Episode #196: “He used to help me with debt…Now he’s making it worse”

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[00:01:17] Ramit: On today’s episode–

[00:01:18] Jill: Our mentality is always like, it’s just me and him. And if we just put enough stuff around us, then we’ll be all right. We’ll be able to function. And it’s not true.

[00:01:27] Ramit: Meet Frank and Jill.

[00:01:29] Frank: Groceries have quadrupled since the start of our debt to now.

[00:01:35] Ramit: Frank is 29. Jill is 33. They’re married with two young children, and they are stuck in a vicious cycle of overspending and credit card debt.

[00:01:46] Jill: I’m angry at this cycle. I’m angry at myself. I’m angry that we can’t be aligned. I’m frustrated.

[00:01:53] Ramit: Frank and Jill both struggle with the money messages they grew up with.

[00:01:58] Frank: I was taught by my mother that the credit cards are the devil, and if you get them, they are going to ruin your life.

[00:02:04] Jill: We’d ask like, “Oh, can we have this cereal?” all And she’d be like, “No, we don’t have a coupon for that.” And so it was just constantly like, no.

[00:02:11] Ramit: They tell themselves stories that prevent them from taking responsibility for their poor spending habits.

[00:02:18] Frank: My  Rich Life is not driving a Ferrari. I want to be able to just relax and go places and go hang out with the kids and not fear poverty.

[00:02:27] Ramit: And their inability to talk about money has driven a massive wedge in their relationship.

[00:02:33] Jill: I felt like he’s checked out. Even when I asked, “Hey, can you figure out what your retirement is?” It was like, I don’t care. And to me, I’m like, “Don’t you understand that’s what we’re working towards?”

[00:02:45] Ramit: If things don’t change soon, they might face some major consequences.

[00:02:50] Jill: The biggest fear is we’re going to be bankrupt and all of the fears that we have been fueling are going going to be reality.

[00:02:57] Ramit: Can they ditch their old money habits and start working towards building their  Rich Life?

[00:03:04] Frank: We need to stop doing these things to us, and we need to come together and make time for each other and make time for our money.

[00:03:11] Ramit: Now, let’s meet Frank and Jill.

[00:03:13] Ramit: I’m about to open Frank and Jill’s conscious spending plan, which breaks down their net worth, income, and exactly where they spend. You can download and create your own Conscious Spending Plan or CSP using my free template at iwt.com/CSP.

[00:03:32] Okay. Jill and Frank, they write, “We both want to live a  Rich Life, but we continue to block ourselves from making sustained changes. We are back in debt again after our second child. We’re trying to get out of debt before our credit cards go high interest next August.”

[00:03:48] She says, “I always want to plan and think ahead, so I often bring up money conversations, but I end up chasing him and nagging him for things to happen. We struggle with overspending, me out of emotions and him out of resentment and emotions. He never spends anything, and I always end up making the purchase for the kids and the household.”

[00:04:06] This is a very common dynamic. Let’s take a look at their CSP. Assets, 341,000. Investments, 27,000. Savings, $42, not $4,200. $42 in savings. And debt is 449,000. Total net worth of negative 80,000. Okay, before I go on, I should point out that it’s often that people have a negative net worth, especially early on in their lives.

[00:04:34] That is when you factor in things like student loans or other types of debt. But what is obviously and immediately concerning is the fact that we have anyone with only $42 in savings, but especially young parents. If I saw this in my own life, I would stop everything and I would focus on this.

[00:04:53] This is a red alert. It is a 10 out of 10 emergency. Let’s keep going along. Gross monthly income is about $120,000 a year. Okay, nice. Fixed costs at 107%. Okay, right there is the ball game. They are broke. They are spending more than they make every single month just on fixed costs alone. So this is it.

[00:05:15] Right here we know why they feel stressed. We know why they are fighting about money, avoiding money, using words like chasing and nagging. It’s right here. Let’s break down what’s going on in this fixed costs. Housing costs are not crazy. They’re at about 21% or so. Got a car payment of $750. Nothing crazy as well. Let’s see what else. Whoa. Debt payments at $1,571 a month. That’s a big deal. And then groceries at $1,500 a month. It’s difficult when you have two of those things.

[00:05:50] Let’s look at investments. Predictably, they’re at zero. Savings are– what the hell? Savings are at 5%, but that 5% is $300 a month for Christmas. And then guilt free spending says negative 12%. I don’t believe that. I believe they’re probably eating out, probably spending on a bunch of discretionary stuff.

[00:06:10] I almost guarantee that they’re spending a ton of money on kids’ stuff, people who are in debt, especially credit card debt, it’s almost 100% correlation being in credit card debt and an inability to say no to kids. So there’s a lot going on here, but I’m actually really excited to get a chance to speak to them. I think that we can make some big, big changes with their spending and probably zoom out and really help them think about money in a different way. So looking forward to talking to them.

[Interview]

[00:06:40] Jill: we have big problems to attack here. The biggest fear, is we’re going to be bankrupt and all of the fears that we have been fueling are going going to be reality. We’ve tried to get ourselves out of this process three times, and we’re back here again. We don’t have the tools. There’s something deeper here. We need a behavioral change, and I’ve seen your podcasts and your videos, and I’m like, “Okay, this might be the person who can help us get to that space that we’re trying to hide from.”

[00:07:11] Ramit: And if I could wave a magic wand right now, what would I do for you?

[00:07:16] Jill: Showing us the mirror, how we’re both playing a role in this. Because it’s two of us. It’s not just him. It’s not just me. It’s both of us.

[00:07:24] Ramit: What do you say, Frank? If I could wave a magic wand, what would you want me to do for you?

[00:07:28] Frank: That question’s tough for me because the magic wand is just obviously just erase our debt and be done with this. But what does that do for me? Ultimately, I’m just going to do it again. I want to learn how to stop going into debt, how to stop these compulsive behaviors of just, oh, it’s 50 bucks. Oh, it’s 20 bucks. I want to stop getting myself into more and more problems.

[00:07:47] The one thing I want to take away from here is hope. I want hope that there is something that we can do to problem solve. And I want there to be just this motivation that we can find to just get out of this, what feels like a forever-ending hole, like a tunnel that’s just slanted downwards.

[00:08:05] Ramit: How would you describe your financial situation today?

[00:08:08] Frank: Our financial situation to me is credit card debt in this economy with two kids is tough. You felt like you get ahead, but then you don’t because clothes, kids’ school, everything is just getting expensive and more and more each day. And so our financial situation is, right now, we’re just bearing through these first five years, while childcare is like 1,500 bucks a month. So we’re just grinning this out because we’re just going down just enough every month in the red.

[00:08:38] Ramit: Okay. Jill, how about you? How would you describe your financial situation?

[00:08:41] Jill: I feel like it’s self-inflicted. I think the childcare is a piece of it. If we could just hone in our impulse control and the wants, I think we would be fine. To me, I think it’s a communication and being on the same page thing and being proactive versus reactive and being conscious and able to make decisions together. And to me, that’s where the problem is, is that we just can’t be on the same page ever, or it’s an argument. Or the other person’s like, “Okay, whatever. Just do whatever.”

[00:09:12] Ramit: So I’m hearing a few different things. I’m hearing your financial situation is self-inflicted, which is contradicting what Frank said about clothes are getting expensive. Childcare is getting expensive. Groceries are getting expensive. And I’m hearing communication is an issue. You don’t really talk about money, or if you do, it’s quick. It’s fly by night. It’s disagreements or fights. One person retreats.

[00:09:35] Jill: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:35] Ramit: Did the two of you have a shared vision of money?

[00:09:38] Jill: We started your program and we realized a lot of the things we want for the future are very similar. But we never had had that conversation before, so we really never knew that.

[00:09:48] Ramit: That’s good. Which program are we talking about? My book or my Money Coaching program? What are we talking about?

[00:09:53] Jill: The online Money Coaching program.

[00:09:55] Ramit: Okay. And what happened when you finished the program?

[00:09:57] Jill: We sure didn’t.

[00:09:58] Ramit: Really? What happened?

[00:10:00] Jill: The same cycle that we always have.

[00:10:02] Frank: Fear, and we get scared. We don’t want to look at the reality.

[00:10:05] Ramit: So you go through the videos. Did you attend one of the calls?

[00:10:09] Frank: Yes.

[00:10:09] Jill: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:10] Ramit: Okay. Cool. What did it feel like when the two of you were on the live call?

[00:10:14] Frank: Fear.

[00:10:15] Jill: I got hope.

[00:10:16] Ramit: Hope. Fear, shame, and hope. Interesting. Were the two of you sitting together?

[00:10:21] Jill: We couldn’t.

[00:10:22] Frank: We have to divide and conquer with the kids.

[00:10:25] Ramit: How old are the kids?

[00:10:26] Jill: Seven months and four years.

[00:10:28] Ramit: Wow. Okay. All right, so you’re really in it. Young kids. Okay. Did you talk about the Money Coaching after you attended the session?

[00:10:38] Frank: Yeah.

[00:10:38] Jill: We did. Yeah.

[00:10:39] Frank: We’re hearing all these things about how people can live your  Rich Life, how to be somebody that is enjoying your own current financial situation as opposed to someone who’s driving a Ferrari. I don’t want that. I want to be able to just relax and go places and go hang out with the kids and not fear poverty. I want to be able to enjoy the small things. To just be able to eat out and not look at the bank account. That’s what I want to do.

[00:11:01] Ramit: What does it take in order for you to do that?

[00:11:03] Frank: Get our finances together in such a way that I don’t have to question that the money’s not there.

[00:11:09] Ramit: Okay. But then I’m confused because y’all didn’t finish step two of the program.

[00:11:13] Frank: Yes.

[00:11:14] Ramit: Why?

[00:11:15] Frank: Got busy, as we say.

[00:11:18] Ramit: As we say, we didn’t have time. Is that a phrase you use a lot?

[00:11:22] Frank: Every day.

[00:11:24] Ramit: Is that true? Do you not have time?

[00:11:26] Frank: It feels like it. Between kids and work, it just seems like we’re running around like crazy people. Our one son has autism. Our other son’s seven months old. So between daycare and work, we barely cross paths until it’s Saturday or Sunday.

[00:11:40] Ramit: How long would you say that this disconnection of time between the two of you has been going on for?

[00:11:46] Frank: Seven months.

[00:11:47] Ramit: Since the baby came. The second one.

[00:11:48] Jill: No, no. For 11 years.

[00:11:54] Frank: Wow. Different.

[00:11:56] Jill: Come on, it’s been the entirety of our relationship.

[00:11:59] Frank: As far as the disconnect of the time, we’ve always avoided the conversations. But now that we’re trying to come at the conversations, I feel like more times than not we’re struggling to get the time.

[00:12:10] Ramit: Jill, if I asked you what is your  Rich Life, what would you say to me?

[00:12:15] Jill: For me to be able to spend time with the kids and my husband and to have shared memories and build memories with the kids and be able to take care of our health, to just be able to live through the day and not be stressed and on the edge because our finances are in my mind all the time. Not being where I want to be, not being able to have those conversations, I have tried to figure out ways to come at conversations, and I always feel like it’s not successful.

[00:12:47] Ramit: Do you remember what my question was?

[00:12:48] Jill: What’s my  Rich Life?

[00:12:50] Ramit: Mm-hmm. And do you see where we just ended up?

[00:12:53] Jill: Me feeling like I can’t have a  Rich Life with my husband.

[00:12:57] Ramit: I would say you talking about your problems versus painting a picture for me of your  Rich Life. What I can hear from both of you is a really narrow vision of where you are today. So much so that when I ask what is your  Rich Life, within 30 seconds, we’re back to why you can’t live your  Rich Life.

[00:13:18] Jill: Yeah.

[00:13:18] Ramit: Frank, do you see that pattern as well?

[00:13:20] Frank: Yeah.

[00:13:21] Ramit: Do you both believe that there is a future where you can answer a question like the one I just gave you with a positive?

[00:13:28] Jill: When you asked the question earlier about how did you guys feel after you went on the monthly call, we both felt like, oh, look, people do do it. People have done it. And so the conversations to me was like, oh, we can do this.

[00:13:44] Ramit: I appreciate that, and that’s one of the things I love, is being able to expose and show you other people who’ve gone through tough times and made it, so good. Okay. It sounds like you two conceptually believe that there’s a future that can be brighter than today. Perfect. We’ve got to believe that. Let me understand a little bit more about day-to-day lifestyle. Jill, what do you do?

[00:14:05] Jill: I’m a therapist. I own my own private practice.

[00:14:08] Ramit: Cool. All right. Frank?

[00:14:10] Frank: I work from home. I work in IT.

[00:14:12] Ramit: Okay. Great. All right. Let’s talk about the finances. If you had to describe how you feel about your finances in one or two words, what would be the words?

[00:14:21] Frank: Busy.

[00:14:22] Ramit: Okay.

[00:14:22] Jill: Like a hamster wheel.

[00:14:24] Ramit: Okay. Have you ever felt calm about your money in the 11 years you’ve been together?

[00:14:28] Jill: Yeah.

[00:14:29] Frank: Yeah. I used to be the sole income for a while when she was going to school, and so I had no debt. I just had to worry about affording the next thing, and that was calm, even though I now realize, looking back, I had it good. Then I was like, “Oh God. What am I going to do?”

[00:14:45] Ramit: So you’re a worrier. It’s interesting that you worried back when you were even calm. You were worrying. Now you’re worrying more. You’re going into debt more. And you mentioned to me, if I had a magic wand, you would have me wave it, pay off the debt. But even if your debt was paid off, would you stop worrying?

[00:15:01] Frank: Absolutely not.

[00:15:02] Ramit: Okay. Something deeper than the amount on the spreadsheet. Right?

[Narration]

[00:15:06] Ramit: Do you notice that when I ask questions around how they talk about money, Frank uses the phrases, “We are too busy,” or, “We can’t find the time.” Now, remember, they’re parents with young children, and it makes a lot of sense. They are incredibly busy. It’s also a story that we commonly tell ourselves. We are too busy to do X, and we find that the results show up, for example, with their finances.

[00:15:34] I’m not here to tell anybody how to run their time or even how to run their money, but once you get comfortable with the story that we are too busy, suddenly it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, it’s easy to dismiss most parts of managing your money. As Frank just mentioned a moment ago, he’s been a warrior since before they had debt, so there’s a lot to unpack around his relationship with money. Let’s listen in as he talks about the money messages he heard as a child.

[Interview]

[00:16:07] Frank: I grew up in a house where money was like, you didn’t have it. And if you did have it, it was spent ridiculous. Bill’s not getting paid, but you go order $90 in pizza. As a kid, you’re like, “Oh, yum. Pizza.” As an adult, that’s a poor choice.

[00:16:23] Ramit: You grew up poor?

[00:16:24] Frank: I would say middle class with self-destructive behaviors.

[00:16:27] Ramit: Very interesting. What part of the country did you grow up in?

[00:16:30] Frank: Columbus, Ohio. 

[00:16:31] Ramit: What do you remember your parents saying about money when you were a kid?

[00:16:35] Frank: We don’t have any.

[00:16:36] Ramit: What else?

[00:16:37] Frank: We got some. Let’s go spend it.

[00:16:39] Ramit: And they spend it on family stuff like pizza or anything else?

[00:16:42] Frank: Pizza, toys, adventures. We would go tubing down the creeks. We would go camping, eating out, stuff like that.

[00:16:50] Ramit: And then what happened when you didn’t have money again? What would they say to you?

[00:16:53] Frank: There’s no money. Can’t go do those things. We got to wait till the next check.

[00:16:56] Ramit: Do you ever see your parents talking about saving or investing?

[00:17:00] Frank: I didn’t even know what stocks were. I heard of people investing. Of course, you’ve watched movies, but you’re like, “How do you even approach that?”

[00:17:06] Ramit: When you look back at your childhood, what lessons do you take away about money?

[00:17:12] Frank: Save it. I know that contradicts what I just said, but save it. That’s the lesson I took away. Save it all. Don’t spend anything.

[00:17:20] Ramit: That’s a little contradictory based on how much you’re spending right now, right?

[00:17:24] Frank: Yes. When the kids came along, it was like a brain switch for me. I was like, “Well, they need it.” I have to give it.

[00:17:31] Ramit: Wait. Doesn’t this sound like you just switched right into your parents?

[00:17:34] Frank: I don’t want them to know, oh, we can’t afford it. I tell my son, “You got to save up for that.” I’m trying to teach him lessons that I need to teach myself. I’m trying to say like, “We only have five bucks.” He goes, picks out an $8 toy, and I’m like, “Ooh, the budget’s five for this one.”

[00:17:48] Ramit: You can get away with this for about a year and a half more. And then they get too smart. They know what’s going on. Dad’s over here telling me one thing and doing completely the opposite. Kids are really smart. You better find a new line. That’s not going to last much longer.

[00:18:03] Frank: Yeah.

[00:18:03] Ramit: What do you think will happen when your son starts to point out how you’re saying one thing and doing another? How are you going to react to that?

[00:18:09] Frank: I’m going to feel horrible. Like, dad, we don’t have it, but you can go do that?

[00:18:14] Ramit: Very interesting response. You’re going to feel horrible, not I’m going to make a change right now, so that he never has to point out that I’m saying one thing and doing another. What do you get out of that, out of saying, “I’m going to feel horrible,” instead of talking about what you are going to change behaviorally?

[00:18:33] Frank: I have this path in my mind that it’s not changing. Sounds like I’m looking in the future and I see no change.

[00:18:40] Ramit: It seems to me, I agree, you believe your future is already determined and therefore when you look at your future, which is a future you don’t like, the only natural conclusion is, I’m going to feel horrible. Can I tell you? I look at it differently. I look at your future as unwritten.

[00:18:52] Of course, you have some clothing that you are wearing. It came from your childhood. These are messages you picked up. These are lessons you learned consciously and unconsciously. So yes, you’re bringing those with you, but the next chapter of your life is not written yet. I believe I have control. I have agency over what is going to happen to me next. Do you think that way or not?

[00:19:13] Frank: I think I can learn to think that way. I think I can change and do something different. That’s why we’re here. I wanted to come here.

[00:19:20] Ramit: I’m glad you’re here, and I appreciate you showing up and going full force with me and with your wife. Okay, so you grew up, not a lot of messages about positive saving, investing. A lot of, we can’t afford it. Now I’m curious about you, Jill. What do you remember about the phrases your family, your parents used when you were growing up as it relates to money?

[00:19:42] Jill: I grew up poor, so the phrases were usually that we don’t have it or we can’t have it. We’d go to the thrift store for clothes. When we’d go to the grocery store, my grandma would always go down every single aisle and then she’d have her coupons, and so she’d whip out every single coupon.

[00:20:01] And I remember we’d ask like, “Oh, can we have this cereal? All of our friends have this cereal. Can we have this one?” And she’d be like, “No, we don’t have a coupon for that.” And so it was just constantly like, no.

[00:20:10] Ramit: You mentioned your grandma.

[00:20:11] Jill: My mom has mental health issues, so my grandparents raised me, I think after two or three.

[00:20:18] Ramit: Got it. Wow. I’m sorry to hear that. And did that lead to you getting into the world of therapy?

[00:20:25] Jill: It did, yeah. It was a rough childhood. But my grandma was a big proponent of getting services, so even though we were poor, she made sure we had the state insurance and went to the therapist and saw people. And she always made sure we went to the doctors and dentists. So health was really important to her. We were poor, but we didn’t need anything. We just wanted stuff.

[00:20:51] Ramit: Of course. Every kid wants stuff.

[00:20:53] Jill: Yeah.

[00:20:54] Ramit: So you grew up a lot of talk about, we can’t afford it. And did that same type of conversation continue throughout your teenage years?

[00:21:03] Jill: It changed. I would say probably in elementary my grandpa started talking to me, like– my grandpa was the financial guy, so he would be always sitting on the porch reading a finance book. He would always talk about the investments he was doing. So there was three of us, my sister and my brother, that they took care of. And I’m the youngest.

[00:21:23] So he always would talk to me about like, “Hey, these are the books. This is where I keep all of your guys’ stocks.” And when I started working, he was like, “You got to put back your 30% for savings.” And I just, no. I didn’t want to hear any of it. To me, it was like I finally had my own money to do all of the once that I was always told I couldn’t do.

[00:21:45] I wanted a cell phone when I was in my teens, and they were not going to pay for a cell phone, so I had to buy my own cell phone. I wanted extra clothes, more than what they were going to be able to afford. And so then I would purchase those extra clothes. So it bred this concept of extra money when in reality that was the money that I needed to be preparing myself for life with. And he was constantly telling me that, but I just was like in one ear and out the other. It wasn’t until we got out of debt the second time where I was like, “Oh, this is what he meant.”

[00:22:21] This is why this is so important. I am getting older and I don’t have any savings. I don’t have any retirement. And I’m like, “Man, all of that extra money that I was using for things that I wanted that I didn’t need, I could have had all these savings because my needs were met with my grandparents.” It’s just the wants. And so that’s exactly how I spend as an adult, and that’s the challenge I have, is the telling myself, no, you do not need that. You have your needs met. That’s my issue.

[00:22:53] Ramit: Is that the challenge you currently have as well?

[00:22:56] Jill: I still fight it. I go through periods of time where I’m like, “I’m on it.” This is my plan. I want retirement. I want to not work my whole life. And then literally, I’ll just be like, “Oh, but I really want that.”

[00:23:10] Ramit: Feel like a battle, like you’re fighting a battle with yourself.

[00:23:12] Jill: It does. It literally feels like my adult self is fighting my child self. I’m trying to tell the child self like, “Dude, I know you want that, but time is running out.” You got to get yourself together. And then the child self is like, “Hmm, I hear you, but I really don’t care. Let’s just get this one thing.”

[Narration]

[00:23:33] Ramit: That’s powerful how Jill admits that. Her grandparents provided for her and tried to teach her to save, but because the message she internalized was, you can’t have that, she struggles to manage her impulse control. It’s like driving a car. Her grandparents only taught her how to hit the brakes, and that has turned into all or nothing for Jill.

[00:24:00] Earlier, we heard Frank describe the money habits that he picked up from his parents and is now passing on to his own kids. There’s a lot at play here, but I will say even the very situation they are in gives them the opportunity to rewrite their story. Let me tell you what I mean. They’re the parents of young children. That’s incredibly stressful, overwhelming.

[00:24:23] Of course, you’re busy. Maybe true. But what if we rewrote that story to say, yes, we might be a little overwhelmed. Of course, we’re going to be busier than we ever thought, and we get to make amazing changes and to build a healthy relationship with money that will be passed down for generations to come.

[00:24:46] We’ll be right back after this short break.

[00:24:49] Ramit: Let’s get back to the conversation.

[Interview]

[00:24:50] Ramit: You said that you got out of debt for the second time. Can you walk me through the number of times you’ve gotten into and out of debt?

[00:24:59] Jill: So while my grandfather gave great lessons on retirement and savings, he did not talk about credit cards with me. We didn’t talk about how to use them, how to manage them, none of them. So I was already under this misconception of like extra money. So when I got my first credit card, I was like, “Oh, I have this extra money I can use? Oh, this is great. I’m going to just spend it.”

[00:25:28] And, “Oh, I only have to pay this small amount monthly. I can afford that.” Then that was a slippery slope of me just, oh, I don’t have it right now, but I’m going to get paid. Let me just swipe my card, over and over and over again through my college years.

[00:25:42] Ramit: How much debt did you get into?

[00:25:45] Jill: Oh, God. The first time I think 12,000.

[00:25:47] Ramit: Okay. And did you pay it off?

[00:25:50] Jill: I did, yeah.

[00:25:51] Ramit: How did you do that?

[00:25:52] Jill: My husband said, I’m not going to marry you until you get this debt paid off.

[00:25:56] Ramit: We’re talking about Frank?

[00:25:57] Jill: Yes. We’re talking about Frank.

[00:25:58] Ramit: What? Okay. I have to say, that surprises me. Frank, I love the boundaries. I love that. I love any partner who says, “Look, this is what I need in order to be in a healthy relationship. I’m not trying to change you, but I’m telling you what I need.” Frank, that’s pretty cool. Where did that come from for you?

[00:26:19] Frank: It came from a very, very disciplined man, who would not spend any of his money unless he had it. I was taught, by my mother, that the credit cards are the devil, and if you get them, they are going to ruin your life. And so I didn’t own one. I didn’t want one and the debt associated with them.

[00:26:36] Ramit: So Jill, what was your reaction when he said that?

[00:26:38] Jill: Oh, I’ll take care of it. Don’t hold my French fries. That’s all it takes because we were, I think, six years in, five years in maybe.

[00:26:49] Frank: Yeah, we waited a while.

[00:26:50] Ramit: That’s interesting. You waited five years to talk about that?

[00:26:55] Frank: She was still going through college and hadn’t entered the workforce. And I was working full-time.

[00:27:01] Ramit: All right. So he said, I would like you to pay that debt off, otherwise we’re not going to get married. And Jill, you were like, “Cool. Say no more.” How long did it take you to pay that debt off?

[00:27:10] Jill: A couple of years. Yeah. Three years.

[00:27:13] Ramit: Was it hard?

[00:27:15] Jill: Yeah, it was hard.

[00:27:16] Ramit: And looking back, do you feel proud?

[00:27:18] Jill: Absolutely. I celebrated when we got out of debt that first time.

[00:27:23] Ramit: So you get out of debt. Y’all get married. When was the second time you got into debt?

[00:27:27] Frank: It was when we lived next to a Earth Fair, which is like Whole Foods. And my wife grew up being told no on a lot of the food choices that she wanted. And credit card later, I turned around and look and I was blindsided by some severe debt and I was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.”

[00:27:45] Ramit: Hold on. How much is severe debt?

[00:27:48] Frank: I think it was 14,000.

[00:27:50] Ramit: What are you buying, Frosted Flakes or something? The same stuff your grandma told you you can’t buy, you’re like, “I’m going to buy it now?”

[00:27:56] Frank: No, no, no.

[00:27:57] Jill: I would handle pretty much all the stuff for the house. I would go grocery shopping, get the household goods, all those things, because he would go to the grocery store and get the cheapest stuff. And I’d be like, “I don’t want this cheap stuff.” And then he’d get upset and say, “Why? We don’t have the money for it.” And I would say, “But we do.” And then he was like, “Then you just go grocery shopping. I don’t care.” I wanted the pristine health, so everything was organic, everything grass-fed. Everything was the best of the best.

[00:28:23] Frank: It was outrageous to come home with a brown bag. I’m like, “It couldn’t have been that bad.” You’re like, “It was $400.” I’m like, “It fits in a bag, a brown bag, and it’s 400 bucks? What’s in there? Gold?”

[00:28:34] Ramit: It sounds like the way you brought it up would be jokey. Was it a joke or were you mad?

[00:28:39] Frank: I was very mad. I didn’t know that it was going on a credit card. I didn’t know the true cost of these items. In the moment I’d be like, “Oh, this is good. This is great. Oh, this tastes great. This is nice. How much was this? Okay, wow. That’s outrageous.”

[00:28:52] Jill: At the time it was like, how could you do this again?

[00:28:56] Ramit: So you got into personal debt buying groceries for both of you.

[00:29:00] Jill: Yes.

[00:29:00] Ramit: All right, so Frank finds out and then what happened with that debt?

[00:29:03] Frank: I got upset and I said, “I am going to fix this right now. You are going to give me your credit cards. I’m going to take you down to a federal credit union. You’re going to get yourself on a payment plan with a personal loan, and you’re going to pay this off and you’re going to hand me the cards.

[00:29:16] Ramit: What is this guy? It’s not Frank. It’s like Frederico. Frederico comes out just freaking gangster, suave. He goes, “This is how it’s going to be. You want to get married to me, Frederico, you’re going to pay off your debt. $14,000 of debt. Let’s go. We’re going to the credit union. We’re going to take care of business.” Where did this come from? The second time.

[00:29:37] Frank: Well, wait till we get to the third time.

[00:29:39] Ramit: Hold on, Frederico. Let me take this step by step. I know you like to run [Bleep] around here. All right. So you go to the credit union, you put the payment plan in place, and what happens? It gets paid off. What’d you do at the end when you paid it off?

[00:29:50] Jill: Celebrated again.

[00:29:52] Frank: We went out to dinner.

[00:29:53] Ramit: High five. Good job. Love you. Celebrate. Okay. Are we in the middle of the third time right now?

[00:29:58] Jill: Yeah.

[00:29:59] Frank: We’re in deep.

[00:30:00] Jill: There’s a caveat here though, because after that last time I was like, “I’m sick of this cycle. I want to get ahead of this.” And I went spreadsheet happy. I was like, we have to figure out where our money’s going.” And at that point I had broken the trust enough, I guess, he didn’t care. He wasn’t trying to have the conversation. I was chasing him for months.

[00:30:21] Ramit: Even though the debt had been paid off. Why were you out of it, Frank?

[00:30:26] Frank: I was so sick of having the mindset of we don’t have it. We don’t have it. I got jealous. I was like, “Well, if we don’t have it, why are you spending it and I’m not?” I was like, “Okay, I’m going to go buy a computer then.” If I were going to rack up debt, I’m going to do something for myself once in a while.

[Narration]

[00:30:41] Ramit: Whoa. I just have to jump in here because this is a heartbreaking comment from Frank. It’s heavy, but I’m also not surprised to hear it. The thing is when one person in a relationship is the money person, or even the enforcer, as Frank or his alter ego, Frederico was, and the other person’s just content to be along for the ride, that can often breed resentment.

[00:31:08] You do not want to be in a relationship where there’s a parent-child dynamic. It is bad in so many ways. And in this case that resentment led to Frank basically thrown in the towel saying, why bother? Why do you get to buy whatever you want and I have to be the bad guy?

[00:31:28] This is one more example why it is so crucial for both people in a relationship to have an active role in managing the family finances. There can never be one money person because this is an example of what happens when there is. I talk more about this in my new book, Money for Couples.

[00:31:51] And real quick as you’re watching this, if you enjoy these videos, you want to be the first to know when we drop a new one, make sure you hit that Subscribe button. It really helps my team and me grow this channel.

[Interview]

[00:32:02] Ramit: So what do you think about this decision looking back?

[00:32:05] Frank: I screwed up royally. I should have had conversations and kept the mindset firm. You don’t have it, you don’t spend it.

[00:32:11] Ramit: What happened on the third time? Tell me what’d you buy and then we’ll get into the numbers.

[00:32:17] Frank: It’s so much at this point, I don’t even remember, but I just know between electronics and children and household furniture, we bought a house. I think it was during COVID. The market was just going insane. And I was looking at all these forecasts and I was just like, either we buy a house this month or we’re screwed. We did and then the market went off the roof and our house went up $150,000 in value.

[00:32:42] Ramit: Wait. Where’d you get the down payment? Where’d you get the money to furnish the house and maintain it? Where’d you get all that?

[00:32:47] Frank: Credit cards.

[00:32:49] Ramit: Oh.

[00:32:50] Jill: Yes, yes.

[00:32:51] Frank: Welcome to the debt.

[00:32:54] Jill: Yeah.

[00:32:54] Frank: Then we had our son, our 1-year-old at the time, and he was in childcare, so childcare was an expense. So as we were putting our money towards that, we were also like, “Well, we need a couch. Oh, we need a table. Oh, we need a bookshelf. Oh, we need clothes. Go ahead and get the computer that you want because you’re already $4,000 in debt. What’s an extra five?

[00:33:13] Ramit: How much are you in debt today?

[00:33:14] Frank: Card debt alone, I think, is 25,000. Auto loan is 25, home is 220. Student loans, what are they?

[00:33:23] Jill: 160 or 140.

[00:33:26] Frank: We looked at it one day and we’re like, “Oh, no. Oh, no. What do we do?” How do I problem solve? How do I logically get rid of this? How do I solve it like the last two times? And I’m panicking. I just don’t have a good solution. The economy, groceries have quadrupled since the start of our debt to now. Everything’s gone up. Childcare used to be 700 bucks a month. It’s 1,500 today. I don’t know what to do. Eventually, we’re going to run out. Our debt was maxed out. Our cards were maxed. That’s when we realized we did something wrong.

[00:34:02] Ramit: You didn’t realize that before the cards were maxed out?

[00:34:05] Frank: No. We were like, “We have to spend this money. We don’t have a choice. We have to do it.” It’s what we have to do to keep it going, keep the cycle, keep the lights on, keep getting the kids in school and keep paying for clothes and food. Ask us if we spent anything extravagant in the last year. I’d say no. We have been pretty good I think about trying to make sure the things that we need are needs, not wants.

[00:34:30] Ramit: What’s in your house right now? What’s the most expensive thing in there?

[00:34:33] Frank: Oh, man.

[00:34:34] Ramit: Usually it’s a car.

[00:34:35] Frank: Okay, so the car. Yeah, obviously.

[00:34:37] Ramit: How much is that?

[00:34:38] Frank: It’s a van, 25,000.

[00:34:40] Ramit: Okay. What’s next?

[00:34:42] Frank: The other car, which is 9,000. We got computers that are probably our next big items.

[00:34:48] Jill: The furniture.

[00:34:49] Ramit: What’s the most expensive piece of furniture?

[00:34:52] Jill: Our bed.

[00:34:54] Ramit: How much?

[00:34:55] Frank: It was 2,500 for the base and then 3,000 for the mattress.

[00:34:58] Ramit: Okay. So you all have a more expensive bed than I do. Okay. What’s next after the mattress, the $5,500 mattress and bed? What’s next?

[00:35:07] Frank: Solid wood Amish table.

[00:35:10] Ramit: Okay.

[00:35:11] Frank: Then a 3,000-dollar couch. We bought a fancy Roomba for $1,000. I bought a monitor for my computer gaming and working, and it’s like  $1,000. And I think that was in the cycle of just panic buying all the things that we wanted.

[00:35:28] Ramit: Can I make an observation?

[00:35:30] Frank: Yeah.

[00:35:30] Ramit: Frank, you said we haven’t spent on a lot of extravagant stuff. I think you have, particularly for your income. The bed alone, not to mention the table, the multiple computers and on and on and on, that is extravagant.

[00:35:44] Jill: Our mentality is always like, it’s just me and him. So we have to figure out how do we make me and him work well enough to keep our day-to-day going. And so we’re like, “Okay, if we have a better monitor, then we’re going to be working faster.” If we have a Roomba that cleans the floor, then we won’t have to mop the floor so often because we’re so stressed. If we just put enough stuff around us, then we’ll be all right. We’ll be able to function. And it’s not true.

[00:36:10] Ramit: This is the most Americana of stories. We don’t communicate effectively about money. We don’t even spend a lot of time together. We tell ourselves the story that we’re doing it all for our kids, but we lie to our kids. We tell them, save money. We don’t save money. Meanwhile, we’re increasingly in debt. We’re busy.

[00:36:30] We start to concoct stories. Well, we need this because of that. Let’s buy this. It’ll make us feel better. We then tell ourself another layer of story, which is we’re not actually buying anything extravagant. It’s all necessary. We’re investing in our time and ourselves. And you end up where?

[00:36:46] Jill: Yeah, in debt.

[00:36:47] Ramit: In debt, disconnected, feeling behind, stressed out, bad health.

[00:36:53] Jill: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:54] Ramit: Here we are. Now, what happens if you keep going?

[00:36:57] Jill: The biggest fear is we’re going to be bankrupt and all of the fears that we have been fueling are going going to be reality.

[00:37:05] Ramit: You’re going to be bankrupt. Do you know when?

[00:37:07] Frank: All the interest rates of the cards go on full strong next year.

[00:37:11] Jill: Yeah, we’re already in red.

[00:37:12] Ramit: Oh, you have artificially low interest rates right now?

[00:37:14] Jill: Yes.

[00:37:15] Frank: Part of my panic problem solving was I balance transfer to 0% interest cards for a year so that we would have some time to pay things down and just keep slapping as much extra income as we could. That’s what we’re doing to fix it. I’m taking on more household stuff, my wife is taking on more hours at work. We’re trying to get ahead.

[00:37:33] Ramit: Frank, what role has your panic played in contributing to this financial problem?

[00:37:39] Frank: I get so overwhelmed and so anxious about it that I just push it to the next day. There’s a tightness in my chest all the time.

[00:37:45] Ramit: Now imagine you bring that panic, that manic energy towards money. What ends up happening? We got to balance transfer. We got to do this. We got to buy this. We got to do this. Don’t tell this. We got to fix this. We’ll figure it out. I don’t know what to do. I got to go to sleep. We’ll figure it out tomorrow. Not calm, cool, and collected. Frenzy, panicked, making every short-term decision you can. Jill, you recognize this pattern that I’m describing?

[00:38:10] Jill: Yeah, I bring it up all the time. I wish we could just have a calm conversation. I just want to sit down and us just talk about it. It doesn’t have to be anything more than just a conversation.

[00:38:22] Ramit: Now, you are a therapist. Have you two gone to therapy together?

[00:38:26] Frank: We have in the past.

[00:38:27] Jill: Yeah.

[00:38:28] Ramit: Was that helpful?

[00:38:29] Frank: It was at the time.

[00:38:30] Ramit: And how come you haven’t gone back to talk about money?

[00:38:33] Frank: I didn’t think that was the thing you could do.

[00:38:36] Ramit: What do you mean? There’s a whole financial therapy industry. There’s even therapists who can just help you talk about connecting.

[00:38:42] Jill: I try to have these conversations with him. He just shuts me down.

[00:38:46] Frank: I didn’t know there’s therapy for money.

[00:38:48] Jill: [Inaudible] talk about the expertise I have. He doesn’t care about it. He doesn’t want to hear it.

[00:38:53] Ramit: It’s got to be tough.

[00:38:53] Jill: Yeah, it’s hard. I feel like I try to look at things from a big picture. I still have my issues. I have my anxious and all those things, but there’s a lot of times before it got to this level that I tried to say, “Hey, something’s not right.” We need to sit down and look at this. And it was just like, it’s fine, it’s fine. It’s in the green, it’s in the green, whatever. It’s fine. I’ll just put money towards it. It was just constantly pushing me away from the conversation. And it was hard. I felt really alone.

[00:39:28] Ramit: Do you feel that way today?

[00:39:29] Jill: He’s gotten better, but I still feel like there’s days where he’s just– sometimes it feels like he’s in his head having all these conversations with himself, and I’m just on the outside of like, hey, I’m here. And sometimes it’s like I’m talking to him and I’m looking for feedback, or I’m looking for engagement, and he just says, “Uh-huh,” or tries to walk away.

[00:39:51] And it’s been hard. I’ve talked about therapy. I brought it up multiple times, and he’s shut me down. I don’t know how else to approach it to be heard. So then I give up and I say, well, I’m not going to do this financial thing on own. I’m not going to penny pinch on my own. And so I’m just like, “Who cares? Let’s spend it on the credit card. I don’t care anymore.”

[00:40:10] Ramit: Are you both at that point where you both just don’t care anymore?

[00:40:13] Jill: I care a lot.

[00:40:14] Frank: I care now a lot. Yeah. I got really scared when we saw that big number, and it was double what we had ever gotten ourselves out of before. I got scared and I started to halt drastically.

[00:40:26] Ramit: First two times you got into debt, it was Jill, and then the third time it seems like the roles were reversed. Am I reading that correctly?

[00:40:32] Jill: I feel like I still played a role in it. For me, it was like, I don’t care anymore, because we’re not going to have the conversation. And I feel like maybe his was, I didn’t get my opportunity, now here’s my time.

[00:40:43] Ramit: Okay. Fair enough. I appreciate that. So both played a part in debt number three. So why don’t you all just keep going.

[00:40:51] Jill: I never wanted to keep at this rate. I’ve never wanted this, to be in this state.

[00:40:55] Ramit: Well, you are here.

[00:40:56] Jill: Yeah, but we are here.

[00:40:58] Ramit: So why don’t you just keep going?

[00:41:00] Frank: We’ve been telling each other, we want to have generational wealth for our kids.

[00:41:03] Jill: I don’t care so much about generational wealth. I feel like we’ve had a really hard life, and I would like to just be able to spend quality time together and to spend it with the kids and watch our kids grow up and actually be present.

[00:41:16] I want to be home with them. I want to spend quality time. I feel like I’m missing the time I have when I’m healthy enough to be with my kids. So for me, that’s what I want, and I’m angry. I’m angry at this cycle. I’m angry at myself. I’m angry that we can’t be aligned. I’m frustrated.

[00:41:35] Ramit: Yeah, I hear that. You both hear that you’re not aligned about why you want to make a change right now. Generational wealth, talking about it at 29, versus Jill’s, like, “We got our whole lives ahead of us, the two of us, the four of us.”

[00:41:53] Frank: It’s the anxious. It’s the worrying. What is going to happen at the end?

[00:41:56] Ramit: I think what I’m hearing from you, Frank, is I believe I’ve lost the game for myself. If you’ve lost the game, then Jill’s simply going to be running uphill for the rest of her life alone because you’re checked out. Do you believe that you’ve lost the game for yourself and it’s over?

[00:42:10] Frank: No. I think if I can fix my mistakes and change my behaviors, I can turn this around. I feel like the problems that I have, I have to handle those myself. Yes, we do make choices together, but sometimes she leans on me to make a choice and I make it, and it’s not a good choice. And I have to change that so that we can have a better future.

[00:42:29] Ramit: Jill, how you doing over there?

[00:42:30] Jill: That hurts. That hurts to hear.

[00:42:34] Ramit: Why?

[00:42:36] Jill: Because that’s how it feels. That’s how it’s felt. And I didn’t know why it felt that way. It didn’t make sense. I felt alone. I felt like he’s checked out. I felt like he’s written it in the sand that there is no tomorrow. Why are we even planning it? Even when I asked, “Hey, can you figure out what your retirement is?” It was like, I don’t care. And to me, I’m like, “Don’t you understand? That’s what we’re working towards. That’s why we’re working so hard.” If he already feels like his life is over, then yeah, why would he be trying?

[00:43:10] Ramit: I’m trying to think about how this has got to feel for you, Jill. In a way, it’s like, oh, I finally understand why he’s acting that way. But also, oh my God, is my husband at 29 years old, checked out?

[00:43:23] Jill: To me, I’m like, there’s so much to live for. We have these two beautiful kids. All of it just hit me like a brick wall, like, well, if he doesn’t care to be here with me in this, then of course he’s not going to care about how he parents or how he cares about how he treats the marriage or how he wants to spend time with me. Of course, he wouldn’t want to spend time with me if he doesn’t care. He’s done. There’s nothing here anymore.

[Narration]

[00:43:48] Ramit: Sometimes it’s surprising the things that we hear on this show. Hearing Jill say she doesn’t think her husband cares anymore is incredibly devastating. But since she’s repeatedly asked Frank to engage and he has shut her out, I completely understand what she’s saying. That would be painful for any of us.

[00:44:12] Of course, this points to something so much deeper than strictly their finances. This is why I always encourage my guests to speak to a therapist. But this is also a classic example of how a crack in the foundation can bleed into so many parts of life, including money.

[00:44:31] It’s very easy to get to a place like this, especially with young kids at home, including one with special needs and an increasingly disconnected view of money. It doesn’t have to be like this. Yes, they’re at a crossroads here, but I think they can make changes that will help them correct course.

[00:44:51] If they are going to get aligned, they have to do it together. This disjointed way of everybody going to their own corner is not going to work. And we will dig in after a quick pause to support our sponsors.

[00:45:04] Now back to the show.

[00:45:06] Let’s see if I can help Jill and Frank find a way to work together as a team.

[Interview]

[00:45:10] Do you all want to talk to each other right now? I feel like this is a really important moment for the two of you.

[00:45:16] Frank: Yeah, I definitely feel like I care. I care more than I show. I tend to be reclusive in my behaviors. I tend to handle and fix things by myself.

[00:45:25] Ramit: Frank, listen. You’re not listening to your wife. You’re definitely not listening to me. What did she say?

[00:45:30] Frank: She says he feels like I’m checked out.

[00:45:32] Ramit: She’s not asking for you to give a 10-minute exposition on why you do this and that. What do you think she’s looking for right now?

[00:45:39] Frank: An apology.

[00:45:41] Ramit: How about just accepting what she said and validating her? Wow, I can see why you feel that way. That’s going to be so tough to feel alone. I am sorry.

[00:45:50] Frank: I am. I am sorry. And it does hurt to see that you feel the way you’re feeling, and I don’t want you to feel that way. I want you to feel loved, and I want our kids to be happy.

[00:46:01] Jill: I hear him apologizing, and I still don’t know if he understands what he is apologizing for.

[00:46:06] Frank: Apologize for making you feel alone throughout this whole time, making you do it all by yourself and not being a part of the solution.

[00:46:13] Jill: Okay.

[00:46:15] Ramit: A lot to work through here. Some of it is not my specialty. I would like to talk about the numbers. I would like to talk about the money, and we’ll talk about how that’s affecting the two of you. How’s that sound?

[00:46:28] Frank: Good.

[00:46:29] Ramit: I want to take a look at your numbers because we’ve just spent quite a bit of emotional energy talking about some pretty deep stuff– stuff that definitely needs to be explored in therapy. Let’s take a look at the numbers, which will help ground us and see where you are today. Jill, why don’t you go ahead and read the word in bold and then the number in full next to it and just work your way down.

[00:46:51] Jill: Assets are $341,109. Investments is $27,554. Savings is $42, and debt is $449,000. For a total net worth of–

[00:47:06] Ramit: Total net worth?

[00:47:07] Jill: Negative 80,861.

[00:47:10] Ramit: Okay, just so everybody hears those numbers correctly, we have savings of $42. That’s the full amount, and then debt of $449,565. All right. What do y’all think about these numbers?

[00:47:25] Frank: Not good. Yeah. I want the savings to be up so we have emergency funds, and I want our investments to get to the point where we’re investing money so we can retire.

[00:47:33] Ramit: Jill, how about you?

[00:47:34] Jill: Yeah, I want to invest more. I want to save more. I want to get the debt paid off. I would like to see a positive toll on net worth. That’d be wonderful.

[00:47:44] Ramit: Do y’all see the connection between your behavior with money over the last 11 years and the net worth numbers?

[00:47:53] Jill: Absolutely.

[00:47:55] Ramit: Okay. Let’s go to down to income. This time let’s hear from Frank. Frank, what is the combined current monthly income?

[00:48:02] Frank: $10,613.

[00:48:05] Ramit: All right. 10.6k per month gross, which is gross income of $127,351 per year. Did you both know that’s how much your household makes?

[00:48:17] Jill: Yeah.

[00:48:17] Frank: Yes.

[00:48:18] Ramit: Wow. Good. Okay, great. Now we’re going to work our way down the CSP going through four key numbers. What is this fixed cost number right here?

[00:48:27] Jill: 107%.

[00:48:29] Ramit: Your fixed costs are 107% of your net pay. So that’s it. That’s the end. You’re broke.

[00:48:35] Jill: Yeah. This has been the conversation I’ve been having, is that we’re not okay.

[00:48:40] Ramit: 107% means you’re spending more than you make just on fixed costs every month alone.

[00:48:46] Jill: Mm-hmm.

[00:48:47] Ramit: All right. Let’s just finish out and then we’ll come back and do the line items. Investments are at zero. You’re putting $0 away. Is there any 401K or pre-tax money going away?

[00:48:57] Frank: Not currently.

[00:48:57] Ramit: All right. So $0 going there. Savings, almost zero, but it looks like you all put $300 a month away for Christmas. Am I reading that correctly?

[00:49:06] Jill: Oh, no, no, no. That was $300 flat.

[00:49:09] Ramit: Like for this year coming up, how much will you spend?

[00:49:12] Frank: 300, yeah. 

[00:49:14] Ramit: All right. And then the last one, guilt-free spending says negative 12%. I know that’s not true because when was the last time y’all ate out?

[00:49:21] Jill: Monday.

[00:49:22] Ramit: Out of curiosity, where’d you eat?

[00:49:23] Frank: Firehouse Subs

[00:49:24] Jill: Yeah.

[00:49:25] Ramit: Okay. How much total?

[00:49:26] Frank: Everything, including delivery, I think it was 60 bucks.

[00:49:29] Ramit: Okay. According to the CSP, you spend negative $783 a month. How can that be?

[00:49:36] Frank: I don’t know.

[00:49:37] Jill: We spend more than that.

[00:49:39] Ramit: I know you do. The answer is it’s going on your credit cards.

[00:49:43] Jill: No, it’s owner draws, and we’re paying it with cash.

[00:49:46] Frank: Yeah, the income on that sheet is her base salary. She makes more, but she keeps it in the business, so that income is not accurate.

[00:49:54] Ramit: What’s with all these technicalities? All right. Maybe you’re not putting on a credit card, but in the end, are your credit card balances going up? Yes. Are you spending more at all on your credit cards right now?

[00:50:04] Jill: No.

[00:50:05] Ramit: You put them away?

[00:50:06] Frank: Yeah. We are trying our best every single chance we get to throw all the money at it.

[00:50:12] Jill: Yeah, yeah.

[00:50:13] Ramit: I need to understand more about how you make money, Jill. You’re a therapist. You get paid per session?

[00:50:20] Jill: Yeah, I’m on salary. So I pay myself and then it fluctuates based off of people canceling or whatever, then I’ll do owner draws.

[00:50:30] Ramit: You run your own business; is that correct?

[00:50:32] Jill: Mm-hmm.

[00:50:34] Ramit: Can we just look at this? Which salary are you? Are you the higher or the lower salary.

[00:50:38] Jill: The lower salary.

[00:50:39] Ramit: Okay. 4,737 a month. Okay. So you’re paying yourself $56,000 a year in base salary.

[00:50:45] Jill: Yes.

[00:50:46] Ramit: Okay. Cool. And then how much on average do you take in salary draws or any anything else?

[00:50:51] Jill: It’s between two to 4,000 additional each month.

[00:50:54] Ramit: What? That’s a lot.

[00:50:56] Jill: It’s only been since the past two months because I increased my hours a lot.

[00:51:00] Ramit: In order to make more money?

[00:51:02] Jill: Yes.

[00:51:02] Ramit: And is this part of why you feel like you’re not spending as much time with your kids and you’re resentful of that?

[00:51:08] Jill: I used to have everything built in, so I had time for my husband and time for the kids, and that’s all gone.

[00:51:16] Ramit: Can we make the change right here and just see what happens?

[00:51:18] Jill: Mm-hmm.

[00:51:19] Ramit: So you’re actually taking home, if we’re going to be conservative, let’s just say you’re taking home 2,000 extra per month. Watch what happens to this fixed cost number, this percentage that currently says 107%. Watch what happens when I increase your take home pay. What’d that number drop to?

[00:51:35] Frank: 85.

[00:51:36] Jill: Yeah.

[00:51:37] Ramit: From 107 to 85%. What do y’all think about that?

[00:51:40] Jill: That’s why I took on the hours.

[00:51:43] Ramit: Before we go line by line, do you all know why I recommend 50 to 60% for fixed costs?

[00:51:50] Jill: To live a  Rich Life.

[00:51:53] Ramit: So your fixed costs are fixed. Every month you pretty much spend this amount. And if you wake up in the morning and you’ve already got 60% of your money going somewhere, you still have 40% of it that can be distributed among savings, investments, and guilt-free spending. But let’s say you wake up and in the morning you got 85% of your entire month’s money already claimed by your fixed costs. What does that mean?

[00:52:22] Frank: We got to live with 15%.

[00:52:24] Jill: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:24] Ramit: Yes. And what usually happens when people have to live with a very small amount?

[00:52:28] Frank: We explode out because we’re just wanting something more.

[00:52:33] Ramit: You want more because you feel scarce, which is correct, especially the way you were both raised with money. You go, “I don’t want this feeling again. I’m going to just spend money.” You run up the credit card. But also, notice what’s happening here. People who only have a little bit of money after their fixed cost claim at the majority, they don’t save or invest any money.

[00:52:49] And they remain stuck in this cycle  because they cannot escape. The only way you escape your fixed costs is to invest and save aggressively. You’ll never escape. Otherwise, you’ll be doing this for the rest of your life.

[00:53:02] Jill: Yeah. That’s the conversations that I wanted to start having, is the ability to start saving and investing so we’re not constantly, like I said earlier, the hamster wheel.

[00:53:12] Ramit: Yeah, you’re on the hamster wheel because your fixed costs are at 85%. No wonder you’re stressed out. No wonder you’re fighting. No wonder you’re avoiding each other and not talking about money and can’t even connect enough to fill out a spreadsheet knowing you’re going to be here talking to me. It’s that you have no money left over. And yet you’re still going out to eat and still doing those things, knowing deep down, oh my God, we probably should not be doing this.

[00:53:34] Jill: Yes.

[00:53:34] Ramit: You have trapped yourselves.

[00:53:36] Jill: Yes.

[Narration]

[00:53:37] Ramit: We’ll finish reviewing their conscious spending plan after this.

[00:53:41] Now back to Frank and Jill’s conscious spending plan and their fixed costs.

[00:53:45] [Interview]

[00:53:46] Ramit: Let’s go through them line by line. Your mortgage is not bad. It’s 17%. That’s quite low. So you got a very low total payment relative to your income. That’s great. Your car payment is $750, alittle high for my taste, but okay. Not bad. It’s fine.

[00:54:02] Frank: That’s gas too. I didn’t know where we should put the gas.

[00:54:05] Ramit: Yeah, that’s good. That’s how it should be. Good job. Your debt payments are $1,571. And we know that’s not the true number because your credit cards are about to kick in, right?

[00:54:15] Frank: Well, the extra money that she owner draws, we try to put it all towards the debt payment.

[00:54:19] Ramit: That can’t be. You told me you just went to Firehouse Subs or whatever and got a $60 meal. Come on, let’s get real. What are we talking about here?

[00:54:25] Jill: We really put a portion of it towards–

[00:54:28] Ramit: How much portion? What percent?

[00:54:30] Jill: 50%.

[00:54:31] Ramit: You’re telling me you put  $1,000 a month towards your debt extra?

[00:54:36] Frank: Yeah. We were at 32. We’re down in two months to 24 now.

[00:54:41] Ramit: Oh, okay. I stand corrected. I apologize. That’s impressive. Tell me the numbers again.

[00:54:47] Frank: We started at 32, and then she’s killing it, and I’m taking on other stuff at the house and we’re trying to just do as much as we possibly can and now we’re down to 25.

[00:54:57] Ramit: 32 to 25 in two months?

[00:55:00] Jill: Yeah.

[00:55:01] Frank: Yeah, it’s been a long two months.

[00:55:02] Ramit: Hold on. Damn. Take the win. That’s impressive. So you put effort towards this debt. You prioritized it, you did it together, and you’re getting amazing results. This is promising. All right. Let’s get back to it. My eyes are open. So again, you have $1,571 in debt payments, but you are putting at least  $1,000 extra towards it every month.

[00:55:26] Jill: Yes.

[00:55:27] Ramit: Whoa. That’s on top of 1,571.

[00:55:30] Frank: I think we put 1,000 on check and then 1,000 the next check. We went down hard on this credit card.

[00:55:36] Ramit: Love it. Let’s keep moving. Groceries at $1,500 a month. What’s that?

[00:55:41] Frank: We have allergy kids that are allergic to milks and stuff, so we have to buy specialty foods for the kids.

[00:55:48] Ramit: Fair enough. Y’all have to shop very consciously for your kids. I get that. It’s probably going to be more expensive regardless. I get that. Y’all ever say no to your kids?

[00:55:57] Frank: Yeah. He just wants everything in the store, and I say, “No, just pick two.”

[00:56:01] Ramit: Okay. What about like, pick zero?

[00:56:05] Frank: No, I can’t. I feel horrible.

[00:56:07] Ramit: What are you teaching your kids when you do that, especially your older one?

[00:56:10] Frank: He can get what he wants when we go to the store.

[00:56:13] Ramit: Mm-hmm. And what’s going to happen as he gets older and he gets his first job and starts spending money? What’s he going to do?

[00:56:19] Frank: He gets what he wants.

[00:56:20] Ramit: Mm-hmm. What’s going to happen when he has kids?

[00:56:23] Frank: They’re going to get what they want.

[00:56:25] Ramit: No is love.

[00:56:26] Jill: Yes.

[00:56:26] Ramit: Can be delivered lovingly. It can be delivered with a great lesson. Sometimes it can just be delivered with one syllable– no. But I will tell you that 100% of the couples I speak to in credit card debt struggle to say no to their kids.

[00:56:41] Jill: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:42] Ramit: You two are a statistic. I love being a statistic. It means I’m like most people in most things. Amazing. If I’m like most people in most things, that means I could probably use advice that most other people use in most things. If you two are like every other couple I’ve spoken to in credit card debt who struggles to say no to their kids, how do you take that, and what might you do with that information?

[00:57:02] Jill: Say no. You got to have boundaries.

[00:57:04] Frank: You got to fix the behavior.

[00:57:05] Ramit: Whose behavior?

[00:57:06] Frank: Our behavior.

[00:57:07] Ramit: Oh, so you’re saying fix your behavior first, model it, go through the same thing your kid is going through, learn how to modulate and talk and communicate about that. And then when you go to your kids, it’s going to be that much easier because you, yourself, have regulated yourself.

[00:57:26] Frank: [Sigh].

[00:57:27] Ramit: What’s that sigh?

[00:57:27] Frank: Hope.

[00:57:28] Ramit: It is? I never heard someone give a sigh of hope like that.

[00:57:32] Frank: It’s relief. I don’t think the way that you’re thinking these things out for us. I don’t think like this.

[00:57:37] Ramit: Okay, cool. I appreciate that you’re receiving this well. That’s awesome. That’s as much as I could have hoped for. Fantastic. Let’s keep going. I have a question about your mortgage. Does that include your property taxes?

[00:57:47] Frank: Yes.

[00:57:48] Ramit: Okay, it does. Great. And maintenance? What about stuff you got to fix in your house? Where’s that?

[00:57:52] Frank: We had a home warranty that you just paid and they’d come and fix your stuff. We just canceled this last month, and we’re going to take all the money that we would’ve used for that and put it into a savings account. 

[00:58:02] Ramit: How come I don’t see that in your savings?

[00:58:03] Frank: We just did this two days ago. I didn’t think consciously to update this file because I was like, what does it matter? But now I’m thinking if I change something, I need to update the numbers.

[00:58:13] Ramit: Isn’t that the theme of your behavior, what does it matter?

[00:58:18] Frank: Yeah. I’m seeing that I think that way and I need to change that behavior.

[00:58:21] Ramit: And Jill, what is the theme of your financial behavior?

[00:58:25] Jill: Give up when he gives up.

[00:58:26] Ramit: Why? You earn more than he does. Not to say that means you know more about money, but why would you put yourself in the passenger seat with money?

[00:58:34] Jill: Because I was tired of fighting. I don’t care anymore. I do want to change it because I know that this is my life too. And that’s why every now and again, I say, “No, we got to do this.” Because I know this is my life and this is our children’s life and it’s our life.

[00:58:47] Ramit: Sounds vague. What I’m trying to do is to get you and you, Frank, to see if there’s a reason why you would want to make vast, wide-ranging changes to the way that you think about money, behave with money, and feel about money. If you want to get out of this, you can, but it’s going to require a massive lifestyle, psychological, relational shift, and I’m trying to hunt for that. Why?

[00:59:15] Frank: I want to be able to see my wife happy. I want to live a happy life with her and do the things that we want to do.

[00:59:23] Ramit: Jill?

[00:59:24] Jill: I have a reason. I want to change because I want to be able to, one, not work for the rest of my life. Two, not always fear money, to be able to live freely with my husband and my children and to be anxiety free around money.

[00:59:42] Ramit: What are you prepared to do in order to pay off your debt and build a healthy relationship with money?

[00:59:50] Frank: Anything.

[00:59:51] Ramit: Okay. Jill?

[00:59:53] Jill: Anything it takes.

[00:59:54] Ramit: All right. Let’s go back to the CSP. So what do we need to do on this CSP in order for you both to have at least a healthy conscious spending plan?

[01:00:04] Frank: Lower our fixed cost to 50%.

[01:00:07] Jill: Yeah.

[01:00:07] Ramit: Let’s even say 60.

[01:00:09] Frank: Sure.

[01:00:10] Ramit: What do you want to do?

[01:00:12] Frank: Groceries.

[01:00:12] Ramit: All right. Tell me the number.

[01:00:14] Frank: 800.

[01:00:15] Jill: Yeah.

[01:00:16] Ramit: I thought you told me this whole story about we need to get butter and we got to go to the ends of the earth for this oil.

[01:00:22] Frank: No, it is true if you want to go shopping, but it’s not true if you want to meal prep and not buy so much processed food and start actually making it from simpler ingredients.

[01:00:33] Ramit: What’s happening right now? Hold on. What’s in your cabinet and your fridge right now?

[01:00:36] Frank: Usually what’s in the fridge is 28 containers of meal prepped food with chicken, rice, and broccoli.

[01:00:44] Ramit: I don’t believe that. This is [Bleep]. How do you spend $1,500 a month on chicken, rice, and broccoli? I know that diet.

[01:00:50] Jill: Yeah. Here’s where it comes out. Frank, Amazon.

[01:00:55] Ramit: Is anyone going to tell me the truth right now or what? I’m fearful you’re all running out of money in a few months. You have no savings. You have two kids. One of you loses your job, or frankly, if you just keep going the way you’re going, it’s over. That’s it. You lose the house. I think I’d like to see your Amazon account. Can you open it up?

[01:01:10] There. we go. All right, hold on. Let me just describe what I’m seeing here. This is from a few days ago, five days ago. I see shampoo, some healing ointment, more shampoo, and then cutlery set, 360 pieces. We have a organic aluminum deodorant, cast iron care set, and a 10 inch cast iron skillet. This order was $77 and 87 cents. And then the next one was $126.

[01:01:44] Let’s go down a little bit more. This was also the same day. This is kids’ body wash, hand soap, bamboo cutting board, bamboo tong, a bunch of soap and tongs and stuff. And this total was, $208. All right, this is all on the same day. Keep going down. This is just a few days prior. $52 for Elf on the Shelf. Paul Mitchell styling cream and volumizing foam for kids’ hair.

[01:02:10] 30 bucks. Similar day, more deodorant, and then 41 bucks for body wash, etc. Is there a total amount somewhere? 46 orders placed in the past three months? So that’s interesting. I didn’t see Amazon pop up in the spending.

[01:02:28] Jill: I put it in the groceries.

[01:02:29] Ramit: So what happened to all these stories about my kids need this and my kids need that?

[01:02:33] Frank: It goes back to that health-conscious part, is we are trying to get away from these non-stick poisonous pans. That’s the mentality of why we bought it.

[01:02:42] Ramit: Can I ask you guys a direct question? Do you really believe this stuff?

[01:02:44] Frank: I believe that what you can put in your body, it does matter.

[01:02:47] Ramit: Fine. And how’s both your health?

[01:02:49] Jill: Our health is terrible. I think half of it’s stress.

[01:02:52] Ramit: But maybe if we buy another 360-piece wood cutlery reset, that will change everything.

[01:02:59] Jill: Yeah, pretty much.

[01:03:00] Ramit: I make jokes online about how a lot of these podcast bros, they would be better spent stopping spending all this money on these dumb mattresses and these ultraviolet light therapy, whatever stuff they do. Take 100 bucks a month, go out with a good friend to lunch two times a month. It would be better for them than any of these contraptions that they buy. Now, instead of buying these extremely expensive deodorants, etc., what might be better for your health?

[01:03:30] Frank: Lowering our debt.

[01:03:31] Ramit: Yes. Why?

[01:03:32] Frank: To have more time to spend with our children so we could not have to worry about working to pay off the bamboo sticks.

[01:03:39] Ramit: I’m not sitting here telling you like, don’t buy this deodorant. That’s not my place. It’s not my money. But when I talk about living a  Rich Life, I have learned that some people misconstrue what I say. They take my advice and basically use it to twirl around and chant  Rich Life,  Rich Life,  Rich Life. And then they just buy whatever they want. That’s not the message.

[01:03:56] The message is you have to define your  Rich Life and then if you can afford it, go for it. But you got to be able to afford it. Y’all cannot afford the lifestyle you’re living. If you want to, we can talk about how you’d both have to work more, raise your income significantly, pay off your debt, but the fact is you cannot afford it right now.

[01:04:16] Frank: Yeah, I agree.

[01:04:17] Jill: I knew that our problem was we’re spending money that we don’t have on things that we don’t need, which then takes me back to your question earlier, which was like, what’s my behavior that I need to change? Is the wants. It’s gotten me in a lot of trouble. Most of my purchases are impulse purchases. And so it’s in that moment, I have to have it. There’s no way around it.

[01:04:38] Ramit: Can we look at your phone right now? Let’s open up to texts. What texts are you getting from companies?

[01:04:43] Jill: I have a Hungry Root, Nutrisystem that we did a long time ago. First day, which was vitamins for the kids. IFit, a hair product place, pump stuff.

[01:04:55] Ramit: Okay, there’s a lot. And all that is in what time period?

[01:04:58] Jill: Gosh, within the last day.

[01:05:00] Ramit: Do you see that you surround yourself with temptation? This stuff is designed to make you buy, and the fact is the two of you are not particularly good at having a vision of a  Rich Life, so you end up just buying whatever some freaking charlatan is telling you to. I can watch this stuff and I’m not trying to buy some substandard lotion for my hands. I have one lotion.

[01:05:24] It’s good lotion. I buy the same lotion all the time. I don’t need to try anything new. I know it works great. Now, let’s talk about what we can do going forward. You told me in your CSP that you can cut some of this spending, this Amazon stuff?

[01:05:37] Jill: Oh yeah, yeah.

[01:05:39] Ramit: Like how much? I thought you need it.

[01:05:41] Frank: I would almost be okay with completely canceling it. We can buy toilet paper at the store.

[01:05:46] Jill: We sure can.

[01:05:47] Ramit: I like that. So cancel Amazon Prime.

[01:05:49] Frank: Yeah.

[01:05:50] Ramit: Or maybe Amazon altogether? It’s up to you.

[01:05:53] Frank: Yeah.

[01:05:53] Ramit: That would probably be really helpful. Amazing.

[01:05:58] Frank: Oh God, yeah.

[01:05:59] Ramit: Let’s go ahead and go back into the CSP because you said you’re willing to do anything. So how much should we drop off of this groceries’ $1,500 bill?

[01:06:07] Frank: I think we can get 1,000.

[01:06:09] Jill: Okay.

[01:06:10] Ramit: Over time I think you could get it down more, but let’s just say 1,000. All right. Your fixed costs are still at 79%. We need to get that way lower. Go ahead. Tell me what else.

[01:06:18] Jill: We don’t need clothes all the time.

[01:06:20] Frank: Kids need shoes and they need clothes. They grow. They have to get them. You might as well set yourself up for realistic prices.

[01:06:27] Ramit: What was the number?

[01:06:28] Frank: 50.

[01:06:29] Ramit: What else? We’re at 78%.

[01:06:31] Jill: The subscriptions, obviously.

[01:06:34] Ramit: Tell me the number you want to take these subscriptions down to. Tell me what you’re going to cut out of it.

[01:06:38] Jill: We can cut out maybe 200 of it.

[01:06:41] Ramit: Subscriptions from 347 to how much?

[01:06:43] Jill: $52.

[01:06:44] Ramit: Fantastic. I love it. The number went to 74%.

[01:06:48] Jill: Wow.

[01:06:49] Ramit: It’s a lot. Still got to keep working. Keep going. What do you got? How much stuff are you willing to sell?

[01:06:54] Frank: I’d sell everything in this room memorabilia. I’d sell all my gaming systems. I would just keep my computer, maybe sell the monitor that’s expensive and get a small monitor.

[01:07:03] Ramit: Great. How much can you make off of all that?

[01:07:06] Frank: I’d be lucky to get 1,000.

[01:07:07] Ramit: You’re willing to do it?

[01:07:08] Frank: Yeah, if I have to sell it.

[01:07:10] Ramit: Love it. You probably do if you want to get rid of this debt. The debt is increasing faster than you can keep up with it, and it’s about to go turbo. You know what those credit card interest rates are about to kick in. You’ll never catch up. So  $1,000 there. Great. How about you, Jill? What are you willing to sell?

[01:07:25] Jill: I sell everything, man. I sell this whole house. I don’t care where we go. I don’t want to be in debt. Sell it all.

[01:07:31] Ramit: How much could you make if you sold the house?

[01:07:33] Frank: After everybody gets their cut and said, maybe we’ll get lucky and get 60.

[01:07:36] Ramit: But what’s the lowest amount that you could pay for a place that the two of you would agree to live in?

[01:07:41] Frank: I think at best, $1,600. We could find a two bedroom, maybe a three bedroom for 1,800.

[01:07:47] Ramit: If you sold the house for 80, you end up making 65, let’s just say. All right. So 65. What do you do with that?

[01:07:55] Frank: Pay off the car and maybe the credit card debt, but it wouldn’t pay off the student loans.

[01:07:58] Ramit: Do you know your interest rate on your student loans?

[01:08:01] Jill: They’re all around six to 7%.

[01:08:03] Ramit: Okay. What’s the total balance?

[01:08:06] Jill: 165.

[01:08:08] Ramit: Okay, that’s fine. Frank, what’s your opportunity to earn more money?

[01:08:12] Frank: If I wanted to work all the time and be gone, I could probably make 120 a year

[01:08:18] Ramit: Okay, that’s good to know. All right. Here’s what I’m thinking. The first thing I love is that you’re all willing to put everything on the table. I love that. A lot of couples are not, but you two are actually telling the truth when you say we’re willing to do anything. And I can see that. I appreciate that. Frank, you’re willing to sell a bunch of stuff. Sell it. Get rid of it.

[01:08:38] First of all, that’ll simplify your life. Less stuff means less temptation to get more stuff. We’re living a monastic life for a while. It’s going to be very simple in here. You all should pay off your credit card debt before the interest rate goes up.

[01:08:51] Jill: Yeah, that’s been our goal.

[01:08:53] Ramit: So do that. Use the money accordingly. But it all goes towards paying off debt. Jill, we heard you say you will sell it all, but first I want to know in the house. This stuff that you’re buying is, again, causing you to buy more stuff. It’s a never-ending cycle of the American homeowner to fill up their house and never be happy and always be stressed. What could you make if you sold a bunch of stuff in your house?

[01:09:16] Jill: Probably $3,000 easily.

[01:09:18] Ramit: 3,000? That’s a lot. Is that a realistic number?

[01:09:21] Jill: Yeah. I have a bike in that closet that I do not use.

[01:09:25] Ramit: How much is the bike?

[01:09:26] Jill: It’s like two grand maybe.

[01:09:29] Ramit: Americans love expensive mattresses. They love them and then they love expensive bikes. And both of them, they tell me, “I cannot live without these, Ramit.” You cannot spend less on a mattress because it’s all about back pain and affordability is irrelevant. Same with a bike. And it’s always thousands of dollars. All right. Sell that freaking thing. What else do you have that you don’t use or you even do use and you can sell it?

[01:09:53] Jill: There’s a treadmill that’s underneath this bed.

[01:09:56] Ramit: Goodbye.

[01:09:57] Jill: I can go down to one monitor.

[01:09:59] Ramit: Hmm.

[01:10:00] Jill: The gaming systems that I haven’t even used in years, we don’t need those.

[01:10:05] Ramit: All right. Sell them or donate them, goodbye. They’re out. We don’t need all this junk surrounding us. It’s not for us. It’s not part of our  Rich Life. 3,000 bucks plus 1,000 over there, that’s 4,000 bucks. I like it. I like it. That’s really good. Okay, great. And then the reason I asked about the housing was, if I’m looking at your housing, I don’t know if it’s a good idea to sell your house or not. I don’t know.

[01:10:28] The reason I’m saying that is, yeah, of course, you’d make some money and you would be able to clear out some debt, which is great. But right now you have probably a very low interest rate. Your housing percentage is pretty low, 17%. I want to know that you can find a place that is cheaper than this because right now, at least your mortgage is locked

[01:10:50] But if you’re renting, for example, let’s say right now your mortgage, housing costs, are 2,600 a month, is my guess, total. So if you found something that was 2,500 a month, I would be like, “Don’t do that.” Why would you take on all that risk to save 200 bucks a month? It makes no sense. But if you found something for, say, 1,200 a month, boy, you’re saving a lot of money.

[01:11:10] And you would be taking that difference and paying off debt, investing it, doing all of those things. So this is the way we got to think about housing decisions. What’s going on? What do you both think about that?

[01:11:22] Frank: I’m thinking, how are we going to make that work with our jobs? That’s my first thought. And then my second thought is our kids, having a backyard, having a consistent school district.

[01:11:30] Ramit: How about having parents that don’t go bankrupt?

[01:11:32] Jill: We put so much pride in being able to buy our first home, but we’re just one really bad repair away. From this being just another issue that we can’t afford.

[01:11:44] Ramit: You too can keep the house if you want. You have to make other changes in order to make it feasible.

[01:11:49] Jill: Right.

[01:11:50] Ramit: It’s a very good housing percentage, 17%. Way lower than 28%. It’s just that the rest of your costs are way too high. So you either need to cut some of this stuff, or you need to figure out a way to make a lot more money. But you can’t do all these things, not on your income.

[01:12:04] Jill: Yeah.

[Narration]

[01:12:05] Ramit: Well, I love that Frank and Jill are open to making changes, like selling their house. It tells me they’re actually serious about getting out of this cycle. But I’m not sure that selling their house is the best idea. That’s right, everybody, especially internet trolls online. Ramit Sethi, the person who you have claimed is totally against home ownership, which is a [Bleep] lie is saying it might not make sense to sell your house.

[01:12:30] The truth, of course, is that I’m not against buying a house. In fact, someday I’m sure I will buy a house. What I ask you to do is to run the numbers on the biggest purchase of your life, which in any normal world, should not be controversial advice. It is only in our highly weird puritanical society where our one and only one religion is home ownership, that people rebel against the mere suggestion that you should run one calculation before you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. What [Bleep] world am I living in?

[01:13:02] Anyway, Frank and Jill, good job, but I don’t know if you should sell the house. What they need to do is run the numbers and find out if it would make sense for them to sell the house, because they could save a substantial amount by renting. Now, if you have questions about whether you can afford to buy a house or you should rent, I’ve got a free house buying guide for you. Go to iwt.com/house, and you will find it there.

[01:13:26] Now, the other option Jill and Frank have is to increase their income. Listen in as I ask them about their earning potential.

[Interview]

[01:13:33] Ramit: Let’s talk about the income side right now. Jill, you’re making 6,700 bucks a month, including that draw. This is your own business. How much are you charging?

[01:13:42] Jill: I charge 150 per session, but I have no out-of-pocket people. Most of them are insurance. And insurance sets the rate that you get paid.

[01:13:52] Ramit: Can you raise your rate?

[01:13:54] Jill: No, not with insurance. I’ve thought about working in Charlotte, where I could charge out of pocket because there’s city folks and people who are able to pay that amount. But then it’s a commute.

[01:14:07] Ramit: So what’s the solution?

[01:14:08] Jill: The option that I’ve always gone to is just that I work more hours, which has been really difficult on me anyway. To me, I feel like I’ve maxed myself out on my options, and the kids are already struggling with me not being around. I literally see my one son for an hour a day and I literally see my infant to put to bed.

[01:14:31] Ramit: This is really hard.

[01:14:37] Jill: It is hard, but I also am angry at myself because I know I did it to myself.

[01:14:45] Frank: We did it.

[01:14:46] Ramit: I don’t believe that there are no options. I don’t believe that the two of you are stuck and this is it in your late 20s and early 30s. I don’t believe that. That’s sometime the benefit of talking to a third party, somebody who’s not in the weeds. You knocked out $5,000 of debt in the last couple of months. I think that’s pretty impressive.

[01:15:08] We looked at the Amazon spending. Not only did you agree that you don’t need a lot of this stuff, you actually told me you want to close off your Amazon account. Amazing. You agreed to sell thousands of dollars worth of stuff. That’s going to go straight to your debt. Amazing.

[01:15:22] We’re making progress. It feels hard because it is. We’re in some of the hardest parts of this transformation right now. But this is stuff that really matters. And it matters because it’s big numbers and it matters because it’s time with your family. Jill, have you ever considered how much you might make if you worked for somebody else?

[01:15:41] Jill: I used to work for someone else. I made less.

[01:15:44] Ramit: Right now you make approximately $80,000 a year when we include those owner draws. Is this it for your career, is the max income?

[01:15:51] Jill: I don’t want it to be. If I find an ability to work in Charlotte, then I could make more income. That’s something that we’ve avoided for a really long time.

[01:16:02] Ramit: If your salary is capped out at 80k, okay. Then we will accept that and then we will shift over to Frank and then Frank needs to make a lot more money. And Frank might need to travel, and that’s how it has to be. But right now I feel like I’m pulling teeth. I’m trying to get you all to give me solutions. You need to get these numbers down. You need to pay off your debt. You need to start saving and investing aggressively. It needs to happen right now. How do you want to do it?

[01:16:25] Jill: We struggle with finding those solutions because we haven’t had the people in our life to teach us about these things and give us any guidance, and we haven’t been able to find that information ourselves.

[01:16:39] Ramit: I appreciate that, but Jill, you had your grandfather talking about investing when you were young. And how did you describe your reaction to him?

[01:16:48] Jill: In one ear and out the other.

[01:16:50] Ramit: Correct. You both subscribed to my Money Coaching program. It’s very accessible. It’s very friendly. I’m there answering questions live. Did you finish it?

[01:17:00] Frank: No.

[01:17:00] Ramit: So while I appreciate that you may not have the network that some other people have, you all have the information available to you. It’s free. It’s premium. It’s everywhere. It’s not about the information. It’s about you two.

[01:17:15] Jill: That’s fair.

[01:17:16] Ramit: We’re at 74%. Got to get this number down. You just cannot have a sustainable life with your fixed cost that high.

[01:17:23] Frank: We might need to downsize the house. There’s all those shadow costs. We might need to go to something smaller.

[01:17:29] Jill: Hmm. Yeah.

[01:17:30] Ramit: That could certainly change things in a huge way. You would need to be measured about the decision because, again, your housing costs are not out of control, but your other costs are high. And so if you wanted to downsize, you would need to make sure that you accounted for all costs, ow much would you walk away with, how much would it cost to move, how much would it cost to get a new place set up and activated and all that stuff, first month’s rent, last month’s rent, lots of those considerations. And would you be saving enough on a monthly basis so that in one year, two years, it would be worth it? And then from then on it would be much more worth it. You would need to be very thoughtful about those calculations. It’s not something to do on a whim.

[01:18:14] Here’s my suggestion. You need to earn more money, and I think that you need to drop the assumptions about I can’t work more. I can’t charge more. I can’t do this in Charlotte. Find a way. When my parents were growing up and they had big family, not a lot of money, they’re just very pragmatic about this. Like, we’re going to find a way to do it. We’re not eating out. We’re not doing this. We’re going to do that. And that’s the way it is. That is our family culture. Look at this.

[01:18:39] In this book, the new one, I talk about how to create a family culture. In our family we– what? My wife and I, we are debt free. We are a debt-free family. Or in our family, we always eat dinner together on Friday nights with the kids, whatever it may be. In your family, what’s the culture that you’ve created?

[01:19:02] Frank: We’re workaholics

[01:19:03] Ramit: We’re workaholics, we are stressed out in poor health, and we buy stuff to feel better about our dire situation. Fair?

[01:19:12] Jill: Yes.

[01:19:13] Ramit: And we also don’t communicate with each other.

[01:19:15] Frank: Yeah.

[01:19:16] Ramit: All right. In our healthy relationship, what do we do?

[01:19:19] Frank: Communicate about finances.

[01:19:22] Ramit: How often?

[01:19:23] Frank: At least every month.

[01:19:24] Ramit: Okay. How are you going to do that? There was this whole thing about the kids. How are you going to do that?

[01:19:27] Frank: We’re going to make it happen with the kids.

[01:19:30] Ramit: Okay, great.

[01:19:31] Frank: One kid has to sit near, by us, while we do it. That has to be how it’s done.

[01:19:35] Jill: Maybe include him into the conversation.

[01:19:37] Ramit: Love it. What’s next?

[01:19:39] Frank: We write down things before we buy them.

[01:19:40] Ramit: Love it. What about the food thing? You’re all dropping your food costs dramatically. How are you going to do that?

[01:19:46] Frank: We need to start shopping store brand products.

[01:19:49] Jill: We cook our meals.

[01:19:51] Ramit: The whole thing about like, we buy all this organic stuff, the fact is you just can’t afford it. I’m sorry. If you want to afford it, move into a one-bedroom apartment and then you can buy all the fancy stuff you want. That’s up to you. It’s your choice, your money, but you can’t do both.

[01:20:02] So it would be very worthwhile for the two of you to really define, in our family, we blank. You can always change it. You can always add or remove, but right now there is no we. And sometimes if somebody slips, they try something. You just go, “Hey, look, I thought we agreed. This is our family.” You don’t have to come down on them. It’s just like, hey, just a reminder. This is what we agreed on. I want to make sure that we’re both sticking to it.

[01:20:24] Sometimes I need help, but right now it seems like you want to go out to pizza tonight, but in our family, we only spend on whatever. 800 bucks a month for groceries. Boom. Okay, cool. Back to this, let’s talk about the earning part, the last part of it. The earning needs to go up. It’s just that simple. Frank, when was the last time you looked for a new job?

[01:20:44] Frank: Two years. I tried the two-year cycle approach. I’ve been slowly, steadily increasing over two years I’ll look and seek for new positions.

[01:20:52] Ramit: And how much can you get paid today?

[01:20:54] Frank: If I take a job that’s no longer remote, I could make a lot more, 50,000 more a year.

[01:20:59] Ramit: If you had to commute.

[01:21:00] Frank: Yeah. I have a CDL class A license. I could become a truck driver.

[01:21:05] Ramit: Here’s how I would approach that conversation. So I would start off by saying, let’s talk about, look, I have this amazing opportunity. If I wanted to, I could make $50,000 more. First off, can we just give each other a high five that we even have this opportunity? That’s amazing that we even have that. High five. I love you. Oh my gosh, we’re so fortunate. Then can we talk about what would happen if I did this? Let’s first start with all the positives. What would we get?

[01:21:30] Let’s redo the CSP. I would type in adapted numbers. You would see things go insane. The numbers would come way down. You would have thousands of dollars extra you could save, invest. All that. Let’s talk about what it would mean for us. Positive stuff. Well, we’d have more money and we could have some help, etc. All that stuff is great. We stayed there. We focused on the positive. Now, let’s go to the negative. Well, what would it mean?

[01:21:54] It would mean time away. It would mean you would have to take on more burden, Jill. Jill’s like, I don’t want to do that. And so it would mean this, and it would mean that, and we’re apart. And you write it all down. And you sit on it for a day and you come back and you talk about it. You take another crack at it.

[01:22:08] Here’s what I’m thinking. I definitely think we need to make more money, but I don’t want you to be on the road that much. Is there something else we could do? Or, you know what? I think this is a really good idea for the next two years. Two years, extra 50k, it puts us in a position. We pay this off. We do it aggressively. We get on our feet and then we can switch to something else. Who knows? That’s how I would have that conversation. What do you notice about that approach?

[01:22:31] Frank: Thought out, and you were waiting on the decision.

[01:22:34] Jill: We’re working together.

[01:22:36] Ramit: Yeah. Both of you have a voice. This is a decision for both of you. It affects the two of you. It affects your kids. It affects your relationship. But we got to start with all the positive stuff. That’s the thing I noticed. It’s not just everyone going to their corner of the ring and then boxing.

[01:22:50] It’s like, no, let’s be methodical about this. Treat it with the respected deserves. Similarly for you, Jill, your role, your income, you’re a therapist. You have options. Maybe there’s a commute involved. Who knows? Maybe you move cities. Who knows? The fact is right now though, it’s not sustainable. You two cannot operate on $162 a month in guilt-free spending. No way.

[01:23:11] You’re spending 10 times that right now. You have no savings. The minute something breaks in your house or something goes wrong with your car, you two are in big trouble. So the biggest suggestion I have is you immediately start saving at least  $1,000 a month. But the truth is you need to make some big changes fast. It’s as simple as that. How are you both feeling hearing this?

[01:23:31] Jill: It’s hard information. It’s information we knew. It’s information that we didn’t want to look at, that we couldn’t have an open dialogue for longer than a few moments. So I think that’s progress, to even be able to sit down and have this conversation. And us both still be sitting here, that’s a plus. I feel like we’re actually going to be able to move through this and get on the other side of this and feel like we have a life to live.

[01:23:57] Ramit: I love that. Frank?

[01:23:58] Frank: The choices that we’re doing are only hurting ourselves. We are the thorn to our own financial problems, and we need to stop doing these things to us, and we need to come together and make time for each other and make time for our money. And we need to get this ball moving quickly.

[01:24:18] Ramit: I like that. Time is not on your side, but if you start to use time, it can become your biggest friend, not your biggest adversary. Look at this. Here’s your investment. It’s $27,554. You’re not contributing anything else right now. Let’s say we give it 35 years to grow. You end up with $294,000. That’s at retirement. What do y’all think about that?

[01:24:42] Frank: Not enough.

[01:24:43] Jill: That’s not enough. We ain’t retiring.

[01:24:45] Ramit: That means you would live off about $11,000 per year.

[01:24:49] Frank: Good luck. Yeah.

[01:24:50] Ramit: Good news is you have a house, but nobody can live off $11,000 a year, certainly not 35 years from now.

[01:24:55] Jill: That’s what I was afraid of.

[01:24:57] Ramit: Sometimes the best thing we can do with our fears is shine a light on them and look them straight in the eye. This is our future unless we make a change. So you two have digested a lot. We have talked about your childhood. We’ve talked about your relationship, talked about your careers, your income, your spending, even the stories you tell yourselves and you tried to tell me. What are you going to do tomorrow?

[01:25:20] Jill: Have a conversation, a real conversation, and reframe our thinking.

[01:25:24] Ramit: Love that. Then what?

[01:25:26] Frank: Change how we spend. I think having physical cash to limit us will be a good way to handle this.

[01:25:33] Ramit: Good idea. What else?

[01:25:36] Frank: Maybe instead of doing the drastic approach of changing careers, I try to go to the next step in my career. Maybe I look for a promotion.

[01:25:43] Ramit: Map it out. Talk to the boss. Many options on the table. You’re doing two things at once. They’re so powerful. One is you’re moving fast. Get those things on Facebook. Start using cash. And then two is you are zooming out out of this dark, never-ending tunnel that you described to me at the beginning of our call, Frank.

[01:26:01] And what you’ve done is you’ve stopped the sliding down and you said, “Wait a second. I don’t want to go down there anymore. Sucks down here. I’m pausing. I’m looking around with my flashlight. What are my options? Because I’m making my way back, back to the light. That’s where I’m going.

[01:26:15] Jill: Yeah.

[01:26:15] Frank: Agreed.

[01:26:16] Jill: When we do make those big changes, what does it look like in terms of our retirement and savings?

[01:26:22] Ramit: It’s a great question. Let’s say that you sold the house and you took $10,000 of that money and invested just that $10,000. Let’s see what would happen. So that used to be 27. We’ll make it 37. Watch this number right here. Instead of 294, it turns into 400,000. So that $10,000 turned into over $100,000 increase. Y’all see the power of that? Now imagine we keep that, it’s at 400, but we do $12,000 a year or $1,000 a month invested. Look at what happens here. $2.1 million.

[01:27:01] Jill: Wow.

[01:27:02] Ramit: What did you notice?

[01:27:03] Jill: That’s feasible. If we can climb out of this and be regimented, we could actually retire. We could actually have a life to live.

[01:27:11] Ramit: Yes. This is why I was getting a little aggravated when we were spending five minutes talking about some 10-dollar subscription, and I was like, “We can’t be doing this.” These are the numbers that matter. $10 is a waste of life for you two to be focusing on. Remember I talk about 30,000-dollar questions. Here it is. This is what I would be starting with as a couple. We are going to be investing  $1,000 a month. We make $150,000 a year. We could find $12,000 a year to invest.

[01:27:39] Jill: Yeah.

[01:27:40] Ramit: And if we can’t find 12,000, we’ll start with 5,000. And as we make more, we’ll increase that number. That’s so powerful. On the other hand, you could end up changing nothing. You could end up perpetuating the same cycle that both of you grew up with, doing the same thing. Teaching your kids this, doing these games about, oh, let’s just tell them to save, but we don’t save. Let’s buy them everything, not teaching them any restraint. And then you all end up without a lot of money and then your kids end up without a lot of money and it goes on. I don’t want that.

[01:28:06] Frank: Agreed.

[01:28:07] Jill: Yeah. We don’t want that.

[01:28:09] Ramit: Now, what should I expect six months from now?

[01:28:14] Jill: Downsizing in some capacity.

[01:28:17] Ramit: What does that mean?

[01:28:18] Frank: I have three desks in my office. I don’t need this stuff. I don’t need all this stuff. This stuff doesn’t feel good anymore. It just feels like–

[01:28:26] Jill: A burden.

[01:28:26] Frank: There goes two months of retirement right there.

[01:28:28] Ramit: Look at that.

[01:28:28] Jill: Yeah.

[01:28:29] Ramit: Wow. I love that. So you’re going to have a simpler life. So that means stuff in your house, your room is going to look simpler.

[01:28:36] Frank: Gone.

[01:28:37] Ramit: Love it. Beautiful. Okay, great. And what else?

[01:28:40] Jill: I think we need to make career changes, whatever that looks like. If that looks like me trying to do private pay, I have never tried. I’ve been too afraid to try.

[01:28:50] Frank: Yeah, career advancements. That’s a great point.

[01:28:52] Ramit: Amazing. The two of you are so young. If you both decided together we are changing the way that we live, it is going to be a journey. It’s going to be a tough journey. But the best part is you get to do it together. You could get out of this, change the trajectory of your life, and you could do it in two to three years. It’ll be magical. You are at that point, still in your 30s, young, and then you have wind behind you pushing you forward together for the rest of your  Rich Life.

[01:29:27] Every stage, learning. Oh my god. This is what we want to do with our money. Now we have a little bit of extra. We paid off our debt. We’ve taught our kids how to be responsible. They’re all learning with us. We have a family culture of money. We’re having fun. We’re being super responsible. We’re investing aggressively. We actually like talking about money, and we are living our  Rich Life together. That’s what I see.

[01:29:49] Jill: That would feel amazing. I want that. Yeah. Yes, yes.

[01:29:53] Frank: 100%.

[Narration]

[01:29:54] Ramit: I want to thank Jill and Frank for being so open today. Being stuck in this cycle of debt sucks. It’s heavy. It feels like there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. And at a certain point, many people just give up. They tell themselves, this is how we’re going to live. We’ve always been in debt. We’re always going to be in debt. But it does not have to be that way.

[01:30:15] They’re going to have to make some big changes to get out of this cycle and they say they’re up for it. But as you’ve seen on this podcast, almost everybody says they want to make big changes. Only some people follow through, and that is what we get to see right now. Let’s check out their follow-ups. We will start with Frank.

[01:30:36] Frank: One of the biggest surprises that I took from that call was just about how much we lied to ourselves about the reasons why we’re in this situation. It seems that we have memorized some excuse as to why we’re in this situation, but in reality, we’re in it because of our own choices. So that was a reality check.

[01:30:53] My biggest takeaway is to make time about our finances and how to talk about them and not give up and just stay focused on our long-term goals, our retirement, our savings, and getting our debt paid down. And speaking of our debt being paid down, we chose to cut out Amazon completely. We meant what we said. We also are going to start using cash.

[01:31:13] It’s easier to spend stuff when you’re using a card. So that’s how we’re going to create a better household around money, just being focused and having those open conversations. So thanks again to your team for showing us what we can do better as a family.

[01:31:26] Ramit: And now Jill’s follow-up.

[01:31:28] Jill: What really stuck with us is just being able to have good dialogue and conversation about our finances and not avoiding the problem. We’ve been doing a lot better with having a lot of conversations. We went ahead and finished the Money Coaching program and have started our automated system, which we’re getting used to. It’s a hard adjustment, but we’re very, very excited to actually sit back and allow our money to work for us rather than us worrying about our money all the time.

[01:31:58] We are looking into selling our home and going to be renting for a little bit, which is going to be a big shift, but we are very excited about what’s to come and being able to actually afford the things that we want to afford, which is going on vacations and trips with our family and having more time together as a family. That’s really what we’re hopeful for.

[01:32:16] So we have some big things in the mix of just life changes. And already have paid off two credit cards, which we were very happy. We paid off a personal loan in one of our credit cards, and that was great too. So we’re making good progress. Thanks.

[01:32:34] Ramit: Honestly, amazing. Amazing. Yes, I love all the tactical changes they made. I love how quickly they moved. I love all of that. But what I really love is how they started to look at money differently. And when you start to look at money differently, when you radically reconceptualize your relationship with money, you’ll often find that you reconceptualize your relationship with the people you love. Jill and Frank, I’m very proud of you. Thank you for sharing your story, and please keep me updated.