The Ramsey Show - App - I Bought a Car at 24% Interest! (Hour 2)

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

George Kamel & Ken Coleman answer your questions and discuss: Getting your budget dialed in, "I bought a car at 24% interest!", The insanity of recent Google layoffs, "I'm retired but I want to go back to work" Have a question for the show? Call 888-825-5225 Weekdays from 2-5pm ET Want a plan for your money? Find out where to start: https://bit.ly/3nInETX Listen to all The Ramsey Network podcasts: https://bit.ly/3GxiXm6 Learn more about your ad choices. https://www.megaphone.fm/adchoices Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy

МУЗЫКАЛЬНАЯ ЗАСТАВКА МУЗЫКАЛЬНАЯ ЗАСТАВКА Live from the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, broadcasting from the Pods Moving and Storage Studio, it's The Ramsey Show, where America hangs out to have a conversation about your life and your money. I'm your host, George Campbell, joined this hour by my good friend, Ken Coleman, and we're taking your calls about life, money, work, purpose, career, you name it, at this number, 888-825-5225. Jaron kicks us off in St. Louis. Jaron, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. How can Ken and I help? Well, I've been, we've been trying, me and my wife have been trying to do this baby step thing.

This is the third time now we're doing it. We've been debt-free two other times, but we're having trouble this time with condensing all of our money that we're making, all of our excess money, and putting it all towards our debts because now that we've got some extra cash, we know that we can obviously here and there, nickel and dime, oh, so to here, maybe a so to there, and we can't just keep to the budget at all.

So you said you've become debt-free two times, but you keep going back into debt? Yeah, we didn't do it the hard way. We did it the easy way with income taxes on tax returns. That's how I got our debts paid off. And now we're in a bigger debt snowball. How much debt do you have? I don't remember total here and there, but I know like auto, we have $28,000 for one vehicle, $86,000 for another vehicle, a personal loan at $54,000, and then another personal loan at probably about $22,000. For what? What are these loans for?

Well, two vehicles we have, and then one personal loan is our AC, and our furnace went out over the summer, so we had to get a new one. And then the $22,000 personal loan was for my mom to help us out last year when I got laid off from the whole COVID thing. And so she helped us keep our house and everything else, so we just eventually owe her some money that obviously doesn't collect interest. What's your income, household? Take-home is about $5,000, give or or take a couple hundred you both working

yes she works part-time and i work full-time so you guys are making 60k yes roughly and you have a hundred and ten thousand dollars in car loans no no no no no two personal loans in addition to the car loan. But you said 28 on one vehicle and 86 on another. You mean 8,600? No. Yeah, 8,600. Oh, you scared me to death, Jeremy. Oh, my goodness. There's no freaking way that's going to happen. I had an aneurysm. Okay, we're good. Well, you say no freaking way, like we might be a little nervous.

You got, best I could tell, close to 70 grand or not more in personal loans. I would die. Well, you're drowning 37 in car loans and you got another 76 in personal loans. Yeah. So we're talking 110 total in consumer debt, making 60K. And we're not able to stick to a budget. Is that both of you equally? This is not coming down to you wanting to buy a soda. These are big decisions you guys have made. Yeah. Yeah. We've been trying to pay off our debts for the past couple of years, but it's just my income was steady. We weren't making any, like any extra.

But now that I doubled my income this year, what's your income? We've got all those extra. My income. Now I bring home about 4,000 a month instead of the 2000 a month. I was bringing home. What do you do? I'm a truck driver.

How long have you been doing that for? Uh, uh, off and on since 2014 I think it is but I just got back into the business in November because I can listen to your all show and focus. Are you over the road? No I'm home every night. Okay I was gonna say what's your opportunity for growth there? Yeah being in the business eight years can you go make more as a truck driver elsewhere? No, not really. Not in my area. Are you sure about that? Because I just, I mean, I just, this off the top of my head, I always see huge bonuses.

Companies are desperate for drivers these days. I'll give you an idea of what George is talking about. I shared an article on the Ken Coleman Show not too long ago about Walmart hiring in the $110,000 range for drivers. Oh, yeah. They say they're hiring for that, but I've applied everywhere.

But since I haven't actually driven over the road in the past year, year and a half, they say that I can't drive for them, so they don't want me. So what do you need to do in order to be qualified? Drive over the road, what I'm doing for about a year and a half.

Okay. Well, you need to get busy then when you're not driving, you need to be working extra hours, another 30 hours minimal. You've got to bring in some more income right now. And your wife needs to think about full-time job uh if not for very long but just a short season to get some momentum here what's the car worth the one that has 28 000 left on it uh well we got it for 26 and then after tax sales tax everything's 28 but it's worth 28 okay how much money do you guys have in the bank? We have $1,000 in our emergency fund, and then, yeah, we have about that. We've done baby step loan, which is $1,000, and we've already paid off our first debt, which was a medical bill, and that's all we've got right now.

Okay. I'm wondering if we stack up cash to buy a beater car, and we sell this car, and we clear $28,000 just like that. Okay, yeah. The only reason I got it was so that I could get out of the house to get to work in case it snows in the middle of the night. You can get out of the house with a beater car. They go the same places as $28,000 cars, turns out, and they're out there. If you get an auto trader. $5,000 car, you sell the $28,000.

What's your car payment on that $28,000? $4,000, $29,000 car. What's your car payment on that $28,000? $4,200 a month. Imagine if you had that back in your budget to then put on other debts, how much quickly you'd begin to pay stuff off. You got it? Yes, sir. Sell the car.

It's got to go right now. It's a lot of your world tied up in cars. Yep. now. It's a lot of your world tied up in cars. Yeah. I figured since both payments were almost about half of my yearly take home. The payment doesn't matter. They'll get you on $100 payment. They don't care. They'll just stretch it out until you die at 8% interest. They don't give a rip. And I care about the balance because that's what it's going to take to get this payment out of your life. And so that's what you got to do, man. And as far as the budget goes, I'll gift you every dollar premium, which will connect to your bank. It'll make it easier to track all those transactions. There's a paycheck planning tool in there where it'll show you exactly when your bills are due,

when you would run out of money. It helps you figure out what I need to move around in order to do this. But Jaron has to be a part of this and your spouse has to be a part of this going, we are not going to spend money that is not reflected in the budget. And if we go over, that's it. Once the money's out, it's out. And cash envelopes are a great way to do this, Jaren, where you say, all right, 300 bucks for groceries. We're going to get 300 in cash from the ATM and put it in an envelope. Once the $300 is gone, it's out. And we've got to figure something out. But that's part of the reason people are successful with the budget is because they treat it like gospel.

This is what we planned. This is what we're going to set out to do. And we did it. You've got to track every dollar. No more random stops. No more eating out. We got to clean up this six-figure mess. And it's going to take spending less and

making more. And if you do both of those things, you can become debt-free within a few years, my friend. Hang on the line. Austin's going to pick up. We will gift you one year of every dollar premium. Call us back if we can help along the way. This is The Ramsey Show. The welcome back to the ramsey show i'm'm George Campbell, joined by Ken Coleman this hour. So many of you are asking this year, building wealth in this economy in 2023, can it be done? We keep hearing that question. We get your confusion. There's so much noise out there right now with inflation and layoffs and interest rates, and you deserve answers. And we are coming to a city near you with the Building Wealth live event tour. Dave Ramsey and all of us Ramsey personalities will be hitting the road this spring to see you live in person. And at each event, we're going to dig into all of these hot topics and give you a proven plan to build wealth and keep it even in this economy. Tickets are moving fast.

So if you've been thinking about joining us, don't miss your chance. We're coming to Indianapolis February 16th, Austin, Texas on February the 23rd, Salt Lake City on April the 24th, and Anaheim, California on May 2nd. Tickets start at just 49 bucks, or you can get a four pack of tickets starting at 175. Bring some friends, bring some family. It's going to be a good time. RamseySolutions.com slash events is the place to go to reserve your seats today. What's up, Austin? What's up, Anaheim? Me and

Dr. John Deloney will be out on that trip. And Rachel Cruz and I are Team Indianapolis and Salt Lake City. In case you're wondering. Let's get more support in those two cities so that we can trash talk George and Rachel. It's not a competition, Ken. But we'll smoke you in a heartbeat. I like it.

No, I'll miss you on the road. Don't say that those millennials are snowflakes. They got some fight in them. That's right, we do. Way to go, George. Well, I'll miss you on the road, Ken. Yeah. We always have a good time.

We do have a good time. Do have a good time. But those events, by the way, great, great energy. Great crowds. And you and Dr. John do a fantastic pre-show that's kind of a secret bonus, but it's become a highlight for many of the attendees. Come early and you get a bunch of free content and lots of tears, lots of high fives, lots of laughs. I love it. RamseySolutions.com slash events is the place to go. Who's up next, George? Let's go to Frank.

He's been waiting in Phoenix patiently. Frank, welcome to the show. Frank, are you there? Oh, hey, thanks for taking my call, guys. Sorry about my phone. I'm doing a Dave Ramsey thing of driving a beater car, applying it to a smartphone, so it's not very good. Oh, so you've got a beater smartphone. That's what I got.

That's what I got. You sound fantastic. Well, thank you. I'm in a quandary, and I want your advice on this. I'm 58 years old, never financed anything in my life. I've got a pretty good job here, and the car that I had eight months ago started breaking down. I mean, every week was another $1,000. Getting to the point, my dependability at work was in question so i ended up going to a dealership and getting into

the most horrible deal i had no idea what i understood is that i was buying a fifteen thousand dollar car at 24 interest for 19.8. I agree to that. They said I can make payments early to pay off the principal, and I just work like a gazelle, right, and pay it off. Well, that's not the case. It turns out I called the finance company about a couple, three days after taking possession of the car, and they said, no, Mr. Reynolds, Frank, you owe $30,000,

not $19,000. And I'm like, wait a minute. I didn't agree to this. Well, here's where we're at. So for seven months, I've been making payments every month, never been late. The total hasn't come down at all.

And I'm going nowhere and killing myself on this the warranty expired you know the dealer's uh seven year hundred thousand that's gone because of the year now my father has offered to loan me twenty thousand dollars for the buyout price of 1908 or whatever it is and he's probably going to charge me 6% simple interest. And, well, that would mean that I'm going to end up paying $27,000. Oh, and when I blue-booked the car, it came up to $10,000, not the $15,000 that they claimed. So I would end up paying $27,000 on a $10,000 car without a warranty.

Now, what I'm thinking is offering them $13,000, tell them to apply the $7,000 I've already spent and see if they'll take it. If not, give them the car back. I don't know if any of it works like that, Frank. What in tarnation? Did you make a deal with the devil? What dealership was this? I might call about myself.

They are the spawn of Satan. They really are. You know, the thing is, a week later when when i talked to him the guy even told me he knew i didn't know what i was doing you know like dude you got raked over the coals how do you even get a car loan for 24 interest well i how is that legal i've never are borrowed. Well, there you go. You know, I had a roommate that was an attorney once, and there's three parts to a contract, and one is what a reasonable person would expect from a deal and the meeting of the mind.

We've got neither one of them. Oh, boy. But here's what I'm looking at. What's your income, Frank? How do we get out of this mess? I signed it. I signed it. You know, it's not a bad car.

Don't get me wrong. Frank, okay. Frank, let's start. We got to start breaking this thing down. Okay. What is your income, George asked you? It depends. I'm hourly and depending.

Like this year, we've been rained out a lot. Look at about 55. What do you do? Oh, this must be the day of the trucker because i do in a local trucker okay all right local trucker hourly wage and you're making about 55 000 a year that's right do you have any other debt uh there's depending on what the irs i may owe them about four thousand but that may be absorbed through this last tax season i've got to look out that so you may owe some irs back taxes

well yeah well we've been from 2019 but they only claimed one dependent this year myself so i should have a refund that will go through that debt. Okay. So that might be wiped out. Other than that, you have no debt, no credit card debt, no personal loans out there, just this card. I have a credit card, but that's only for emergencies. Cut it out, Frank. And it's a zero balance. There is no emergency where your money isn't good, and so the goal is for you to cover it. You have to get me to work. Because you know what's going to happen? You're going to get charged 24% interest from the credit card company as soon as you don't play their game perfectly.

Oh, I don't use their card. Honestly, I'm 57. I've never used credit in my life. Then cut it up. I don't use that card. You haven't needed it for 58 years. You don't need it now. All right, we've got to get rid of this car.

So what is the car worth? I want out of this car. Have you done good homework on what the car is actually worth today? 10.5. And you owe what? There were so many numbers flying around. What do you owe? What is your actual loan currently? 19.8 or 19.6 would be the buyout. Okay. So this car you are underwater on by a degree of about $9,000, right? That's right. Okay. How much money do you have in the bank? Maybe the $1,000 emergency after the first round of rent, utilities, and all that.

Are you single? Yeah. Yes. Okay. Where is all of your money going? You make $55K. You've got the $1,000 emergency fund. Where's your monthly income going outside of the car payment? Oh, honestly, I am a zealous listener of your program.

In fact, I just read the book, Total Money Makeover. A lot of it went to repairs in the previous car. You add in rent of, well, it's $1,250 a month. Frank, do you think you could go to a credit union today and get a $9,000 loan? I don't think so. I've never applied for a loan. Okay. Here's the way out of this, Frank. I'm not going to go into debt with Dad at 6% and move this money around. Here's the best plan. You need to save up and get a beater car. You need to borrow one from a friend.

If you've got a local church community, see how cheaply you can get a reliable car and save up that amount. I have. I own a car outright. You have another car? What's that car doing? Where is another car? What's that car doing? Where is that car? The whole reason I got into this is because every week... Frank, where's the other car? Let me explain.

We don't have... We have 30 seconds. We got a commercial we got to get to. I got you. Use the other car. Sell the car today. It's not dependable. It doesn't matter.

It's not dependable. Well, sell that one and get something that is dependable. But going 30 grand into debt at 24% interest is not the path out of this thing. So you need to go to the credit union, get the difference you need to pay that loan off, to sell the car, and drive that beater until you're out of this mess. Woo! That was an entertaining doozy, Ken. Love talking to Frank.

But man, I need a break. I'll get you some Tums. This is The Ramsey Show. Open phones at 888-825-5225. You know, Ken, usually I come with the videos to react to, This is The Ramsey Show. Open phones at 888-825-5225. You know, Ken, usually I come with the videos to react to, but apparently you've got one for me. I have not seen this. I don't know anything about it.

I'm in the dark. I've got a video off the talk. I shortened TikTok to say talk. That somehow made it worse. Well, it irritates my teenagers as well. So I bring that to you because I know you're equally irritated. Anything you need to tell me about this video? No. Well, this is a video that went viral. And this is a warning video. And I shared this on the Ken Coleman Show earlier today. And this could be relevant for a lot of our listeners

and viewers. So let's play it, then we'll comment on it. A day in my life getting laid off at Google. So I woke up to this really ominous text from my boss, and I honestly had no idea what it was going to be about. So I called her the minute I woke up and saw this, and she told me to check the news and my email. So I rushed downstairs to find out that I had lost access to basically everything. I couldn't log into my email or even check my calendar. I called my boss back and we just sobbed over the phone because she was also finding out about my layoff for the first time today too. I started getting calls from a bunch of my co-workers and started finding out who else was let go on my

team and some neighboring teams as well. But I think the worst part is that it seems like no one was consulted on this decision and everyone was just finding out about the layoffs at the same time. It just felt like a really bad game of Russian roulette, and there was no consistency around who was let go. It was also not performance-based, so it just felt really random. Okay, so there you go. Now, in the news, it came out on Friday of last week, George, Google laid off about 12,000 employees, which is about 6% of their global workforce.

This was across product areas, functions, different product areas, functions, levels, and regions. According to CEO Sundar Pakai, if you say it that way, I think it is, I think I'm hooked on phonics, that this is a result of Google hiring too quickly and couldn't keep all its staff on the current economic reality. But here's why I showed that video on the Ken Coleman Show and why we show it here, George. Anytime that you hear talk of recession and we're seeing larger companies laying off people, more announced, more expected to be announced this week, a lot of tech companies laying people off, and this is happening more and more. This is a young lady who finds out about the layoffs when she sees the news and she wakes up. She calls

her direct leader who says, well, let's get online and figure this out together. I don't know if you've been laid off or not. She goes downstairs to get on her laptop and is subsequently locked out. She finds out I've been locked out overnight. And so her direct leader did not even know that this young lady had been laid off. Now, how does that hit you? Well, from what I read, I saw a piece that was saying, hey, folks didn't know. If they didn't check their email the night before, they showed up to work, and there was just a line of people checking their fobs, and that's how you figure out. That's how you found out.

If you can get in the door, you're still employed. That's a terrible way to go about this. Now, folks, the reason we share this is if you are at a company, I don't care how large or small, and you don't have a sense that the leadership values you as an individual, not a unit of production, then you need to start paying attention because leaders like this, and this is Google, and they think they're too big for it to really have a negative impact on them. But I'm going to tell you something. They aren't too big to fall. And this has been a wave of just social media testimonies about them doing this. I've got

a Business Insider article right here in my hands. And one engineer shares a story of being at google for 20 years an engineer for 20 years and he was laid off via email no face-to-face conversation here's a couple more um this is this is the worst uh another guy um says that he went in at 4 a.m. This is Dan Russell, research scientist, said on LinkedIn, I found out when I went to work at 4 a.m. to finish up an important analysis, and my badge didn't work. The guy's going in at 4 a.m. to work, and his badge doesn't work. 17 and a half years at Google gone.

Elizabeth Hart, a senior marketing manager on Google's global ads team, said she woke up early Friday morning and saw a notification that her corporate access had expired, along with an email with the New York Times link to the article about Google laying people off. Oh, man. So Google is big enough, savvy enough, to know that they're going to have to lay people off. There's no excuse for not having

a real person sit down with them, eyeball to eyeball, knee to knee, and explain what's going on and have some sense of compassion. But let me tell you what it is, George. It's about a checklist. We've got to lay off 12,000 people, 6% of our workforce. We don't have time to do it this way. This is how we're going to do it. And you know what? We're Google. We'll just get another batch of young people coming out of college. And I'm going to tell you something. This is eventually going to catch up to companies. Well, you lose the guy who had 20 years experience and you hire the guy who's just jumping into this thing. Well, you make a very good point. Not only do you lose him, you treat him so harshly that he leaves with a bunch of institutional knowledge that you don't even know what he's what

he knows and what he's taking with him it's bad business forget bad human behavior it's bad business behavior so all that to say well in these publicly traded companies ken a lot of them are just beholden to the shareholders that's all about the stock price whatever they got to do to make the shareholders happy and therefore people become a unit of production, which is sad. So you want to know why there's an anti-work movement? Why is that? This kind of nonsense.

You treat people like they aren't humans. You treat them like they are just a number on your spreadsheet. They start to believe that. You know why quiet quitting is a phenomenon because of crap like this leaders not valuing people and when you would just keep treating people like units of production you don't care for them you don't treat them like they've got a heart uh like they've like they've got emotions then uh you're gonna have a revolt And this just continues to happen. So we're going to shine the light on here at Ramsey Solutions because we care about people here.

We care about our team. We care about you. And you can work in a place that values you. You better get to one of those places because I'm telling you, if you're not in a place that values people, even if they have to lay you off, in a place where they care about you,

they'll treat you well. That's true. And thankfully, Ramsey has never had to lay anyone off in the history of this place, which is pretty amazing. And it speaks to how much they value people. So just bad behavior. So Ken, a lot of people I see on their LinkedIn, it says, you know, hashtag open to work. What do people do in a case where they were just laid off or they could potentially be laid off any minute? What would you suggest they do on the career side? Okay. Well, first thing is this is a really rough rejection. So you need to grieve this. You need to understand that while it may not be personal, it feels personal. So let's go get it out of our system. Friends, family members, if you got to cry some, fine. The point is,

let's own it that it sucks, that it hurts. And then after we've gotten that out of our system, that it feels that way, we've got to then step back into reality that it does not hurt your future. A lot of people have been laid off. People get laid off all the time. And there are still a lot of opportunities. And so you get back up on the horse. And the way you do that is, I'm going to make connections, connections, connections. I hope that you have connections laid out way in advance. You know, when you get on an airplane and the flight attendants come in and they tell you, in case of a water landing, here are your exits. You need to do the same thing if you work for a large company.

If you work for a company that may be struggling financially, you don't know what could happen. So what would an exit strategy look like? If a storm came, you know, I can see you in your new home. I bet you know what could happen. So what would an exit strategy look like if a storm came? I can see you in your new home. I bet you have a storm shelter. And so you got your flashlight, you got your batteries, you got your water. I'm going to John Deloney's house if something goes down. That's not a good idea because he's just going to put you with the chickens. That's true. But the idea is, okay, who are people that I know in my industry that are really well connected? What is a part-time or an Uber-type job that I could take on or two part-time jobs? You might have to swallow your pride and go, what do I need to do right now to bring an income?

Well, this gets back to, George, you and what Dave and Rachel teach about the budget. If I know my four walls budget, then what are some jobs that I know that I could probably go get pretty quickly that take care of my four walls? That's what I mean by having an exit strategy. That's temporary until maybe I can then get back into the industry that I want to be in. That's the idea. It doesn't have to be a crisis. We want it to be a nuisance.

Big difference. I like that. So the emergency fund. Yeah, being debt-free and having money in the bank, it changes a layoff drastically. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Because now it's annoying and frustrating, but it's not devastating.

So, man, really pulling for all those folks that are getting laid off around the nation. And it's a wild time. We are hoping the best for you, that you can jump into a new career. And Ken's advice is spot on. This is not the end. This does not define you. It will refine you if you let it. This is The Ramsey Show. I'm George Campbell, joined this hour by Ken Coleman.

Hey, if you like this show, there's only one thing I would ask of you. Again, the show is free. And what I'm asking you to do is free. Consider subscribing, leaving a review wherever you're listening, and sharing this show with a friend. We want to spread the impact and affect more people this year with our money message, our career message, mental health relationships. There are so many problems out there in the world, and we want to help solve them. And this show is a part of that. And the way you do that is you share it with friends who need to hear it,

and word of mouth goes a long way. Appreciate you doing that. Thank you. And by the way, who doesn't like this show? I don't know why they're listening. I'm unaware of this. It's strange to waste your time listening to a show you don't like. Goodness gracious.

Speaking of things you like or don't like, what do you think about my sweater today, George? I'm a fan. I like the chunky, Donegal look, Ken. Now I regret asking you. I don't know what any of that means. Well, we'll get you there. Just Google it. Okay. Let's go to Shannon up next in Austin, Texas. Shannon, how are you doing? I'm great. Thanks so much for taking my call. Absolutely. Okay, so I have career-changing questions. About three years ago, right before COVID, I retired from over 30 years in education. I'd been a teacher, a principal, even a director at, like, the central office level.

Awesome. And I left that job because it just wasn't a good situation, but I left it for another job. I was able to retire. So I had my retirement, my pension income, and I left to be a director at a day school, which because of COVID ended up closing in early 21. So since then, I have just kind of been working a couple of part-time jobs. Plus I have about $5,400 a month coming in from my pension. But I feel like I need to be doing something else. When I retired, I was only 54.

I'm 57. I'll be 58 this year. So I've had time since like 21, about a year and a half to just kind of be in this kind of flux state. But I'm not really sure what I want to do next. Yeah. I don't know if I, you know, the easy thing is yes, go back to education. But I really, I'm not really sure what I want to do next. All right, so let me ask you, when you really loved it, when teaching was good, what did you love most about it? Making a connection with the kids, and then as a principal making a connection with the staff and the teachers

and just being able to positively bring about change. Nice. And what kind of change? So I understand the connection part. You would do that through communication and instruction. But the change that most excited you, describe that just a little bit more. Just being able to help somebody get from a place where they weren't able to read or to understand something, and then they were able to do that. Or to help a teacher, you know, develop their skill set so they were even a better teacher.

Or bringing staff together so that they were developing their own leadership and, you know, that kind of thing. All right. That's beautiful. So this is what i heard okay the change that most motivates you that gives you the juice as i like to say is where you take someone from where they are to where they want to be whether it's a kid struggling with math whether yeah i mean that's your jam am Am I right? Okay. Yes. All right. So I think that you do that through instruction or you do that through leadership. And I'm talking functionally. Right.

So when we look at potential jobs and positions, for you, it comes down to you've got to be in the role of instructor, leader, advisor. And these aren't job titles. I'm just talking about a role. Right, right. If you're spending most of your day doing that, that's a good day for you, true or false? Yes, very true. Yeah. So that's what you're looking for.

But it does not have to be in a traditional educational environment. I mean, if you look at the world at work right now, you're wildly qualified to be a trainer. But I guess, yes, and I just don't know how to make that leap. And I also have kind of like a little confidence problem. That's what's going on. That's what's going on. It's not that you don't know how to make the leap it's that you doubt that anyone's going to give you a chance in a different field because that's all you've ever done is education right i know so how do we overcome that doubt we got to start

having conversations we got to make connections to people who see you as a very experienced educator, a woman who has 30 years of pouring into the lives of others. And on the other side of that, delivering influential, positive change, that's your MO. And so when you start believing that about yourself, you're going to be more confident to have those conversations. But I'm going to give you a copy of my book. The first book I wrote here at Ramsey Solutions was called The Proximity Principle, which says in order to do what Shannon wants to do, she's got to be around people that are doing it and in places where it is happening. Very simple idea, correct? Okay. Yes. So there's five people in five places in the book that will kind of help you begin to visualize and then make direct connections with these people in Austin or around the country

if you're open to moving outside of Austin. If you're not, there's certainly a lot of opportunities in Austin, Texas for a woman like you who's got heart and who's got crazy skill and a whole lot of experience. Am I right, Shannon? Probably, yes. Oh, come on. Shannon, I just gave that big pep talk and I get a probably? I know, I know. Shannon. Yes, there is. There are things that I could be doing rather than making $13 an hour at two parts. Exactly. So here's the deal. You need to start looking at job opportunities today that are around training opportunities, instructional opportunities. I'll give you an example. We hired someone here recently in instructional design for our Ramsey Education Department, a lifelong teacher on the collegiate level or maybe high school level, but the ability to connect with students as we're creating programs. My point is, if it is

training, if it is instruction, if it is advising, if it is guiding, if it is leading, you're qualified for all of that, Shannon. Okay. I am. You're right, I am. There we go. So now you know what you're looking for. We're not even looking in the education. But now listen, once we look, very practically, no more pep talk. Once we begin to see those jobs, then you step back. You've got my book, The Proximity Principle, we'll give to you. You step back and you go, who do I know that knows somebody in this company? Or who do I know that knows somebody in this organization? Or if I don't know anybody that knows somebody, who do I know that knows somebody that knows

somebody? And we begin to start to make connections you start having conversations and then people meet this unbelievably qualified lady who's got a lot of horsepower and a lot left to give and they go man we'd love to have you over here we just need to train you on this particular type of training but you got all the skills all the experience we're just going to teach you the language. You see where I'm going here? Okay. You are full of doubt. You feel like you've got this imposter syndrome because you don't know what you don't know. That's true.

That's really true. That's your problem, Shannon. You know nothing. So it's big and scary. Am I right, Shannon? Right. But if I was your student and i walked in your classroom and i said shannon i don't know anything what would you say to me well let's start to see what you do know because you do know some things right and so you do know people in austin texas

you do know quality companies you do know now what to look for don't you yes so then what would you say to me i'd say okay i do know now what to look for, don't you? Yes. So then what would you say to me? I'd say, okay, I do know this, Shannon, and I know this, Miss Shannon, and I know this. What do I do now? What would you say to me? You have to just buck up and do it. You have to just start reaching out to people, making the connections,

and having the confidence to do that. The student becomes the teacher. Look at that. Sounds like you should do what you just said. What's amazing is that financially you're not desperate. Yeah. You like you should do what you just said. And Shannon, what's amazing is that financially, you're not desperate. You're not worried about what the paycheck is. Right now, you're looking for what will give me the most purpose and allow me to contribute

in a way I want to. And that opens up your options. I got two words for you, Shannon. These are teacher-level words I'm trying to impress you right now. Picky and persnickety. That's your prize. Those are your words. Okay, there we go. All right, fantastic. Thank you for calling, Shannon.

We are rooting for you, pumped for you. That's awesome. All right, that puts this hour of The Ramsey Show in the books. My thanks to my fabulous co-host, Ken Coleman, and all the guys in the booth. We got Austin, Ben, James, Zach, and Andrew. And you, America, thank you so much for tuning in. We'll be back before you know it right here on The Ramsey Show. Hey, it's Ken. If you love the show and want a deeper dive on your money journey, we have a weekly newsletter that gives you trending and helpful articles and tips on following the Ramsey way. Go to RamseySolutions.com today to sign up for our newsletter.

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