The Ramsey Show - App - My Wife Is Inheriting $3.6 Million...What Do We Do With It? (Hour 3)

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

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Live from the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, broadcasting from the Dollar Car Rental Studio, this is The Ramsey Show, where America hangs out to have a conversation about your life and your money. My name is Anthony O'Neill, host of the popular YouTube and podcast show, The Table, with your boy, Anthony O'Neill, that's me, and co-hosting with me is the one and only Christy Wright, number one national bestselling author and host of the Christy Wright Show. And also, you guys, I just have to say this because I'm excited about this hour because Christy has her academy opening up next week. Business Academy opening up next week.

And it's only open for four days, I think. Am I right? Yeah. We only open twice a year. So I get a new class of people

into my coaching group and then I walk with them and help them in their business for the next six months. So we won't open again until fall. What?

Yes. It's going to be fun. Open on Monday. Open on Monday. Where can they go? Businessboutique.com and we have a webinar, free webinar on Monday which is kind Monday. Where can they go? Businessboutique.com. And we have a webinar, free webinar on Monday,

which is kind of a sample of my coaching, but I'm going to teach them how to sell without feeling slimy. So how to actually turn fans into customers so you can get sales into your business and not feel bad about the process. So that'll be fun. You can go to businessboutique.com,

sign up and get your spot and your worksheet for that free webinar on Monday. And then yeah, the Academy's open. So budget, talk to your spouse, plan it, get in while you can. We close on Thursday. Man. And the price is amazing. You're actually on my show on Monday. I know. I'm so excited. And I'm telling y'all right now. I'm so excited about that one. You want to go over to my YouTube show because Christy is a fireball. This woman, when she talks about business, she gets fired up about it.

She knows what she's talking about. And I think the thing that I love about you, Christy, is you genuinely love helping people. Yes. And you want to help as many people as you can. And the price, you guys, is unheard of. Christy can do this much higher and scale down on numbers but she said nope i want to help as many ladies as i possibly can so um and she uh her and i get into an argument on my show on monday it's so fun i love arguing with you of all the people you're like at the top

of my favorite list it's all in good fun i hope people know that we pick at each other i hope people know it's all in good fun no i love people know that. We pick at each other. I hope people know it's all in good fun. I love doing a show with Christy. She's one of my favorites to do it, man, because we have such a good time. And so, hey, this hour we want to talk with you. If you are a young lady or even a brother and you have some business questions, our business expert

is in the building. We only have two of them, Dave Ramsey and Christy Wright, not Anthony O'Neill. And so Christy is here to take your phone calls. Now, if you want to talk about money, I'm the number one guy. Dave Ramsey is number two.

We can say what we want because we have the microphone. That's right. So give us a call, 888-825-5225, 888-825-5225. And to kick off this hour, Cindy is with us in Kansas. How can we help you, Cindy?

Hey, thanks for taking my call. I am trying to figure out a compelling reason to pay off our mortgage. We've been through all the baby steps. And so we have retirement savings. We have a cash reserve. I am working one more year before I retire and my husband is retired. And so I'm max funding my 401k until I retire. And we just refinanced our house. So our mortgage is 144,000 and the rate is two and a half percent. So we only really have a $600 a month mortgage. So I'm trying to figure out if we really should start to pay down the mortgage, and if so, what's the best way to do it? I hate to not max on my 401k, and we're about flush with cash flow, but I just needed some input. Now, what's your household income right now?

Well, I make $60,000 a year working part-time. My husband has some earned income, about $15,000 a year, but he also has $54,000 a year in guaranteed income with his pension and Social Security. Okay. So that's a total of what, $120,000 or so? Yep. Which will only go down by about $60,000 in a year. In a year, when you retire? $70,000.

When I retire, we'll still have his $54,000. Okay, cool. Now, any of the debt outside of the mortgage right now? Nope. Okay, cool. Love it. And you have, how much cash do you all have in your savings account? $86,000.

$86,000. I love it. I know it's more than we should, and I don't really need that there. Okay. But it's there right now. And total investments in retirement, what's you all's income there? We have about $450,000 in retirement, outside of that $86,000. Okay.

We have about $450,000 in retirement savings. Some of that is guaranteed income as well. Okay, cool. So do you have any kind of retirement checks coming in on top of this once you retire? No. Okay, cool. No, not yet. No.

So you're looking for... Unless we take it from our portfolio, but we're not planning on it until we need to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I totally, totally agree. Here's my thing. And I don't have nothing deep to tell you, Cindy, okay? And I'm not going to try and convince you with something deep. I'm just going to try and convince you with something deep. I was going to be real with you.

Having no payments, mandatory payments when you retire, that is all of the information that I need for myself. And I know you're saying, well, it's $600, Anthony. Well, that's $600, $1,200 every two months, $1,800 every quarter. That's a lot of money that if you and your husband can just pay this off and then you all would have, how much is the house worth? About $325,000. Yeah, $325,000.

Listen, if you keep the money inside of the $450,000, that's going to grow $325,000 in the house. You are close to being a millionaire. You all can pretty much live off the interest and the income that you all have coming in so if i'm in your shoes i am definitely i'm going to max out my 401k because you're absolutely right i'm actually going to sit

down and talk with a smart investor pro because with you just having a 600 mortgage payment you have way too much just sitting there not gaining compound interest. So I'm going to jump on a phone with a smart Vesta Pro and I'm going to figure out how can I catch up? How where can I invest a little bit more into maybe on a Roth IRA right now? So right now I'm thinking you and your husband only need maybe 15 grand in your savings account, you know, and then other money. I'm putting that in there so we can save and invest. So should we take a chunk of that money and put it towards the mortgage, or should we start paying towards the mortgage extra each month from that savings, from that cash? Real quick.

Is there one better way to do it? If you pay the chunk, then you're reducing the amount of interest that you're paying versus spacing out over months. Because while it's only $600 a month, you have a percentage of that that is interest only that you're just paying for no reason when you don't have to. And so if I'm you, and you do what you want to, but if I'm you, I take a chunk of that savings like Anthony's talking about and put that towards mortgage as a one-time thing. And make sure there's no penalties in whatever your mortgage agreement is. Usually there's no penalties in whatever your mortgage agreement is, usually there's not, then that immediately drops your principal down and then you don't have the interest is significantly lower on your remaining payments. Here's what I'm doing, Cindy, in your case. If I'm your husband, I'm saying, wife, let's take $15,000, part that in our savings account for emergencies.

Well, if I'm your husband. I'm saying wife. Yeah, yeah. If I'm your husband, I'm saying wife. Let's put $15,000 in the savings. That leaves us with $71,000 that we can put towards this $144,000. That leaves us with $73,000. And then let's focus on attacking that over the next year before you retire.

Now you retire with absolutely no major bills and you still have about $60,000, $70,000 in income coming in a year. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. So that's what I'm doing. And I am a man and I am a husband. This is The Ramsey Show. technology and digital products are changing every single day ramsey solutions is no exception we are working hard to produce shows and design products that will

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That's CAREERS to 33789. Christy Wright, Anthony O'Neill, Ramsey Personnel is taking over the Ramsey Show during this hour. And Ryan is in North Dakota, and he is kicking off this segment. Ryan, good afternoon. How can Christy and I help? Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my call. I guess I have a few questions.

I downloaded the EveryDollar app because I would like to get a budget going because I'm looking at getting some investments going, if you will say. I'm looking at getting like a disability. I guess it's not necessarily an investment, but I guess it can since I'm a small business owner. I'm looking at getting some disability and maybe some term life insurance and stuff like that. I have zero personal debt, but I have about $120,000 in business debt. And two of those loans are 0% interest. So I'm not too terribly worried about those ones. The other ones I should be able to pay off, I would say by August, um, based on the

season we're going to have here. So I'm trying to set up this every dollar, um, my budget, but my, my income is constantly changing because I'm a seasonal worker, you know, um, we do landscaping, snow removal and it's stuff space, you know, always changing from year to year income is whether it fluctuates or lowers. So on that app, can I go and plug in what my revenue is, if you will say, and will that app give me kind of an idea of what I can budget for investing into disability and life insurance and what I should be obviously contributing to my Roth IRA, $6,000 a year. I'm just trying to figure out my next steps as where I should be going, growing my net worth,

if you will say. Yeah, great question. I'll tell you one of the things that I'm with you, I love EveryDollar and because I've helped so many women and men start and grow businesses, one of the things I'd love to see in the future is a EveryDollar for business app. We just don't have it right now. So I know of a lot of business owners that have used the EveryDollar app for businesses. I just want to give you some tips on things to keep in mind. First and foremost, it wasn't designed for that. So it's not going to be perfect.

It's not going to be a perfect user experience for you. You're going to have to modify some headers and just the way that you interact with it because it wasn't designed specifically for business. But overall, it's going to accomplish what you want it to do. What I would recommend, though, is I would recommend you have separate budgets in every dollar, just like you have separate budgets in real life. And you should just keeping all of your business and personal finances separate. So you can just simply use a second email address to set up that every dollar account business and then have an every dollar account that you manage for your

personal. As far as the inconsistent income, you know, irregular income, you're just going to manage your budget one month at a time. And the way that you will create a business budget in every dollar from a revenue standpoint is based on projections and past years actuals. So you look at your last few years. If you know, oh gosh, every July, we have a huge July. Then when you make July's budget, you're going to account for we're going to pay off more debt that month. And you've got really low months.

There may be some months that you are barely making payroll or whatever that looks like with your expenses and you may not be paying hardly anything on your debt and you just you create the budget one month at a time based on the projections of what you think your business will do and you just modify update as you go based on the actuals in the year does that make sense absolutely yeah which is currently what i'm doing now i'm just not doing it on an app you know i just do it on on paper so i mean i guess i can just transfer that kind of broke down on paper as it is in the app so that's kind of i think what's what's confusing me is if you will say yeah and i will say when you start to input it it'll take a month or two

to get used to using it in this way but But once you do, it is such a better experience than paper. And because it has that category specifically for paying off debt, it's just going to be this awesome visual for you to remember. Here's how we're paying down. Here's the progress we're making. I think it's going to help you be even more motivated to pay it off. And then you can, to your point, allocate the amount of money that you want to set aside for disability for all these other expenses. You're just going to plug them in just like you do your personal expenses, like your cable bill, your phone bill, whatever. It's just going to be a separate app, a separate account, and those are separate expenses.

It sounds like you know what to do. I think it just is a matter of setting it up under a separate email address. Yeah, great question. Thanks for calling. That's awesome. Oh, man. Chrissy, I love watching you work. You it elizabeth is with us in tennessee good afternoon elizabeth how can christy and i help hey hey guys hey oh my gosh you guys are the dream team yes we won we know that thank you that's awesome how can i how can we help elizabeth yeah so christy i am i'm a

dietician and i went into this field to help people lose weight get healthy um i hated seeing the growing obesity trend in america and seeing all these uh diseases that really could maybe not be prevented, but at least helped if they were to lose weight, get healthy exercise. And that is why I went into this career, and I have ended up in long-term care. So it's totally the opposite of what I really wanted to do. So how in the world? I would love to one day to own my own practice. You know, how do I go from this job to private practice, helping people lose weight

and get to a overall better lifestyle? Well, there's so many different ways for you to do it, Elizabeth. And sometimes that can be exciting because you have lots of options. Sometimes that can be overwhelming because you have lots of options. Sometimes that can be overwhelming because you have lots of options. Even when you use the word practice, it sounds so official. Like that could be way, way, way off. You could literally start helping people right now on the side through a blog or podcast or consulting or courses. There's so many different mediums for you to do what you do and help people. And there's so many different ways to monetize it what were you so i have been on this side i have been i've been working uh with

a company that's like tell it's like teledoc um i've been working with them and it's just been so slow and i want to be able to move more from the job that I am right now to more of a more picking up more clients through that you're you're working for a company though you're not doing your own thing right yeah I'm not recommending you do your own thing and again it's not the only option it's not the only option but I'm saying if you want to use your skills experience and your why your passion for helping people get healthy you don't have to work for a company to do that. You can take your skills, your certifications, and you can help people through all these different mediums, which is what I'm saying. What I would recommend you do

is I would recommend you figure out what's the way that you love doing it the most. Is it face to face? Is it something where you would like to maybe create a course or create something that you just put out there and it continues to sell in the background? Do you like helping groups? Is it, you know, what are the different formats that you enjoy? And then look at the options

to help people through that format. I will, if you'll stay on the line, we will send you a copy of my book, Business Boutique. And this is a plan, very unintimidating Elizabeth so don't think oh I'm not business minded I just want you to read it even if you don't start your own business I just want you to read it and look at it I want to be business minded

it will help you explore your options of how that you can do what you want to do and help the people that you want to help and picking the right path for you and just because this is so fun I'm so excited you're here. Elizabeth, whenever you complete that, whenever you read the book, call me back and we will give you a membership to the Academy.

But you need to know what your business idea is because it's really for people already running their businesses. But call us back and I would love to have you in my coaching group because I want to help you explore your options, but then bring those options and those ideas to life. So if you'll stay on the phone, we will send you a copy of Business Boutique. Anthony, one of the things I see a lot is people, they don't consider how many different ways they could do what they do. Like this month, we're celebrating teachers.

You and I are teachers. Not in the traditional school sense, but that's what we teach. It's a different way to do it. We teach through courses. We teach through shows. We teach through podcasts and so on. So there's so many different ways for you guys to do what you want to do. And if you're not

happy in the way that you're doing it or the company you're working for, look at other ways to do what you love to do. Absolutely. Absolutely. I love how you just sewed into her. I hope you understand, Elizabeth. She said, once you do what you do, call her back. Okay? So she can get you inside the academy.

So call her. Look her up on Instagram. At Christy B. Wright. Christy, you said. Yes. At Christy B. Wright. And tell her. Remind her.

Hey, you said. That's right. Okay? Call her out. And if she don't do it, hit me up. I'll remind her. I would never. You watch it.

This is The Ramsey personalities. Taking over the Ramsey show today. And this has been the Ramsey show with the Christy Wright and the table show all in one. And it's so,

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and with the new promos they run every month you'll save even more use promo code ramsey to get the best deal rules and restrictions apply so chrissy today's question comes from janiyah in north carolina my home state i'm married with one child we earn eighty five thousand dollars annually and have two car loans. Goodness gracious. I'm pursuing a nursing degree but can't get approved for a private student loan. Good. There's a $1,000 balance on my account every eight weeks and I currently use credit cards to pay it. Can you help me find a better way to continue my studies i feel like

you're going to take this one so just go ahead and just get on your soapbox i am here for it oh my goodness eighty five thousand dollars a year and you have two car loans and you can't get approved for a private student loan good and you there's1,000 balance on your account every eight weeks. How do I currently use, and I currently use credit cards to pay for it. This is crazy. Can you help me find a better way

to continue my studies? Stop. Bottom line. You're racking up so much debt. One of the very first things, Christy, I teach people in this situation is to just stop.

Is to step back and take debt completely off the table. Yes. It's not even an option. It's to step back and take debt completely off the table. Yes. It's not even an option. It's not an option. I'm talking about student loans, private loans, credit cards, buy here financing or school financing. No, no, no.

Take debt completely off the table. And what you do is it forces you to look at different options right and this means if you're making eighty five thousand dollars annually let me tell you the problem is you got two car loans if you if you can get rid of those you can pay a thousand dollars every eight weeks right you know because i'm pretty sure your car notes by themselves was about twelve hundred dollars every month so i'm trying to calm down because you say you tried to get a private loan like you tried to

get it you try to get the most expensive loan at that this is ridiculous so here's what you need to do you need to pause you need to step back and say you know what hey I'm not going to do this anymore I'm not going to put myself into debt anymore take Take debt off of the table. You need to sit back and say, you know what? Hey, how do we fix this situation? Okay. You need to get these cars paid off. You need to get them out of your situation. That's going to free up some money right there for you to go to school, you know, and then also look at what are some different opportunities out there that can help pay for school. I want you to go into MyScholarly.com. Go to MyScholarly.com.

They have a lot of nursing programs, a lot of nursing scholarships out there. MyScholarly.com, that will help you out. But take that off of the table and start attacking these car loans. I would honestly sell them and go buy something cash so you can go to school. Yeah, just acknowledge that what you've been doing has not been working for you. So let's do something different. Digging yourself in a hole is not going to get you ahead. Digging further in a hole with a private loan

is not going to help the situation. You've got to do something different. And I love how you say that, Ayo. Take debt off the table. You get creative and you come up with completely new ways to do what you want to do when it's not an option. When it's an option, you'll take it. It's the easy route. You sign your name, you get a credit card. It feels like free money. It's not the easy route. It's a different, longer type of

hard. So we want you to have the discipline up front, to have the hard route of doing some research on how you can get scholarships and pay this debt off, and it will pay off in the long run. You've just got to do something different. This is not working for you. And I feel y'all. I feel your heat. You're saying to somebody, Anthony, she needs to go to school and so she can make more money. No, no, she's drowning in debt.

Well, Anthony, you're telling her to stop going to school, pay off her debt, then go back and pay cash for it. It's going to take her longer. Who cares? That's good. The average person, Christyy it takes them about 20 years to pay back their student loans 20 years to pay back their student loans there's 45 million student loan borrowers with 1.7 trillion dollars in student loan debt and y'all want me to

sit here and tell this lady to be a part of that stat no no this guy's shaking his head out there like tell him anthony i'm gonna tell him i get frustrated when i hear this this is the only To be a part of that stat. No. This guy is shaking his head out there. Tell him Anthony. I'm going to tell him. I get frustrated when I hear this. This is the only thing I got to do. I'm going to make more money. No. I interviewed and met with a dentist.

A dentist with $900,000 in student loan debt. $900,000. What kind of dentist is he? He's a broke one. He's a miserable one. And no miserable one and no stop stop stop stop step back get rid of these car loans stop applying for things take a year two years to pay off this stuff you all are making good money right now annually and if it takes you four years to complete this program i I would rather you,

I would rather see you work and work your behind off for four years in a struggle for the next 20. Yeah. Bottom line. That's good. Bottom line. That's good. Oh man.

Okay. We're going to go out to David and talk to him out in the beautiful state of Florida. Good afternoon, David. How can we help? Hey guys. Thank you for taking my call.

Yeah. Sure. So I recently, like like like two weeks ago found out that i'm going to be a dad congratulations thank you thank you and and for some reason a video from ramsey came up at some point and i started looking into all this and it got it caught my interest. And I just want to, I didn't know I was such a normal person. I thought I was doing good, but it turns out that I'm very normal. And I just want advice on what, what should I do?

Because I, I think the baby's due in December. And I think if I go like gazelle intense, like I've heard in the past two weeks, I can pay off my debt except for the house and maybe get three to six months. But I also want to do this in a healthy way for my wife. I mean, she's pregnant, so it's going to be an interesting time. So I just want to make it the right way. I don't know if you have any advice for that. By when? I'm sorry, you said you could pay off all your debt

and get your emergency fund by when? By the time the baby's here. I think I can do it by before the baby is born. Yeah. Well, first of all, congratulations on becoming a dad. And I'm so glad you're here. You're new to us. You stumbled upon the video, and two weeks in,

you're calling in to get yourself prepared. So well done for calling. I'm just, I'm so glad you're here. And I think you have a great plan. The one thing I would take into consideration is how much, what kind of savings do you have right now? Do you have anything? Probably like six, six thousand.

Okay. I don't have, I don't have much. And in terms of depth, I have like 30K. Okay. Plus the house, but. Okay. I don't have much. And in terms of debt, I have like $30,000. Okay. Plus the house, but that's what I have. What's your income?

Because if you can get it all paid off by December, you must be making some good income. I'm doing, between me and my wife, $120,000 a year. Okay. Cool. Okay.

So here's the one thing I'll say, and Ayo, you tell me if this is not the right advice, because this is what I would do, and again, I'm not as black and white on stuff. Sometimes I like to just find a happy medium on things. Because your wife is pregnant and there always

could be unexpected medical bills and you don't want that to be added stress when you're already worried about your wife, your baby, etc. I still want you to attack that debt. I think you can. I think you can get gazelle intense. You can sacrifice.

You can get it paid off by the time the baby's here. I just would not recommend you drop your savings down to $1,000 right now in the process. Like we normally tell people, that extra cushion could be necessary in your specific situation and season that you've got a baby on the way. And the whole pregnancy process can be expensive with doctors and that type of thing. And you just want a little bit more peace of mind if anything were to happen that you've got that extra cushion. That's what I would say. Ayo, I know we always say $1,000, but you're the real money guy. Great advice, Chrissy.

You're spot on. Real quick, Dave, before we go to break, man, how's your health insurance? Is it pretty good? Yeah. I did the research, what it covers and what it's been, and it's pretty good. Yeah. So, man, do this. Put four more thousand dollars with that $6,000

I give you $10,000. It's a good cushion to just cover some medical bills along this journey. And then, yes, go ahead and spend the rest and attack this debt. If you can get that $30,000 paid off within the next six, seven months, great. But I agree with Christy. Make sure you have at least $10,000 in that savings account to just give you some cushion just in case some medical bills come up.

But, man, again, congrats, my guy. Congratulations. That is awesome. This is The Ramsey Show. Today's scripture comes from Psalsalms chapter 50 verse 15 call upon me in the day of trouble i will deliver you and you shall glorify me les brown once said christy which i love this quote when life knocks you down try to land on your back because if you can look up, you can show enough get up. I love that. If you can look up, you can get up.

I like it. I love that. John is with us in Fort Worth, Texas. Good afternoon, John. How can Christy and I help? Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on. Yeah.

Sure. So my wife is about to receive a pretty large sum of money, and we would like some advice on how she can best utilize that to set up her future and potentially our future as a couple. Cool. Great. How much is she about to receive? About $3.6 million. $3.6 million. Okay, John, you're not messing around. Okay. That's incredible. I mean, my, my, my, my, my. Where's she inheriting the money from, if you mind me asking? She is a part owner. Well, her mother was a part owner of a business that her family operates. And when she passed years back, her sister and her split the the ownership that her mother had in that business.

And they just sold that business. Wow. That's amazing. So we're looking at three point six million dollars. All right. Tell me about you all's financial situation. How much debt do you have? We just have a mortgage that has about $132,000 left.

$132K left on it. Okay. And what's y'all's combined income a year? Our combined income before the dealership sold is about $300,000. $300,000. All right. Sounds good. And then what are, where, let me ask you this question.

I don't even know that question. I was going to ask you what were some of the things that you all need, but I think right now, how old are you two? I'm 27 and she's 24. Okay, cool. So here's what I'm going to recommend clearly going to pay off the house when you get the 3.6 million dollars you're going to pay off the house and even

so if y'all want to upgrade the house I mean I'll have a problem with that but the key thing here is you need to get connected with one of our smart best of pros okay and you need to get connected with someone that's going to have a teachable spirit because right now you all have the opportunity to really make some major major moves and there's

only two things i'm like dave that i only invest in that's mutual funds and that's real estate and so i'm getting with a smart investor pro to see okay hey how do we invest this money what do we do how do we make her money? What do we do? How do we make her mother proud of this? Because she left it for us. And then also there's nothing wrong with spending a little bit of it. And so I would just definitely get with one of our smart investor pros to see, okay, how can we invest this? And then you and your wife sit down and talk about, okay, what do we want? Do we want to go get a bigger home for our future family? Is there something we want to do as a nice vacation?

Do we want to invest into maybe a small business? I don't know. Do we want to invest into some real estate? Just really have a good conversation, but definitely get with one of our smart investor pros that will teach you and educate you on how to win with this money and to set you and your kids up to win. John, when is she going to get it? It should be within the next couple of weeks here. Okay. So a pretty, I guess, immediate thing I would do is I would get with your tax professional.

We also have endorsed tax professionals to help you know if there's certain ways that you can manage the money to reduce the tax burden that you're going to have on you from that. So that's in addition to in combination with the investment conversation. But I would just that's a such a large amount of money that it will make a massive difference how you treat it and the tax implication from that. So I would do that as well. But I mean, congratulations. That's amazing. And you there's so many options for what you can do. And if you do it right, if you invest correctly, even in addition to upgrading your house or anything you want to do with it like that, it will turn into a lot more than that really fast. So that's incredible. You guys are an awesome spot. Yeah. Yeah,

absolutely, man. Thank you, guys. Hey, no problem at all. Just so you know, when you get it, sit it. Just let it sit there for a little bit. Go out there and get some wise counsel. Don't be in a rush to spin it. Get the wise counsel. Have the heart and the ears of a student, and I'm pretty sure you all will be well. Daniel's in the beautiful city of Raleigh. Good afternoon.

How can we help? Hey, how are you doing? Really appreciate your guys' faith and your guys' focus on finances and how you're helping so many people. Thank you. So I want to thank you for that first. Yeah. Thanks. How can we help, man? Yeah.

Yeah, so I'm kind of young and kind of growing in this financial knowledge. I wanted to kind of know how to start off my finances because I'm a graduate student at UNCW and I'm 26 and I have some debt from school, but I kind of wanted to know how to start off my finances in terms of the retirement fund and in terms of like what I need to start before I get to the workforce. Yeah, yeah.

I think the number one thing that you need to do, and I want to say this, man. Daniel, how old are you? I'm 26. Yeah, 26. This is the most important question you can ask when it comes to your money. What do I need to do right? When you can be

humble enough to ask the question, man, that's phenomenal. You're going to be a bright, bright, bright young man in the future. The number one thing, man, you can do right now with your finances is invest into yourself. So how much debt are you coming out with outside of college? So I would say around $45,000. I think that's around what I have. Okay. Do you have anything in the savings right now? I have $2,000 in savings.

Okay. $2,000 in savings. Okay, cool. And then when you graduate, what do you think your ballpark income will be? So I'm going to try to go into the biotech field. Okay. I think that it's going to be around $65,000 to $80,000. Yeah, I'm thinking more so right around at 75 to 85 range as well. All right. So let's just say 75 to be on the lower side on my end. All right. And so here's the thing, man, uh, what you graduate in college, the best thing you could

do right now is to attack this debt. The best thing you can do right now is for the next three years. I'm even thinking maybe two and a half years. If you really, really work hard is to live like you're still in college is to take this $75,000 and pay off the $45,000. So this way you're debt free. By the time you turn 28 and a half, then you're going to put three to six months of your expenses inside of a savings account. So this way by 30 years old, you're debt free with some money in account. And by then, I think you're going to be making about 85, 90, stretching to 100. So now at 30 years old, you're making six figures.

You are debt free. You have a fully funded emergency fund. And Daniel, let me tell you this, man. A study just came out that nearly 57% of the people in America, Christy, can't even afford to pay an emergency that's up to $600. 57%. So the fact that you get out of debt, the fact that you have at least three months in your savings account,

man, you are ahead of half of your friends. And that's what I want to see you do at your young age now you're going to be tempted when you get this check uh you can be tempted to look good and you know um you sound like you're a single brother and so any kind of single brother that has a good head on his shoulder making a little bit of money the ladies are coming you know the ladies are coming and so you know keep your head on right uh so that way when you do find your wife at least you added that of debt don't look at me kristen because you know i'm telling the truth you know but i want to see you win man and

so that's what i would recommend kristen you have any suggestions no i love what you said about the paycheck because you get this income it's like oh it sounds like so much money it feels like so much money i've never had this much money you don't you're right you don't have that much money because you got this debt you get rid of this, and then you can enjoy that income in a different way. But right out of the gate, pretend like you don't have that. Live on hardly anything, and you'll get it knocked out so much faster. And then you do get to enjoy that income, and it's a good income. You will have earned it.

You just got to get this out of the way first. You want a wife down the road, Daniel? Of course. Only God-fearing women. I like that. Yes, sir. So let me tell you, man, and I can say this on the Ramsey Show. I think the coolest thing and the best thing I think you could do for your future wife is to think about her now.

Is to be a good steward of your single season and say, you know what? I'm going to get myself prepared for the future. And doing that by paying off your debt, doing that by being intentional with every decision and every choice you made today is setting you up to win. And I know your future wife would be like, thank you so much for thinking about me when you didn't know me. Yeah, I like that. I feel like I'm about to go to church. Let me get off this show, y'all. Christy, thank you so much for rocking with me.

This is so fun. James Child and Kelly for producing this amazing show. And America, thank you all for listening to Christy and myself, Anthony O'Neill, right here on The Ramsey Show. Keep it live. We'll see you here real soon. Have a friend or family member that needs a daily dose of Ramsey advice in their life? Let them know about the Ramsey Call of the Day podcast.

It's a quick hit of advice about life and money in under 10 minutes. Check out the Ramsey Call of the Day podcast wherever you listen to podcasts.