The Ramsey Show - App - How to Balance Giving and Providing for Your Family (Hour 1)

Episode Date: October 8, 2019

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Music Music Live from the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, broadcasting from the Dollar Car Rental Studios, it's the Dave Ramsey Show, where debt is dumb, cash is king, and the paid off home mortgage has taken the place of the BMW as the status symbol of choice. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host. Open phones at 888-825-5225. That's 888-825-5225. Starting off this hour is going to be David in Georgia. Hi, David.

Welcome to the Dave Ramsey Show. Hey, Dave. How are you doing? Better than I deserve, sir. How can I help? Well, I recently graduated college along with my wife. She's a teacher, a high school math teacher. I graduated debt-free.

She has about $25,000 in student loans. And we have no credit card debt, no car payments, and the student loan debt and then our mortgage is really the only debt we have. And so my question is this. Since we have about $3,000 saved up in savings and we've got the baby step one done, my wife teaches in a Title I school. And because of the federal loan forgiveness program, the teacher loan forgiveness program, if you teach in a Title I school for five consecutive years, you can apply to have your student loans forgiven. So my question is this, should we pay off or try to pay off our student loan debt as quickly as possible, or should we make the

minimum payments on that and instead turn our attention to the house mortgage and try to get her loans forgiven in five years? Yeah, I would put $22,000 extra in your emergency fund in case she decides to not teach at a Title I school for whatever reason. There's some kind of a toxic behavior by leadership there, so she has to leave, or there's a dangerous situation, so she has to leave, or's a dangerous situation so she has to leave or whatever comes up i don't know that anything will come up she may be there five years everything will be fine in which case you will have the loans forgiven and you'll have an extra twenty two thousand dollars laying around but i do not want the golden handcuffs or the screwed up paperwork to cause you to accidentally end up in debt. So we're going to put baby step three is your fully funded emergency fund plus $22,000.

Now, most of those that are five-year forgiveness are forgiven one-fifth a year. And so you need to go ahead and get the one-fifth done. It's not all in one fell swoop at the end. And so, you know roughly four thousand dollars a year here and i would go ahead and try to get that done each year incrementally then you can reduce your savings by that much as well but uh no we wouldn't throw it on the house because the house is maybe step six and you'd have your emergency fund done you'd have enough in there in addition to your emergency fund to pay off your student loan balance and then if something happens she just decides she's not going to work there anymore for

whatever reason then you can just write a check and pay it off you're not handcuffed to that deal then you move on with your baby step four fifteen percent of your income going into retirement so you're an emergency fund and twenty two thousand000 away from being at the end of baby step three. And if you wanted to just say, I got $22,000 in the bank. Now I'm at the end of baby step two. And I've got my emergency fund in addition to that. Now I'm at the end of baby step three. And you can count it out that way as if you were getting the debt paid off.

But I would put yourself in a position where this loan is not in any way hanging over your head. And don't invest that money. Just put it in a simple savings account. Lousy rate of return, but it is not at risk. You're not going to lose any of it in the process. Good question. Blair is with us in Alabama. Hi, Blair.

Welcome to the Dave Ramsey Show. Thanks, Dave. So I guess real quick, me and my husband have $123,000 in debt. $65,000 of that is charged off credit cards. I've been listening to the show for a few weeks now, and I'm glad I did because I got some really good pointers as far as handling these credit cards. We're starting the debt snowball. My question is, as we save the money up to tackle these credit cards one by one and I settle with them, what do I need to worry about as far as the rest being charged off as, like, canceled debt?

Do I need to worry about as far as taxes, if that's going to be considered income that I'm going to have to pay taxes on? I'm not really sure what to expect. Debt forgiveness is taxable income. You will get a 1099 on that. And so if you have a $10,000 credit card and they agree to settle it for three, they're going to send you a 1099 for the $7,000 difference, and that will go on your tax bill. But we'll worry about that later.

The tax bill is not 100%, but that is going to create a couple grand in taxes too. So you don't get out 100%. You don't get out completely free with that. And, of course, that debt snowball should be worked after your other debts are paid that are active. What are the other debts? What's the other $60,000? Well, $40,000 of it is student loans. $10,000 is a home equity loan.

My car is about $5,300. And there might be a couple of smaller just miscellaneous things. Okay. What's your household income? About $76,000 base. I do get mileage for work, so that doesn't include any of my mileage. It sounds like you've been poking around our material a little bit. You probably already heard me say this, but when you've got old bad debt, I separate that from active debt and I run two different debt snowballs.

The first one is the active debt. So I'm not screwing with these credit cards right now. I'm just setting them aside. The only thing that scares me, and I absolutely understand that, is one of my credit cards actually sent me a civil complaint earlier this year and was going to sue me. So we are on a settlement then because I didn't want it to have to go to court. Because honestly, I mean, it's embarrassing. This is not how I was raised. I never intended to not pay it, but we had a hard time.

Yeah, that's fine. Settle that way. If they raise their head up and do something like that, you can settle that way. But otherwise, I want you to clear up this car loan, the student loan, all the miscellaneous stuff, because that clears up cash flow for you. See, if you're not paying the credit cards and you pay one of them off, it doesn't change your monthly budget. But if you pay off your car, you don't have the car payment anymore. It changes your monthly budget by the car payment and enables you to get after the old credit card debt faster yeah so unless they raise their head up and smack you with a suit or something i just let them sit over there in the bushes okay just let them sit there uh and

don't wake them up let sleeping dogs lie and then you wake them up after you get your student loan your car payment and your active debts cleared that'll give more room in your budget to be able to attack the rest of it. Be sure you get all of these amounts for these old bad debts agreed in writing before you give them any money. And old bad debts never give them electronic access to your checking account. They'll clean you out. They lie. You can tell they're lying if their mouth is moving it's a it's a horrible industry so uh bad stuff hey thanks for the call open phones at 888-825-5225

you jump in we'll talk about your life and your money this is your show it's common sense we talk about deep concepts here like live on less than you make be on a plan called a budget get out of debt save money invest money this is deep isn't it well not many people do it so apparently it is a needed service the service we call it the dave ramsey show Business leaders, if you're not using LinkedIn jobs, you are missing out. Our Ramsey Solutions Company page on LinkedIn has over 100,000 followers. That's over 100,000 potential like-minded people our team communicates our current openings to. We also post on LinkedIn Jobs because we know the right person will have an impact on our company for years to come.

And LinkedIn Jobs matches the right person with the right job. It's no wonder a hire is made every eight seconds on LinkedIn and over 600 million members visit LinkedIn to make connections, learn and grow as professionals, and discover new job opportunities. In fact, LinkedIn members add 15 new skills to their profiles and apply to 35 job posts every two seconds. Get started today with linkedin jobs and get 50 off your first job post visit linkedin.com slash ramsey terms and conditions apply Thank you for joining us, America. We're in full-on attack mode against the student loan debacle here at Ramsey Solutions.

We are wide open and straight up on it. We're giving away $10,000, teamed up with our friends over at Speedy Prep and College Scholarships. Go to anthonyoneal.com. If you're a high schooler and register, we're going to give away a $5,000 scholarship and two $2,500 scholarships to help you. There's a scholarships search tool there at anthonyoneal.com. 10,000 different scholarships in there for you to apply for and you should billions of dollars of unclaimed scholarships occur every year meanwhile we run up trillions of dollars of student loan debt because we're just too trifling to go apply for the

scholarships i guess so go get the scholarship money the money we're giving away and the money there. And go ahead and actually, you know how you actually achieve a goal? You have to define the details of the goal. If you want to graduate from school, you should, like, know what classes to take in order to graduate. And you should take those classes. And if you do that in four years and you pass those classes, magically you graduate in four years because you had a goal and you knew the components of what it took to achieve the goal.

One of the components it takes to achieve the goal is to be able to pay the bill. So maybe you need to know what your college is going to cost. We have a college calculator at anthonyoneal.com. With all the major and most of the minor colleges built into the database, you enter in where you want to go to school, and it'll help you calculate what you've got to do to get ready for school, money-wise, and help you avoid going into stupid student loan debt. And I got to tell you, this culture has, it's got a victim mentality out there floating around.

It's got a mentality that's just, nobody told me. And that's a valid thing, because I've got a lot of stuff nobody told me. And, you know, it leaves a scar, you know, a lot of stuff nobody told me and you know it leaves a scar you know that kind of stuff but like you know some moron tweeted a while ago anthony o'neill's book is out debt-free degree what's the book say just don't be poor well a little bit he's a little whiner a little victim whiner just don't be No, the answer is don't be stupid. We've all been poor, just about most of us at one time or another. Actually, I've never been poor.

I've only been broke. Poor is a state of mind. And Eeyore is your spirit animal, you know? Little man can't get ahead. We're just stuck. And people like me can't win. Call the Wambulance. Seriously.

Unbelievable. No, the book gives you a step-by-step plan. If you're completely broke, you have no money, your parents have no money, we can still show you how to go to school completely debt-free. Now, I'm going to have to put your little butt to work, and I know that's not going to make you happy, and you're going to have to apply for scholarships, and maybe you're not going to get to play beer pong every night while you're in school

because you're going to be working. Well, or you can go deeply in debt for a degree in beer pong and that's what people do so i mean really honestly how you approach this and what you believe to be true about life has a big part of whether or not you hit these goals we just gave you a ton of tools at anthonyoneal.com including giving away ten thousand dollars and it's completely free last i checked free is accessible if you don't have any money we didn't charge you a dime for that we've got borrowed future podcasts is in the top 10 podcasts already on apple podcast started a week ago monday second episode dropped yesterday out of 10

episodes or out of eight episodes and guess what podcasts are free and i know you have a phone so you could use it for something positive because you were tweeting whining so we know you have access to the media, social media. Good Lord. It's just sickening. So here's the thing. We're going to show you exactly how to do this stuff so you don't have to be one of the new victims of Congress.

Congress is victimizing our entire culture by continuing to make these student loans. If they're so bad that we have to talk about forgiving them, lefties, maybe you lefties should introduce a bill that says no more making the loans. It's intellectual dishonesty to talk about forgiving something while you're still making the loans. What are you trying to do, create more victims so you can get more voters when you help them? This is a false dichotomy, people. So you've got to stop it. We have to stop these loans.

And the one way to stop them is you just stop taking them out. Another way to stop them is Congress actually grows brain cells. Oh, there's a wish. And it stops the thing. So this is how it's done, you guys. This is how it's done. But, you know, most of believing is thinking you can. And that's, you know, I can guarantee you.

Henry Ford said, if you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. And if you think it's impossible to go to college without a student loan, you're going to get a student loan. You're wrong, but just your thought patterns have screwed you. Your belief system screwed you. If you think it's impossible for the little man to get ahead, you're going to whine and claim victim status the rest of your life, and you're always going to be the little man who didn't get ahead.

And it's always going to be Walmart's fault. Your McDonald's didn't pay enough. Oh, give me a break. Who got rich working at McDonald's to start with? Unless it's the one you own in St. Thomas. I mean, really, is this your life goal? Seriously. The whining has to stop.

You've got to start looking into your future and seeing something bright that can happen, and it's possible, and it's doable, regardless of how you grew up, regardless of your race, creed, color, or national origin. You can do this. People of all ilks and backgrounds do it. So you can go to school debt-free,ony o'neill show you how we'll have him on here in another hour he's out there touring the nation right now on this book tour waking up this next generation and their parents with this debt-free degree idea so check it out folks it's doable katie is with us katie is in ohio hi katie how are you hi dave i'm wonderful thank you for taking my call sure what's up really appreciate everything

that you're doing um so my sister-in-law just uh let me borrow your book i didn't even ask so um she must know um a look at this that I have. I don't know. Basically, we are on baby step two. And my husband and I projected that we will not be able to get our down payment saved in time. So all of our debt, like our credit cards, medical bills, car loan vehicles, those will be paid off. And then basically. I'm sorry, not be able to get your down payment saved in time for what? What are you talking about?

Okay, yeah. So my son will be in kindergarten in like three years, but our down payment won't be saved until, like, five. So we were just trying to see if that would be, like, an exception. No. Because we don't want him to, like, bounce around different school districts. No. Do you rent now? Yes.

So move and rent in the school district. So just rent and then wait until he's not bouncing around you're bouncing around a little but he's not okay oh and here's another thing a hundred percent of the time that people start this plan it happens faster than the original math shows them because once you start having some success you turn up the heat on creating income. You turn up the heat on cutting expenses. And you turn up the heat on your focus and your intentionality on getting out of debt. And so the plan that you think is going to take you five

will probably take you three, maybe four. But if you have to move and rent something in a different school district to get him in the right school district, I'm cool with that. We did that with our kids. I was actually a renter to get our kids in the right school district. To get them out of a private school that was killing me.

There you go. We were too broke to do all that, and we were trying to do every bit of it. This is the Dave Ramsey Show. folks let's cut through the bull interest rates are exceptionally low so you're missing out if you have not called churchill mortgage to see if you can save money on your home loan lots of other companies are out there claiming great deals, but don't get lured by slick advertisements. No-cost refinance offers do not mean they're free. Churchill Mortgage has a no-bull refinance. This means there are no hidden fees.

They will shoot straight with you. Yes, Churchill can offer loans with no closing costs, different down payment options, or of course, a traditional refinance. The key difference is you can trust my friends at Churchill to let you know what you're getting up front so you can make the smartest choice and save the most money. Go to churchillemortgage.com. Do it today while rates are low. This is a paid advertisement. NMLS ID 1591. NMLSconsumeraccess.org. Equal housing lender. 761 Old Hickory Boulevard, Brentwood, Tennessee 37027. Thanks for joining us, America. Stacey's in Michigan. Welcome to the Dave Ramsey Show, Stacey. Hi, how are you?

Thanks for taking my call. My honor. How can I help? Okay, so I'm on baby step four and six, and I just got a new job, but I'm also receiving some alimony for the next four, well, about three and a half years. And I also have a goal eventually of owning real estate property, rental property. But my question is, do I put the alimony toward my 15%

or do I use that just to pay off the house? I would just count it in your income and say 15% of your income is going to retirement and maybe step four. It sounds like you don't have a college situation that you need to save four and five. And so everything else would go towards in your budget that you have room would go towards paying off your home. When you get your home paid off, then you would start investing and saving to create a, I want to buy a paid for rental house fund, and that would be your step after baby step six when you're in seven.

Okay. So the total amount of my income from work plus the alimony. Yeah. That 15% of that total. Yeah, I would. I mean, it's kind of like how much giving is too much, how much saving is too much. It's like, you know, it's just, you know, is there such a thing as a steak that's too thick? No. I love this.

It's that kind of thing, right? So that's what we're looking for. You can't save too much, can't give too much. You can't really mess that up. So you're going to end up with the money. It's not like you're blowing it. So, hey, great question. I'm glad you're on top of it.

Darla's with us. Darla's in Louisiana. Hey, Darla, how are you? Hey, Dave, I'm doing great. I have a retirement question for you. Cool. Okay, I'm leaving my job, and I have about $40,000 in a defined benefits plan. Cool.

Should I take that out and roll it to an IRA? Yes. Okay. Always. That's what I thought you were going to say. Yeah, you always take your plans that you can. If you can take a lump sum on a pension or an old 401k or 403b or an old defined benefit plan like you've got and roll it to an IRA, yes.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Several reasons. One is you've got control over it, meaning that it's right there at your fingertips. It's not going to move around. No one's going to do anything. You are, you know, you're the master of your destiny then. The second thing is you can probably pick mutual funds in the open market that will outperform your old 401K or your old defined benefit plan. And in the case of a pension plan, when you die, that money is lost.

And if you've moved it into a 401 or if you've rolled it into an individual IRA, then it's not lost. The money is still in your estate. But when you die with a pension, your heirs don't get anything. So anytime you can take a lump sum, anytime you leave, always take your money that you've got access to with you in a direct transfer rollover to an IRA. Direct transfer means they don't give you the check. access to with you in a direct transfer rollover to an IRA. Direct transfer means they don't give you the check.

They mail the check directly to your new mutual fund for your new IRA. A direct transfer. That way they don't have to withhold the 20% on it, and you're not coming up short because you've got to invest 100%. And if you take the check, you're only going to have 80% in your hands. And you're going to be set up for a penalty and everything. So always do a direct transfer rollover. Get with a SmartVestor Pro. Click SmartVestor at DaveRamsey.com.

It'll drop down a list of the pros in your area. You pick one that you think you'd like to work with. Sit down with someone with the heart of a teacher. And there are people that have been interviewed by us and vetted by us. And they will help you do stuff the way we teach it around here. Evan is next up. Evan's in California. Hi, Evan. How are you?

I'm doing well. How about yourself? Better than I deserve. What's up? So my wife and I just got married back in January. Congratulations. Thanks a lot. And my mom actually gave me

Financial Peace University as a gift. She said she didn't believe that she gave me the right financial training growing up, so she figured you could do it. So we are debt-free, and we didn't go into marriage with a whole lot of debt anyway. And we're trying to figure out when to buy a house, and we're in the Bay Area in California, and so it's pretty expensive out here. And we're trying to figure out, we have about $30,000 in savings. I just got a new job, and our household income is about $125,000 a year. I'm just trying to think, you know, when's the best time to spend the money, and, you know, how much should I have in savings before I put the money down, that sort of thing.

Well, you're already debt-free, and you need to have an emergency fund of three to six months of expenses above your down payment. And then any down payment you can scrape together after that, you know, that's whenever you've got a big enough down payment to do the deal you want to do, that makes sense. We tell folks not to buy a home on more than a 15-year mortgage on a fixed rate where the payment's more than a fourth of your take-home pay. You have a good income, but you live in one of the most expensive real estate markets in America. Yep. And so you've got a tough road here. The problem is just because housing is expensive in San Francisco does not mean you get a pass on math. Math still applies.

You can still break your butt by buying too much house and you won't be able to do nothing. And so don't get house poor. Don't get crazy. Don't get, you know, California house fever, like gold rush fever or something, and you'll get yourself in a mess. So take your time. Anytime someone's buying a home, if you can put down 20%, it's a great thing or more because you avoid PMI, which is private mortgage insurance. And private mortgage insurance is nothing more than foreclosure insurance that covers the lender in the case that they have to foreclose on you and lose money. It does nothing for you.

And it's $50 to $75 to $100 a month per $100,000 borrowed. So, I mean, this is a pretty substantial charge. But it's not unusual for a first-time homebuyer, a young couple getting married like you, to not put's not a hard and fast rule it's just knowledge you need to have so um i want you i do want you to have your emergency fund in place plus your down payment and a 15-year fixed where the payment's no more than a fourth of your take-home pay and when you have a strong enough down payment that you're ready to go ahead and act and you meet those guidelines then we don't yell at you for taking out a home mortgage so hey man that's consistent with what we teach thanks for calling by the way that is the only thing i teach on this show that i don't do i don't borrow money for anything ever under any circumstances And so full disclosure on the hypocrisy network.

But I don't yell at you for a mortgage, but I prefer you to do the 100% down plan. And I know some of you don't think that works, but I can tell you some math. A lot of people do the 100% down plan. San Francisco Bay a lot harder, obviously. But it's not unusual at all for me to talk to a millennial whose both of them have

professional jobs and they're making 80 to 100 000 a year and they decide to live on 30 and save 50 grand a year for four years and they pay cash for a little 200 000 house at 28 29 years old after saving for four years i run into that all the time now and so the 100 down plan is possible but you have to live like no one else so that later you can live and give like no one else and i gotta tell you they're not um running around doing all the things that their friends are doing when they're doing that kind of savings rate so the 100 down plan is preferable why because the shortest path to wealth is zero debt. Your most powerful wealth-building tool is your income. Plus, there's just tremendous peace when you don't have a payment in the world.

Man, what a feeling. That's why we call it financial peace. Two words that don't go together like airline service. You can do this stuff, folks. You just got to think differently. So even if you do take out that 15-year mortgage, make a plan. Make a promise to yourself that you're going to pay it off in seven or eight years. And pay it off in ten years.

You want to be an everyday millionaire. You want to get Chris Hogan's book, Everyday Millionaires. You want to do what those people did. And not because we're greedy and we think that money's everything. But money's a tool that gives you peace, your family opportunities, and puts you in a position to be outrageously generous. It's really hard to give large sums of money away when you don't have large sums of money. Think about it. This is the Dave Ramsey Show. Rosie is with us in Florida.

Hi, Rosie. Welcome to the Dave Ramsey Show. Hey, Dave. How are you? Better than I deserve. What's up in your world? Thank you for taking my call. My pleasure.

I have a question. So I'm a nurse, and I have a car that I bought, and it was the worst decision ever. So now I'm trying to get rid of it, but I got bad equity on it, around $17,000. I owe $39,000 on it. So my husband and I have been discussing because I'm in this gazelle in Tenzi. He doesn't get yet. But what his idea was, because I've been paying all the debt. I've paid around three debts already.

And he's like, well, before you pay the other one, let's pay it down this car so we can get rid of it. But I work, I'm a nurse, so I work, my part-time job, I go to my clients. So I'm putting a lot of mileage on it, and I don't want it, when I'm able to sell it, I don't want to have to sell it for less because I'm putting mileage on it. So his idea was, let's buy a $3,000 car, put this one in the garage, pay it off, pay it down to the amount we owe, and then sell it and get rid of that debt. So what do you think about that? You owe $39,000 on it, and it's worth $17,000 less than that?

Yes. $22,000? You must have rolled negative equity from your other deal into this one. I did. Okay. All right. Because, I mean, cars go down in value fast, but not usually that fast. Okay.

So what kind of car is this? It's a RAV4 2018 2018 and who said it's worth 22 um i went to kelly blue book and our private sale is says 23 000 23 okay all right so you probably rolled 10 000 negative into it to start with. Yes. Okay and what is your total household income? I make 65 we make around 95,000 but in my second job that I have I've been making I'm making almost the same amount of what I'm making on my regular job. So what is the total household income with you working the second job? I would say around $120,000. Very good.

Okay. What other debts do you have other than this car? I have a Home Depot car that only has $4,000 on it, which is I'm working on it at, what else? And then I have have 95,000 on student loan my husband doesn't have any any your husband has all this debt he married you I know that's right that's right he knows he knows so we're working together the entire household income you have to be working together you're not

gonna get out if you don't work together we are now i have a question for you how do i get my husband it came from the dominican republic and he's a spanish speaking so it's hard for me to get him like i'm all riled up because i keep he i keep listening to the program um on my way to work and everywhere but he's not so he doesn't really understand. I mean, he's very good with money. He tries to, you know, pay debt and stuff, but he doesn't know exactly the program that I'm following because he doesn't speak English. He only speaks Spanish. Okay, remember this name.

Look up Andres Gutierrez. Okay. Andres is a young man, Hispanic young man, that does all of our material in Spanish. He actually has a talk radio show that's on in about 30 or 40 cities out of San Antonio. And a sharp young guy. And he's probably got some stuff on YouTube. He is the talent.

We actually have Financial Peace University in Spanish, and he's the speaker. Oh, okay. I couldn't do it because hillbilly Spanish doesn't work. So do you guys sell that on the absolutely and let me do this i'll just what i'll do is i'm going to give you the total money makeover in spanish i'll mail that to you and then you check out the rest of the stuff and you and your husband get on the same page because if you take 120 000 and you start attacking you knock out that home depot card real fast you're going to knock out that seventeen thousand really really fast it's not going to take you long

it's just a matter of a few months so do you think it is wise to part the car and not use it no because i think you're going to be if you're both on track here i mean making 120 you should pay off like uh you're 17 and your four is 21 you should be on track to pay off uh 60 000 a year so 30 000 every six months so you should do this in just four or five months your car and your home depot card okay and you're not gonna put that much miles on it in four or five months. Okay. If you were going to wait two years and run up 50,000 miles on it or something, I would agree with his plan. But I want you two to get on the same page and get out of debt faster than that.

So hold on. I'll have Madison pick up, and we'll send you a Spanish version of the total money makeover, and that will help you guys get on the same page and work together on this, which is absolutely vital to winning. Marie is with us. Marie is in Texas. Hi, Marie.

How are you? Hi, Dave. I'm doing great. Thank you. Thank you for taking my call. Sure. What's up? I was wondering if you could give me any advice on balancing giving to charities and meeting our

family's needs. We do tithe and we have some other charities that we give to on a monthly basis. And then there are other opportunities to give, you know, throughout the year. Sure. But we're having a problem like with saving up for a new car, a newer car, fixing problems that come up, you know, in our house and stuff like that. Well, Jesus said, don't build a tower without first counting the cost, lest you get halfway up and you're unable to finish. And all who see you begin to mock you and say, this man began to build and was unable to finish. So scripturally, planning is the proper way to

approach it the mind of man plans his ways the lord directs his steps proverb says planning is all through scripture and so when you lay out a budget and you include giving in your budget tithing in your budget even if you included some other lines, you should be able to systematically make that value judgment between what we need to do for our family and some other giving in the monthly budget. Rare exception is the Holy Spirit interrupts something and says, go do this right now. But that's an exception. That is not the normal pattern the way you god teaches us to give now the tithe is a baseline for the evangelical christian for

those of us that call ourselves people of the book where we tie that a minimum it's hard to find as a matter of fact i think it's impossible to find in scripture that you give above the tithe when your family has needs. Take care of your own household first or you're worse than an unbeliever. Now, I do want you to be generous, and I love your hearts, that you've got this outrageously generous heart, and you want to put yourself in a position that you can enjoy the generosity and that you can give because giving is, I think, the most fun you can have with money. I think it's what we want to encourage everyone to do i think if we the people all start taking care

of we the people we could put the government out of business i think that'd be a plan you know so i'm i love your heart and i want you to do that but i feel the strain that it's putting on your family so i think that strain can be alleviated in uh 90something percent of the cases by simply planning your giving as a budget item, and then you go, okay, we're going to back that off this month. We're only going to do the tithe because we really need to lean in on this car. Oh, we got the car purchased. Next month we can increase the giving a little bit, you know, that kind of thing. So, you know, there's a little ebb and flow, a little rhythm to this, but it's all written

down every month before the month begins. And then you're making a value choice. And just release you from shame. You are not required to give in Scripture except from surplus other than the tithe. And so it's, you know know you're not a bad person you're not a greedy person if you save up and take your family on a vacation if you save up and buy a little better car um but all along you've got your eye on becoming outrageously generous outrageously generous as you you know as you raise the threshold hold of your wealth by being in control. So you're going to get there, but there's no shame in planning it,

and there's no shame in limiting giving now so that I can give more later by getting myself in control. There's no shame in any of that. And you're not a bad person, and you're not lacking in generous spirit or anything like that. But we want to get back around to the giving, because that's what the whole purpose of this thing is. Hey, thanks for calling.

This is The Dave Ramsey Show. Hey, it's Kelly, associate producer and phone screener for The Dave Ramsey Show. If you would like to do your debt-free scream live on the show, make sure you visit DaveRamsey.com slash show and register. We would love for you to come to Nashville and tell Dave your story.