The Ramsey Show - App - Is There a Spending Limit on Pets? (Hour 2)

Episode Date: March 6, 2020

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🎵 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. Thank you for joining us. Open phones at 888-825-5225. That's 888-825-5225. All right, up next is going to start off this hour is going to be Anya in Kansas.

Hey, Anya, how are you? Hi, Dave. I'm doing awesome. How are you? Better than I deserve. What's up? Dave. I'm doing awesome. How are you? Better than I deserve. What's up? Awesome. I'm glad to talk to you.

Just so you know, in 2016, I had come and visited you and did my debt-free yell. And ever since then, I've stayed debt-free, and I have saved up my emergency fund. I saved up my house down payment, and I have been investing for the last three years and maxing out my Roth IRA. And my goal is to be a millionaire. And the reason I was calling is because I have got a full-time job where I get paid really well, and I'm able to save $6,000 within the first three months of the year. And I was wondering if it's better to, when you put into the law, if you should do $500 a month or if it's okay to do $6,000 all at one time. Okay.

If the market, the stock market, were to go up exactly the same every single month, which it doesn't, obviously, you would be better off to put it in in a lump sum because you get that money working all of those other months that you wouldn't have had it in the market. In other words, it's making almost nothing right now, and if you put it in now, you would make money all year long versus you wouldn't have made money the whole year long.

Now, if the market goes down substantially after you put the lump sum in, over the length of time that you're in the market with a retirement, you're going to be fine. The lump sum is going to be the best way to go. If it goes up, obviously the lump sum was the best way to go so um overall as long as you can handle it emotionally if the market continues to dip on coronavirus or on something else korea or whatever if the market goes down and you put in six thousand dollars and by the end of the year it's worth uh i don't know five thousand dollars if you can emotionally handle that the year it's worth, I don't know, $5,000, if you can emotionally handle that,

knowing that it's going to go up a lot over the coming years, long before you get to it in retirement, 20, 30 years from now we're pretty sure we're going to see an increase between now and 20 or 30 years. So you're going to make money as long as you leave it alone. But you might have a dip before it goes up. As long as you can emotionally handle that, I would go ahead and do it now, especially because right now there's a coronavirus sale. It's on sale.

The market's on sale. It's a deal right now because these numbers are down artificially right now. Those companies didn't all stop making money as much as their stock went down. So they're artificially low based on fear, not based on math. And so it is a great time to invest right now. Go ahead. If I max out my Roth IRA, do I just do traditional and then buy stock, mutual funds through traditional and then convert it to a Roth? No, you just max it out as a Roth. Do you make over $200,000?

No, I don't, but I have a lot of extra money that I can put towards retirement and savings and so on. Well, I want you to put 15% of your income into retirement and no more until you've got the house paid off. Everything else goes towards the house. I don't have a house yet. Oh, I thought you said you'd save the down payment for a house. Yes, I save the down payment, but I don't have a house. It's just sitting right now in the money locker until I'm ready to buy a house yes i see the down payment but i don't have a house it's just sitting right now in the um money market until i'm ready to buy a house okay be anything above 15 of your income right now needs to go in that down payment fund

okay how much do i need to pay for a down payment 100 100 as much as you can okay as much as you can there's not you can't save too much is my point so say 15 of your income into retirement if as part of that you're going to do some lump sum roths that's fine as a part of that 15 but anything above 15 of your income should be going into that down payment fund until your home is paid off in full and that's that's working the baby steps properly so hey really good question thank you for joining us open phones at 888-825-5225 you jump in we'll talk about your life and your money Kayla is with us in Colorado hi Kayla how are you I'm great Dave how are you? I'm great, Dave. How are you? Better than I deserve. What's up?

All right. Well, I'm 28 and I'm on baby step two after driving my feet for a couple of months. I have a little bit over $158,000 in debt. $139,000, give or take, is student loans and $43,000 of that is parent plus loans. And not only do I hate that interest rate of 7.65%, which is outrageous. I feel a moral obligation to take them off my mom and put them on my own credit history. So I'm looking at the parent loan refinancing, and I was just wondering what your thoughts were on that. I have some more details, but I'll stop there.

You found a loan that is offering for you to refinance your mother's student loan debt that she took out. Yeah, by 4%. In her name or your name? In my name, I could reduce it almost 4%. And get it out of her name. And get it out of her name and get it out of her name exactly and the there's no question that you are supposed to pay this i mean the deal you made with your mom was you you were going to pay it i've always been paying it yep i've i've never she's never paid a dollar

on it um i've always paid it because it's my obligation okay um it's just i've just done the minimum payments and kind of just let it go okay all right if you're taking it on as one of your student loans in mathematically you might as well take it on legally and especially if you can say four percent there's no downside to this discussion then um so the one question i had um dave is obviously this would increase my monthly payment by about four hundred dollars which i can do i've been sticking to the every dollar like religiously i thought you were already making the payment on this yes yeah yeah i am but it would just increase my total payment my minimum payment by by about $400 for that loan. Why, they're restructuring the loan in a way that makes the payment go up?

Because you're already paying your mother's payment, right? Yes. And you're getting a cheaper interest rate than she has. So why is your payment going up? Because the way that we chose to do it was on an incremental basis. On the refinancing, it's through Navient. Oh, okay. So we started on one of those two-year incremental things.

I got you. Okay. Yeah. So it's artificially low now, and you're going to own that. Okay. Yeah, I think you still go ahead and do this. It still makes sense because you've decided that this is your obligation at some point in this process. And so Parent PLUS loans are not always morally the student's obligation.

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Today's question is from Kate in Texas. Dave, we recently purchased a new home and have decided to retain our current paid-off home as rental property. Our long-term goal is to purchase several more rental properties with the profits. Is there any benefit to incorporating or forming an LLC, or should we wait until we have more properties in our portfolio? You can move the old rental property into an LLC if you want to and then just add other ones to it. The main reason to do a separate company to hold rental properties is just risk management

and so um i don't put when if i'm buying for instance single family homes and i've probably i've got a bunch of them uh i don't i don't put more than about two million dollars five million dollars worth of homes something like no more than five million dollars worth of homes in one LLC and then I open another one and then if somebody decides to get hurt on one of those properties and sue they have to sue the company that owns that property the owner of that property which so the maximum thing they could get of course I've got insurance too and of course if somebody got hurt and it was our fault we'd take care of. But I'm talking about risk management in a litigious culture we live in. So the most they could get would be the things in that LLC. And they couldn't get any of our other items that we own because

they're all broken up. As a matter of fact, I've gone so crazy now because our stuff has gotten so complicated and so big that I don't own a single thing personally. I don't even own my cars anymore. They're all in LLCs or trusts or corporations or something. So that it's all split out, and each individual company then takes the risk of that company. So, yeah, just from a risk management standpoint, I would drop. You don't want property in a sub-S. You've got to get into all kinds of tax issues.

But the LLC is a straight pass-through. And your first four, five, six houses or whatever that you buy, of course, we're paying cash for them. I'm assuming you pay cash for your personal residence that you bought there. I mean, we don't do real estate except with cash. I don't, and I don't teach anybody else to. But assuming all of that as you're buying another one, up until you get the size of the target on the thing starts to make you nervous, I would put it into an LLC.

Now, I had one guy, every time he bought a property, put it in an LLC. That would drive me nuts because you have to file a tax return on every separate LLC, and you have to keep a set of books on every separate LLC and that'll drive you bananas. So I don't have, now if I've got one singular big property, like I've got one office building that I rent out that's worth about 15 million, it's its own LLC. That one's worth keeping separate. But as far as every single property we own does not have a separate one. It's only when it gets up to the size of the target on your butt gets to be too big in the case of somebody suing you. That's the only benefit to it. There's no tax benefit whatsoever.

You have the same exact taxes on an LLC you do on your personal residence. So I mean, on your personal tax return. All right. Kevin is with us in Texas. Hey, Kevin, how are you? Hi, Dave. I'm wonderful, sir. How are you? Better than I deserve. How can I help? So I'm 24 years old, and seven years ago, my mom took out a whole life policy from a family friend for her, my dad, and me.

Yeah, and I'm trying to convince them to at least cancel mine because they have some debts. And these premiums, obviously, are going to be a burden on them. The whole life policy for me is $500,000. And she pays like $4,000 a year in premiums. And some of that, I don't know how much, is gone into something called a paid-up additions rider. Now, the whole way this thing is set up is like mental gymnastics to me. I can't really understand it. I can't find any unbiased explanations on what this rider is.

But I was able to contact the agent, and he was telling me a very vague explanation that, you know, it adds on to the face value so that even though I don't get the cash value if I would die, that face value would end up growing by an exponential amount. And therefore, it's worth for me to keep it, and I shouldn't be canceling it. I just think, you know, either way, I can get a low-term insurance rate. So I'm trying to convince my family to just cancel it. Don't know if that's a smart thing to do because I don't understand the state of the business right here.

So I just wanted to get some clarity on that. Well, you're on to something here. You should cancel it and you should get term insurance. And it's no shock that a whole life agent, when you called them, said you should keep the whole life. Well, duh. That's how he gets his commissions. And so he didn't want you to cancel it. He wants to get a commission.

So paid-up additions are in what are called mutual companies. Mutual companies are owned by the customers, okay? And so technically speaking, it doesn't work out this way, but technically speaking, when they make a profit, they don't have stockholders. The policyholders are the stockholders. You are a stockholder.holders you are a stockholder your mom's a stockholder and so they pay out dividends okay but it's not like dividends in stock they make it sound like it is but it's not dividends in stock are when you own a share of

stock in a company the company makes a profit and they give you the money okay but if you're the customer and the company makes a profit and they give you money whose money are they giving you yours they overcharged you in the first place that created the profit and then they gave you some of your money and made you act like they did you a favor okay and so the ir IRS has ruled with mutual companies that dividends in life insurance are not like dividends. They're not taxable because they're a refund of a deliberate overcharge. That's what the IRS says. Okay, so that's the money that's being used to buy paid-up additions. Okay, now let's listen to the words.

Additions means you're buying more insurance, additional insurance. Paid-up on whole life policies is when you are, if you wanted to just buy a whole life policy and not pay monthly, you could give them a lump sum. They would take a portion of the money you gave them and put it into a cash value and you would have given them so much money up front that you paid them in advance so they don't charge you anymore that's paid up okay okay and so what what paid-up additions are is you gave them so much money, you prepaid for additional insurance using the dividends that are the refund of a deliberate overcharge.

There's a lot of mental gymnastics here, but it is understandable. So they charged too much to start with, handed it back to you in the form of profits called dividends that aren't really profits. They just gave you some of your money back they use that to buy additional insurance and give you the benefit give you the wonderful benefit of letting you prepay for your whole life for that additional insurance paid up additions bought with dividends that's what this is okay and so it's a bunch of horse crap is what it is. It's horse crap.

It's manure. My parents' policy, they're also shaped like this, but they're near 60 now, so their term rates, I checked it out for them, but their term rates are really high. Do they even need insurance? Do they have money? They're in a lot of debt. They have over six figures of debt, about $100,000. Yeah, because they've been buying this horse crap their whole life. Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, it's just a burden. So is it wise for them to just keep theirs? Because their term rate is just about the lumpy premium of this whole life. It depends on the level of debt that they're in and how much money they're going to need if one of them dies. If they need insurance, then you have to decide what you're going to do to get the insurance and what's the cheapest way to do it but for you at 24 years old you know shovel the manure out of the barn and cancel this crap it's horrible and i'm yeah there's about 16k in the cash value i'm just planning on telling them to take that you know add it to their you know pay out their debt use it to clean up some of their debts, and you go buy you a term policy and get on with your life, young man.

You have figured this out. You have good gut instincts because you can smell horse crap when it's in the room with you, and that's what you were doing. You smelled a skunk. You just didn't know what his name was. And so I walked you through the definition of the terms, and then you start to figure out, oh, they charge me too much, they give it back to me.

It's the refund of a deliberate overcharge. I use that to buy more insurance, and I prepay for it. Well, how could this possibly be good for anybody but the insurance company? That's what it is. This is The Dave Ramsey Show. Thank you for joining us, America. This is the Dave Ramsey Show. Open phones at 888-825-5225. Thanks for being here.

David is on the line. David is in Florida. Hi, David. Welcome to the Dave Ramsey Show. Thank you, Dave. Appreciate you taking the call and love your show. Thank you, sir. How can I help? I was curious where you would put the blessing of alimony in your seven baby steps,

or if you would. I would guess it's a monthly payment, is it not? It is, but there's a finite amount, and I was wondering whether I should pay it early to get it gone. Okay. What is the finite amount? It's just the total of all the payments, or is there a discount for paying it early? There's no discount as far as I know, so it's just the total of all the payments. Which is what? Left $150. What do you make a year? Quarter of a million.

Okay. How long have you been divorced? Five and a half years. Okay. How is the current relationship? Not great, but we tolerate each other for the kids. Okay. All right. What is her financial condition? Don't know. I know what it was five and a half years ago, but I don't know at this point. What would you guess? She's probably making $50 or $60. But, I mean, does she have any money? She has a job and business.

I don't know whether she has any saved or not. Okay. All right. I was just wondering, what I was fishing for is I wonder if a lump sum would be attractive enough to her that it would be worth it to you, or worth it to her to take a discount to get it all out front. I got you. Okay. Because a normal thing, not counting emotions and law, okay, and all that crap, okay, but let's just say that she uh that she held a note that

someone owed her a note with interest at based on 150 000 principal balance okay but the but the stream of payments was over the next how many years five and a half five and a half more years yes okay if you had a note that you were receiving 150 000 with interest over the next five and a half. Five and a half more years? Yes. Okay. If you had a note that you were receiving $150,000 with interest over the next five and a half years, and you wanted to sell that note, you would have to discount it. No one would pay you $150,000 for it, right? Right. Okay. And so that's the concept.

But obviously, if just bringing that up brings claws out, then it's not worth it, right? And you might need an intermediary, her old attorney or somebody, I don't know, that could explain that to her that it is to her benefit. In other words, if she called me and said, my ex is offering me $90,000 or $105,000 or whatever for a $150,000 total payout five and a half years early i would tell her to take that and invest it because she will end up with more money right mathematically it'll end up with being five and a half years from now more than 150 because a hundred thousand if it earned

ten percent for five and a half years it would earn ten thousand dollars a year for five and a half years or another fifty thousand right so actually more so you know if somebody is offered a hundred and five hundred and ten on this deal it would be wise for them to take it but someone has to explain the business aspects of that right aside from all the emotion so all of that to say that would be my if you're going to lump some this that would be my first attempt would be to say i'll give you 105 000 110 000 cash today you invest that you'll make more on it over the five and a half years than you would have if you'd have just gotten it a little bit at a time okay now if she says absolutely not i will not discount it one penny then i would not prepay it i would put it i would prepay it into an account in your name and then just dole it out of that account so when you had 150 000 in a side account you're done but you just got to peel it out of

that account every month, right? Gotcha. But I'm not going to prepay it to her because something weird could happen during the five years and you don't end up owing it for some reason. Correct. Are there any provisions like remarriage or anything? Yes, if she got married, it would end the alimony. Yeah, see, there's a reason that you wouldn't prepay it. Okay.

Because it could end it. But in terms of the debt snowball i would just set it aside the 150 000 in your debt snowball i'd set it over there in a separate savings account and go box checked okay and just pay it out of that it's oh you're done with it it's just you got to do the transfer every month for the next five and a half years that's all yeah does that make sense to you thank you it does thank you very much thank you for the next five and a half years. That's all. Does that make sense to you? Thank you. It does.

Thank you very much. Thank you for the call. Open phones at 888-825-5225. Kathy is with us in South Carolina. Hi, Kathy. How are you? Hi, Dave. Good.

How are you? Better than I deserve. What's up? Good, good. Well, so me and my husband are having a baby in August, and we've paused our debt snowball to build up cash. Good. Yeah, so we have a good amount,

but one of our cats has a sort of medical emergency, and the surgery is going to be anywhere from like $2,000 to $5,000 depending on if we go to a specialist or have our vet do the best she can, quote-unquote. So my question is somewhat of an ethical one. Is there ever a limit you would put on spending on a pet depending on where you are financially? Well, I'm just an animal lover. I just cry every time one of our dogs dies. You know, I just cry like a little girl. I mean, I just cry every time one of our dogs dies. You know, I just cry like a little girl.

I mean, I just love animals. My wife grew up on the farm, and animals went away every week. So she loves animals, but I treat them like people, you know. So it's harder for me emotionally than it is for her. If a dog dies, she's just like just like well that's sad the dog died and with me i like cry you know and so um you know it you kind of have to get into it and it's personal finance but i i think you gotta you know it is an animal it's not a person and personally the way i look at it and everybody can look at it however you want to look at it y'all can all

everybody always gets mad at me every time this question comes up, but I get all this hate mail on Twitter. But, you know, you have a new baby coming. That is a real obligation. A cat is not. And so if you're going to spend $5,000 on a cat, you should probably be worth several hundred thousand dollars and you're not. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

Cause we, we have, we were going to, I was actually going to go back on the debt snowball cause we, we can't, we have like about 10,000 now right now from just kind of preparing for that. But I was like, that seems like maybe too much for just to have on hand for the baby

so it's like we have this it's too much to have on hand for the baby steps but you're building up cash that you're going to use on this debt snowball as soon as you and baby come home from the hospital healthy yeah you weren't building it up to spend five thousand dollars on a cat yeah so another way to look at it is this in the, and this is again, it's, it's, it's breaks your heart. Okay. So I'm not, I'm not acting like this doesn't matter. It does matter. I'm the guy that cries. Okay. So I'll cry when Kitty, I'll cry when Kitty goes to Kitty heaven, you know, but not me cause I'm not a cat guy, but I'll cry when doggy goes to doggy heaven. Okay. So, but aside from that, if you didn't have a cat, would you buy a cat for $5,000 right now?

No! You wouldn't, right? No, I wouldn't. Not in this situation. And I feel guilty because I do. I like the cat, but it's not a baby of mine. You know, like I have a cat that I love, and this cat, the other one I haven't bonded with, so I'm trying to be really fair.

Well, it's not that. If it were the cat you loved, it's the same decision. It's a cat, not a baby. Yeah. They're different. They're not humans. Human life is different than animal life. And so we love our animals, and we're kind to them and good to them,

and they have a better life than most humans if they live at the Ramsey house or at your house, right? But, you know, they're loved and cherished. But, you know, we had a pug one time that was a 2,500. They said it's got spinal bifida and it's gonna be 2500 bucks to have a 15 chance that this dog can walk and i'm like i'm not putting the dog through that and i'm not spending 2500 bucks on the dog and so that dog went to heaven and um i cried harder than anybody else in the family but everybody else just went well the dog died but

dave just falls into the basket right but that's okay still make the decision that's called leadership i'm sorry are you facing this you know when you're in debt it feels like you have a weight on your shoulders, on your back, around your neck, on top of your head. You don't even realize it's there because you get used to carrying it. The way you know that the weight is gone, of course, is when the debt is gone and you're like, wow, I feel like I lost 300 pounds. It changes everything, right? Some of you listening right now are really desperate because you don't think there's a way out. Debt collectors are hunting you down, balances that never shrink. You're out of control where you're spending.

Just kind of feel overwhelmed and hopeless. I've been there. I know. I know how it feels. It hurts. It's a pain. If you're there right now, you're in the pit, here's what you need to hear. There is a way out. There is hope. You need to get serious with the only person who can turn this thing around. You, the person in your mirror. You do need a plan. You need someone to hold you accountable and someone to encourage you. You need a new peer group. You don't want to hang out with broke people. They're telling you to do broke people stuff because you're going to be broke people when you do that. You need a new peer group.

You need the encouragement, the lift. You get all of that and far more when you go to Financial Peace University. We've taught nearly 6 million people not only how to get out of debt, but get out of debt so that you can build wealth, so that you can be outrageously generous, so that you can change your family tree. You don't just get out of debt. We're getting out of debt so that it affects your marriage,

helps you win in every aspect of your life. It changes your parenting even. There is hope. You can get out of this mess. You can turn things around. If you want to learn more about Financial Peace University, just go to DaveRamsey.com. Click on FPU there.

Or call the Ramsey Concierge Team. They'll help you out. 888-22-PEACE. 888-227-3223. So my team was making fun of me at the break about crying over my pug. It's a worse story than that so i bought this pug for the kids it was a christmas present so it was a christmas pug named angel and i love bulldogs of all kinds anyway and so this little dog captured all of

our hearts my little boy at the time was like six years old and it was like his buddy and he's swapping spit with this thing it sleeps sleeps in his bed i mean this is like the family animal right about eight months old its back legs quit working right starts dragging its back legs around so we go the dock and the dock goes got spinal bifida uh we can spend twenty five hundred dollars you got a ten percent chance that this dog will walk again. It's hurting right now. It's going to continue to hurt the rest of its life. And I'm like, we can't do that. That doesn't, that's not. So I go home and cry because I know I've got what I've got to do

because I'm not spending $2,500 on this dog, number one. Number two, it's not fair to the little dog. It's hurting. And I'm not going to be selfish, and I'm'm not going to be selfish and i'm even not going to be selfish in the name of my little six-year-old little boy who's going to have his little heart broken and so you know we make the decision that this is what's got to happen so we call the breeder up that sold us and the breeder was just horrified and gave us another dog which was very nice and so i took my little boy over my kids and we picked out the

new he got to pick out the new dog and he got to name the new dog because angel was going to heaven so he names the pug heaven so i have a pug for 12 years named heaven so i'm out in the yard yelling heaven the neighbors think i'm pentecostal or something right come here heaven dadgummit come here you can't make this up i'm telling you so he grew up and was okay but i end up with a dog named heaven okay so well there you go but that's what happens when you have a big heart and you cry over animals and you love your animals and that's the whole story oh my gosh but you know it's just leadership you have to sometimes you have to be the daddy right sometimes you have to be the mommy and when you

you know the little animals you cannot make an animal suffer because you're so selfish and you're going to spend or you can't make your kid not be able to go to college because you'd spent ten thousand dollars on chemo for the german shepherd i mean and people do this stuff and i understand it's because you love your animals but guys there's a point that you violate common sense and wisdom here and if you say i don't love animals, then you did not listen to this. You didn't understand. I get it. It's one of the most easy things to be completely illogical over, completely unwise over.

But you've got to be grownups. We're not a bunch of children. And we have to make wise decisions that are good for the animals and good for the people that are involved and you know and based on where you are now if you're a billionaire and you want to spend ten thousand dollars on your dog okay i don't care you've got the money as long as you're not leaving the dog in pain because you're selfish but if it really fixes the dog and you can spend 10 grand on him and you're a billionaire sure that's fine if you want to do that that's okay you got to decide what you're going to do though and it's just hard

admittedly it's hard it's a difficult subject and that's why it activates so much hate from those of you who operate on an emotional level of a four-year-old. Because you cannot process these decisions without turning it into hate towards me. So, oh well, there you go. Open phones at 888-825-5225. Adam is with us. Adam is in Illinois. Hi, Adam. Welcome to the Dave is in Illinois. Hi, Adam.

Welcome to the Dave Ramsey Show. Hi, Dave. Thanks for taking my call. How are you doing today? Better than I deserve. What's up? Hey, I've got a question. I'm 29 years old.

I've been married just shy of six years. I've been listening to you for about a year now, and it wasn't until the new year that I finally decided, my wife and I finally decided, no, we're going to really get on this on these baby steps and tackle our debt situation. We've got just shy of 53,000 in student combined between student loans, car loans, personal loan.

And what we've decided to do is allocate all of my salary into paying off the mortgage and our debts. And then what she makes covers our gas, our utilities, our clothes, food, et cetera. With that said, we've got about an extra $300 a month on my side to pay for all of our debts. And I want to know if it'd be better to put that into the debt snowball, we're in baby step two, or with the rates, interest rates, the way they are right now, it'd be better to refinance from a 30-year into a 15-year mortgage. Okay. Well, to start with, the plan you're using is different than our plan. And what I would teach you to do is not what you're doing.

I would teach you to combine your incomes, and you have one income figure that is the combination of the two of you at the top of the page. And I wouldn't separate them out and say you're paying this and you're paying that. I would run this together, combined incomes. And then it may end up being that the equivalent of her salary is going to that or the equivalent of your salary is going to this. It may end up being that.

But what I would do is just pay the household bills out of that combined income. And any money we can squeeze out of the budget in baby step two, I would list all of my debts, smallest to largest, and I would attack them in that order and squeeze every dollar out. The way you're doing it, you're losing some efficiencies. Okay. Maybe I just wasn't clear enough. Oh, I heard you loud and clear.

I knew exactly what you said. No, I guess what I was trying to say is we do have two checking accounts. They're both joint checking accounts. We both have access to all of mine. But I would not allocate someone's salary to one thing and someone's salary to something else. I would not do that. Okay.

I would put them all in one thing, and out of that, I would make the decision to work the debt snowball straight down through there. I would not bother with refinancing your mortgage right now unless you have a mortgage in excess of 6% in your situation. I think you need to attack these debts instead right now to answer your original question. Hey, thank you for the call. We appreciate you joining us. Thanks to James Childs and Kelly Daniel in the booth. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host, and we'll be back.

Hey, it's Kelly, associate producer and phone screener for The Dave Ramsey Show. This episode is over, but if you heard about an event, product, or service and didn't have a chance to write it down, don't worry. We list everything you've heard about during this episode in the podcast show notes or head to DaveRamsey.com.