The Ramsey Show - App - Stop Coming Up With Schemes To Get Your Way! (Hour 3)

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

George Kamel & John Delony answer your questions and discuss:  "My wife doesn't trust me with our finances", What having financial freedom can provide when things go wrong in life, "I don't know what to do about my financial future", "Should I take a pay cut for a more exciting job?" Have a question for the show? Call 888-825-5225 Weekdays from 2-5pm ET Join a Personality-led FPU class. Click here! Enter The Ramsey Cash Giveaway for a chance at $3,000! https://bit.ly/TRSgvwy Shop our bestsellers during the $10 Sale! https://bit.ly/TRS10Sale Want a plan for your money? Find out where to start: https://bit.ly/3cEP4n6 Listen to all The Ramsey Network podcasts: https://bit.ly/3GxiXm6 Interested in advertising on The Ramsey Show? https://ter.li/s64ye3 Learn more about your ad choices. https://www.megaphone.fm/adchoices Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy

🎵 Live from the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, broadcasting from the pods, moving and storage studio. It's the Ramsey Show, where we help people build wealth, do work that they love and create amazing relationships. I'm George Campbell, joined this hour by my friend Dr. John Deloney best selling author and just an all around good guy. Great husband, great dad and I'm being paid to say all of this and we're taking your calls at 888-825-5225

if you want to jump in we'll talk about whatever you want to talk about. This is your show which means if it's bad it's your fault isn't that right John? It could be your fault that's true. But hey um if you are like most people and you're scared of how our country deals with money and you're watching the debt ceiling fights and you're listening to the stats about credit cards about to cross the trillion dollar threshold and mortgage debt all that and you just wish hey hey, I wish people were

listening to this show. I wish people could get some of the empowerment and not be told this is the only way to do this and you're a slave to the system. Here is a no cost. It doesn't cost you anything way of getting this information into the hands of your neighbors, of the people who vote the wrong way according to you, people that you disagree with, people that you love. The easiest, best way to do that is simply subscribe to the show. Like it, thumbs up it, whatever you got to do on your device,

however you're consuming this, whether you're watching us on YouTube, you're listening to us on podcast, you're listening to us on the radio, give us the thumbs up, leave a five-star review, subscribe to the show. It kicks it up in the algorithms and it simply puts the

show in front of more people we don't need any more pats on the back george makes us do that for him all the time we're always telling george how great he is but you can really help out your neighbor and you can help out people who are struggling by just doing something as simple as hitting subscribe so please take a second and do that for all of us. And man, George, I'm hoping that as we're sitting in this crisis and this mess and crisis after crisis after crisis, at some point a huge swath of this country will say, enough, enough, enough. I think we're getting there.

People are getting sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I hope we can intersect their life with some truth and some hope and go, it doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be like this. And that's a great place to get to. So we're grateful to be here, grateful you're listening. Scott kicks us off this hour in Austin, Texas. Scott, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you so much. I appreciate y'all taking my call. Absolutely. How can we help? So the biggest issue I'm having is my wife and I are having a hard time aligning on budget categories and following through on it. We've been through

Dave Ramsey a few times, and I'm kind of more of the strict one on it, and she's not 100% with it. So we're having a hard time, I guess, in that area. Is it a certain category? What's the argument here? Yeah. Hold on. You put in two very different challenges. One is we're having trouble aligning together, uniting around who we are. The other one is we're just not doing it. And you kindly and graciously said, I am. She's not. So what's the bigger challenge here? Trying to come up with the right categories.

You want a little more in savings. She wants some in food. You want some in clothes. Or is the harder thing, y'all agree on this budget. You high-five each other. Y'all weep and pray and sing old white snake covers together y'all bond and unite and then she goes off and just spends whatever she's going to spend yeah so we will get together and have our meeting and agree on it but i feel like when we do have it she hasn't really

looked correct hasn't really uh she'll say she agrees on it but then we go back and just blow over it each time myself included in some areas why do y'all disrespect each other in that way that is a good question so well i get the backstory we've been married for about 20 years and for the first half or three quarters of our marriage i was just blowing it financially she was handling everything so i was continuously just kind of spending over what we had, and she was trying to manage it. Now the tables have kind of turned, and I'm doing the finances. And I feel like she told me a few times, like, hey, you know,

this is what you did for 15 years. So I think a little bit of this just doesn't kind of trust me. With my track record, which I totally... So is that kind of a boy who cried wolf? Like, oh, look at Scott over here telling me he's going to stick to the budget. Look at this. Is it kind of that? 100%. And have you sat down with her and told her what you just told us?

Like, hey, I screwed up. I'm sorry. Instead of kind of a place of tit for tat, I'm going to get at you because you got at me. You know, what's the spirit of these conversations been? Yeah, so we have talked about that. I think she still, she said, yeah, I get it. But I think she's still kind of not, I won't say over it, but yeah, I can tell it's still irritating her. Are there things about your former life, Scott, that still show up in the modern times?

They just have a different gloss on them? Meaning, maybe you drank a lot when y'all first got married, and she did not like how you were a little bit out of control. She didn't know if you were going to show up on time. And now you never drink, but you're kind of having an affair with your job and you work 90 hours a week. The pathology is the same,

but the action's a little bit different. And a lot of times when we try to solve vision issues with just a plan and not an identity change, our behaviors might be a little bit different, but that machine that's running underneath everything is still going. And so if you're just a guy with another scheme and another plan and another this and another that, man, she's going to feel that and smell that a mile away.

So she'll go along with it, man. She's just going to spin what she's going to spin. Because you're still the same guy. you just wrapped it up in a different suit what george was saying is profound and i don't want to miss that there's a difference between saying hey i screwed up so i got this new plan for us there's there's that avenue and it almost never works you doing the money versus her doing the money y'all doing the same thing you just flipped you just flip the other side of the money y'all doing the same thing you just flipped you just flip the other side of the barbell there's something different about saying hey let's go out

for a weekend what we're doing is not working and i started this and so as the guy that that blew you off for 15 years i need you to hear me say from my core, I'm sorry. I let you down. I let me down and I let future us down. And we're starting to fall right back into that same thing. And I don't want to do it. Will you plan a new life for us together? And what are the things that I bring to the table that make you cringe, that make you not believe me, and then give her an opportunity to ask you that same question. And now we're uniting around who we are and where we want to go. And then a plan laid on top of that, man, it's going to work every time.

But if a football coach calls a play and a couple of the people on the field only care about themselves and their stats and their numbers, and some other guys just care about knocking the guy down in front of them, and then a couple of guys care about running the play, everything's going to fall apart. So you've got to have that core identity. Does that make sense?

That makes total sense. Just more backstory. I definitely have a background of addiction in different areas. I've been cleaning those up over the years. So you've got a wife who's scared. Let's start with identity and let's start with I'm sorry and let's start with forgiveness and let's start with let's get on the same page of where we're headed together. And then we're going to put the Ramsey plan on top of that and there will be no stopping you.

Compromise, my friend, grace and accountability. Those are the keys to doing a budget together. This is The Ramsey Show. It's a show about you, and it's a show about living a life of debt freedom, going against the grain, living counter-culturally, bucking the system, taking control of your mental health, your relationships, your career, your money, and realizing that it's not up to someone else. It's not up to the government. It's not up to your brother-in-law or your uncle or your parents or your trauma that you can overcome and you can move forward.

And so if you want to be a part of that, you can call into the show at 888-825-5225. I'm George Campbell, joined by Dr. John Deloney this hour. And so if you want to be a part of that, you can call into the show at 888-825-5225. I'm George Campbell, joined by Dr. John Deloney this hour. And Dr. John, I thought it would be fun to play a little clip of a celebrity. You know, time to time we like to play some celebrity clips that have to do with money. And usually, like, it's not always a good kind of clip. But this one tickled me in a wonderful way, and I thought you might enjoy it too. Would you indulge me? If you want to be tickled in a wonderful way i'm happy to uh indulge let's roll that

beautiful bean footage uh-oh we lost the outlook that's too much i'm like you want it we're gonna try it one more time mother go pick a house you know she's still one of them old school my baby that's too much i'm like you? And like, it feels good to just tell them, yeah, give me that. Without no checking credit or none of that. Like the lady was like, she was like, I need to check your credit. I was like, I beg your pardon. Excuse me. Straight cash. Yeah. My mama's like's like baby don't do that i was like hold on mama she disrespected me hey lady i want this house and i want the 10-day closing right now do it oh okay so for context that is shaquille o'neal talking with uh with some guys explaining the story of when he went to buy his mom a house and the lady's like hey we need to run your credit score if you want to buy this house and he was disrespected because shack is worth 400 million dollars and so the credit score is

not needed because the guy's paying with cash like he mentioned and there was uh the the further backstory is his sister just passed away and it was right during COVID or right before COVID he wanted his family close and so he said mom I'll buy you a house once you come on down and George like you know we we had uh calls earlier today in the segment about hey I've been doing this I've been doing this and life keeps happening I think it's important to tell folks following following the Ramsey plan, getting out of debt, it does not inoculate you from bad stuff. Mom is still going to get sick. You know, wife is still going to step out of your marriage. Kids are going to have struggles. Life is going to happen. What this does is it gives you options. And it just, I mean, this is a personal story.

My cousin passed away suddenly. His name was James. He was just an amazing guy. Somebody, a cousin that I really loved. And he told me some things privately over the course of my life that meant a lot to me. And when he passed away, this is seven or eight months ago, my wife and I had the privilege and the ability to get this, just be really, really sad. We bought plane tickets.

We flew down to see him. Went to his funeral. I got to stand at his casket and we had a couple of hard conversations. I wasn't happy. It was sad. I was frustrated. But I didn't have to worry about, can we even afford to go to this thing? Can we afford to get a hotel? When everyone was like, I don't know if we can go out to eat. Let's just go out to eat. I'll pick it up a ticket.

And it's not because we're super rich or wealthy or anything, but it's because we had an emergency fund. And Shaq at a much elevated situation can just say, I need all my family around me right now when the world's falling apart, just go pick out a house and I'm going to buy the house. So we do this stuff, not because life's not going to happen, but because it's going to happen. And it gives us the ability to just make some moves and to take care of ourselves, to just experience life, to be really joyful or to really see beauty or to really be sad because we're not worried about, can I eat?

Can I afford to do this stuff? And I just, I just, I love that. It's such a cool picture. I just, it won't happen in my lifetime, but it'd be awesome to be able to say, mom, just I'm buying my next door neighbor's house. Just come over. So we, gosh, what an amazing, what an amazing moment, right? That's an aspirational goal. And you know, it's easy to look at a video like that and go, well, Shaq's got $400 million, so it's easy for him to just go buy a house in cash for his whole family. Listen, the idea behind it is that Shaq said, oh, you're not going to disrespect me by saying I got to be a part of this little maze and system you guys created. I exist outside of that. I opted out of the system. I opted out of the system. And so even

if you don't have $400 million, you can still pay for a home with cash. That's reasonable. People still do it, even in today's America. And people can buy houses without credit scores. And I tell you that because I did it. And there's a process called manual underwriting. There's a product called a no-score loan. And if you just hit a set of criteria, like, you know, have a very low debt-to-income ratio, have a pile of money in the bank, have a good down payment, get a 15-year fixed rate, you will get a mortgage with an excellent interest

rate. And when you think about what the credit score is made up of, every single piece relates to debt, right? Your payment history, how much you owe, the length of your credit history, how much new credit you've taken on, what the mix of the credit is. Are you getting the hint here? All of this has to do with debt. And I love nothing more than helping people take off this veil of the system and go, you don't have to play this game. Is it slightly more nuanced or the things you got a few hoops you might have to jump through? Sure. But way less hoops than figuring out how the credit card reward system works. Well, and it was when I found out that if somebody wrote you a check for $5 million,

your credit score doesn't change, that I realized, oh, that has nothing to do with- Your net worth, your income, not a factor. You can be absolutely broke and have a great credit score. It has to do with your relationship to lenders. Has nothing to do with how well you're doing financially. Nothing. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. And one of those prizes is I have a great credit score and no money in the

bank and no money in retirement, but I pay my debts perfectly on time. Good for you, bro. I'm playing a different game. And if you want to play that game, go for it. If you want to play that game, just watch the news for 30 minutes and look at the anxiety and depression and default and debt ratios and that's the game you are opting into and george this show takes a lot of heat because we're not real this i'm so out of touch i can't think of a more empowering show that says we believe in you the listener you the person who's been on, you, the person who's been spit on and kicked, you, the person who's been through abuse and hell at home. We believe in you so much. We think you can do something different.

We don't think that you are stuck in some sort of have to be rescued moment. No, we believe in you. We believe in your family. We believe in your community. We believe in your family. We believe in your community. We believe in your friends. We believe in all of you. And nobody tells you that. They tell you you're broken. You're screwed up. You're the worst thing that ever happened to you. And that nobody's coming for you. So you just better sit at home and maybe the government will come. No, we think more of you than that. We think more of you than you think of you.

And that's why we tell you, you can, you can, you can. But George, like I said, you got to opt out of the system. You got to play a different game. Absolutely. And one of the ways we help people do that is through Financial Peace University. That's the thing that did it for me when I went through it 10 years ago. And what's really cool is that right now, all of the personalities are leading Financial Peace University themselves through virtual classes, which means anyone around the country can join this. And John Deloney is going to be leading one. I'll be leading one. And this is the plan.

There's nine lessons in here. We're going to go through it in about four and a half weeks, meeting twice a week. And we unpack how the system is meant to keep you broke. We unpack how it's not all your fault, but it's your responsibility. We unpack how to buck the system and take control and get that financial freedom and freedom in all areas of your life. So join us for this. We're going to be your personal cheerleaders, encouragers, showing you how to pay off debt, how to build wealth. And you're going to have a community of thousands of people joining you as well. Hey, my class starts on Monday. Oh, this Monday? Monday. So you got to join because once it starts, you can't join.

That's a good call out. Is that the rule? That's the rule. If you don't join mine, you're going to be stuck in George's class. God forbid. And it's over lunch. It's over lunch. You can take the class out in the parking lot during your lunch break. Let's do this.

Love it. So John's class is on Monday. Mine launches June 20th. Go grab your spot right now at FPU.com FPU.com is the place to go it's gonna be a party sign up

hey tell your friends tell your mom this is all virtual so anyone around the country can join we'll be meeting for about an hour each time

have an awesome discussion activities you watch the videos beforehand and I'm telling you live Q&A this four to five weeks could change everything you look back and go

oh that was it that was the turning point for me. So don't miss it. FPU.com. Join one of our virtual FPU classes coming up real soon. I'm George Campbell joined by Dr. John Deloney. This is The Ramsey Show. If you want to call us up, it's 888-825-5225.

We'll talk about your life and your money. Wesley joins us up next in Atlanta. Wesley, welcome to the show. Thank y'all for having me. Sure. What's going on? I'm a 20-year-old college student. My grandmother and my mother passed away. Both passed away within the past two years.

And I've been left with a mortgage on the house with my older sister. Um, how old did you say you were? 21. Okay. Uh, I currently have 20, 20 K in savings and, uh, and currently making roughly 41 K a year. Um, I was calling for advice about the mortgage. Um, where do I invest or what to invest in with no Roth IRA, and then thoughts about me on my first car loan. So I think you need to back up first. Tell me about this house. Can you afford it?

Me and my sister are splitting everything down the middle and paying on the mortgage. What's the payment on the mortgage total? At least $1 a thousand a month. And so you're splitting that 500 a piece? Yes, sir. Okay. To what end? Can I have a little more detail on that one? Like, so you and your sister are going to pay into this house together and pay it off one day for what is somebody living there are you living there is she living there my sister lives there and that's that's where i go back home when i go out leave school and it's 50 50 between you and her the

ownership yes sir so i'm going to tell you something, and it's hard to hear, okay, because I know there's a lot of love and memories wrapped into that home, but you're putting money into – you're keeping a dream alive. Let me put it this way. Your mom was doing the best she could and said i just want to split everything 50 50 but right now y'all are splitting an asset 50 50 and i would much rather see you guys consider selling this house and taking that equity and your sister take hers you take yours and then y'all can start making some decisions that are going to be best for each other right now moving forward versus you putting $500 a month into a house that your sister lives in that you don't have and what you're going to do is you're going to find yourself without a house

in a couple of years or you're going to find yourself in an apartment still in a couple of years pretty frustrated that your sister's living in this you see what i'm saying it's just gonna it's a recipe for you and your sister really having some relational challenges down the road that's why i asked you to what end what's the end game here have you talked to your sister about the long-term plan yeah we talk about it. What is the long-term plan? To both own it and then, in all honesty, I'll probably just give it on to her since we don't have anywhere else to live. How old is your sister?

In the future. She's 25. Okay. Now, you call with a bunch of questions. You're like, I got 20 in savings, I make $41,000, I've got the mortgage, but then you also said, I'm looking at my first car loan. Do you have a car currently? Yes, sir.

So this would be upgrading in car? Yes, sir. Okay. Why can't you pay cash for a reasonable used car? You've done so well so far. Why go into debt now? Long term for the purposes. I plan on owning a truck over time, and then I wanted that truck to be the family car for whenever that happens. But I was just going to just go ahead and get it now and just chip away at it and then just have it to have it. By the time you have a family, you may go, oh, this truck's, I want a new truck. And so I don't make plans for 10 years down the line with a car purchase

because it's a depreciating asset. So you have 20 in savings. Is that your emergency fund plus some? Yes, sir. Okay. I would be looking at getting a very reasonable used truck. I'm talking used because trucks are insanely expensive right now. It's the worst time in history to buy a truck. Let me put it this way. I make way more than $41,000 a year, and my truck is a 2006 Tundra with almost 200,000 miles on it, and I love it. So if you want to spend cash factoring in the price of the car, the taxes, the maintenance, the gas, all of that, and you can do it with cash, then go for it.

But outside of that, it sounds like you're still in school. Are you cash-flowing school? Do you have more to pay? No, sir. I don't have any debt. Okay, so school is paid for? Outside of the mortgage. And then once you graduate, what's the plan?

Possibly professional. And there's a couple big companies in Atlanta that have talked to me before and offered me a job. And whenever I get done playing or being an athlete, that they'd hire me. And I also can go into coaching as well. And then you've still got this house situation. And so that's what John was talking about. We have to have a game plan of, hey, when I'm done with college

and I need to move somewhere, I can't still be paying into this, and we may need to be looking at selling this thing once I graduate. And you take your half, I take my half. That becomes Wesley's down payment and her down payment for a house in the future. Is there any reason you said she wouldn't have a place to live? She's 25. Is there any reason why she isn't working or wouldn't be able to get herself an apartment just like you have?

Well, she wasn't working since she was taking care of our grandmother while she was sick. And so she wasn't able to work at all. And so now she's just getting back into working. Okay. All right. And I'm just trying to make it easier for her to crawl back out. No, I mean, the world needs more guys

with hearts like you have. Okay? You have an incredible heart and you've had an incredible amount on your shoulders the last few years. Trying to stay in school, trying to continue to perform

on the athletic field, trying to take care of your mom and your grandmother as they pass away, trying to take care of your sister. Man, you're a good man. That's why i want you to hear what i'm saying not as like oh this guy's just it wouldn't wouldn't fuddy-duddy old man he doesn't understand what i don't want you to be is 23 and you're paying on last year's truck you're paying on a home you don't own you're looking at man i, I didn't get drafted

like I thought I was going to, and now I've got to figure out what comes next. You can create a mess for yourself. Or you can talk to your sister and say, hey, I'm going to pay on this house for six more months. I'm going to pay on this house for three more months. And then you and I are going to have to make a hard decision about, are we going to keep this house with all the joy, but also all the pain inside this place? Or are we going to sell it? Are we going to split the equity? Even if you want to give her a little bit more of the equity, whatever is in your heart. But I want the next few years for you and your sister to be as free as possible with as few chains wrapped around your hands and your wrists and your ankles as possible. And so sometimes that's sitting down and doing really hard things like selling the family house, like telling your sister, hey, I've got to put a boundary on this thing because I also have to be smart about where I'm going to live.

And don't count chickens before they hatch, man. A lot of businesses talk a lot of, oh, yeah, when you get done, you come talk to me. And, man, they are a ghost when you you pick up the phone and make those calls. So maybe sitting down with your sister and having a, a George, I'm talking about like a boundaries conversation, like a deadline, like this can't go on indefinitely. What if we on September one, or what if October 1st, we sit down and we figure out where we are, how much money you're making, what job prospects look like for you How you feel about being in this house what my prospects are let's just be honest about where we happen to be You talk a lot about grieving what was especially when something traumatic happens It can be hard to just let go of something that had such sentimental value and even financial value in the case of a house

What is the steps to take when you know you have a loss in the family and there's this thing that's attached to that how do you even grieve that and move on i think you got to stop for a second um and when what what i know about the the psychology of grief and the neurology of grief is we don't often make great choices which is why you got to have people in your life around you. That's why people call the show because sometimes they find themselves in a mess and they've got nobody to call

or nobody that they trust, right? Having a mentor, having a coach, having a counselor, having a pastor, having some people who are a few years down the road. I would love to see his sister get in a grief group of people who've lost their mom, who've been caretakers of people who passed away. There's groups like that everywhere where people will walk alongside you as your body heals and the fog begins to lift and you begin to ask that scary, terrifying question, what am I going to do next?

Good wisdom there. Thanks for the call, Wesley. This is The Ramsey Show. Welcome back to The Ramsey Show. Welcome back to The Ramsey Show. Our scripture of the day comes from James 1.17. Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.

The great Tim Keller, who passed away today at 72 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, said, if you have money, power, and status today, it is due to the century and place in which you were born, to your talents and capacities and health, none of which you earned. In short, all your resources are in the end the gift of God. Sad to hear the news today, John, about one of the greatest Christian thinkers, authors, evangelical ministers of our time. Yeah, I can be pretty sarcastic when it comes to some of what passes as spiritual wisdom these days, and Tim Keller was one of the steadfast ones. He's a good guy. Yeah, decades of impact and ministry, and I'm currently reading through his The Meaning of Marriage book, one of his greats. So highly recommend you guys pick that up and pick up

really any of his books. So much wisdom there, and thinking of his family today with the heartbreaking news of his passing. Great guy. Great guy. All right, let's go to the phones. Chris is up next in West Virginia. Chris, welcome to The Ramsey Show. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my call. Sure. How can we help? I've been in my current job now, I guess, about six years.

I took it because good benefits, good money, job security and everything, but now it's just really boring, not very fulfilling. And so I'm kind of at a crossroads here, and all the perks that I enjoy here at my current job. So it's just kind of a hard decision to make. And, of course, my wife is a little concerned about it. And I'm just trying to decide the best option and what to do there. Often when we find ourselves at what feels like a crossroads here, there's a whole bunch of other rooms that just don't have the lights turned on yet.

And so it could be that your friend calling you kind of wakes you out of a stupor and says, yeah, man, just the thought of doing something different, doing something new, doing something with a buddy, lights you up. And also that doesn't mean that's the right thing. It could be, all right, I'm going to make a plan because this job is slowly killing me. But at the same time, I do like the life that it provides. So what else can I do that might provide me and my wife with a similar life, but man, it's going to bring me more joy. And so I really want to caution you against that either or thinking. I'm trapped and I got to get out and I got to get on the first train out of town. The whole city's coming. It's not, right? It's not. So when you say I'm kind of bored, tell me a little bit more about that. Really, the job is not very fulfilling. I

work in education and it's more or less based on number of students and that fluctuates so much. There's days I go without having students, which means I'm in an office for eight hours trying to occupy my time with working on certifications or different things just to pass the time throughout the day. And what is it that brought you into education in the first place? Well, I taught through most of my career in one form or another. I was a certified instructor and such.

And then after retiring from my previous job, kind of took it on just to pass time that I found I enjoyed teaching and stuck with it. And then it turned into the fact that it's a great paying job, great benefits, and, you know, it takes care of all the necessities. So you're – I could be way off here, but are you a military veteran who's working at a university in some sort of veteran affairs role? Close.

Military vet and law enforcement for 15 years, but I do work for an adult education program. Okay. You are a teacher and you are a public servant. Right or wrong, up or down, that is who you are, my brother. And so the world needs two things real bad, public servants and teachers. And so it sounds to me like the world needs what you are good at and what you are passionate about. It's just about finding the right place to do that. And there is no shortage of those places. So what makes this next job the saving grace that's going to be the ticket out? What is it about it that draws you to it?

Well, it's working back in security, but as an operations manager for a small company. So it's active. It's moving and getting around. Is there a potential that you could be bored on some days um not likely my worry is that chris goes with chris and so if the solution you know is chris needs to figure out what's going on inside him that's going man i'm just dragging i need a challenge now it could be the job but it could also be we've got some stuff to deal with deeper. So my wife told me one time, I was talking about how I wanted to take this other job, but I really liked where I was.

And she said something that was really important. She said, I'm watching this job kill my husband. And I'm willing to take whatever avenue is going to get you from this. And so you mentioned that your wife is really kind of tied to the benefits and the perks and the cool stuff. And this is true across the board. So is she more interested in the perks than she is her husband coming home joyful and happy and excited about the day he just had? Or you see what I'm getting at? I don't want to talk bad about your wife, but also there's a reality.

No, no, no, no. No, she agrees. She wants me to be happy with what I'm doing. We've talked about it. We're baby step three financially. We're doing well. We paid off everything except for the mortgage, and the money that I make at the job is what we're setting to the side, so her job covers the bills. So if I took a hit in the pay department,

it wouldn't hurt that bad, but the concern, I guess, for both of us is retirement. I'm 54, she's 44. So we're just now getting to the point of starting to put 15% back for retirement starting next month. So it's just more or less the benefits package. Are there no retirement options with the new gig? No, it's just a small business, maybe in the future. But right now, no, it's just pretty much an hour in a car. That part is worrisome. The fact that there's no option for retirement with this new gig and you want to retire in the next 10 years, probably. So that might be something where you go, I need to switch jobs. This ain't it. I appreciate you, friend, for bringing this to my attention. I'm going to keep looking for something that has benefits because that's what we need as a family right now. And I sound like a broken record here because I feel like I say this on my show all the time. I say this on this show,

of course, all the time. I would love to see you and your wife go for a weekend retreat together. Y'all are busting your butt. Y'all are working hard. And plan, have the fun. It can be so fun. But plan, where do we want to be? I turned 65, which is basically a thousand, right? I turned 65 in 10 years. Where do we want to be? And then it can be about dreaming and about where we want to live and what do we want our life to look like? And here's a fun exercise. What do you want the house to feel like when you get home? And what do you want the house to feel like when I get home? And then we're going to reverse engineer, how do we build that world? And there's a mathematical component. Here's how much money I got to make. So I might have to stay in this job that I'm kind of slowly dying in for two more years so that we can get this far ahead. Or I'm

going to stay in this job, but I'm going to start looking for opportunities to get out at X salary and X benefit package. But it gives you a guiding map and it's something that y'all build together. So man, go do this together, plan ahead, be very specific. And then I'm telling you, man, you're a hard worker. The job will show up when you know where you're headed. Thanks for the call, Chris. That puts this hour of the Ramsey Show in the books. My thanks to my co-host, Dr. John Maloney, all the folks in the booth, and you, America. Until next time, spend wisely, save intentionally, and give generously.