The Ramsey Show - App - What Baby Step Am I On? (Hour 2)

Episode Date: December 26, 2023

Девочка-пай Live from the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, it's the Ramsey Show, where we help people build wealth, do work that they love, and create actual amazing relationships. Dr. John Deloney, Ramsey Personality, is my co-host today. Open phones at 888-825-5225. John, sometimes people wonder why I say we help people build actual real relationships, and that's because you and I have made this unbelievable discovery that in the current century,

there are people that are starting to realize, finally, that Facebook friends are not real friends. They're not real friends. It's not a real relationship. The way you tell somebody that you love them is not an electronic thumbs up. That's not how love is transferred these days. Can't click a like. Nope.

Click like. I like you. You can. It's going to leave you hollow inside. Can't click a like. Nope. Click like. I like you. You can. It's going to leave you hollow inside. We used to send these little notes up and down the aisle in elementary school. Oh, yeah. Remember those things? Yeah.

Yeah. And you'd be like, you're dumb. You're ugly. You like Dave. Ooh. Yeah. Grody. Grody.

Remember that word? There was something tactile about it. And you could see them open up. There was an actual human over there. Yeah. Not a not a digit yes you weren't arguing with a bot with the zero one one one one zero yeah yeah it's a different world so it turns out that trolls are the mean people on the internet when you meet them are highly disappointing individuals yeah they're really kind of sad little cowardly people that in a real world would never be that brave.

And people who are mean on Facebook and gossipy, if you ever sat in a room with them, would never have that kind of courage. We call that digital courage. So it turns out real, actual relationships are something that we specialize around in here. And it's kind of like common sense. it's really marketable in america today so it's like a discovery your facebook friends will not help you change your tire at 2 a.m well and it's not one of them it's

that dave it's that um you know the criticism of of ramsey solutions is you know you're just you're just giving people common sense that That's where we are. That's where we are. A hundred percent. Unashamedly. I'm giving people like... And I'll charge you for it since you haven't got any. Turn your phone off and talk to your children, and I'll show you how to do that. Yes.

If you don't know how to have a conversation, John will sell you a deck of cards to help you do that. I got you. If you don't know how to tell your wife, hey, this is what I need, I will help you out. It's a wild world, man. It's a wild world. Well, it's –

Dave, people are crazy. It's wild. But, you know, there is a relationship revolution that's starting to occur where people are saying it's not okay to sit in a restaurant and both of you send texts across the table. There's people starting to understand that that's sick. Yeah. Dave, I saw some students that had, they took all their phones and they stacked them up in a pile. And the first person who grabbed them had to pay for the whole meal. And they are practicing. We realize we're addicts. we're going to practice just sitting at the table

together yeah i love it i love it i love it so for five years i've been trying to learn how to play golf and um that's another story we'll go it's another type of problem and addiction but um anyway aside from that uh one thing i've been practicing is i i have my phone on the golf course well i mean golf is a really ridiculously difficult, complicated game for somebody like me that is limited in athletic ability. And so add to it distractions of crap coming from the office on the iPhone. So my new thing is for four hours, I don't look at it. Okay. How do you feel when you do that?

Are you angsty or do you feel free? You know, for a little while, it was like an addict. It was like I was being taken off the pill, right, or taken off the drug. But now I kind of look forward to it. And there's this peace when you come because there's an agitation that goes with the constant screen check. Is it 2,500 times a day somebody checks the screen? Those numbers are longer. Typical people, 2,500 times a day they checked the screen it's those numbers are typical people

2,500 2,500 times a day they check their scratch for it grab it grab it it's like you know it's just like i just got dinged i got i just got liked i just got unfollowed oh my god i'm rejected by somebody i didn't even like did your golf game improve considerable really it's all about concentration anything that that interrupts if you're thinking i was playing with a pro and he said his sports psychologist says uh okay after you hit every shot in the round we're gonna we're gonna grade we're gonna step to the side and grade uh a five is you were thinking about nothing but the golf ball a one is you're thinking about buying a car when you get home. Okay?

Right. And so he said, and then we go back and we take the one to fives, and he said, guess where my best shots were? Well, duh. Right. Where you were concentrating on the shot. Well, guess how life and relationships work. Your marriage works the same, right?

Right. Guess what? I followed a guy out of the neighborhood the other day my little hoa he's it's you know six o'clock in the morning still dark he's swerving all over the place i'm like he's drunk at six o'clock in the morning no just texting it was a contractor setting up his subs while he was driving and he's swerving he's driving like he's drunk with a stupid phone like okay decide are you going to drive are you going to be on the phone you drunk you know get out of the way too by the way but yeah oh my gosh but that's it's hard to do that thing that phone thing and anything else right but here's the other side of it and and you noticed

in short order i i get itchy without it and then i go four hours and suddenly there's a piece and my golf game's improving and now i've now kind of crave it and I can't wait to get out there because I don't have this thing a few weeks ago uh my she let my wife left left town and it was just me and Josephine and Hank and Hank had something he was going to so it's just me and Joe and I just told Sheila I'm gonna get off the rails we're gonna go eat every donut we're gonna go eat like a pancake breakfast at a restaurant we're like me and her are just pizza and chocolate cake it was 24 7 madness um her blood sugar wasn't so great but everything else listen since that weekend where i put my phone away and she had my undivided dad's gonna be with you for breakfast for lunch for dinner i have a whole new relationship with

my kid like she comes in hugs and when i wake up in the morning and it was it was literally day 48 hours it was 48 hours of i'm just gonna laser in on this little girl and uh to control delete our relationship it's amazing it's really amazing how quick it comes back around well that's the good news it'll heal back yeah bad news is it doesn't if you don't put the screen gotta put it down you gotta put it down and screens aren't evil but the overuse of them and substituting that for real connection and real relationship is evil i'm starting to think you you say you've said for 30 years that money is is a byproduct of of your marriage or relationship like what you got going on your life it's not the problem it's the same i'm starting to think uh screen time is too if if

you're sitting there at a restaurant and both of you are staring on screens and you're on a date with your wife, that is the smoke coming up from the fire of your relationship. I'm assuming you ever knew how to do a relationship. That's right. We have a segment of the demographic that has never been without a phone in their hand. Right. And so they don't know how to break up except by text. I'll tell you what man i had a student come in that got his wife left him divorced via text and uh god dave listen i said

what are you doing in my office why aren't you going home and this is a direct quote we have a zoom conference set up for friday and i was like you should probably just get out of my office good grief we have a zoom conference because she texted me that she's leaving. Why are you here? We're so real relationships. It's part of what we do here. This is the Ramsey Show. Dr. John Deloney, Ramsey Personality, is my co-host today. Luke is with us in Cleveland, Ohio. Hi, Luke. Welcome to the Ramsey Show. Good afternoon, gentlemen. It's a pleasure to speak with you.

You too. How can we help? Well, I'm either on Baby Step 2 or Baby Step 7, and I need a little clarification to figure out which one I'm on. Okay. So I have a credit card, which I don't want to have a credit card, but with where I'm at in my life, I'm fortunate enough that I can take a trip to Mexico or to the Caribbean about twice a year.

And on all the debit cards I've found, they all have a 2% foreign transaction fee, and my credit card does not. So I do have the credit card, but I use it for the time when I'm at the trip, and I pay it off the following month when the bill comes due. You know, that's interesting. I got back from Mexico Sunday, and I have been there 10 days,

and I didn't have a single charge you're talking about on my debit cards. Really? Yeah. They just asked me, do you want to run it in pesos or dollars when they run the little machine out to you? Right. Yeah, no, and it's always in dollars dollars and that's still apparently a two percent fee at my two credit unions and two i just booked a trip to to out of the country in the south too and they had the same i think you just need a

better debit card a different bank but anyway even if you're i mean we we would tell you to get a different better debit card because we don't believe in credit cards at all but even then if you use a credit card you paid it off what's your problem i'm you're not in debt what it doesn't that's not a baby step two thing well i mean there's i guess there's a bill but it's not really i guess a true debt but also i'll keep my credit score which i don't really want and yeah that's a problem i know something something that you talked about before so i was kind of confused on what i should do well um number one here's the thing the amount of pain that you were in before because of your stupid money decisions will dictate how

drastically far you go with these things i went completely broke so i don't walk anywhere near a bank except to make a deposit okay i can't stand those people even my banker who's a friend of mine i'm not sure i like no i'm kidding but uh but you know you know what i'm saying right and so uh it's just the whole thing and so there's no chance even if i wasn't the guy about no credit card dave ramsey guy i would have a credit card because of what I've been through. You, by listening to you, have not had that, I've been that burned experience, so it's a little bit more, eh, whatever for you. And I get that, that's not a criticism, but I'm just an observation. Is that fair? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So again, what we teach is based on this absolute, I'm never going to go near a debt instrument again because I'm never going in debt again.

So that would dictate for someone doing that, that they go and find a bank that doesn't have ridiculous fees on their internationals. And I'm really shocked your credit union does. I would talk to them about just removing that because credit unions are very, very customer-oriented, much more so than banks in general. And they don't want to lose a Baby Step 7 customer either. But if you have a bill that comes in during the month,

like your electric bill, and you pay it, you're not in debt. If you had a credit card bill that came in and you paid it, you're not in debt. You're on Baby Step 7. You're just on Baby Step 7, and you still have a credit card, which is the only thing I would obviously have just griped at you about but yeah but that's the you know but you're a baby step seven guys where you are to answer your overall question and um but yeah i dude i'm in mexico three or four times a year uh i like mexico and so um

uh um and i you know i do have to watch the peso exchange shifting a little bit. It's gone from 0.2 to 0.18, and so it does affect things a little bit. You have to watch what you're doing, and sometimes they'll catch you with a conversion if you're not watching your math in some of these locations, but that's a vendor issue. That's the merchant. That's not the credit card or the debit card.

So we use our debit cards frequently. We use a lot of cash, too. Mexicans much prefer cash, by the way, for the same reasons a lot of Americans do, but even more so. They don't want the government after them, so that's the whole thing. They don't want the government. They like being off the grid as much as we do, those of us that are rednecks okay so we don't want to be on the grid either we don't want um anybody knowing where we are so that's very interesting a good question

hannah's in pittsburgh hey hannah welcome to the ramsey show hi thank you for taking my call sure what's up um i was just wondering if we should pay our mortgage or if we should wait until we have a little bit more saved as like a safety net. Okay, do you have any other debt? No. You're fairly new to this whole Ramsey stuff, aren't you? Yes. Okay. So we teach a process called the baby steps.

And it's how to apply. It's the next step, the next thing, and then the next thing, and the next thing. A clear path from where you are now to wealth. First thing is get $1,000. Second thing is be debt-free, but the house. You've done those two, right? Yes. Okay. Then the third step is to have a fully funded emergency fund. Grandma called it a rainy day fund. The proper amount is three to six months of household expenses.

What's your household income? Well, I just quit my job, so now it's going to be about $100,000. Okay. Are you going back to work? No, I'm going to be a stay-at-home mom for a while. Okay. How much is your house payment? About $650 a month.

Wow. Good work, Hannah. Wow. Okay. That's weird. That's wonderfully weird. Okay. And so, okay, so let's pretend that your monthly expenses, if everybody's income stopped,

that you could live easily on $4,000 a month. I wouldn't be far from wrong, would I? No. Okay, 3 times 4 is 12. 6 times 4 is 24. So you should have an emergency fund of $12,000 to $24,000 before you start paying off your house. How much do you have in savings? Savings, we have about $95,000.

Okay. Let's allocate $20,000 of that to your emergency fund. Now, everything else is going towards your mortgage. How much is your mortgage balance? About $92,000. Great. Okay. So you said you have $95,000 in savings?

Yes. Okay. Well, the way we would teach it is you keep your emergency fund of three to six months. We could call that 15 for fun. That'd be putting 80 on the house, and then you pay off the house, what, by Christmas? If you only had 15 owed, right? And then if you want to build up your emergency fund a little further, you could. That's what we would do around here, because no house payment is going to make you even more brilliant than you already are and you're pretty stinking brilliant good grief i love

that that was like a slow flex and we have a ninety five thousand dollars and six hundred dollar house payment it's fantastic translation hannah you are well on your way before you ever met anybody called remsey but we'll help you get you get there even faster so dave one of the one of the criticisms i get is it let's just this situation how do you tell somebody like because mathematically that's it kind of went in the lottery the 650 house payment there's but there's the the umbrella the shadow that sits over you that says somebody else you owe money to right you owe money to somebody else how would you explain that to somebody that says no it's worth it to go ahead and do it it's worth it to go ahead and pay that thing off even though your house payment is so low relative to what you're bringing home every month because several things

happen in addition to the math being freed up the first thing number one the math is freed up and now you can invest and save um and and be generous with your entire income and it will cause you to be wealthy faster that's the basic thing but it's only 600 bucks we're freeing up here so it's not like it's a ton but it's there and whatever else extra they were paying or putting into savings so she's got this vague savings over here that hasn't got a real assignment yet it doesn't have a mission the second thing that happens is um that people that don't have a single piece of debt you talk about this they relax in a place they didn't know was tight their relationships get better their employment changes for the better because they don't have to work there their uh the quality their health improves literally yeah i mean the hypertension that

we face in this culture yeah you know people with mortgages don't have as much high blood pressure hello wow just think about it people that don't have mortgages have peace financial peace two words that don't go together like airline service this is the Ramsey Show. Dr. John Deloney, Ramsey Personality, is my co-host today in the lobby of Ramsey Solutions on the debt-free stage. Corey and Amber are with us. Hey, guys, how are you? Hey, David, John. Good to have you guys.

Where do you all live? Raleigh, North Carolina. Oh, fun. That's a great town. We love Raleigh-Durham. Good, good. So how much debt have you two paid off? $181,558.11.

Wow. Give or take. Way to go. And how long did this take? Two years and five months. All right. Love it. And your range of income during that two years and five months? We started at $95,000, and now we are a little over $200,000. Nice double in two years. So how'd you double your income in two months? We started at $95,000 and now we are a little over $200,000. Nice double in two

years. So how'd you double your income in two years? Well, starting about the beginning of 2020, I didn't realize how much debt we actually were in. It was primarily student loan debt. Amber finally shared it with me and I said, I'm tired of all this money going out the door and not being able to keep it. So we got that gazelle intensity. I'm a mental health therapist and so when March 2020 hit, unfortunately, COVID impacted a lot of people's mental health, and therefore... You were kind of in the plexiglass business right there, buddy.

Yeah, exactly. I'm just saying. Yeah, mental health and plexiglass, big deal during COVID, right? Right. Wow. Wow. You just took client after client after client?

Client after client, yep. Whew, man, that's exhausting work. It is. That's like walking through spider webs you had long hair when that started i did i did it all disappeared yep wow that's a lot of therapy without it without getting any and amber uh what do you do for a living i'm a reseller and i have a small youtube channel oh cool what do you resell clothes and shoes and really anything and everything what do you do ebay or facebook marketplace ebay poshmark mercari facebook marketplace what's the most successful

which platform it varies it changes depending on the season um the years but ebay and poshmark are pretty much the top two for me i've met people that are buying clothes at garage sales for 10 cents and selling them for three dollars on ebay and they're making 10 grand a month i mean i've met people doing that i was afraid when covet hit that my sales would decrease because they went up they did because people didn't want to leave their homes so online shopping well and they're bored they're just sitting there dinging on buying stuff then they feel ashamed so they call you they call me got it figured out and they got to get back up there you guys got a racket all right so what got y'all started on this two and a half years ago

i shared with cory how much debt we were in when we first got married i pretty much handled all of the money and cory kind of was just on the back burner he just worked and just had his head down when I finally shared how much debt we were in and he realized how much debt we were like we have to do something and I found the seven baby steps and we're like this is it so as a mental health therapist what was it like when realizing oh we should probably communicate as a married couple. Yeah, imagine that. Not only aided me in my personal growth, but professionally as well,

teaching clients to do the same thing. So it's all about communication, intentionality, being on the same page. Yeah. That's definitely. That's very cool. Okay, so what was the $182,000? What kind of debt? It was primarily student loans.

We did have a couple credit cards and furniture, but someone went to a private university for six years. Oh, so when you shared it with him, you told him, right? The one he already knew that he was deeply in debt. The way y'all say that is so gentle. I shared with him the debt. No, I told him how much you racked up. Yeah, I had some as well, but his the the larger chunk of it yeah okay so he looked at and said oh yeah this is a thing so um talk to me for the sake of the audience about that dynamic

because it's really important when we're kind of joking around and laughing over the top of what is actual some actual pain um you were carrying a lot of stress yeah and uh by you i mean amber and um you kind of went i'm i don't know what happened you just like i'm at the end of my rope i can't carry this by myself anymore or i need some help and you're not paying attention or what was what was that dynamic like um it was it was pretty much i had to tell him because we had to change what we were doing we were we'd go on vacations but we'd always cash flow it and then when i get home it's like we have all this debt left you couldn't manipulate it enough to make it work and then when i when i

finally shared it with him because i didn't want to stress him out when i finally shared the numbers with him it was eye-opening you know over the years i've done this for 30 years talking to people in this situation, whether it's the husband that was doing the bills and has to bring in the wife or the wife in your case, there's this weird thing that it's like, I'm supposed to be taking care of this, and I can't do anymore. I don't know how to fix this. I've got to have some help.

And it's like, people feel sometimes, I don't know if you did, but sometimes people feel like you failed at your job which was to take care of the money and so there's almost a shame to bring it to the other person when it actually is their job to help you but there's this weird thing it's like god i i can't do it there's a let did you sense that yes okay it's hard isn't it yes and then there's it's dave you just nailed it there's it's a it's a stress to shame loop-de-loop because then you handed him your stress and then you felt really shamed about all this debt you racked up right it's very challenging but self-compassion is a very important trait in this journey without it we wouldn't have been able to make it yeah that's

good and it made our our marriage stronger as well yeah that's a good one self-forgiveness right it goes with compassion yeah like when i went bankrupt it was completely my fault sharon i mean she didn't have any idea what's going on we've owned houses she never saw you know i mean it was completely my fault because i ran the thing in the ditch uh and and so it took a little while for me to get over going you're an idiot i was an idiot but it took me a little while to get over that just forgive myself and move on from that and go i'm just going to learn from this we're going to take all these lemons and make some lemonade yeah there's a real thing to what you guys have been through it's very powerful thank you for being open about it and sharing it you're going to help some people today by having done that and you're victorious

too by goodness 182 000 how's it feel to be free wonderful wonderful okay now now that you did it and you leaned in for two and two years and five months almost two and a half years there's a whole reformation that occurs during that time and not only in your relationship but just in the way your brain looks at money um a transformation if you will uh what do you tell people the key to getting out of debt is i would say don't focus on what you have to give up look at what you have to gain if we would have stayed living how we were living there's no way that we could be able to afford the future that we want and have a house one day so that would that that's what i would say and be willing to sacrifice a bit we'd work seven days a week weekends all our All our friends, hey, do you want to hang out? Love what you said one episode, Dave.

No means yes, may later. A lot of our friends really stuck to it, have some great support because of that. Yeah. And then we also really cut down on the grocery budget. And for two and a half years, he had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch every single day. So that's his tuna fish sandwich. So that's how you get muscles like that. Wow.

Yes. It's a peanut butter and jelly system sandwich. So that's how you get muscles like that. Wow, yes. It's a peanut butter and jelly system. That's how you get those muscles. Okay, yeah, that's for sure. Oh, my God. Yeah, it didn't kill him, I can tell. Way to go, you guys. Can you eat peanut butter and jelly now?

That's the question. No. Okay. Can't do it. I ate tuna fish sandwiches when we were broke, and I smell tuna fish still to this day. My net worth goes down. I hate them. I ate tuna fish sandwiches when we were broke, and I smell tuna fish still to this day. My net worth goes down. I hate them.

I hate tuna fish. It's just because it was broke people food. For you, it's peanut butter and jelly. You get that smell. It's like, do you have a peanut allergy, sir? Yes, I do. I'm completely allergic to peanut butter and jelly now. Y'all are incredible.

That's awesome. Well done, you guys. Thank you. Very well done. Very well done. Very well done. Now that you're 100% free, how's it feel? Amazing. Wonderful.

Cool. Proud of you. Very well done. Now, who are these cheerleaders you brought with you? These are my parents. Oh, okay. They're awful proud. Just watching their body language while you're talking, they're just like, they're so proud.

They were our biggest supporters. Yeah. When your grown kids actually have sense, it makes all of us parents proud it really does it's pretty because we all have friends that their grown kids are idiots i mean we do and when you're when they're not it's pretty cool it's pretty cool so hey we've got the live and give bundle for you it's the baby steps millionaires book which is your next uh step in this process you'll be there before you know it uh the total money makeover book which is what you've just done maybe you can give it to one of your friends that stood by you out there a financial peace university membership as well

and again the live and give bundle we're so proud of you guys you're a very neat couple what you've been through is very obvious it's on your face it's on the way you're looking at each other it's on the words you're using you're very powerful very well done all right it's cory and amber raleigh north carolina 182 000 paid off in two years and five months making 95 to 200 lots of communication lots of hard work count it down let's hear a debt-free scream three two one we're debt free. Yeah. Whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. Yeah. Oh, you got to love it. Man.

This is the Ramsey Show. Dr. John Deloney, Ramsey personality, is my co-host today. Thank you for joining us. Open phones at 888-825-5225 if you're a new listener and we know there's a whole bunch of you out there that are uh and all some of this that we talk about is uh like tribal speak the vernacular that we're using the words we're using are new to you like baby steps and debt snowballs and all that kind of stuff if you want to kind of figure out where you are and start to plug into this whole thing completely free go to ramsey solutions.com click on the get started button ramsey solutions.com

click on the get started button and you know that'll get you moving in the right direction get you where you're supposed to be so our question of the day comes from neighborly it's sponsored by neighborly your hub for home services to repair maintain improve our home researching dozens of providers is a thing of the past neighborly is all you need to remember a nationwide network of local home service pros of all kinds we love neighborly we're honored that they're sponsoring us molly made, Mr. Rooter, Mr. Electric, to name just a few. Just really good stuff. Neighborly.com, and you can get some help near you.

All right, today's question comes from Molly in Oregon. Molly writes, my husband makes $30,000 a month take home. Well done. And I'm fortunate enough to stay home with my daughter. We have zero debt. Our rent is currently $2,100 a month and utilities are fairly cheap. We have visited Maui several times and are planning on making a move there. The thing is, I feel like even though we have no debt and a paid off car and

everything, we are still scared to go into debt on a house. We're waiting for a good deal and think we found something really nice around 900 grand. We're making a trip out to see the house at the end of this month, and if that doesn't work out, we have a property we think we might buy and build a house on for about the same price. Are we too scared to spend money? We've just been at a point in our life when we first got together where we struggled so much, and I think we both just get scared of being there again.

Yeah, I mean, that's the story of my life. Yeah, you've really helped me with that one, Dave. Um, I think when your identity is survival and I say it sounds identity when your body's trying to survive all the time, um, that, that you just develop a scarcity mindset. This all goes away in any second. Um, and then we live in a world that tells us it's all coming down. It's all coming down. It's all coming down. And so it's really easy. $30,000 a month is a ton of money. And they still live like they're broke, right? They're still renting.

It's just this terror that's in there. And you taught me, Dave, that in my language, you got to practice your way out of this thing. And for me, the gift that you gave me was practicing using ratios and to stop looking at um like for a couple that went broke nine hundred thousand dollars feels like a billion right let's look at the ratios let's look at the costs let's look at the actual um percentages of things and that's given me a lot of peace and allowed me to practice a new way of doing life well it helps your use your uh, your brain, to make the decision on facts. It's bringing my brain back online.

Yeah, I'm using facts instead of feelings. That's right. Because what happens is there's two things that cause, two situations, and they usually go together, actually. Number one, if you've gone broke, like I have, or like she has in this situation, you have to heal from that. And the only way you heal from that, move from this I'm always going to be broke mentality to I'm never going to be there again mentality is you have to practice and you have to do new things. The second thing that happens is when you start and you are making $30,000 a year and then you're making $30,000 a year and then you're making $30,000 a month,

what happens is the math grew faster than your emotional capacity to manage that. Now, I'm not saying you don't have the intellectual capacity to manage the money. I'm saying that, you know, I'll give you an example. Around here at Ramsey, okay, I mean, I grew up normal kid, right? And I worked my butt off cutting grass and doing everything else shoveling whatever had to be shoved all this kind of stuff right and what we spend on coffee at Ramsey with 1100 employees I never made that much in a year right and we spent it on coffee oh my god you know I mean it's just like to get my emotional head

around those numbers sometimes I have it's an intellectual exercise you know i mean it's just like to get my emotional head around those numbers sometimes i have it's an intellectual exercise you know what we spend on copier paper in a building that's just like the cause of the scale right you know and it's like and we're not doing anything wrong it's nothing irresponsible the coffee's not ridiculous it's not starbucks i mean like starbucks and so uh but it's just it's not it's not inexpensive coffee it's not expensive it's just good coffee but you know it's not that it's just there's a lot of it right and so the same thing's true when you're buying a uh you know you've been driving a five thousand dollar eight thousand dollar car that breaks down and the tires are bare

for the majority of your life to emotionally buy a $50,000 car, even if you're worth $10 million. Doesn't matter. It's a difficult decision because you feel like weird because your emotions are not used to sitting in that car. Your nose is not used to smelling that smell. You know, the new car smell. It doesn't come up. Well, for us, so for Sheila and I, when we bought our house in Texas, I had a great job.

She had a great job. I could not believe that a human being would spend this much money on a house. Dave, I didn't sleep for two or three days. Couldn't breathe. When we bought it and we closed, we went in with the key, opened it up. Sheila fell to the floor crying. She could never have believed that she could live in such opulence. And we sold the

house and i made enough money to pay cash for like a fifteen thousand dollar truck so we made a little money on it and we got 185 for it and then we moved to nashville and you you can't buy somebody's you can't i mean so here's the thing i had and uh i'll use the word sinfully I had lumped people who buy houses that cost this much cost this much money into those are those people where are these people and people like us I had divided the world up into us's and them's in an unfair way sometimes people do that on race sometimes on everything on education level on religion sometimes they do it based on the fact they've been broke or they grew up broke. A friend of mine grew up in the hood, and he said,

getting out of the hood is easier than getting the hood out of you. Uh-huh. Yeah. And that's the truth. That's the thing. And so what we're saying is every one of us have had down times or broke times or made more money than we ever made in our life, and it is normal for your emotions to struggle to catch up.

So, Molly, you're normal. Yes. Buy the house. Yes. The way you fix this is you have to do what John says about trauma of any kind. You have to say facts are your friends. These fears are irrational. And so if you have $600,000 cash in your bank account and you want to buy a $15,000 car,

you know, and you have a weird feeling, it ain't the math, Bubba. It's you. And acknowledge the feeling. Acknowledge it. I have a little thing that I write them down. I still write them down. Yeah. When they're obnoxious and they're dumb, I write them down and then we move on.

Yeah, because it takes the power away from you. That's right. Stacey's in Fort Worth, Texas. Hi, Stacey. How are you? Hi, I'm fine. Thank you from you. That's right. Stacey's in Fort Worth, Texas. Hi, Stacey. How are you? Hi, I'm fine. Thank you so much for taking my call. I'm very honored to speak with you both.

You too. What's up? So we have a daughter who's in college, and then our younger, our twins, who will be going off to college in the fall. And we, we had a very lengthy, not your normal baby step to you. And it's left us with a house that needs repair on everything. And so I was, my question for you is, would it financially make sense to just sort of,

um, get rid of the house as is, um, you know, sell it to one of those companies that just takes it off your hands. No, they take it off your hands at wholesale. You need to call a good real estate agent and have them come in and say, there's ten things you could do. Six of them are worth the money. The other four you need to let the other people do. Whatever it is, okay? But if you'll spend the money on paint, on landscaping, on the recarpet,

it's going to 2X your return when you get ready to sell the house, and you're going to get the enjoyment of it. So you need to make a list of projects. The way you eat an elephant is a bite at a time that your real estate agent, your future real estate agent, gives you the priority on. This is the most important one down to the least important one and work your way down those projects with cash and then some of them you don't need to do because they're not worth doing we'll let the next owner do it but it's a retail buyer not a we buy houses buyer so we buy houses buyers a wholesale buyer and you

don't need to take that hit because you don't have the energy to fix this house. Get the house fixed up. Get a real estate agent to guide you through it. Get multiple bids. Prioritize it. Work one project at a time. You don't have to do them all at once, and you don't go into debt to do this. So, good question. You're on your way.

You're on your way, Stacey. You're closer than you feel like. This is The Ramsey Show. Dave here. You can find all of our shows with the Ramsey Network app on your smartphone. It's the only place to listen to the entire back catalog of episodes. Download the Ramsey Network app in your favorite app store today.