The Ramsey Show - App - Proof That Anyone Can Be a Millionaire (Hour 2)

Episode Date: August 28, 2018

The show about you

Live from the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, 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. So 30 years ago, after I went broke, I started studying how to handle money. Studying what the Bible said about money, because it was a new thing to me. I was a new Christian. I was a baby Christian. I met God on the way up. I got to know Him on the way down. And so I thought, I better find out what His love letter to me says about money, and what it says about everything else, for that matter.

But I started studying what the Bible says about money and i started talking to old rich people to ask them how to handle money now i didn't want to talk to young rich people i'd been him and i didn't want his opinion old people that had made money and kept money that's who i wanted to talk to i didn't want get rich quick i had already been down that road and lost everything i was a millionaire by the time i was 26 and then broke by the time i was 28 and bankrupt with a brand new baby a marriage hanging on by a thread and a new toddler so i started coaching people and i would show them exactly what to do i would lay out their budget with them. I would sit and talk to them and coach them and say, this is what we do. I would call their creditors and get the deal set

up so that they could pay the payments. We lay out the budget. It balanced. All they had to do was go home and do it, and they didn't do it. I'd run into them six weeks later. How you doing, man? I figured they're going to be doing great. We filed bankruptcy. You filed bankruptcy? Why? I just showed you what to do. I got really frustrated. So I started studying in the field of counseling. I'm not a professional counselor, but I started studying in that field and saying, okay, what is working to cause people to win? Because I started figuring out it's not an information problem. It's an information and inspiration problem personal

finances 80 behavior it's only 20 head knowledge and so then we put together a little class and i start teaching it with an overhead projector and a bad suit that little class later become known became known as financial peace university and when i first started coaching people and started the class i was just saying get out of debt first thing you do is you get out of debt before you do anything else you got to get out of debt because if you don't have any payments you're gonna have money to save money to invest money to give you got to get out of debt there wasn't any baby steps baby step was get out of debt and then save and invest that was the baby steps well when do i do this well when do i do that when do i do this when do i do that all these questions kept coming up coming

up coming up and so i said well first step is we're going to pay off all the debt except the house and we're going to use the debt snowball that's the first step well then i would have people get halfway through their baby step what we now call baby step to get halfway through their debt snowball and you know the hot water heater would go out in the house, and they're like, we don't have the money to fix the hot water heater, so we're going in debt. Well, you're trying to get out of debt. You can't get out of a hole while you're digging out the bottom,

so that didn't work. So we added a baby step, and we started calling them the baby steps because we started realizing people, if they're going to change behaviors, need to see a clear path. And it has worked astronomically. Over 5 million people through Financial Peace University now, millions and millions of you listening, over 6 million total money, makeover books sold, all about the baby steps. And baby step one, as you know, is to save $1,000. Baby step two, that's your starter, beginner, emergency fund.

I didn't used to have that on there, but you need that little bit of pad in case something small happens, you don't lose hope and fall off the wagon and walk away from the whole thing in disappointment. You don't throw up your hands and go, well well i tried that stuff and it didn't work now you can just fix that one thing and then there we go right and then you get back to it thousand dollars maybe step one starter emergency fund then once you've done that and you should do that like in a month have a garage sale pull, pull money out of savings, whatever you do, immediately put $1,000. Then, you start your debt snowball, and that's listing your debts, everything but your house, smallest to largest, pay minimum payments on everything but the little one, attack the little one, work your way right down that list.

You see, you shouldn't have to live paycheck to paycheck. You work too hard to be broke. And you shouldn't have to live paycheck to paycheck. You work too hard to be broke. And you don't have to. And I know some of you made some mistakes. Well, so have I. I've got a Ph.D. in DUMB. That's what qualifies me to teach this show. I've done every stupid thing you can do.

But I started noticing the stupid things, and I quit doing them. And the fewer stupid things I do, the wealthier I get when it comes to money. Hello? The fewer stupid things I do in any area of my life, the better that area gets. Hello? Winners never quit. Yes, they do. They quit doing stupid stuff pretty regularly.

You find stupid stuff and you stop doing it. Stuff that's not working in your life, stop doing it. And you've heard me talk about these seven baby steps for decades now. They work every time for everyone. Now, here's what's happened. See, I've been doing this so long that we've had, it usually takes about a month to do baby step one, $1,000, baby step two. Most people do in 18 to 24 months.

So in under two years almost everyone is debt free except their home now you may have an exception but almost everyone's debt free except their home if they get after it with gazelle intensity and focus and deep sacrifice then it takes about another three or four months to finish off your emergency fund and then you're on to baby that's baby step three at three to six months of expenses then you're on to start savings 15 of your income into retirement start your kids college and then you're on to baby. That's maybe step three at three to six months of expenses. Then you're on to start savings, 15% of your income into retirement, start your kids college. And then you start working to pay your house off. Now what's happening is all these years later, millionaires are popping up everywhere.

And we start doing a millionaire theme hour. And then it got us intrigued. And so we hired an outside research firm to research non-Dave millionaires, meaning people that have not followed me, and we used that same research structure, which was a detailed, you know, properly done research project, to study Dave millionaires, meaning people that do know who I am and follow me, and give me some of the credit for them being a millionaire. In other words, although I didn't do it. They did it. And now we finished the largest study on millionaires ever done, over 10,000 millionaires,

and the number one thing they agreed on was getting out and staying out of debt. Our research shows that the vast majority of millionaires never had a penny of credit card debt, and if they did, they hadn't used a credit card, hadn't carried a balance on a credit card in decades. Most of them never had a car loan, or if they did, it was in their early 20s and they got rid of it. They never borrowed money for family or friends, they never took out student loans, and they

live on less than they make. So, if you're willing to do the work, you follow the stuff we teach, you don't need the government to produce a living wage for you. You get your butt out there and work. Get up, leave the cave, kill something, and drag it home. Socialism has never caused people to prosper. And the living wage movement is a socialism movement. So, Dave, I'm living proof you can come from a poor family with terrible money habits and win.

Owl, $1.5 million net worth. Dave, I've been a single mom for 27 years. I've built my wealth almost all during that time. And $1 million net worth. Financial Peace University is right now on sale for 20% off. And you can get the Everyday Millionaire book included on pre-sale. So you need to check both of these out. This causes all of this to happen.

Everyday Millionaire is how ordinary people build extraordinary wealth and how you can too. And Financial Peace University all on sale right now at DaveRamsey.com. Listen up, my friends at Churchill Mortgage. Want to put some cash back into your pocket? Go to ChurchillMortgage.com today and enter the $3,000 end-of-summer giveaway. Whether you're buying a new home or evaluating your current mortgage, you know I'm going to recommend talking to Churchill first. I trust these folks to save you money. I'm talking thousands.

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NMLS ID 1591. NMLSconsumeraccess.org. Equal housing lender 761 Old Hickory Boulevard. Redwood, Tennessee 37027. Roberto is with us in Pittsburgh. Hey, Roberto, how are you? Good. How's my Christmas, Dave? Better than I deserve, sir.

How can I help? So my wife found you about a year ago. We just had our third child this year, and she was kind of bummed that she hasn't been able to stay home with the kids. So she wanted to get us out, and we have a pretty big hole. But in the past year, we've been able to pay off five loans. We still got a long way to go. My question I have, though, in doing ours from lowest to highest, I know you say about doing save the house for last.

No, the house is not in that list. It's in baby step six. Right, right, right. That's what I mean, saving it. Okay. When you have a student loan that's $20,000 more than your house, would you pay your house off first? No.

Pay the student loan off first. Always a student loan. Yeah. Yeah, we're going to get rid of all debt that's not a mortgage debt first and baby step two and knock it out as fast as you can. How much have you paid off already, Roberto? So we did about $20,000 in the past year. Great.

And what's the balance on the student loan? Just one of her student loans is $82,000. Another one she has is $28,000. Okay, good. Well, the $28,000 is the next one. You just list your student loans. It's not by category. It's by individual loan amounts.

Okay, so 28 is your next one then, it sounds like, and you're going to knock that out pretty quick, and then you've got to get through the 82, yeah. What's your household income? We make about $100,000. Okay, good. All right. Well, if I were in your shoes making that kind of money,

I would want to do more debt reduction than $20,000 a year. $20,000 out of $100,000 leaves $80,000. I think you can do more than that. As a matter of fact, I know you can. People that call in here do it all the time, and over the last 30 years of working with people, they do it all the time. So I would tell you to turn the heat up you've had some success very well done um i would just say let's take what's working and turn the heat up on it and let's because what the reason you're calling really is it's like this mountain of student loan debt is ominous it's just overwhelming it's like

i paid off 20 but i got a hundred to go and at this rate i'm gonna be six more years on this well i don't want that's what i say i don't like the rate i want you to crank up and uh crank down the lifestyle even more um make you know even more sacrificial choices and throw more and more and more at because here's the thing if you can get this to 40 000 a year instead of 20 000 it's done in two and a half years. Now that starts to be more reasonable, and you can see the light at the end of the tunnel then that's not an oncoming train.

Bob's in Detroit, Michigan. Hey, Bob, how are you? Great. Thanks for taking my call, Dave. Sure. What's up? I'm debt-free, thanks to you, and just retired this year. And I've been with a financial advisor for about four years now,

and my average rate of return, he just sent me a report, is like 9.5%. But they changed their fee structure, where they're charging me 1.35% of my money. So I figure I'm losing money over the long term, based on what I'm making. His fees are eating up more of my money than I'm really making. So what should I expect to pay a financial advisor? Well, most of the people are moving to that model.

It's called a managed fee model, a managed account model or whatever. And they're charging a flat. You're right. Over the lifetime, it is more expensive than just paying a commission up front when you do a buy. Because, for instance, if you take $100,000 and you get charged 5.75% on a typical mutual fund buy, you know, that's 5.75%, right? But if you take $100,000 and you don't get charged when you make a buy, but every year you get one, 1.3,

well, it doesn't take but five years to get up to where you were, right? Everything after that, you're going in the hole on these fees. That doesn't bother me much. If you're earning enough because of their management that it justifies them. Okay, let me give you an example. Let's look at it this way. Let's say that without them, you made 10%. With them, you made 12%.

Well, they paid for themselves then, didn't they? Yep. And that's what I want to see. I want to see that you show me that you're making me more than the s&p by what you cost because i can buy the s&p without you in an index fund but if you can make me more than an s&p by the way my guy does have that and um you know our smart investor pros know how to look at a trend line and say, well, these mutual funds have outperformed the standard and poor.

That's the only reason that anybody would pay an advisor is to help pick out funds that are going to outperform the market and to give you advice when times are good or when times are bad and, you know, to help you kind of stay on the track. It's worth all that too so i know a lot about mutual funds a lot about investing and i use an advisor and so i i you know i'm not hypocritical when i recommend that folks use an advisor uh and if you want to sit down and talk to some others and do some interviewing with them that's not a bad thing to do ever so often. Uh, especially if you kind of got this, uh, head tilt you've got right now, just click on smart Vester at Dave Ramsey.com.

Put in your info. It'll drop down a list of the people we recommend in your area. We call them smart Vester pros. I'm not in the business, but this is the people I recommend. One of those smart Vester Pros is who I actually use. And, again, charges me a commission when I buy a fund. And so most of them, though, are moving to this managed account type process that you're talking about. And it's okay as long as they justify their existence.

Chris is with us in Raleigh, North Carolina. Hi, Chris. Welcome to the Daveave ramsey show hey dave thanks for taking the call sure what's up so um about three years ago my wife and i we got out of debt um and we since then we've had two children and we recently moved to the raleigh area and sold our home uh and made a decent profit from it and we're going to be looking at buying another home soon. Good. I was wondering, would it be best to take all of our earnings

that we got from that home sale and put it into another home or take a 20% deposit and put that down and take the remaining and put that in the savings? Well, my goal is to get completely debt-free. So the best way to do that is throw it all at the house because I want to get the house paid off. I'm assuming you have no other debt. Correct.

And you would be on what we call, if you have an emergency fund of three to six months of expenses independent of this discussion, I'd have that, and then I'd be putting 15% of my income into retirement, and that's what we call baby step four. That comes out of your income, though, not out of this lump sum. And so I'm throwing everything at the house, putting the house on a 15-year fixed, and then turning around and saying, you know, how can we knock this house out as fast as we can? Yeah, and we were on baby step six until we moved.

Yeah, you put yourself back there, and you wouldn't have extra money sitting in savings if you're in Baby Step 6, because Baby Step 6 is throw all extra money at the house. Okay. Right? And so let's just get back on that. And in a sense, this is a different version of a Baby Step 6 question, but that's very much where you are. So, good question. Thanks for joining us.

Gerald's on Instagram. Dave, should I be looking to buy a house while I still have student loans? I don't feel good with paying rent and throwing my money away. Well, you are throwing your money away. It is, you know, you're paying to rent. So you need to keep in mind when you're renting, you want to rent the least expensive thing that is reasonable while you get these student loans paid off.

But, no, you should be debt-free, have your emergency fund in place, plus a down payment when you buy. If you buy a house broken in debt, that house is not going to be a blessing. It's going to be a curse. I want you to get a house. I don that house is not going to be a blessing it's going to be a curse i want you to get a house i don't want your house to get you so get the student loans cleaned up rent as cheap as you can to cause that to happen as fast as possible right because we're camping here that's all renting is but it's not a way of life we're passing through we're not staying here this is the the Dave Ramsey Show. One question I get asked all the time is, do I need life insurance?

Listen, the whole point of life insurance is to replace your income for someone who counts on you. So if you have a spouse or you have kids, yes, you need term life insurance. It's the only way to protect them until you're out of debt and have built up your wealth. You're only digging a deeper hole if you waste money on cash value plans since it robs you of the ability to make real progress. And that's why I send you to Zander Insurance, and I have for 20 years. That's where I get all my insurance, and they only offer the plans I recommend. It is not expensive.

It's not complicated. And Zander will be there as your guide every step of the way. Visit Zander.com or call 800-356-4282. You need to get this taken care of. I can give you the advice and I can tell you where to go, but it's really up to you to take that important step to get your family protected. That's Zander.com or 800-356-4282. Magnolia is calling from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Welcome, Magnolia. Hi.

I see on my screen you're debt-free. Congrats. Thank you. Well done, well done. So, how much have you paid off? All right, so I did the math, and it was like something like $64,500 in like 20 and a half months. Good, way to go. And your range of income during that time?

I was married at the time, so we made like $65,000 to $110,000. Okay, married at the time. So you've divorced during this time? Yes. Okay, how long ago was that? We filed at the end of March. It was finalized on the 5th, and then I think like on the 12th, we made our final payment. Wow.

Okay. So it was all part of that then. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's okay. Thank you. What kind of debt was the $64,000? Like $34,000 was student loans. $14,000 was his car.

$5,000 was mine. And then $10,000 or so or more was like credit cards. Okay. All right. So what started the process 20 months ago to get you out of debt? Can I just say I'm like super excited to talk to you. I'm like a huge, huge fan. And like during this time, you're like all that I listened to when I was at the gym when i was in the car like anytime that i wasn't at work or at home basically so i'm just like super super excited and grateful and blessed to be able to like speak to you well we're honored

to have you we're proud of you very well done what started the process 20 months ago for you thank you um basically well i had a friend my best friend yavi in 2007 she told me about you um but i was like straight out of high school and i was like no i can't be that free come on Basically, well, I had a friend, my best friend, Yavi, in 2007. She told me about you. But I was straight out of high school, and I was like, no, I can't be debt-free. Come on, everybody has debt, right? And I didn't have a vehicle to become debt-free. In 2016, May of 2016, I got my master's in social work. And so I finally had hope. And then in August, my ex-husband Shannon, one of his friends from work,

let him borrow, I guess, Financial Peace University, the DVDs. And so he brought them home, and we listened to it. We watched them and all. And then, like, yeah, I guess we, like, slowly, you know, reluctantly, little by little, kind of, like, started working the plan and then just kind of gained more momentum over time. Okay, cool. Well, good. good well i'm glad you got there so um what do you tell people the key to getting out of debt is i think a lot of things for me it was um the key to getting out of debt i mean figure out like you said like figure out your why figure out your vision and kind of keep that you know

like at the forefront. Because if you don't know why you're doing something, you can't really keep the momentum, I think. I would say get serious early. We didn't. Like we started off making like maybe like $1,000 payments. And by the end, we were like making $6,000 payments. Right. Wow.

Okay, cool. So you were knocking it out. So what happened to your marriage? It was an unhealthy relationship. Wow. Okay, cool. So you were knocking it out. So what happened to your marriage? What happened to my marriage? It was an unhealthy relationship. There was, you know, like emotional abuse. Oh, okay. Yeah, I had to leave.

Yeah, wow. And still were able to pull off the getting out of debt together. That's wild. Yes, and co-parenting successfully. Yeah, wow. Very cool. Well, congratulations. I'm proud of you. Well done.

Thank you. I would also say surrounding myself like others. I didn't actually know anybody in person who was on the same page. But listening to the show kind of provided that. I'm like, okay, these strangers all over the country are doing it. I can do it. I'm listening to their stories. I can do it.

There you go. Very cool. Well, I'm glad you plugged in. I'm glad YouTube and all that stuff caused that to work for you. you're doing it i can do it you know i'm listening to the stories i can do it there you go very cool well i'm glad you plugged in i'm glad youtube and all that stuff caused that to work for you very cool we got a copy of chris hogan's book for you retire inspired we want that to be the next chapter in your story that you not only are debt free but now you move into millionaire world and uh outrageously generous as you go along so So very, very well done, Magnolia. All right, Magnolia, Albuquerque, New Mexico, $64,500 paid off in 20 months, making $65,000 to $110,000. Count it down.

Let's hear a debt-free scream. One, two, three. I'm that free! This is how it's done. Look at that. I love it, I love it, I love it. Very, very cool. Michelle is with us in Alexandria, Virginia.

Hi, Michelle. How are you? Hi, Dave. How are you? Better than I deserve. What's up? So we are Alaska residents. My husband's military.

And in the beginning of October, we get the oil dividends, the PSB money. Right. From Alaska. We have some debt. We've made some stupid decisions. I've tried to get my husband on board with buying the day break and going with it, but we're just really starting baby step number two. So I'm trying to figure out, kind of doing it on my own. When I list everything, lowest amount to highest amount.

If I take the money we get from Alaska and pay off debts, I can pay off three of our debts, but I'll only free up $212, where I could take the same amount of money and have a little bit left over and free up $486. We're not trying to free up money. We're trying to get out of debt. Get out of debt. Okay. So we're listing the debts, smallest to largest,

and attacking them with any money we can find from any source in that order. So let me tell you this. Okay. You and your husband being on the same page, you and your husband both being excited about this, which is not where you are right now, is 20 times more important than this single check you got. Right.

It's a big deal. Yeah. The probability of your success financially is much more dependent upon the two of you learning to work together, having shared goals and shared excitement, and really pulling together. It's much more important. It's a bigger data point on whether or not you're going to be successful with your money than whether or not you get increased income from any source

so yeah list your debts smallest to largest do the plan work them in that order but the plan is the two of you working together that's the plan j Jessica is in Pittsburgh. Hi, Jessica. How are you? I'm great. How are you, Dave? Better than I deserve. What's up?

So my husband and I are on baby steps four, five, and six. Good. And I've got the itch to be a stay-at-home mom while my kiddos are still little. They're three and one right now. But we feel like money would be a little too tight and it'd be a little bit of a too much of an adjustment if we didn't have my income. So we'd like to pay off the mortgage first. We'd go about $85,000 on it and we feel like we can pay it off in 18 to 20 months if we just put all of my income towards there basically plus daycare costs okay can we temporarily skip step five for this this time to just get yeah get the mortgage taken care of yeah

for 18 months when you got babies okay yeah because you know the point is are they going to not go to college because of this and the answer is no of course they're going not go to college because of this? And the answer is no. Of course they're going to go to college. You know, you've got plenty of time to do college. So the point of baby step, now I do not want you to stop your 15%. Okay. Baby step four, 15% of your income going into retirement. And then let's attack, because baby step four, that's set. We do that, 15% of our income.

While we're doing that, we simultaneously do, we look at kids we simultaneously do we look at kids college we look at the house and we say okay most of the time people are saying i'm gonna start doing something on the college i'm gonna you know set up a monthly plan or something and everything above that i'm gonna throw out the house and the typical person pays off their house in about seven years okay what you're saying is is yours is within reach so i'm gonna intentionally put zeros on baby step five for a very short period of time. And then baby step six is going to zero. Oh, wait a minute.

When baby step six zeros, that means we're on baby step seven. And now we just address college and retirement out of our wealth, right? Because this forces you to, once your house is paid off, that's baby step seven. Perfect. So you're 18 months from baby step seven, and then you're going to be putting at least 15% into retirement, and you're going to be luxuriously addressing this college issue to where any lost ground you had in 18 months is caught right up.

If that's your plan, I'm with you. Does that make sense? That makes sense. Just wanted to double check. Get after them. And you get to live your dream, being home with the babies, which was your dream. Very good. I love it.

Love it. Love it. What are you doing? I'm living the dream. This is the Dave Ramsey Show. Okay, I need you to listen to this, because one normal routine that everyone does can cause total chaos in your life. Folks, I'm talking about the simple act of using Wi-Fi. When you're on Wi-Fi anywhere in public or at home, you're at risk of hackers easily seeing every site you visit and search you're doing online. It doesn't matter if you're doing it on your cell phone or your laptop.

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That's hotspotshield.com slash Dave. You can be secure in seconds. Download Hotspot Shield today. Abraham is with us in San Diego, California. Hey, Abraham, how are you? I'm doing well, Dave. How are you doing? Better than I deserve. What's up? Okay, I've recently started listening to your show, and I haven't really gone through the steps exactly, but I think I'm through them.

You know, I've got a savings of about $300,000, me and my wife. Good. Putting away 12% to 15% in retirement. Mm-hmm. You know, we've got the kids' college funds going. Okay. We're out of debt. Mm-hmm.

And the only debt that we have left is our investment, our rental properties, and our home mortgage. Good. So, you know, which one should I do first? What do you owe on the rental properties? One of them about $250,000 and the other one about $275,000. What about your home? About $300,000. Okay.

Those are all fairly close. And, you know, so what I'm going to do is uh number one you're debt free everything but the home number two you need to have an emergency fund of three to six months of expenses that's baby step three then you're putting 15 away doing kids college which you said you're doing already then any extra money which one do i throw it at the uh rentals or the home i'm going to throw it at my home first, given that they're fairly similar in balances. And I do that from a very worst-case scenario analysis, a risk management analysis, meaning if the world came to an end and I got in a real pickle and I was going to lose something,

what would I want to lose, rentals or my house? Well, the rentals. Gotcha. So I'm going Rentals or my house? Well, the rentals. Gotcha. So I'm going to pay off my house first. And I don't think that's going to happen, but that's the only tiebreaker for me is, plus there's something that happens inside of you when your house is paid for. Gotcha.

Well, I do have about $300,000 saved up. In retirement? No, just in savings. Write a check and pay off your house today. Okay, okay. Will you do it? I got to talk to my wife. She's the one that's kind of, I got to convince her.

Yeah, pay off your house today. Here's my challenge. Pay off your house today, and if in six months you hate being debt-free, get you a mortgage. Okay. The problem that I see, if I pay off the house, she's going to want to go buy a million-dollar home. That's my fear. Well, I think you need to go buy a million-dollar home,

but let's do that after we get the house paid off and then turn around and pay off the rentals pretty quick. And when they're all paid off, then you save up the cash to move up in-house, adding to the equity of your personal home, and you can get you a million-dollar home then. What's your household income? About $325,000. Yeah, nothing wrong with having a million-dollar home at that situation. It's paid for, right?

I agree. I'm with you. So the answer is, can we get a million-dollar home? The answer is yes, but not now. Gotcha. So I'm kind of on your side, but we're going to get, you know, it's okay if you end up over there in a million-dollar house with this situation, especially in your area.

I mean, a million-dollar is not that opulent in San Diego necessarily. So it's a nice place, obviously, but you're living in about an average home in the $400,000 range there, you know. So, yeah, that's what I would do. I'd ride check the day, be debt-free on the house. Then I would take any extra money I can find, and I'm going to start throwing it at one of those rentals

until it's gone. And when I find extra money, I'm going to throw it at the other rental until it's gone. And then I'm going to start saving and investing above my normal retirement investing towards moving up in-house, because that's what she's going to want to do, it sounds like. Very cool, man. Very cool.

Good to talk to you. All right. Michael's with us in Chino, California. Hey, Michael, how are you? I'm doing well. Thank you. Good. How can I help?

So, Dave, I'm in a situation where I've been on medical leave for almost six months from my current job. I'm a forklift technician, so I repair and maintain forklift equipment. And I got a back injury from a car accident back in February. It is now almost September, and I'm slated to hopefully get back to work by, gosh, hopefully by the end of September, as long as all my physical therapy and everything gets back together. But my question is, I want to start attacking my debt. I'm going to freeze my 401k input, use that extra money to start attacking my debt. My concern is my job is so physically demanding.

Do I still just work at it, do it as hard as I can? I've been with the company for seven years. It's a good company. Or do I try and find another avenue to make income? I'm just deciding what's best for me, whether it's physical or trying to get into another field. It sounds like that you don't see yourself doing this 10 years from now due to this back injury. Well, I don't think I'll survive. That's what I mean.

I don't want to be 40 and feeling like I am now. Yeah, I'm broken up, yeah. So it sounds like you need to, from a physical limitation standpoint, not panic, but you need to see a light where you have a way out. Yes. Okay, so I don't know how long that takes so you start asking yourself questions like what do i want to be when i grow up you know what do i want to be 10 years from now i'm 30 so i know but you i'm kidding with you right but but i mean what do i

want to be when i'm 40 right that makes that makes what do you make now i make about $65,000 a year. Okay. What do I want to be when I'm 40 that makes $130,000 a year? Okay. Or more. And I don't care. I don't care what it is. Then once you kind of start to identify that, then you say, okay, what do I have to do to become one of those? Do I have to get in a mentorship program? Do I have to go take some classes and get certified?

Do I need to go back to college do i uh what have i got to do to be one of those you know an example would be let's just make up something i'm not saying this is you okay but you want to move into more of a white collar thing where uh where you don't use your back is what i'm hearing okay right so let's just say that you've always loved real estate. I've always loved real estate, so I'll use that as an example. So you want to be a real estate agent. Well, what have you got to do to be making $130,000 as a real estate agent 10 years from now?

Well, the first thing you have to do is get a real estate license, and you have to study to do your pre-licensing requirements, take the test, pass the test, and then do your post-licensing requirements, but it doesn't require a college degree. The second part of that is I would want to talk to somebody that makes a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in the real estate business and ask them how they do that. Right. What does that involve? Now, I'm not saying that's your answer.

My point is the first thing we did was we identified what you wanted to be doing, and then we identified what the steps are to go do it and you've got time it's not it's not like you can't go back to work you can do the work right now you're saying but yeah as soon as you get cleared but you just don't see it as a good long-term plan because this is this was kind of your wake-up call right yeah and it's you know what it's actually a flare-up from, right? Yeah, and you know what? It's actually a flare-up from a – I got in a car accident two and a half years ago that caused the initial back injury, and this last one just made it worse.

Okay. And while I've been off, I've actually been getting mildly involved in a multi-level marketing business, and I kind of like it. We teach all the same things that you guys teach. I believe you've probably heard of Primerica Financial Services. Oh yeah. And there's some aspects of the business I honestly do not like. I love the point of sitting down with people, showing them how to attack their bet, how to be properly protected. The thing I don't like is what it takes for me to have to grow the business. That's what's hard about it.

Yeah, you like helping people with their finances. You don't like recruiting and building a hierarchy. Exactly. I love, I'm a numbers guy. I'm very technical. And the money in any kind of a multi-level is in recruiting. Yeah, and because that's the only way you build your hierarchy. Yeah, you are a sales manager and a sales recruiter if you're going to make money in a multilevel.

And Primerica is no different than that. And I guess my question is, at my job, I can go in as soon as I go back. I know how busy we are. I can do overtime like crazy. I can work on Saturdays. I can bring in so much extra income. That's subject to your physical ability to do that. You might want to be working your side hustle towards your long-term goal,

whether that's Primerica or whether you say, well, I don't want to do recruiting, so I'm going to take that same set of things and go, maybe I want to move into the financial advising world. And maybe I need to look at getting my licenses and doing it in a more traditional way than a multi-level way so that I actually do the work rather than do the recruiting. That may be your route. I don't know. Sounds like you've got something there to talk about. Hey guys, this is Blake Thompson, Chief Production Officer for The Dave Ramsey Show.

Here's a tip. To keep from missing Dave's classic facial expressions to some of those calls, make sure you watch him live. Just visit DaveRamsey.com slash show each day from 2 to 5 p.m. Eastern.