recommend?

Well,

what did you used to earn at your other position?

I varied in income.

At the last, when I was let go, I made a little over $100,000.

Okay.

All right.

The $1.1 million is in traditional or Roth?

It's in traditional.

It's in a fidelity like a target date fund.

Okay.

All right.

I would have you sit down with a Smart Vestor Pro, and there's a couple of things in this portfolio I want to work on, and I'll give you the background on what and why, okay.

A Smart Vestor Pro is a network of people that are in the business.

We don't do investing at Ramsey, but we endorse these folks.

We embrace them, and they are aligned with the teaching that we give.

So you're going to hear things that sound a lot like Ramsey when you sit down with one of them.

The first thing is you never invest anything without understanding it yourself.

You've done a very good job getting to this point.

Congratulations.

You're almost multi-millionaires, and you're definitely millionaires, and it's pretty incredible.

Well, you are multimillionaires because your house is worth enough to get you over the 2 million mark, so net worth-wise.

So, good.

Congratulations.

You're in really, really, really good shape.

I got two things here.

One, we want to get the 500 invested, which is your question.

The second thing is, I want to begin to think about how to move that 1.1 gradually to Roth and pay some taxes on it.

Because at 72, you're going to be facing, which is going to be here in a heartbeat, only 11 years, you're going to be facing what's called RMDs, required minimum distributions on that.

And I want to keep that from happening.

And if you die with the whole thing intact, the entire account, of course, is taxable in an inherited IRA.

for your kids.

And by then, it'll be $3 million.

Okay.

Because you're not going to die anytime soon.

And it'll double and double again, double again, might be $5 or $6 million even.

And so if it's in a Roth, if we can get it into a Roth gradually in the next 11 years before you get to RMDs, A, you don't have RMDs.

B, your kids will never pay taxes on it.

C, you'll never pay taxes on it if you decide to use some of it for something.

So if it is invested, and I would probably reset the investments inside of there today

from target date into some quality, long-track record growth stock mutual funds.

I invest invest inside my retirement, and I've recommended for 30 years people do that in growth, growth and income, aggressive growth and international.

I do not do target

because I don't believe, because I'm 64, I'm going to be 65, a touch older than you.

And

the data tells us that at your age and my age, if we're in good shape, healthy, right, which you are right now, I guess, and I am too, you didn't tell me otherwise, that we have a high likelihood of making it into our 90s statistically.

And so that's still 30 years you've got to outpace inflation.

And that target date is going to dumb down your returns as you get a little bit older.

And there's no need to do that because you don't need,

you can handle the little bit of risk that a good equality investment portfolio represents.

So I'm going to move you away from target date.

I'm going to move you towards Roth with the 1.1.

That's two things.

All of this as you understand it.

Don't do it because I said do it.

But I'm really happy right now that all of my retirement accounts are Roth for those reasons.

I don't have RMD.

I won't ever have any taxes on it.

Neither will my kids as an inherited IRA.

How are you

am I able to convert the traditional staff?

You're going to pay taxes when you do.

You're going to pay taxes on the amount you convert every year.

That's why you're going to want to do it in stages to keep bracket creep from hitting you so hard.

Because it's all ordinary income.

There's no capital gains available on it.

Now, moving on to the 500, which was your original question, which is a good question, too.

You've done a great job.

I just want to say it over and over.

These are minor tweaks, but they'll help you to the tune of millions of dollars over the next two decades.

The 500.

That's what we're looking for.

Yeah, the 500.

The 500, obviously, you do need to get that invested sitting there in stupid high yields crazy.

It needs to get ⁇ you lost 50 grand last year or 60 grand by sitting there.

And

that would have been nice to have around.

Yeah, don't tell my wife that.

Yeah, I mean, it's missed what the market did versus what you did.

You know, that's what you're missing, opportunity cost.

So

what you're going to do there is look for what's called a low turnover mutual fund.

Inside the mutual fund, there's 90 to 200 stocks.

If they sell almost none of them, low turnover of the stocks, it does not activate any taxable gain or very little taxable gain unless you sell it.

Okay.

An example of that is an S ⁇ P 500.

They typically have a 3% or 4% turnover ratio, meaning 97% of the stocks sit there and grow, but create no taxes.

It's like buying a single share of Home Depot for 50 bucks and it goes to 70.

You don't pay any taxes on the 20 until you sell it.

That's capital gains growth.

Okay?

Okay.

And so it's like buying a rental house for 500 grand and it goes to 700 grand.

You don't pay any gain, capital gains tax.

You don't pay any tax on that 200 growth until you sell the house.

Same thing's true in a low turnover mutual fund.

So you're not going to have taxes.

That's great for now.

When When you do have taxes and do decide to pay them, they're going to be a capital gains rate, which is 15% instead of 37%.

So that's wonderful.

So low turnover growth stock mutual funds.

So I use S ⁇ P 500s for a lot of that.

You can use other stuff too.

I've got another

couple of million in a different one that's not an S ⁇ P that I'm letting sit.

The S ⁇ P, I use it for saving up to buy real estate.

Anyway, so you're looking to learn about the low turnover mutual fund because it grows with no taxation unless you pull it out.

Okay.

And you're going to get marketplace growth because S ⁇ P 500 is going to be, you know, traditionally has been 11, 12% a year, has been the rate of returns.

So

in the last two years, it was over 20%.

It's not going to be that forever.

That's not an offbeat thing.

Low turnover mutual funds,

that keeps you from paying taxes on it as it grows unless you pull it out.

If you leave it alone a year and you do pull it out, it's only going to to be at

capital gains rate, not at ordinary income rate.

So smart, all of this to say, learn all that again because you don't want to learn it from some guy on the dad gum podcast.

You want to sit down and learn about this yourself.

It's millions of dollars and it matters.

So you're smart to ask the questions.

The Smart Investor Pro's job is not to do it for you, not to tell you what to do.

Their job is to teach you what is possible and then you choose among the things that are possible.

And that'll get you there.

But that little, those two little tweaks right there in the next two decades are probably $4 million,

maybe more,

in what happens to your stuff versus target, regular investments versus target date,

Roth versus traditional, and low turnover versus high yield.

And those rates of return and that amount of money, that's what it's going to do.

And a good thing to keep in mind if you're looking at this stuff, folks, is it's fun to do the math real quick.

Okay, he's sitting on basically $2 million.

If it's growing at 10% every seven years, it's going to double.

He's 61.

At 68, he's going to have 4 million.

At 75,

he's going to have 8 million.

At 82, he's going to have 16 million.

And he's very likely to get there, statistically, from an actuarial table, which is the death rate table thing, okay, for life insurance policies.

So once you make it empty into your 60s and you're healthy, you're not going to die at 76, usually.

76 is your average male death rate, but that includes infant mortality, teenage death, and so on.

So you can't run your numbers based on that anymore once you get to be old like me and him.

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Dr.

John Deloney has had

three number one bestsellers, two of them big, hairy, nice hardback books.

John, none of them are as pretty as this.

They're not as pretty, or

and none of them are as

personally important to a guy that struggles with being on time as the 2026 Ramsey Goal Planner.

Yeah, you have a goal and a planner.

Maybe you can be on time.

But if you write a book.

I can see the thing you did on Instagram.

That's pretty funny.

If you co-write a book with Rachel Cruz and Jade Warshall, it's going to ⁇

the beauty will win out over whatever madness I was trying to pick up.

I got to tell you,

the Ramsey team,

the design team.

Yeah, the Ramsey Gold Planner is a big deal.

Everybody gets them every year, and they always sell out.

We only do about 10,000 of them, but they sell out like immediately here in the fall.

So this is 2026.

It's gorgeous.

Creatives, we kind of turn the creatives loose and go have fun.

Right.

This is like their sandbox.

And usually I'm like, yeah, I want to see it.

And they say, you're not allowed to see this one.

Yeah, and you're not allowed to touch this, John.

Nope.

Dave, you can't even say anything about how much it costs because it costs a lot to produce the thing.

It's a beautiful piece, though.

A full calendar, of course, and a full process for applying the calendar, setting goals.

And it's absolutely amazing.

And let me shout out.

And the weird thing is, we did cut the price.

We do.

We sell it early, and we do cut the price significantly.

And I want to shout out everybody who's fighting the system and still writes things down with pen and paper gotta tell you i love it i love it my wife and i in the mornings one of the things she says let's do calendars which is one of the things we stay aligned on our money we stay aligned on our time oh that's romance talk in my house and we stay sales and we stay aligned yeah

so um

yeah we we this morning she said let's do calendars let me tell you what she gets out old school that's what my wife does little black thing with a little flip on it and it flips it open it's got she's it's all written down yep and you know what?

It doesn't get deleted.

Nope.

Unless you mark through it.

There's no AI box

going through it.

$35.97 if you want to pre-order.

It's the best deal you're going to get because that

we paid a lot to bruise these.

So, yeah, we did.

Jade, Rachel, and Deloney monthly content from them as you go through your months and planning.

If you grab it before Labor Day, it's just $35.97, the lowest price.

Even Black Friday pricing won't beat this.

Ramseysolutions.com slash store.

If you're watching on YouTube or podcasts, you can click the link in the description.

I got to tell you, we put out a lot of nice products.

I'm really, really proud of this product.

The people that get it always love it.

It's a lot.

And you got it.

It's all there.

It walks you through lessons from Rachel, from Jade, and from Dr.

Deloney as you're going through.

And you can lay out your spiritual year.

You can lay out your physical year.

You can lay out your time.

It's all in there.

And it is an incredible, incredibly well-designed tool.

And again, it's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful piece of work.

So all the way around.

Eric is in Cleveland, Ohio.

Hi, Eric.

What's up?

Hi, good afternoon, everyone.

So I am a third-year medical student, and I've talked to a lot of physicians who have advised me not to worry about loans because they'll easily be paid off when you're earning a physician salary down the line.

Sure, easily.

The med students never call into the business.

Honestly, that's a long ways away.

New residents never call into the show, Eric, ever.

Panicking.

So you're

nothing.

Go ahead.

Go ahead, Eric.

So I also recently got married about eight, nine months ago, and I want to know the best way for my wife and I to be proactive about our loan study now and manage slash know how much we should be putting aside for savings for a house, investing in our ROS at this time.

I love your question.

It's a very wise question to say, I'm getting ready to come into some money.

What is the smart thing to do with it?

I've worked really, really hard to get to this point.

How can I be the smartest and get the most traction with all this work I put in?

Because you've worked your tail off to get here.

Congratulations, sir.

So very good question.

All right.

All snarkiness aside, I'm still going to tell you the truth.

The first rule is this.

I live in Nashville.

Okay.

And

so I know the country music folk.

I grew up in Nashville.

I know the country music folk.

Okay.

And I know all of them that almost made it,

too.

And I also speak to NFL rookie camps and explain to the young guys that NFL stands for not for long.

The average NFL career is 3.8 years and they think they're rich.

Okay.

So there's only one thing dumber than a country music artist who's getting ready to lose everything because of bad financial advice or a new NFL star that's getting ready to lose everything and that's your fellow doctors giving you financial advice.

They are the world's worst with money.

35 years I've been doing this.

I am constantly amazed at how the typical MD is absolutely stupid with money.

It blows my mind.

Now there's exceptions.

There's exceptions.

So that's rule number one.

Don't listen to these guys that have advice.

Now, rule number two, you're very smart to ask advice and to learn things from several different sources, and you use that wonderful brain God has given you because dumb people don't get this far in a medical school, even though I just made fun of them for their financial stuff, but they're not dumb, okay?

But you don't get that far, and so use that brain of yours to learn.

Do not put money in stuff you don't understand, and keep asking a thousand questions like the one you just asked for the next 10 years, and you will become very, very wealthy.

So, you are on the right track.

In the multitude of counsel, there is safety, the Bible says.

And And so you keep gathering and learning and learning and don't do everything Dave Ramsey says.

You go learn about it for yourself.

Now, having said that, also having coached some docs who did a great job becoming very wealthy very quickly,

one of the things we coach them to do is to avoid what we call doc-itis when you come out of med school.

So you have a

You're in the top 1%

of the population in emotional maturity.

One measure of emotional maturity is the ability to delay pleasure.

You have, while all of your friends from high school have been out playing beer pong, you've been going to class and reading books

for a decade longer than they have to get to where you are.

And so you've been holding your breath much longer than the typical person walking around listening to this conversation right now.

You've been delaying pleasure to get to a greater good.

So you know how to accept pain to get to a greater good.

You know how to pay a price to win.

Otherwise, you wouldn't be where you are.

You don't graduate med school unless you get that concept from a psychological, emotional standpoint.

Does that make sense?

Yes.

It's a huge compliment.

Doesn't necessarily have that, which sometimes can create a clash, but I agree.

Yes, I understand that.

Yeah, so when you get out, the typical doc has been holding their breath for a decade longer than everybody else.

And when they exhale, It looks like this, a new house, an investment account, and a BMW.

And the student loans are just sitting there looking at them because they've been waiting so long to enjoy this income that the first thing they do is go enjoy it.

And I'm going to beg you to do one thing, and that's continue to hold your breath for 18 more months after you get out.

And get your, you pass your bars, you take the big job, you take the signing bonus, and you clear the 200K as fast as you possibly can.

Keep living like a broke resident for a short period of time and clear the debt because then you've got $200,000 to $800,000 a year or whatever your income is going to be for for the rest of your life with no monkey on your back.

And you can become wealthy so quickly.

But if you kick the can down the road on this 200K, like those docs are suggesting, you're going to be in debt the rest of your life and you're going to suck at money and you're going to struggle.

So I would live like a resident, like you were broke, and clear this up as fast as you can.

And with your marriage income, brother, I would

invest not in Roth, not in real estate.

I would invest in you right now.

Can you and your your new wife, can y'all get through the rest of this year and next year before you start getting paid?

Can you get through the tuition?

Can y'all cash flow that?

So she makes, she was making around 80K as a registered nurse.

Okay.

And then

we were able to chip about $40,000 off.

Amazing.

Yeah.

So we got a lot of...

First goal is no more debt, though.

First goal is no more debt.

Second goal is chip away at it.

So the problem was she went back to nurse practitioner school as well in January.

Oh, so how much is she going to owe?

So she doesn't owe anything.

Her father had a 529 for her, so we don't have any loans on her part.

Excellent.

Excellent.

Okay.

You guys are going to be making 600 grand.

Yeah, y'all are going to be doing well.

This is so great.

Please pay off the debt as fast as you can.

As fast as you can.

No investments, no purchases.

Live like broke college students till all the debt is cleared.

18 more months, dude.

Both of you pass your bars.

Don't suffer from dachitis.

Today's Ramsey show question of the day is brought to you by YReFi.

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All right.

Today's question comes from Felix in Pennsylvania.

Felix writes, I am a millennial and multiple families that I know who have children are selling their houses to live in RVs because they want to get out of debt.

They are basically homeless.

What is going on with my generation?

I don't think we can cover that in this podcast.

We don't have enough time.

I know debt is to be avoided, but is this trend healthy or

is gazelle intensity going too far?

It's a good question.

I don't think that's gazelle intensity.

I think that is

gazelle intensity is being very intense and sacrificing to get to a future

goal.

I've done this show for 35 years.

I've never told someone to sell their home and live in an RV.

I think that's a part of

the hack virus that we live in as a culture.

Yeah, but that's not you and I.

I mean, it's not Ramsey advice.

And Ramsey advice is gazelle intensity.

So I invented that phrase.

So no one used that phrase before me.

Right.

So that's,

but

is this

a segment of

a

generation that feels hopeless and stuck, and so they resort to extreme measures that are over the pale to try to get unstuck?

Yeah, that would be true.

Yeah.

Or people have bought way too much house, way too much car, and they're just hitting control-alt-delete on their life.

Or they grew up playing video games and they're just hitting reset on the Nintendo and starting over.

But yeah,

I think it's one of those

not an either-or question here.

It's not the right move, right?

Agreed.

But getting out of debt is very important.

Yeah.

Now, selling your home, moving into an apartment, that might work.

Absolutely.

I've done that.

I sold my house and moved into a dorm for crying out loud.

Yeah, we've been there.

I've been there.

But

I always answer questions the way I would answer them.

What would I do if I was in this shoes?

And there's never a moment in my life that I would live in an RV

because I want my wife to live with me and she wouldn't live there.

So

it's not a dream of ours at all.

It's more like a nightmare.

And we would be like cousin Eddie.

And so,

no, we don't need to do that.

The Ramseys don't.

So I don't tell other people they need to do it.

I have had people do some wild things.

I remember about, gosh, it's a long time ago, a couple of decades ago, a guy

in Birmingham sold his home And he called me up and told me he bought a trailer.

And I'm like, oh, God, why don't you buy something going down in value?

He goes, Dave, I paid $1,000 for it.

You moved into a $1,000

mobile home.

You might be a redneck if.

My god, son, really?

And he's like, yeah.

And he was making like serious money.

And he goes, but in two years, I'm going to pay cash for a house.

And that's the price we're going to pay.

And we're willing to do that.

I'm like, okay, you're willing to do something I'm not willing to do.

So

I can admire you for that, but I can't make that the program.

Sure.

It's not what I teach.

Yes.

And so, and he did.

He saved up like 300,000 bucks or something in the first, in two years, and went and bought a house for cash.

It's amazing.

And but

I don't see you moving Sheila into a single wide.

Nope.

Nope.

So

here's the thing.

When he asks the question,

what's going on with my generation?

There is a challenge.

You can call it resilience.

You can be whatever.

Discipline over time.

Doing a hard thing with repetition, whether it's diet, whether it is working on relationships, whether it is getting out of debt.

I would say there is a generic allergy in our culture to discomfort over 24 to 36 months.

People don't mind doing something painful right this second,

but they don't want to stick to a hard thing over time.

And we've been told you don't have to.

And actually, we're a little sliver of history where there is some hacks around some stuff.

And so everyone's looking for a way to do the craziest thing as pain-free as possible.

And so I think if you ask me that question, your culture doesn't want to live within their means and take what that means, which is, okay, we can't live in Manhattan doing this editor job that we saw on Instagram.

We're going to have to live in Kansas or in Nebraska where we can afford to live and do a job that maybe isn't our quote-unquote passion job.

Or if you found yourself way, way in debt, to sell the cars and put two kids in car seats in a Corolla, which is uncomfortable, but it's doable, and take three years to work with intensity, focus intensity over time, and be uncomfortable for that long.

That to me is the biggest allergy I think we have culturally.

Yeah, I remember distinctly

Millie Ramsey driving a

I mean, when she's 19 years old, driving a Chevy 2,

which is like the first version of a Chevette kind of thing.

It had two doors.

It had a small little four-cylinder in it.

Gas was 12 cents a gallon.

And you could get to the top of the road above the gas station and run out of gas and coast down to the gas station, and we did.

And I would say, Mom, when are we getting an air conditioner for the car?

And she said, We have a 240 air conditioner.

Roll down two windows.

We're going 40.

And so

they paid a price.

That's right.

That generation paid a price to live.

They lived like that for a long time before they saw prosperity.

Right.

And then I saw that.

And so, but, you know, I was telling somebody the other day, they were asking me about Gen Z's because we've got so many Gen Z's here at Ramsey and millennials.

I would say out of our 1,100, those two generations represent probably 700 people.

Maybe 600, something like that.

The vast majority of the people work in this building fall in that.

And I think they're the two best generations I've run into in a long time for wealth building and for a a lot of things.

And the reason is, is they grew up with a magic wand in their hand.

And the magic wand says if you push a button, stuff shows up on your porch.

If you push a button, you can get the answer to any question.

If you push a button, it'll track all of your medical desires and things you wonder about.

If you push a button, and so they have an abundance mentality because to them, everything's possible.

Because if they push a button, anything happens.

And it's a natural built-in in their DNA, an abundance mentality.

They're not scarcity driven.

They're They're abundance driven.

And that's a wonderful thing.

And so they think like anything's possible because to them, anything's possible.

And so that is a wonderful trait of this generation.

What they don't have is zero patience.

Right.

When you push a button, crap shows up on your porch that day.

That day.

I mean, you know, you didn't have to walk uphill both ways in the snow to go buy some toilet paper.

That's right.

It shows up on your porch.

You know, and so there's no patience.

I'm not going to wait for anything.

I'm not going to struggle for anything.

I want it right now.

It's a microwave, not a crock pot.

Don't talk to me about cooking something over the whole weekend.

You don't cook stuff overnight.

You cook it and we eat it right now.

Right.

And

if they have a fallacy, it's that.

And it relates to this question.

Yes, exactly.

And so I would tell you, yes, get out of debt.

And well, I think when it comes to pushing a button, I think the friction between what I want and what I can get is been so intentionally dissolved that it is untethered us from reality.

That water comes from somewhere.

That cow came from some farm somewhere.

It's magic.

It's magic.

And the longer you live in magic land, the more divorced from reality you get.

And that's what companies want, right?

They don't want you tethered to reality.

I'm going to hold an $1,100 magic wand in my hand and criticize capitalism.

I'm going to give one to, I'm going to give an $11,000, I mean $1,100 computer to a six-year-old, right?

Because you quote-unquote need one.

It's madness, but we're untethered from reality.

Right.

But it is, there's good parts to it.

There's amazing parts to it.

I think the possibility thinking,

to quote a guy from three generations ago, Dr.

Robert Schuler, right?

Possibility thinking, this generation thinks anything's possible.

And when you're sitting in meetings with them, dreaming up the next thing to do in business, that's about as positive a trait as you can have rather than some sour-faced boomer sitting in there going, well, it won't work.

It can't be done.

That'll never work.

Like Eeyore is in the meeting with you.

It's a weird juxtaposition of, yes, we can do that, but I need a work-life balance, right?

It's like,

but I want to work from home.

It's like the boomerang's like, that ain't gonna work, and I'm gonna spend the next 80 years trying to tinker it away until it finally does work.

Yeah, I'm gonna keep messing with this and keep messing with this and keep messing with this.

Perseverance.

So the allergy is like discipline over time, perseverance.

It's gonna suck for a long period of time, and we're gonna be stunned at how much we got done and how strong we are at the end of this thing.

Start it with the possibility thinking and then stir in a little patience and

stir in some discipline and perseverance and you've got a real, these two generations are going to be the best generations we've ever seen on the planet.

It's way too easy to put off making a will.

And believe me, I've heard every excuse in the book.

But not having the time is one excuse we can kick to the curb right now.

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Welcome back to the Ramsey Show.

Dr.

John Deloney, Ramsey personality and host of the Dr.

John Deloney Show is my co-host today.

The phone number is 888-825-5225.

Mike's in St.

Louis.

Hey, Mike, how are you?

I'm good.

How are you guys?

Better than I deserve.

What's up?

Just wanted to ask, is it a good idea idea to sell our house in order to get out of our consumer debt and fast forward the baby steps?

Okay.

How much consumer debt do you have?

About $36,000, 24 credit card, $12,000 in a car.

Okay.

And

what's your household income, sir?

Household income right now.

I just picked up another job, but currently I'd say our household income is

about $4,000 or $4,500 after taxes right now, but that should bump by about $3,000 here in the next few months.

So you're going to be making $7,000 a month in the next few months?

I'm sorry, I'm being a little exaggerative, I guess.

So

let's back that down to $6,400, $6,500 a month.

Okay, so you'll be making $6,000 a month.

How much is your house payment?

$1,200.

Okay.

All right.

Do you hate your house?

No, I don't hate it.

It's your wife hate it.

It's very small, so we do not hate it, no.

Okay.

All right.

No, you should not sell your house.

Your house is not the problem and it's not the solution.

Okay, so you make $6,000 a month.

You have a $1,200 house payment.

At some point, you'll make $6,000.

You don't today, I understand.

But we're talking about a couple months ago, right?

Okay.

$1,200.

So that leaves me

$4,500 to buy food and reduce debt.

Okay.

You owe $36,000.

So

if you put $2,000 a month on the debt, you're out in 18 months.

If you put $3,000 a month, you're out in one year.

So somewhere between one year,

and 18 months, depending on whether your 6,000 or your $7,000 is correct, One of those two.

But somewhere between

one year and 18 months, you should be out of debt.

And no, you don't sell your house for that reason.

Instead, you live on beans and rice, rice and beans, for one year to 18 months.

Don't go out to eat.

Don't go on vacation.

Roll up your sleeves.

The two of you sit down and make your budget scream.

Make your broke friends think you've joined a cult.

Get really, really serious about leaning into this debt.

And chop up the credit cards tonight, light a candle and have a plastic surgery ceremony.

And

then let's just tear into these cards and this debt.

You guys have not been living on a plan, and you've just increased your income substantially in the last year or so.

And that's concluded by this next raise, right?

Oh, correct.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So.

Here's the way I like to think of it, dude.

If there was a marathon in your town,

you could take an Uber to the last mile and run the last mile.

They'll give you a ribbon.

They will

congratulate you and everybody will cheer for you as you cross the finish line.

You could do that.

And you'd still have crossed that finish line.

If you train for that thing and you run that thing and you get all the blisters, all the pain,

all the stuff that comes with running it, when you cross that finish line, A, you're a different person.

Y'all will be a different married couple together.

And you're going to be way stronger, way better shape than the person who just took the Uber to the last mile.

And so, selling your house right now is a hack, and it might clear it up, but y'all will still be y'all.

And so, the chances y'all fall back into something is 100%.

And so, I love the idea that y'all are going to scratch and claw for a year, 18 months, and

the sweetness of crossing that finish line will be such a different feeling, and you'll have a different level of strength than if you just got dropped off.

And the two of you locking arms to set a goal and attack this goal with a vengeance is huge for a young marriage.

And the deeper you cut, the faster you get out.

The more you work,

the more you make, the faster you get out.

And so just look at this and say, how much work can I do?

How little can I spend?

And look at your spouse and go, how much work can we do?

How little can we spend?

And then we'll be out that much faster.

And John's right.

You'll never look at a credit card the same after this.

You know, it's kind of like once you get food poisoning on something, you never want to eat it again.

I'll eat nothing again.

Yep.

Ever.

Like 40 years later, it still turns your stomach.

You know, it's like, I am never,

you're just smelling it.

It's just, it's the same.

That's the way I feel about debt.

And once you fight through this, you'll feel that way about it.

John's right.

So, no, you mathematically,

relationally,

psychologically, spiritually do not need to sell your house.

Nothing in this call says says you need to sell your house.

And if you needed to, I'd tell you, because I love you and I want you to win.

And I think you're going to win.

And I just, I can hear, it's funny, John, doing this all these years, I can hear in their voice sometimes

that they're getting ready to do it.

They're done.

This guy's, he's got that thing in his voice like, I'm going to,

I've had it.

Yeah.

So bad.

He's had it so bad.

He's willing to sell his house.

I'll sell everything.

Yeah.

I'll do whatever.

Whatever.

I've had it.

The great Les Brown, the great motivator back in the the Zig Ziglar days, used to do a whole talk on that.

He was like, when you get sick and tired of being sick and tired, you know, and you finally look around and you say, I've had it.

That's when you're about to change your life.

And you can hear that in people's voice, in their sentence structure, in their tone when they're talking to us.

And so many years of being able to just listen to them and not see their body language, but hear it in their voice.

He's got that thing.

I think I predict Mike and his sweet wife are going to be multi-millionaires, and it started today.

Today, day one.

Or it started three days ago when they started talking about this, and we gave it a little boost today, one of the two, something like that.

But yeah, when you're willing to do whatever, there is nothing that can stop you.

Yeah.

I have recently become obsessed.

It's probably too dramatic of a word, but pretty close to the idea of

what is

the hardest way I can do something great or do something well versus what I think I've spent the last 20 years.

What's the easiest way I can get through this thing?

The the neuroscience keeps coming back that when your body doesn't want to do a thing and you go do that thing anyway, it the cascade of benefits is so beyond the accomplishment of that thing.

And at the same time, we live in a culture where, Dave, I was looking up, I was trying to find a part for the mower.

Hank and I were working on a mower and a writing mower that I got.

And right when we got it all fixed up, the belt broke.

I just opened ChatGPT and said, what is the belt product number for this?

And it gave it to me.

There's no friction at all anywhere for anything anymore.

And it's like, do you want to order it here?

And I now want to.

That doesn't disturb me.

When iRobot shows up and puts the belt on for you, now I'm getting pissed.

I'm just right.

Here's the thing.

Like, I like the idea of sitting down with my son and going to tractor supply and looking through it.

And it takes so much longer.

And man, when that thing took off across the yard, watching him cheer, watching me cheer, like we did a thing together and it was hard.

And the benefits were beyond just replacing that belt.

And so I like the idea of taking, okay,

18 months, I bet we can do it in 13 and we're going to figure this thing out.

And you will have a different kind of marriage on the other side of this beyond just being out of debt.

It's everything all at once and it's amazing.

Yeah, when people do that stuff, they sell the knife collection.

They sell everything.

They sell the gun.

And they lose 30 pounds.

It's weird.

And they don't talk bad about each other at the water cooler anymore.

It just changes everything.

Yeah, they like each other because we're working together.

Don't you mess with my wife.

Don't you mess with my husband.

All of a sudden, we're a team now.

We're locked.

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Abby is with us in Virginia.

Hey, Abby, what's up?

All right, how are you guys?

Better than I deserve.

How can I help?

So, I am an applying medical student this year, and my family has an exchange student.

And my mother informed me that they're going to be using my $529 to pay for our exchange students' education here in America.

And I'm worried about how much debt I'm going to be collecting from medical school.

Okay, so there's a 529 account that you thought you were going to get to use for school.

How much is in it?

Yes, sir.

That I don't know.

My mom has never disclosed it to me.

But she's the one who put in majority of the money.

And my father didn't really put in much

of his income into it because he was in the Army.

Okay.

I currently am receiving benefits from the VA to go to a university.

Okay.

And that's for undergrad or for med school?

Undergraduate.

So it'll stop at the end of the four years that I used to.

All right.

And what um

and then you're going to go to med school to become an MD?

Yes, sir.

That's the hope.

When will you finish your four years?

I'll finish this year in 2026.

Okay.

But as far as you know, there's enough for the exchange students and

exchange student and your medical.

You don't know how much is in there.

I don't know how much is in there.

My mother

said ballpark is over 400K, but she doesn't know.

She knows, but she won't just tell me the actual number itself.

Okay.

All right.

So I get to learn something on this show.

I've been doing this show for 30 years, and I get to learn something brutally every so often when I screw up an answer on the air.

And about three weeks ago, I screwed up an answer on a 529, and I've gotten trashed for screwing up the answer.

So I've thoroughly learned about 529s, what I didn't know in the last three weeks or so.

So here's the correct answer because, and I screwed it up before and I'm not going to this time.

You don't own the account, Abby.

She does.

She can do with it what she wants to do with it.

Yes, sir.

So would I take out loans for medical school?

Wait a minute.

I don't know on what planet she can't help an exchange student and still have enough left for you to go to medical school out of $400,000.

Yeah.

Why are you whining about this?

There's like a bigger conversation to be had.

Why is it that your mother is why are you and your mother at odds?

Because my mother believes that I should take out loans from medical school like she did

for her graduate program.

So

she doesn't want to use the 529 for you to go to medical school regardless of the exchange student.

Yes, sir.

But she then told me she's going to use it for the exchange student instead of for me.

And that's like where some of the tension lies.

Not really.

The tension just is that she doesn't want to give it to you for med school, period.

She did pour salt in the wound and say, but I am going to give it to this other kid.

That's not even

a family member.

It's not you, yeah.

I'm not even sure she can do that, by the way, without getting penalized, but I don't know the answer to that, and I'm not going to answer something else.

I don't know the answer to that.

So, but the,

yeah,

maybe she can.

I've never read that you can give it to an exchange student.

Only siblings and people in the family, you could give it to your she could give it to your husband you give it to your wife you could give it to your uh parents you could give it to your kids now but i've never heard exchange student maybe you can though maybe you can uh it doesn't matter though that's not the core issue the core issue is she's not gonna give it to you anyway

yeah i understand that's fair

yeah why what's her reasoning it's like it sounds like an old like frat bro like i got hazed so you get hazed like she should be the one saying how ruthless it was trying to pay back student loans and be a new mom and all that kind of stuff.

So I have almost a half a million dollars in an account.

I'm going to take care of you.

So I have paid for all of my medical school applications.

I'm paying for all of my flights to and from interviews at other medical schools.

Are you a school tank?

Yes, sir.

Okay.

Wow.

So I am paying for everything.

I pay for my rent.

I, yeah, I do pretty much everything.

I have a job.

Okay, there's something deeper here.

What's the tension with you and your mom?

This exchange student has lived with us for four years trying to get an associate's degree and has not yet completed it.

I know.

Let's take a look.

The exchange student is a symptom.

They're not the problem.

What is the problem?

The problem is your mother and you.

Yeah, what is going on?

I honestly don't know.

I

appreciate my mom.

You don't know, really?

I genuinely don't know.

I have a feeling it's because she went through this whole process without any help from her parents and expects me to do the same.

Well, I can tell you, I went through some things all by myself without my parents' help, and I'm making dang sure that my son doesn't do that.

And there's some things that I had to do that were really hard that I'm making sure he does because it's appropriate.

But

okay, number one, let's Sabby, let's set this aside.

The exchange student is not causing you to go to med school with student loans.

Your mother is.

She has the money to do both.

Okay.

So take the exchange student out of the conversation completely.

And then

if I were in your shoes, you're not going to like this, but I simply wouldn't go to med school.

I don't think you can afford to go.

She's not willing to help you, and I'm not going to tell you to go $250,000 in debt to go be an MD.

Not in the current medical climate.

I think it's financial suicide.

I know it's your dream and it's your A game and it's what you've been wanting to do your whole life and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you're going to do it no matter what I say.

I know that.

But I'm not going to leave this call without telling you the truth.

And the truth is you should not do this.

And then you should call your mom up and say, based on the fact I've got to go into student loan debt, I've decided not to go.

Yeah.

I agree with Dave, but I also think it's worth sitting down at a table and asking your mom what happened.

What in the world is wrong?

Yeah, what did I do?

I had this amazing opportunity ahead of me.

Did you go at her after the divorce with your dad?

And she never got over the fact that you got at it.

You know, you took his side.

Or, I mean, what happened?

Yeah, pretty gnarly.

Or this woman is just wounded from something else, and she's taking it out on her kid.

I don't know.

But this is a game of cat and mouse.

I don't want to be in.

I would opt out of the game.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

Yeah, I'd step out.

And Dave's right.

Even

at the highest case scenario, she could put $100,000 towards this other student's tuition and still have $300,000 for your school.

And you can still go to school.

So it's not about her.

Choose a school you can afford.

If you've got $250,000 of cash laying there, choose a school that's $250,000 or don't go.

Find one that gave, because you can find it in med school and get through for that.

But if she's making pay for paying for it, no one asks the doctor where they went to school ever.

Yeah.

If she's making you pay for flights, if she's got 400K and she's not paying for tuition, your senior year helping you with rent, there's other, there's something underneath all of this that is borderline pathological or mom just thinks she's toughening up her daughter.

And then you have to live in that mathematical reality.

I simply don't have the money to go to med school right now.

And I'm like Dave.

I know too many medical doctors whose kids are going to school and they're still paying on their student loans.

And so I can't in good faith tell you to do that right now.

And John has a PhD in higher education.

So he doesn't know actually what this is.

It's tough, man.

It's tough, tough, tough, tough, tough.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

I hate it for you.

That's,

you know, there's a...

a thing where you teach your kids to do hard things

and then there's a thing where you're just being a jerk right

Or it's like I'm gonna

box my kid around the ears because I know the world's tough and they're gonna get boxed around the ears a lot.

And what you end up doing is beating your kid down so much before they even get into the world.

And there's something about teaching your kids strength and discipline and resilience.

And then there's something about kicking your kids' knees out from under them before they leave the house.

And so if, yeah, to this mother, congratulations.

You win.

You're going to have 400 grand in an account, and you have what sounds like a pretty hardworking, amazing young woman who's going to have her dreams diverted.

Either she's going to go into catastrophic debt trying to prove herself, or she's going to have to go do something else, robbing a generation of potentially a great young doctor

because you want to be right.

So, congratulations on being right and altering everything here.

Yeah, that's just,

but you're a tough old bra.

You proved her.

You showed her.

Congratulations.

You showed her.

Give me a break.

Hey guys, Rachel Cruz here, and guess what?

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In the lobby of Ramsey Solutions on the debt-free stage, Jonathan and Sashia are with us.

Hey guys, how are you?

Hi, good.

How are you?

Better than I deserve.

Welcome.

Where do y'all live?

Savannah, Georgia.

Fun.

And how much debt have you two paid off?

$373,346.

Way to go.

How long did that take?

16 months.

Good for you.

Whoa.

And your range of income during that time?

Started out $90,000 and ended up $530,000.

Okay, that's bizarre.

Yes.

Who got a job?

What in the world?

So that's me.

That would be you.

Yes, sir.

Okay, so I'm assuming you're not going to know or something.

You must have come out of med school, huh?

Yes.

Okay, and so you went from making nothing to making $400,000.

Yes.

Or something.

Yes, sir.

Way to go.

What specialization are you in?

So OBGYN.

Oh, wow.

Good for you.

Thank you.

That's the most fun kind of doctor.

Babies, babies, babies.

Yes.

It's the only time people are happy to be in the hospital.

Yes.

Absolutely.

Very cool.

Good for you.

That's

400K from nothing.

So 373 is not a house.

That was med school.

All student loans.

Wow.

And you just said,

we're going to pretend like we're not making any money.

We're going to pay off the loans in 16 months.

That's exactly what we did, Dave.

So you heard us telling somebody on an earlier segment.

I said yes.

That was the seed that was planted for our story.

Okay, tell us about this adventure.

So the journey really started in 2019 whenever I graduated medical school, staring at six figures of debt and it was smothering it was hard to breathe so we went through residency not making much our goal then was just let's not make that number larger right so we lived well beneath our means we had twins yes so we went through all of that um

she but got pregnant she had twins yeah

we have a teen so we got her through school and we were like let's just keep this number steady.

And then when I graduated training, it was like, let's live well below our means, live like a resident, literally, and pay everything onto this debt.

You do.

That's what we did.

Just exactly like we described.

That's incredible.

So when did you get connected to the Ramsey stuff?

So I heard about you in medical school

just from students talking about it.

We were all wondering, how are we going to pay off these loans?

And some people really wanted loan forgiveness, and some people talked about Dave Ramsey.

And I said, well, well, the loan forgiveness doesn't sound very good.

So let me look into that.

And so you were simmering for a long time before we could press play.

Wow, okay.

Yes, sir.

So you had it all lined up.

And then as soon as you get out, boom, we're hitting this, hit that end domino and go.

Yes, yes.

Residency was tough because we wanted to, but we just didn't have the means.

Yeah, you didn't have enough margin then.

But even having the courage and the grit to hold the line.

Yes.

You say, okay, we've dug this big of a hole.

That's a tough order with, what, three kids?

Yes.

And you in residency, which means you're working 900 hours a week.

Yes.

And

you're holding down everything.

Yes, sir.

Still does.

To just say we're holding the line, that's really tough.

That's like doing bench press.

And instead of like pushing it all the way up, it's just holding it.

That's hard, man.

That's really tough.

Yes, absolutely.

Congratulations.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Amazing.

The great news is, is now.

Woohoo!

Yes.

Wow.

You're going to be able to do amazing stuff.

Yes.

Do you have a mortgage?

We

just bought a house.

We just bought it last month.

Good.

Right after this.

Okay.

Yep.

And now turn around and get it paid off.

Exactly.

All right.

Cash flowing.

What do you owe on it?

$5.85.

Okay.

We haven't even got our first mortgage payment.

So

what is your plan on it?

So we're on a 15-year fix.

Shout out to Amy Jo with Churchill Mortgage.

She was amazing.

But our plan is to get that paid off hopefully in five years.

Yeah, good.

That's perfect.

And the fact that y'all didn't go out and buy a $7 million home.

It was tempting.

I bet it was.

I bet they said you qualify for any home you want.

Yes, we qualify for $2 million.

It was crazy.

And we didn't, we said, no, we don't need a $2 million house.

Amazing.

Well, you will someday.

Yeah.

But not now.

Won't be long.

Amazing.

Y'all.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm so proud.

How does it feel?

It feels good.

The excitement part for me was every time we made that payment, it's like you make it.

Let's keep going, let's keep going, let's keep going.

And that was the, that was, that's once we made the last payment, it was like, this is it.

Yeah, we're done.

Yes.

We are done with this.

How'd that feel when you hit that last button?

It was amazing.

It was amazing.

How much dancing around the living room was there?

That was a lot.

Champagne cork going off.

Yes, for sure.

That's great.

Submit no more student loans.

Done, baby.

That's it.

Mic drop.

Okay, how many of your classmates that you graduated with

are debt-free debt-free right now?

16 months away.

Minimum.

Zero.

Zero.

10%.

Zero.

I work in a large practice and nobody who got out a residency.

It was a primary goal for them.

And it was hard.

You mentioned Doc Idis.

You know, I had a lot of colleagues, a lot of classmates with brand new cars, new homes, vacationing, and we're just, you know, thrift shopping and living below our means and pushing through.

But now they're like, man, you did it right.

You know, so I'm inspiring them even now, hopefully, to try to make those changes.

And hopefully this story will help those people in medical school or graduating residency.

You know, it can be done.

It's hard.

It's so hard, but it can be done.

373,000 in 16 months.

Yes.

That's just not messing around.

That's pretty studly.

That's pretty studdy right there.

Jonathan, what was it like keeping everything duct taped and bailing wired together over those many years?

It was hard.

It was hard.

Because

we had the older daughter and then the two twins.

It was a lot to keep up with.

I would probably say the good thing for me is I like everything to be on the schedule.

So once everything was on the schedule, it made it a little bit easier.

But the hardest thing is just not being able to see her.

And I've got to give a shout out to her.

She worked extremely, extremely hard.

I mean,

I can't say enough.

You know,

she dug and dug and dug.

There was a lot of nights.

We didn't see each other, didn't hardly talk.

We may have text a little bit, but I've got to give her a lot of credit on that.

And, you know, I knew that

it was hard, but I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I said, I know it's coming.

I know it's coming.

Just, you know, we just got to dig in there and just keep going.

I can't wait for a few years from now when that older teenager comes home and sees the clothes these young twins are wearing and says, hey, wait a minute.

we're goodwilling it when I was that age and now we're

amazing but she's seen the grit and she's you know she's in college we second week this oh you've changed her life changed her life changed her life yes able to cash flow her college and but she has no excuses she watched her mom and her dad just be gangsters she has no she she has no excuses man none but but not from words she got to watch you guys do it which is the most powerful lesson a parent can give it's amazing And you're not going to put her in student loan debt to teach her a lesson either.

No.

No.

Man.

So she can learn grit.

No.

So cool, guys.

This is so cool.

We've had those calls today.

It's crazy.

Absolutely crazy.

Wow.

So proud of y'all.

Thank you.

So how does it feel?

It feels amazing, you know, to be able to just

work, earn money, and you keep it all.

You know, you put it towards things that are going to build your future home, our first home ever.

We're able to now start and save for retirement.

How long have y'all been married?

Seven years.

Seven years.

Yeah.

So, what?

What's the you bought the house?

That's a good first thing to do.

What's the next, the next second thing you're going to do just to celebrate and enjoy some of this?

I want a truck.

Yes.

There you go.

He needs a truck.

I need a truck.

You do need a truck.

You do need a truck.

What are we going to get?

What are we going to get?

I want a Denali, Chevrolet, or GMC Denali.

Yeah, that's a nice truck.

Yes.

Funny, on the way, on the drive up here, my battery went dead on the side of the road.

No way, it did.

Yeah, I replaced it in the parking lot of auto zone.

What Jasper did is he?

All right, let's get on it.

We're about to run out of time.

Let's count them down.

Awesome.

Thank you.

$500,000 a year.

I'm changing the battery in the auto zone.

I like it.

I like it.

Count it.

All right.

$373,000 paid off in 16 months, making $90,000 to $530,000.

Let's hear a debt-free scream.

Three, two, one.

We're debt-free.

Yeah.

I love it.

Get the man a denaly.

Our scripture of the day, Proverbs 16:9: In their hearts, humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.

Milton Friedman said, if you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand.

Yep, that'll work.

If you're tired of living paycheck to paycheck and feeling like you can't get ahead, join one of our free every dollar trainings.

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You're going to love that.

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Ramseysolutions.com slash webinar.

Be sure and check that out.

Nick is in Knoxville.

Hi, Nick.

How are you?

Hey, Mr.

Ramsey.

Thanks for having me today.

I really appreciate it.

And Doctor, you as well.

Thank you.

I got a, I'm very fortunate in my life.

I inherited a pretty good chunk of money from my grandfather and my grandnie and pop

their estate when they passed away.

My wife and I have no children.

We're very conservative.

We live conservatively.

We live below our means.

We already are doubling up on our payments on our home.

We currently owe about $212,000 on it.

And the money that I have is, I've completed phase one, basically.

It happened in 2022 when my grandfather passed away.

He was with a longtime financial advisor.

And I had to kind of break the ties with him because it was all invested in like one chunk of the company that he worked for.

So I had to diversify it, which was very difficult.

So I went with a good family friend of ours with a large Prime Merica financial institution, which you're familiar with, Mr.

Ramsey.

And it was all diversified.

And so I've kind of got over that now.

And I'm like, do I pay the home off?

How much is in the account?

Right now, 1.639.

And not all of that is my grandparents.

I've saved up a whole lot

during my career.

Why would you you not pay off your house before now why would you not just do that automatically it's a it's an irrelevant amount of money if you got a hundred a million six

yes sir um so the reason being is because my you know a financial advisor friend of mine and then the financial advisor through prime merica also was like well you're making money on this money and you're fixed at a two two and a half percent interest rate um with your mortgage and you can make ten percent so based on that these idiots would tell you to go buy a meet borrow a million dollars on your house because you could make a spread on it.

Well, that's why I'm calling you to say.

No, I mean, that's what these idiots are telling you.

It's the same dadgum stupid thing.

Yeah.

But they don't make any money when you pay off your mortgage.

They only make money when you buy stock from mutual funds from them.

Their commission is not based on your debt reduction, it's based on how much you keep with them under management.

Yeah, yeah.

So that's what I'm sucked.

Yeah, they're ripping you off.

This pisses me off.

Yeah.

And then they drop my name to boot.

Yeah, pay off your house today, man.

Yeah, pay it off today.

And change financial advisors again.

And get one to have some dadgum sent.

Yeah, they're lying to you, brother.

Telling you to stay in debt when you've got a million six in your account and you only owe $200,000 on your mortgage.

That's just asinine.

Yeah.

Has nothing to do with Dave Ramsey.

I can tell you that.

Or go past that.

Drop my name and then give that advice.

Just ask what would it be like to sit at a table with your grandfather

who's seen a few things.

What would your grandpa do?

He'd say, if you're kicking your butt more than I am, don't own your house outright.

Do it right now.

Don't make these other men rich gambling off of your off your spread.

Yeah.

Nope.

Dave, that makes me so mad.

It makes me irrationally angry.

I'm glad you got angry for both of us, but geez.

I got two dips, one bad bad advice and one drop in my name to give the bad advice.

So I double-dipped on the anger.

But yeah,

no, no, no, no, no, no.

Yeah.

And Nick, another thing I do, number one, I use common sense when I'm applying these things.

And I've never had anyone in 40 years of doing this show, it's approaching 40 now,

tell me that I gave them bad advice when I told them to pay off their house.

I've never had a single person send me hate mail that said, I paid off my house and I hate you.

You're awful.

And if you pay off your house and you hate it, you can go get you a new mortgage.

They'll give you another one.

So if you hate being debt-free.

I've never had that experience ever.

And all the data tells us among the millionaires that we've studied, not broke financial people selling you mutual funds, but real millionaires, that the paid-off house is one of the key elements of becoming a multimillionaire

because it sets you free.

You don't have anything to think about anymore.

I promise you, the grass feels different under your feet when you walk out in the backyard with no shoes on and no mortgage.

My grass, shut up, because there's risk involved.

We've done detailed research, and 100% of the foreclosures occur on a home with a mortgage.

So, yeah, go to ramseysolutions.com and click on Smart Vestor Pro and find a Ramsey Smart Vestor Pro in your area that will give you good advice instead of that clown show you're with.

Yeah.

Man.

All right.

Katie's in New Hampshire.

Hey, Katie, what's up?

Hey, guys.

Thanks for taking my call.

Sure.

How can we help?

So my husband and I are first-time homebuyers, and we've been paying extra to the mortgage.

But we've been seeing how much interest we've been paying versus the amount that's actually going to the principal.

And after talking to my in-laws, they highly recommended HELOC as they said that it's just interest payments, which is not a lot compared to the interest that we're paying now.

Your in-laws don't know how to do the math.

Yeah, they don't have a calculator.

It's not how it works.

Okay,

you have a conventional mortgage, right?

Yeah, we do.

Okay.

Your conventional mortgage is calculated exactly like a simple interest HELOC.

Exactly.

Okay, you're not prepaying interest on the front end.

You're paying interest based on the current interest rate of your mortgage and the outstanding balance as of this month.

When you pay a principal balance, you slide forward in the amortization schedule.

So if you put $10,000 extra on the principal balance, it's not next month on the AMS schedule.

It's $10,000 worth of principal reduction forward because that amount of interest is charged on that $10,000 less balance.

So the

amortization schedule is calculated as if it were perfectly done simple interest.

And a HELOC is simple interest as well.

So your in-laws are under the mistaken impression,

it's a fallacy that's believed out there, it's mythology, that because mainly what you pay on the front end of a mortgage is interest, that you're prepaying the interest on the front of the mortgage.

You're not.

You're paying the exact amount of interest due.

The reason it's so high is it's the highest your balance is ever going to be.

As your balance goes down, the amount that goes to interest goes down, and the amount that goes to principal goes up because you have a fixed payment all the way through.

Okay, that's how the actual math works.

So bless your in-law's heart, honey.

Don't take financial advice from them.

They're math challenged.

And that's not how this works.

They'll give you a good husband, and let's just call it.

Yeah, they made a good husband, and he's a good boy, and we'll move on.

She makes a good casserole, but we're not taking math from her.

I'm just.

Okay.

Okay, Dave, help me with this.

I know we're running out of time.

Yeah.

And this segment's about to be

brought to you by Preparation H because the hemorrhoid's getting a little bit out of control with how frustrated I'm getting.

Teach me about why that would even, even under the scenario you drew, they're mistaken understanding.

Why would taking out a loan against your house somehow be better?

Well,

if you were prepaying the interest somehow and you could avoid that by paying down the principal, then borrowing money at simple interest to do that would mathematically make sense.

But there's no such thing.

It's not how it works.

Would the bank come up with a loan and just cross their fingers and hope that nobody figured out that sophisticated response?

Well, there's been more than one hack on the internet over the 30 years I've been doing the 40 years I've been doing this.

So there you go.

Here we go.

I'll always be in business, John.

You always got a job.

You're always going to have work to do, my brother.

There's always work to do between financial planners and in-laws.

And in-laws.

Here we go.

That puts this hour of the Ramsey Show in the books.

We'll be back with you before you know it.

In the meantime, remember, there's ultimately only one way to financial peace, and that's to walk daily with the Prince of Peace, Christ Jesus.

Up next, we are headed out to Chicago and Orlando for the Ramsey Show Live.

Yep, you heard me right.

We are taking this show to you.

This is going to be everything you love about the Ramsey Show, except you get to be a part of it.

Part of what, George?

The Ramsey Show Live.

Again, that's what I'm telling them about.

Ramsey Show Live in here?

Nope, we're doing it on the road.

You're going to Chicago with me and Rachel Cruz September 30th.

Are you free?

The windy city.

I like it that time of year.

You know what else I like, George?

I like the deep dish.

Oh, okay.

Maybe we'll have some deep dish.

You mind if I finish the promo?

Is that okay with you?

Okay.

Okay.

Appreciate that.

Questions and answers, real conversations, and I'm sure a few surprises here and there.

George, are you in here talking about TRS Live?

I am, Jade.

I'm trying to talk about it.

Nice.

So that means it's actually happening, right?

It's happening.

If I could tell the people, I think it could actually come to fruition.

Listen, just tell me when and where.

You don't know?

Okay, we're going to Orlando.

You're going to join Dr.

John Deloney and I October 2nd.

Yes.

Okay, great.

I'm going to go pack now.

Please, please do that.

Go.

Pack.

Hey, George, speaking of packing, is this like sweater weather or is it not that cold yet in Chicago?

What is happening?

Can I please just get to how they buy the tickets?

Geez, I thought it was a good question.

Okay.

This is not an arena tour.

This is a one-night only event in Chicago and Orlando.

General admission is only $39.

Plus, there's a VIP experience if you're bougie like that.

But here's the thing.

There's only 300 seats available.

So get your tickets now at ramseysolutions.com slash events.

Hey, how come you get to go to both cities?

I just go where they tell me, man.

Hey, have you been there the entire time?

Maybe.

Okay, and also, are you reading a children's book?

I'm expanding my mind, George.

That's how we got those PhDs.

Yeah, that's probably where you got that jacket.

Okay.

See you on the road, John.