285. “We bought the perfect house. Now we feel trapped”

Ramit digs into why a couple with a $692,000 net worth feels trapped by a house they no longer want and afraid to give up their 2.7% mortgage. Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to Be Rich talks with Chloe, 32, and Jake, 30, who have been together for ten years. They bought a 3,000-square-foot house on 1.5 acres because they believed homeownership was a smart financial decision. But years later, they're exhausted by the maintenance and questioning whether the American Dream is really worth it. Their attempts to find more freedom have only made things more complicated. An $80,000 home equity loan for an Airbnb plan, a $50,000 RV they never used, and a fear of making another expensive mistake have left them stuck. Jake wants to sell, but Chloe worries about walking away from a good investment. With their finances in good shape, Ramit challenges them to ask a different question: what do they actually want their life to look like? A special thanks to our partners at Monarch for sponsoring this episode. Try Monarch free today and get 50% off your first year of Monarch Core at https://monarch.com/ramit, promo code RAMIT. Sign up through Ramit's link to get his exact Conscious Spending Plan categories already set up in your account. In this episode, we uncover: Why earning $362,000 a year hasn't stopped Chloe and Jake from feeling trapped by their lifestyle How they bought a house above their budget without an inspection Why their 3,000-square-foot house requires eight hours of yard work almost every weekend How an $80,000 home equity loan for an Airbnb plan became a financial regret Why they bought a $50,000 RV, never used it, and sold it for around $32,000 What $692,000 in net worth, $540,000 in debt, and 43% fixed costs reveal about their finances Why Chloe is afraid to give up their 2.7% mortgage despite wanting to leave How selling their house and investing an estimated $250,000 in equity could change their future Why Ramit challenges them to stop optimizing their finances and start enjoying their money Chapters: (00:00:00) Introduction (00:04:20) The expensive business ideas that haven't worked out (00:10:16) Buying a family home above their budget (00:20:36) Strong finances, but still feeling stuck (00:27:45) The RV they bought but never used (00:35:13) Struggling with the decision to sell their house (00:56:19) Weighing the financial case for selling (01:16:35) Choosing happiness over financial returns (01:25:42) Reworking their spending to enjoy life now (01:40:04) Follow-ups 💡 RAMIT’S PODCAST NEWSLETTER • I share new ways to think about money every Saturday. Get the emails here: https://iwt.com/podcastnewsletter 🙌 GET HELP FROM RAMIT SETHI • Order my new book: Money for Couples: https://iwt.com/moneyforcouples • Take control of your money with the Conscious Spending Plan: https://iwt.com/csp • Optimize your credit cards with the 1st chapter of my book: https://iwt.com/chapter1-pod • Join my Rich Life: Road to $100K program: https://iwt.com/100k • Listen to my book — now on Audible: https://amzn.to/48zko28 🤳 CONNECT WITH RAMIT SETHI • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ramit/ • X: https://twitter.com/ramit ✅ SUBSCRIBE SO YOU DON’T MISS ANY EPISODES https://youtube.com/user/ramitsethi/featured/ This episode brought to you by: Granola | Try Granola totally free at https://granola.ai/RAMIT Ladder | Get a free 7-day trial and $10 off your first month at https://ladder.fit/RAMIT Wispr Flow | Try Wispr Flow for free at wisprflow.ai/ramit Facet | As of the date of this recording, Facet is waiving the enrollment fee for new annual members, and for my audience, Facet is offering $300 into your brokerage account if you invest and maintain $5,000 within your first 90 days. Head to facet.com/ramit to learn more about which membership option is best for you. Offer has been extended to 12/31/2026. #FacetAd Connect with Ramit: Get my new book, Money For Couples Get Money Coaching with Ramit Download the Conscious Spending Plan Listen to my book—now on Audible Get my New York Times best-selling book Get my no-numbers journal Other episodes Instagram Twitter YouTube Apply to be coached for free on this podcast at https://iwt.com/apply

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I feel a little bit paralyzed. I don't feel like I know what's right anymore.

• 0:03Ramit Sethi?

  You said, "We know we want something different, but seem unable to decide how to make that happen."

• 0:09Speaker 00

  We wanted to Airbnb our house, took out an $80,000 home equity loan. We bought an RV, made a new truck to pull the RV.

• 0:17Ramit Sethi?

  What the, go on, is this a joke? Am I on candid camera right now?

• 0:21Speaker 00

  None of it has worked out, and it just makes us tired.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  I don't really look at them as like schemes, but more of like an out.

• 0:27Ramit Sethi?

  An out from?

• 0:29Speaker 02

  From corporate America.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  He wants to sell the house.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  I mean, it was stupid. We did not make enough money. I wanted to throw up, like half a million dollars in a loan. I'm just like, this does not feel good.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Everybody that we talked to is like, you know, homeownership is the dream, but we do have this debt hanging over our heads.

• 0:43Ramit Sethi?

  If you don't develop a philosophy, if you don't develop what your rich life is and really start to practice it, then inevitably you wake up one day, you go, wait a second, I did everything they told me to. And then you're like, this actually sucks.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  It's Groundhog Day.

• 0:58Ramit Sethi?

  Let's see if we can figure this out. I do enjoy snooping through people's money. That's my job. And now I actually get to do it even deeper because every couple on this podcast connects their accounts to Monarch before they meet me, which means I get to see all of their accounts, all of their income, all of their transactions in one single view. Now, I'm about to speak to Khloe and Jake, so let's take a look at their Monarch account and see what their money tells me before I get the chance to meet them. All right, let's take a look. Whoa, net income at $19,248. That's a lot of money. Okay, we have a high-earning couple here. Debt payments at $5,000 a month. What the hell?

• 1:39Ramit Sethi?

  Who's paying $3,480 to Camping World? What even cost that much? I've seen it on TV. Don't they sell RVs, those gigantic campers? $3,500 a month for an RV? That's more than triple a normal car payment. We're gonna find out if I'm right. Let's take a look at their accounts. We have investments, $311,000, $537,000 in debt. They have a home equity loan? Why? All right, let's take a look at the recent transactions they have. Here we go. Homeowners going to Lowe's for $866 as recently as yesterday. Wow. And then Lowe's the day before for $47. I'm actually offended. Not that they're spending money at Lowe's,

• 2:23Ramit Sethi?

  but that they went to Lowe's twice in two days. It's the house stuff that I'm looking at that's quite interesting. And I want to find out why they are here. So let's meet Jake and Khloe. Khloe, in your application, you said something. It caught my eye. You said, "We are wary to make the wrong financial decisions because of our chronic schemes that inevitably cost us money. This is putting us in analysis paralysis where we know we want something different, but seem unable to decide how to make that happen. We're pretty grumpy and tired most days." Is that still accurate today?

• 3:02Speaker 00

  I'm tired of spending money on things that don't matter to me, which I feel like this house is.

• 3:07Ramit Sethi?

  The house that I'm looking at right now? Just from the small window I can see, I see what appears to be a somewhat new suburban house. Looks like a very nice room. Jake appears to be sitting in, I don't know, maybe part of the living room or family room. He's got a nicely painted wall. I always appreciate a nicely painted wall. Both of them are nodding. How close did I get to reality?

• 3:33Speaker 00

  So it's not a new house. It's a 70s house that's been renovated multiple times.

• 3:37Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, did you renovate it as well?

• 3:39Speaker 00

  We have tried.

• 3:41Ramit Sethi?

  Wow, that's not a good answer. "We have tried" is like, oh, [BLEEP]. Okay, wow. All right, so "we have tried." So you're grumpy about spending money on the house. Is that right? Okay, wow.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:56Ramit Sethi?

  You're in the right place. Let's talk.

• 4:02Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, and Jake, do you feel the same way?

• 4:04Speaker 02

  I do, yeah. I think that we could do a lot more with that money than spend it on trying to keep our house from returning to dust.

• 4:12Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, now you used the word, Khloe, "schemes", which I thought was quite interesting. Wow, Khloe, what was that look on your face just now?

• 4:19Speaker 00

  Done. So when I say schemes, we want to be entrepreneurs. We both work nine-to-five corporate jobs right now, and we are constantly thinking of different business ideas, wanting to pursue them, and then getting burned out by the maintenance of our house and not being able to. But we like to invest a lot of money in these schemes, and that's become a problem. Like, we decided we wanted to Airbnb our house two years ago. We did very little research into the Airbnb market in our area, which isn't great. And we took out an $80,000 home equity loan to do renovations on the house. We bought an RV. We bought, made a new truck to pull the RV.

• 5:01Ramit Sethi?

  What the, go on, is this a joke? Am I on candid camera right now?

• 5:05Speaker 00

  No.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Our neighbors thought we won the lottery.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, we had a neighbor ask us if we won the lottery. And we were like, no. And we gave her no other explanation. I think she was just like, okay, either they're rich or they're bad with money. So we always, we want to start businesses. We want to create apps. We're always scheming.

• 5:21Ramit Sethi?

  The word "scheme" is quite interesting. Let me read you off some other uses of the word "scheme" from your application. Quote, "We are realizing that our rich life involves more flexibility to follow our schemes. And then, 'we are wary to make the wrong decision because of our chronic schemes.'"

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Did I misuse that word?

• 5:38Ramit Sethi?

  No, it's an interesting use of word. Tell me about that word.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  I think they feel like schemes because none of it has worked out so far, and it just makes us tired. It just feels like everything is kind of this side thing that we decide to do, and then we just, we get overwhelmed.

• 5:58Ramit Sethi?

  What's the difference between a scheme and a business?

• 6:01Speaker 00

  A business makes money.

• 6:03Ramit Sethi?

  And a scheme?

• 6:04Speaker 00

  I don't know. I guess a scheme is an idea that you have, like, oh, let's do this thing. Let's, like, this is a great idea. Let's invest all this money in this. Let's invest all this time. And then just like dropping it or deciding you don't want to do it anymore. And it's like less serious than a business.

• 6:19Ramit Sethi?

  Got it. Okay, and when you think about the schemes that you have participated in, how do you feel?

• 6:25Speaker 00

  Some of them I feel good. The RV one, I don't feel very good about that. I think that was a terrible financial decision. At the time, it seemed like a great idea.

• 6:33Ramit Sethi?

  What's the feeling?

• 6:34Speaker 00

  I'm just embarrassed.

• 6:36Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, Jake, what about you? What's your take on the schemes, as Khloe puts it, that you've been participating in?

• 6:44Speaker 02

  I look at them more as opportunities to break out of the traditional nine-to-fives. Because it's not like we don't want to work. We just don't necessarily want to have to do it within the confines of like a corporate structure. We'd like a little bit more flexibility. So I don't really look at them as like schemes, but more of like an out, if you will.

• 7:04Ramit Sethi?

  An out from?

• 7:06Speaker 02

  From corporate America.

• 7:07Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, got it. Tell me a little bit about your relationship. How long you been together? Are you married? Any children?

• 7:14Speaker 02

  We are married. Been together for 10 years. No kids.

• 7:18Ramit Sethi?

  Great, okay. Can you think of a time in the past six to 12 months where the two of you did not agree about something relating to money? Khloe, I can see it on your face, you've got one.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  It's about the house again. We do agree that we don't want to live here anymore. It's just too much maintenance for us. It's crazy. But he wants to sell the house, and I am hesitant to sell the house. Again, because I think that sometimes we make decisions financially that aren't the best. Everybody keeps saying we should rent it out, and you know, real estate's a good investment and all this stuff. And we have a 2.7 interest rate, so I think we might want to rent it.

• 7:55Ramit Sethi?

  Got it. Can we just go back to when you bought this house? What year was it? How old were the two of you? And then walk me through that thinking process.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  So we were 25 and 27 when we bought this. It was right at the end of 2020 and 2021. So right when all the values started inflating, but they weren't crazy high yet. The interest rates were really low. Again, that's how we got a 2.7. And we bought because it was purely financial. Neither of us had a dream of owning a house. It was just that, that traditional knowledge of renting is throwing away money. You need to buy a house, and it's just the next thing you do. So we bought a house.

• 8:32Ramit Sethi?

  Where does that traditional knowledge, where did you get that from?

• 8:35Speaker 00

  Well, that's Jake.

• 8:37Ramit Sethi?

  Tell me, Jake.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  I mean, with the interest rates being so low, we were never going to see that again. My thought process on buying a house was, if we buy the house and we live there for 20, 30 years, then in some cases, it can be a decent investment, if not anything other than a savings account. Because we weren't saving really much at the time. But then again, we were also making a lot less than what we make now.

• 8:59Ramit Sethi?

  Were you renting at the time?

• 9:01Speaker 02

  We were renting at the time.

• 9:02Ramit Sethi?

  What was your rent?

• 9:03Speaker 02

  $2,400 a month.

• 9:05Ramit Sethi?

  $2,400. And then, once all was said and done, you bought the house, how much total cost every month?

• 9:11Speaker 02

  When we first bought it, it was $2,990. Now it's $3,072.

• 9:17Ramit Sethi?

  That includes maintenance?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  No.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  That's not maintenance.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  That's the minimum.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  That's the mortgage plus the escrow.

• 9:23Ramit Sethi?

  What about if you include everything? Any idea?

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Like $4,500 a month.

• 9:27Ramit Sethi?

  All right, so from $2,400 to $4,400 a month, what do you think of that?

• 9:32Speaker 02

  I mean, it was stupid. We did not make enough money. I'm surprised that a bank lended me the money.

• 9:38Ramit Sethi?

  Well, banks love to give money to Americans. They [BLEEP] love it. And Americans love to take it. What?

• 9:44Speaker 02

  I know.

• 9:45Ramit Sethi?

  I can qualify for this credit card? This mortgage? I must be successful.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Honestly, signing that, though, like, I wanted to throw up, like, half a million dollars in a loan. I'm just like, this does not feel good.

• 9:57Ramit Sethi?

  Is that for real? You really want to throw up?

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I mean, in the moment.

• 10:01Ramit Sethi?

  Why'd you do it?

• 10:01Speaker 02

  I was 25, right? Like, I was very young. I think I was making like $126,000. The house was $595,000 is what it appraised for. So well over our budget.

• 10:12Ramit Sethi?

  Did you have a budget? Did you have a number in mind?

• 10:16Speaker 00

  So we did. We had a number of $500,000 in mind, and that was kind of like our upper. That was as high as we wanted to go.

• 10:22Ramit Sethi?

  Okay.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  But there is a story behind this house. So we bought this house because this is his parents' house.

• 10:28Ramit Sethi?

  Oh.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  Yes, this house has been in the family since like the 90s, I think. It was like one of his uncles, and then they sold it to his parents, and then they sold it to us. So we bought, no inspection. We bought as-is. It was over our budget, but everybody in this area was paying $100,000 over asking with no inspection. And we were like, we'll probably get a townhouse for this much. And like, this house has 1.5 acres. It has a pool. It's a four-bedroom house with like an office. It has...

• 10:55Speaker 02

  3,000 square feet, yeah.

• 10:57Ramit Sethi?

  3,000 square feet for two 25-year-olds.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 11:01Ramit Sethi?

  What do you guys do? Play hide-and-seek all day?

• 11:03Speaker 00

  With the dog sometimes.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  We did with our dog at the time.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  But most of our time is spent dealing with the house and again, has 1.5 acres in the pool. So we have eight hours of yard work pretty much every weekend.

• 11:17Ramit Sethi?

  What? Just lay it out for me. Eight hours, like what do you do?

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Really, the main problem is, is that there's like, there's a bunch of different, I guess landscaped areas of the house.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  So this house, when it originally entered the family, it had been bought by a family member of his that was a multimillionaire. And this guy had gardeners, landscapers, like there were two koi ponds on the property.

• 11:40Ramit Sethi?

  This house is like a mansion owned by a multimillionaire and now it's sold to two 25 year olds. Successful, it sounds like, but still, hello, does this seem a little weird?

• 11:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:54Ramit Sethi?

  You all are like sitting there at escrow like, alright, here we go.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  We're like, money's on sale, money's on sale.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. To put it in perspective, this house was nice in the 90s. It was landscaped, everything, and then it was sold to Jake's parents. And then they weren't multimillionaires, so they didn't have gardeners. So everything kind of got overgrown. So we had spent five years, basically trying to take out all of these overgrown landscape features. And that's just been our life for the last five summers.

• 12:27Ramit Sethi?

  So you buy the thing and then like Jake, you mentioned something quite interesting. You said, I felt like throwing up when we were signing. Did you talk about that with Chloe at the signing?

• 12:36Speaker 02

  At the signing? No, I don't think so. Afterwards, for sure.

• 12:39Ramit Sethi?

  What did you say?

• 12:40Speaker 02

  But it was because I was solely responsible, right? Like when we purchased the house, her credit would have dropped mine below that 760 threshold. Just the average of our two credits. So they had her off of it altogether. So for me, it was just like a very like heavy weight of I'm responsible for half a million dollars to this bank.

• 13:00Ramit Sethi?

  And what did you say afterwards when you started talking to Chloe about it?

• 13:03Speaker 02

  You know, it gave me a lot of anxiety to sign that paperwork and it was just their hand in me a stack of a hundred pieces of paper where I'm signing here and there. And there's no way that I'm reading through all of that. I don't have a lawyer.

• 13:13Ramit Sethi?

  Chloe, what was your take on this as you're signing and you're about to own this house?

• 13:18Speaker 00

  At the time, I had zero financial literacy, so I was just in Lollaland, like just, no, this is fun.

• 13:25Ramit Sethi?

  Did it feel good to know that you're going to be a homeowner?

• 13:28Speaker 00

  I had no desire to own a home. It was kind of just something like I was 27. It was something that like 40 year olds did, you know? None of my friends owned a home. I was just kind of like, okay, like this is a good financial decision because we're throwing away money on rent.

• 13:40Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. Did your parents tell you that?

• 13:42Speaker 00

  No, actually. They didn't do a lot of financial educating. I'm sure they tried, but I was not the most responsible person when I was young.

• 13:51Ramit Sethi?

  Got it.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  When Nate met me, my credit was at a 430. He told me he would never marry me because he would never be able to buy a house with my credit.

• 13:58Ramit Sethi?

  Whoa, okay. And what was your reaction, Chloe?

• 14:02Speaker 00

  At the time, my feelings were hurt, but now as a person with a little bit of financial literacy, I understand where he's coming from.

• 14:08Ramit Sethi?

  She goes, technically, he was correct. I was a liability in this financial partnership.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  I don't know if I would marry someone with a 430 credit either.

• 14:17Ramit Sethi?

  Wow. That's, that's actually quite interesting because I think that first time hearing that you said that, it kind of come off a little bad, but once you become knowledgeable about money, you realize if we're talking about marriage, then money is a very important part of it. And a 430 credit score, while yes, of course it would be difficult for a mortgage, it actually speaks more to your behavior with money. Are you aware? Are you intentional? If you see something that went wrong, can you make changes? So the word liability is a little direct, but as Chloe points out, once you become knowledgeable, I don't know if I would marry somebody with a 430. Jake, so she had the 430. What happened then?

• 15:01Ramit Sethi?

  You put her on a performance improvement plan or something?

• 15:04Speaker 02

  I did. It was a very strict regimen. To be honest, we just talked about like how you can improve your credit, right? She didn't even have a credit card at the time, so I helped her with that.

• 15:14Ramit Sethi?

  So here you are now years later with the house. And Jake, what do you feel about the house?

• 15:23Speaker 02

  Don't get me wrong. Like I feel great that we're in a position that we can own a home. And for some people, that might be their rich place. For us, it's not. You can just see it in the way that we interact with day to day chores. All of these different projects that we've worked on, all this information that's just in our heads now that we don't care to know that kind of stuff. Like what a constant pressure well pump is.

• 15:44Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. I don't ever want to know that. I don't even want to hear those words again. I just heard it. I'm good.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Just look at how much we've spent at Lowe's and that'll tell you exactly how I feel.

• 15:53Ramit Sethi?

  I do have questions about Lowe's. In fact, in the last two days, you've gone to Lowe's twice.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 15:59Ramit Sethi?

  Let me tell you something, like in my hell, I wake up one day, I go out of my bedroom and I have a 6,500 square foot house. Okay. I go outside, there's shrubbery or whatever you call it and just dead animals everywhere. And then I go out to my car. It's a humongous SUV. Okay. It's out of gas, by the way, but I somehow get it turned on. And then the only place it drives me, the only place it goes is Home Depot. I go, fuck, what did I do in my life to end up here? And then it's just every day, it's the same old thing.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  It's Groundhog Day.

• 16:37Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. Okay. I deeply understand where you are coming from. Let's see if we can figure this out. When I think about two young people owning a house, first of all, I go, for a lot of people, why would you do it? When you're young, you're building your career, you want geographical flexibility, all that stuff. But that big of a house, that's like a country estate. And they said, hey, it's not really what we want. We didn't even realize it was going to be like this. It's okay to be like, we made a huge mistake. It happens a lot. In fact, the more money you make and the more money you spend, the more mistakes with money you are going to make. That's okay. The goal is not to try to avoid all mistakes.

• 17:20Ramit Sethi?

  It's actually to become honest and strong enough that you can acknowledge them and then fix it. They admit it and they're like, what do we do next? I can work with that. I have a lot of calls every day and on those calls, we will make a lot of decisions. We will assign tasks, follow ups. I don't want to have to remember all that stuff. If my team and I did not have high quality notes, the whole call would just be pointless. You don't have to do that. Check out Granola. Granola is an AI powered notepad that makes your meeting notes useful. It captures what happens in your meetings and turns it into clean, structured notes with decisions and action items pulled out and made easy to find. What's great is that it seamlessly integrates into how you already work.

• 18:04Ramit Sethi?

  No setup, no awkward bots or unneeded friction. Just jump on a call like usual and Granola will transform your fragmented call notes into actionable insights you can reference and still understand weeks later. One of my colleagues uses it and told me, what I love about Granola is that I can stay focused on the conversation instead of scrambling to take notes and capture every detail. After the meeting, I have clear notes and action items ready to go. Once you try it on a first meeting, it's hard to go without. You can try it totally free. Head to granola.ai/ramit. That's granola.ai/ramit to get your time back, especially if you do lots of calls. Go to granola.ai/ramit and try it on your next call.

• 18:50Ramit Sethi?

  One of my top money dials is health and fitness. And I've worked with a personal trainer for years and I happily spend a lot of money on my own fitness. But I know not everyone has the time or the money for a hundred dollar plus sessions every single week. If that's you and you still want a plan, instead of guessing what to do at the gym, check out the Ladder app. The Ladder app is an expert strength training plan, not a random collection of workouts. It's real progressive programming designed by certified coaches with a new plan every week that builds on the last. It's like having a personal trainer in your headphones. Now I actually tried it myself. I was impressed. I chose bodybuilding. I chose to use machines, dumbbells, et cetera.

• 19:33Ramit Sethi?

  I focused on specific areas that I wanted to work on, that I'm currently working on. And then I evaluated the workouts and did it myself. I thought it was great. If I did not know how to program my own workouts, I would use this app. It tells you exactly what to do. It shows you the form. It helps you enter your weight and your reps and then you can track it all. And I like that it included bodybuilding, but also Pilates, at home dumbbells, kettlebells, and a whole bunch more. The app costs less than a dollar a day. Compare that to over a hundred dollars for a single session with a trainer. Remove the guesswork with Ladder and get a real coach in your ear telling you exactly what to do for every workout. No thinking, everything planned for you.

• 20:19Ramit Sethi?

  If you have an iPhone, head to ladder.fit/ramit and take a quick quiz to find your perfect ladder plan. Use my link and get a free seven day trial with no credit card and $10 off your first month if you join. That's ladder.fit/ramit. I want to take a look at your numbers. All right. Chloe, can you read off the words in bold and then the numbers in full for this entire box, please?

• 20:46Speaker 00

  Sure. So assets is 860,000. Investments is 304,000. Savings, 68,000. Debt, 540,000. And total net worth, 692,000.

• 21:01Ramit Sethi?

  All right. What do you think about those numbers?

• 21:03Speaker 00

  I like them. I mean, the debt's kind of high.

• 21:05Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. Jake?

• 21:06Speaker 02

  I feel good about them. I agree with Chloe here and that's a little bit high, but most of it's the mortgage.

• 21:12Ramit Sethi?

  All right. Let's keep going. I would like to ask Jake to read off the combined gross monthly income, please.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  That is 30,166.

• 21:24Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. That is a household income of 361,992. Who here by a show of hands knew that number?

• 21:35Speaker 00

  Ow.

• 21:36Ramit Sethi?

  Both. Very impressive. Also, that's a lot of money. How old are you again?

• 21:43Speaker 02

  I'm thirty.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  Thirty, thirty-two.

• 21:45Ramit Sethi?

  How are you all making so much money?

• 21:46Speaker 00

  A ten.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  I sacrificed my twenties.

• 21:49Ramit Sethi?

  What do you do for a living?

• 21:50Speaker 02

  I am a senior manager of an engineering department.

• 21:53Ramit Sethi?

  Great, great. And Chloe?

• 21:56Speaker 00

  I'm a software engineer.

• 21:58Ramit Sethi?

  Great. So what I'm looking at here for the breakdown here is Jake is making twenty K a month, right, or roughly two hundred forty K a year. It's great, especially at that age. Very impressive. Chloe making ten thousand dollars a month, also very impressive, especially at that age. All right, I love it. I see that you are contributing a lot to your 401ks. That's great. And I see your net is roughly eighteen K or nineteen K a month. Cool, lot of money. So I thought that once I make an extra five thousand or ten thousand or fifty, I'll never have money problems again. Isn't that how it works?

• 22:37Speaker 02

  I thought so.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  Apparently not.

• 22:41Ramit Sethi?

  I actually really appreciate you being here because one of the things that I want to show people in my community is just making more money does not automatically solve your money problems. And in fact, if you don't develop a philosophy, if you don't develop what your rich life is and really start to practice it, then inevitably you wake up one day, you go, wait a second, I did everything they told me to, and how come I still feel scarce about money? How come we feel like, is this it? We work so hard, this is all we have to show for it? Or like, what do I even do with my money? So I would rather people get that now than wait until they're in their fifty, sixties or seventies. All right, let's continue working on. We see fixed costs. Chloe, what's that number?

• 23:27Speaker 00

  Forty-three percent.

• 23:28Ramit Sethi?

  Forty-three percent on your fixed costs, one of the lowest numbers I've seen. Then again, that is what I would expect with a salary that high. So if your salary were more modest, yeah, we're talking about fifty, sixty percent. But as your salary goes up, you expect that number to come down quite a bit. Again, why? Because bread is the price of bread. Even if you double or triple the price of bread, it's still basically the same. And of course, people who make a lot of money spend a lot of money often. That's fine. But your mortgage is three thousand seventy-two dollars, which is quite modest for what you make. Looking at the rest of it here, there's nothing that really stands out to me. I mean, it's forty-three percent. I have no comments. Investments, ten percent, but that is on top of your 401 case, correct?

• 24:14Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 24:14Ramit Sethi?

  So that's a lot. That's tens of thousands of dollars that you're investing per year. That's nice, especially at this age. Great. Savings at, whoa, thirty-eight percent, seven thousand a month, although, explain this to me, Jake?

• 24:27Speaker 02

  That is just saving to pay off the home equity loan.

• 24:30Ramit Sethi?

  How much?

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Forty-five thousand dollars is what we have remaining.

• 24:33Ramit Sethi?

  Got it. Okay, so you're setting it aside to pay that off. Got it. Okay. And you have sixty-eight thousand dollars already in savings. Is that like your emergency fund?

• 24:44Speaker 02

  High-yield savings.

• 24:45Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, great. That's solid. Okay, that's nice. And then your guilt-free spending is nine percent or one thousand six hundred eighty dollars. How do you feel about that?

• 24:56Speaker 02

  It's low for right now.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  I would like to spend more, but right now, I mean, we've gotten ourselves into a little bit of a pickle. I mean, I know our numbers look fine, but we do have this debt hanging over our heads. Like, we can't sell our house or do anything with it really until we pay off this equity loan. So like, right now, my entire salary pretty much is just going towards that.

• 25:15Ramit Sethi?

  Why'd you take out the home equity loan?

• 25:17Speaker 00

  The RV trip.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  To rent the house. Yeah, to do some improvements on the house so that way we could Airbnb it.

• 25:23Ramit Sethi?

  Why don't you just pay cash? You all make a lot of money.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  We didn't have any.

• 25:26Ramit Sethi?

  So why don't you just wait?

• 25:28Speaker 02

  It was an option.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was an option.

• 25:32Ramit Sethi?

  I actually find it crazy that in America, we take out debt to do renovations. Renovations are mostly a total luxury. They are not an investment. There's like a few that actually pay out a little bit more than you make, but in general, they're total luxuries. This is crazy. First of all, people are like, what? Ramis said what? Yes, it's true. Look it up. Payback rate, home renovations. You will find that the vast majority of them, you're just paying for a luxury. I think now, maybe, would your approach be different if you were to do this again?

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Oh, one hundred percent.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, at the time, it just felt like any money that you put into your house is good money, right? Like, it's an investment. And that's, you know, that's what they tell you. So it could have gone into the stock market.

• 26:14Ramit Sethi?

  Wow. This is the greatest transformation I've ever heard in my life. You sort of tick all the boxes of what they told you, and then you do it, which I love. You're like, okay, cool, we're gonna do everything they told us. And then you're like, wait a second, this actually sucks. The more I hear about this, the more I think like, this actually reflects American culture. The more we do what they told us to, it's just kind of ephemeral, nebulous they. And then we're like, wait a second, I'm supposed to like, buy a house in the suburbs, work at a company, and then one day when I retire, I can finally do what I'm supposed to do. Like, wait, I did that. I actually hate this. And again, some people love it if they do it intentionally.

• 26:56Ramit Sethi?

  I have no problem buying a big old house in the suburbs. That's great if that's your rich life. But I love that you are sharing your experience so we can be like, wait a second, is that actually my vision? Shall we take a look at some of the expenses? All right, let's take a look. Let's go to last month. Let's take a look here at the fixed costs, which were higher than expected. Housing, what's swim gem?

• 27:21Speaker 00

  That's a pool service.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  That is a pool service.

• 27:24Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, fine. Transportation, y'all have two cars?

• 27:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:31Ramit Sethi?

  What do I care? You're all at forty-something percent. Again, I'm just like, do what you're doing. It's great. But let's keep looking. Debt payments at five thousand eighty-nine per month. What is this? Camping World for three thousand four hundred eighty dollars. Explain, please.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  That was paying off our loan so we could sell our RV that we bought.

• 27:49Ramit Sethi?

  I have so many questions because I literally did not know what somebody could buy at Camping World. I thought the most expensive thing at Camping World is a tent. Like, that's what I know. Then I saw the payments. So how much did your RV cost?

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Fifty thousand.

• 28:03Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, why'd you get an RV?

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Because we were gonna rent the house out, Airbnb it, and travel the country. Because we both have good jobs.

• 28:10Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, okay. How much did you get for it?

• 28:14Speaker 00

  Thirty.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  What was it? Thirty, thirty-two, maybe?

• 28:17Ramit Sethi?

  How long did you have it for?

• 28:19Speaker 02

  Two years.

• 28:20Ramit Sethi?

  So it went from fifty to thirty-two. That's actually better than I thought. What do you think about that?

• 28:25Speaker 02

  It's better than I thought too, but we also bought it at eight years old. So it was not a new RV.

• 28:30Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, so it already depreciated?

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Forty-four feet long. It was a big one.

• 28:34Ramit Sethi?

  Is that good or what is that?

• 28:35Speaker 00

  That's huge. It's like the size of a semi truck.

• 28:38Ramit Sethi?

  All right. Did you take any trips in the RV before you sold it?

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Not one.

• 28:44Ramit Sethi?

  Not one?

• 28:50Speaker 02

  That's the sad part.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  You know why? It was too hard to get it out of our driveway. Like, once we got it in there, we were like, it's, we can, it's never gonna leave.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  That was brutal getting it in there.

• 29:00Ramit Sethi?

  This is so crazy. But I like that you have a good sense of humor about it. Like, how is it that you both have a good sense of humor about this?

• 29:07Speaker 00

  Probably because we make enough money where it hasn't destroyed us, honestly.

• 29:11Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, Chloe, I think that's very insightful. If, let's say Jake had lost his job, and you had all these debts, and the ongoing expenses, it's actually not funny. But I do appreciate that when you have enough, you can laugh it off. I remember one time, this is embarrassing, I bought a table. So I hired somebody off of TaskRabbit or something. The guy comes over, and this is in New York, and I was on the phone, so I was like, like, here's the box. Can you just like, put it together and then let me know? And I'll just come take a look. So he's like, yeah, yeah. I go back, I'm on my call. The guy comes up to me like ninety seconds later, and he goes, and he points me over to the table.

• 29:53Ramit Sethi?

  The table came fully assembled, okay? Fully assembled. I just didn't even open it. I said, oh my God, this is gonna be the easiest money you ever make. And I handed him a big old tip, and I'm just like, what can you do? And like, you can laugh at that now, but if my parents had had that happen, even though they never would have even hired somebody to do it, but let's just say they had wasted, you know, two hundred bucks for five minutes, it would have actually been really costly, really hard. But when you make enough, you can kind of laugh these things off. One reason why I want people to focus on improving their income, because I want you to be able to laugh off some of these things. All right, let's keep going. I want to look at some other expenses here. You're done paying off the RV. The RV is sold. It's gone, never having been used.

• 30:39Ramit Sethi?

  I mean, you could have put in the, in the ad, like new.

• 30:44Ramit Sethi?

  Pets, $163. Sounds very reasonable to me. Shopping, there's just a bunch of Amazon purchases, fine. Dining out, we have Chick-fil-A, DoorDash, and Donuts. When you look at these transactions, what do you see?

• 31:01Speaker 00

  It's mostly just like living stuff. Like, a lot of those Amazon purchases are like toilet paper that we have on subscription, or paper towels, or dog food, or something like that.

• 31:12Ramit Sethi?

  My take, from having looked at many, many people's spending, is your spending is very normal, very modest. There are virtually no numbers that stand out to me as like, wow, like, we should dig in there. None of it. It's all just totally normal. The only expenses that really stood out to me was housing-related expenses. Lows, swim stuff, obviously, there's the mortgage, and then the camping world's a little unrelated, but it's that. So if we look at some of the key numbers that you have, you have $304,000 in investments. Where did that come from?

• 31:52Speaker 02

  A lot of it's individual, and then I have a 401K. Chloe has a 401K. And then we have about $60,000 in our own personal investments. And then I have roughly 90, was it 96,000 in restricted share units for my company?

• 32:07Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, got it. And when do those vest?

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Over the next two years.

• 32:11Ramit Sethi?

  Cool. How do you treat your RSUs?

• 32:13Speaker 02

  We get either treated as it's going to be for a vacation, or we use it for like a project that we've been unable, I guess, to individually save for around the house. And I've been getting them for the last six years or so.

• 32:28Ramit Sethi?

  How much do you get on average per year?

• 32:30Speaker 02

  Forty, 50,000 dollars.

• 32:32Ramit Sethi?

  Got it.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  On top of my salary.

• 32:34Ramit Sethi?

  On top of your salary. Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot of money, okay? And it sounds like you discussed it before, so do you end up with a plan like, hey, we got roughly 50K that's going to vest, this is what we're going to do with it?

• 32:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:48Ramit Sethi?

  Great, that's the way to do it.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  We talk about money all the time, like, every day. But we love it.

• 32:52Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, good, I could tell. This is the way to do it, I want everybody to listen here. Yes, you may not make as much as Chloe and Jake, but I want you to listen to just some of the things you hear. You know, the idea that, hey, we have this expected slash unexpected money that's going to come in, we talk about it ahead of time. That's what you should do. And even if you don't have a date where you're going to get an extra 50K, hey, if we made an extra $100, or if we got a tax refund or something, what would we do with that money? You should be talking about it ahead of time, just like you guys are. Great job. Okay, so I don't see any debt payoffs in your fixed costs. Can you just walk me through that?

• 33:31Speaker 00

  Sure. So we don't have any recurring debt, other than Jake's car, that we pay for. We don't have any like scheduled payments. So Jake's car is not paid off, my car is. And then we have this home equity loan, where there's no actual payments. We just have to pay it off when we have the money. So it looks like we have very low debt.

• 33:53Ramit Sethi?

  Got it. And you categorize it separately under your savings? Okay. All right.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, we didn't really know what to do with it.

• 33:59Ramit Sethi?

  That's okay. It's okay. I like that you did it, though. I like that you picked something, and you know why you did it. Hey, maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong, but I like that you were like, this is our best guess, this is what we're going to do. That's how you should do it. Okay, looking at your numbers, they look very healthy to me. You all make a lot of money, you don't spend a lot, you have your savings already dialed in, yeah, you have some debt, you're paying it off. Okay, great. You all are going to end up doing pretty well, regardless. So why are we here? We're here because you said, we're not living our rich lives. In looking at the numbers, tell me about the part that you are not living your rich life. Jake?

• 34:37Speaker 02

  Well, the numbers only tell part of the story. It's really time spent, effort spent, mental energy just spent, right, on the house. These things are going wrong, we have to schedule contractors to come for X, Y, Z. We have two A-tracks of this house, so we could lose one of them, because we've already replaced the other, and that's going to be 13, $14,000. I'm already thinking about that. So in my opinion, if we're not going to live here, I would rather not have the mental load of still owning the property. Because we're still responsible for those things that go wrong.

• 35:12Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, you feel the same way?

• 35:13Speaker 00

  I feel the same way as him, where I don't really want to deal with it. But I'm having a hard time with the idea of just selling the house, because we have such a good interest rate. And like, we're in a good area, where, you know, it's an up and coming area, there's development happening. If I were a real estate investor, I would look at our area. I wouldn't look at our house, but we already have it. So this is kind of a sticking point for us, where I know that when I was young, I was very just flippant with money, I didn't know anything. At this point, I'm the more frugal one. With this house, we made, I think, what was probably a good financial decision, based on our income, right, like, as it is now. A poor lifestyle decision, but I want to make the best of it.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  I don't want to make any more financial mistakes. And the decision to rent this house out, or sell it, is another one. And I feel a little bit paralyzed, that I don't feel like I know what's right anymore, even though our numbers look good.

• 36:13Ramit Sethi?

  Do you trust yourself with money, Chloe?

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Kind of. I think that now, I'm good with money, but I think that both of us have a tendency to throw money at things.

• 36:23Ramit Sethi?

  RV being an example, house?

• 36:26Speaker 00

  I mean, even like, two years, two years ago, three years ago, I bought a new car. The car that I had was like 600, $800 from being paid off. And it developed an electrical issue that would have been a couple thousand dollars to fix. And they were gaslighting us at the dealership, saying it was like that I was leading the overhead light on, and there was all these problems. And we just didn't want to deal with it, so I traded the car in instead. And it took out $17,000 for a car. And now it's paid off, like, we did pay it off. But I think it was stupid. It was a good car, it just had a problem, and it would have been a couple thousand dollars to fix it. And then if you, like, we would have saved $14,000 on car costs over the last two years. Instead, we had this extra loan that we had to pay off, and that money could have gone into the house, or it could have gone into the stock market, or it could have gone towards a vacation.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  Instead, it's gone towards another car that we didn't necessarily need, but we just kind of didn't want to deal with it. And that's what I worry with this house, is that we just don't want to deal with it. And it actually could be a good rental property, and we're just mentally exhausted and don't want to deal with it.

• 37:28Ramit Sethi?

  Got it. So you are worried, hey, maybe we're making the same decision again, impulsively, just on a much bigger scale, and I want to just slow down and check with somebody, am I doing the right thing?

• 37:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I specifically wanted your perspective. That's why I reached out about this, because everybody in our lives is like, what are you doing? This is a great house. They don't see the work that we're putting in, and how like, our lifestyle has depleted since we've been here. But at the same time, it's like, you know, everybody that we talk to is like, you know, homeownership is the dream, like, and I'm like, are we just dumb?

• 38:06Ramit Sethi?

  I love that you both did. I'm really glad. I love when anyone has a philosophy around their rich life. Often, their rich life is different than mine. That's totally fine. And I just love to be able to pull, tell me, what do you love? Why do this way? Because so much of our money decisions are just based around really a lack of critical thinking and examination, and just, and honestly, what other people do. I'm glad you're asking, and I think we can probably dig a little deeper. It is fascinating how much we will stay with a bad decision, not even knowing why. Here we have a couple who could take their unhappy situation and change it like that,

• 38:51Ramit Sethi?

  and they don't. Why? Well, since most of us were young, we were told, buying a house, the American dream. Then you get this humongous house, and, in their case, a low interest rate. Well, how are you supposed to escape this thing that's almost been tied around you, but you also let it be tied? And say, no, actually, we don't want to live on a 1.5 acre property? We don't want to keep our 2.7% interest rate? We don't like this at all. So many of us reach the thing that we were told would make us happy. And when we are not happy, we don't deconstruct it and ask, hmm, what were the messages we absorbed?

• 39:36Ramit Sethi?

  Why did we listen to them? We just go, oh, we should probably just stay here. And then we end up feeling bad about feeling bad. It's kind of easy to understand how they've gotten here, because they actually have made bad decisions about money. And what if selling the house is yet another bad decision? I want to help Jake and Chloe unpack all of the different messages that are coming in, from family, friends, society, but also from the two of them, and help them see a simple way to look at this question. Should we keep the house or not? Think about all the things you have to type out on a daily basis. Email, Slack, text messages, notes.

• 40:17Ramit Sethi?

  Well, one of the tools that we love in my company, lets us use voice to text to save tons of time on all of those things. You can be walking and talking, and capturing your ideas straight into an Apple note, or a Slack message, or a text message. That is why we love Whisperflow. Whisperflow turns the way you naturally talk into clean, ready-to-send text in any app, on any device. I'm talking about Slack, Gmail, Notion, iMessage, even ChatGPT and Claude on Mac, Windows, and Android. With Whisperflow, you just hit a hotkey, speak, and the text appears way faster than typing it. Plus, it's smart, it's adaptive, so you don't send a block of huge incoherent text.

• 41:01Ramit Sethi?

  And unlike other dictation apps, it corrects mistakes, it gets names right the first time, and it can format bullet points and lists on the fly. I find that particularly useful. So if you send tons of emails and messages every day, if you want to be able to capture your own ideas just by talking, Whisperflow is a no-brainer. Get one month of Whisperflow Pro for free at wisprflow.ai/ramit. That's wisprflow.ai/ramit. W-I-S-P-R-flow.ai/ramit. Or click the link in the description. I've worked with a highly credentialed personal trainer for years who gives me long-term,

• 41:45Ramit Sethi?

  personalized, comprehensive advice, is available by text. Do I pay him a percentage of my assets? No. If you decide you need help from a financial advisor, I recommend using a flat fee planner like our friends at Facet. Financial planning is changing and Facet is helping make that happen. Instead of taking a percentage of your portfolio, Facet charges one flat membership fee for financial planning. Never a percentage of your assets, never a commission. And Facet gives you access to a team of CFP professionals, always a CFP, always a fiduciary, who help you create a personalized financial plan that meets you where you are. Your team is there for the decisions that are going to come your way,

• 42:28Ramit Sethi?

  maybe buying a house, tackling debt, managing investments, saving for kids' college, traveling in retirement, estate planning, all of it. Plus, their mobile app makes it easy to do everything in one spot, like tracking your goals, checking balances out, messaging your planner, seeing monthly action steps and more. As of the date of this recording, Facet is waiving the enrollment fee for new annual members. And for my audience, Facet is offering $300 into your brokerage account if you invest and maintain $5,000 within your first 90 days. Head to facet.com/ramit to learn about which membership option is best for you. Facet is an SEC-registered investment advisor. I'm not a member of Facet and I have an incentive to endorse Facet

• 43:10Ramit Sethi?

  as I have an ongoing fee-based contract for cash compensation based on this endorsement. All opinions are my own and not a guarantee of a similar outcome. Chloe, I'm curious, what do you remember your parents saying about money when you were young?

• 43:24Speaker 00

  I remember my dad clearly telling me that I should never have a credit card because I wasn't responsible enough, which was probably true. My parents, so they, we were very middle-class, but they had eight kids. So it didn't go as far.

• 43:39Speaker 00

  So, you know, we had everything that we needed. Like, we weren't, we weren't like poor, but we did all of our clothes shopping at the thrift store, you know? There wasn't like a crazy amount of scarcity, but like they didn't pay for my college or anything like that, right? It was just, at 18, I was out on my own. They didn't really talk about it with us much. To me, I think my parents, kind of like, they tried a little bit and then they kind of just wrote me off as like, okay, this one needs a husband.

• 44:02Ramit Sethi?

  Hold on, I have a lot of questions already. What part of the country did you grow up in?

• 44:06Speaker 00

  I grew up here, Virginia.

• 44:08Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. And what did your parents do for a living?

• 44:12Speaker 00

  My dad was a software engineer, so it paid well. Like, he made probably six figures. But again, it didn't go as far because they had eight children. Like, we had four bedrooms between all of us, 10 people, and one bathroom and all that kind of stuff.

• 44:26Ramit Sethi?

  Got it.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, we didn't go to private school, so that's where all the money went.

• 44:29Ramit Sethi?

  All of you? Wow. What do you think it cost back then?

• 44:33Speaker 00

  I don't know. I know that they gave you a discount. It was like the first kid was the most expensive and every kid that you had was discounted. So like, I'm sure by like the fourth or fifth kid, it wasn't that bad. But again, it was like, there were sacrifices made in other ways. Like, it was, the private schooling was very important to them. It was like a religious private school. We didn't go out to eat, we didn't do any vacations unless my grandparents paid for it, that kind of thing.

• 44:54Ramit Sethi?

  That's interesting. Did you feel mixed messages about money?

• 44:57Speaker 00

  I think when I was younger, I didn't really think critically about it. It was just kind of my reality. As I'd gotten older, it's become clear to me that that's really what mattered to my parents. Like, the private schooling was the thing that they were not willing to compromise on. And that made sacrifices in every other area, even though I complained about it as a kid, right? Like, I was like, I just want to go to the trendy stores and buy fashionable clothes and I'm stuck at the thrift store. And I think that it taught me how to be more frugal, even if I didn't realize it at the time. But now I've drawn from a lot of that.

• 45:30Ramit Sethi?

  Got it. Okay, that's very interesting. Chloe, do you think that your religious upbringing had any effects on your relationship or view of money?

• 45:38Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. I grew up in an environment where it was very much so like, God will provide. You don't take agency for your own decisions. You don't take control of your life. It kind of happens to you and it's all part of a plan, right? So when I was younger, I didn't see the point in developing any type of financial literacy. I barely graduated high school. I didn't go to college at first. I did eventually, I put myself through college when I was working full-time, but I had to make up for a lot of that as an adult. And I see it in my siblings. Some of them are great and they're doing fantastic. And some of them are really struggling financially. And I think it's that same, like, things just happen to them and they're reactive instead of proactive.

• 46:20Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, yeah. Are you still religious?

• 46:23Speaker 00

  Nope.

• 46:24Ramit Sethi?

  No? Okay, okay. When did that change for you?

• 46:26Speaker 00

  So maybe like eight years ago. It kind of was a gradual transition.

• 46:29Ramit Sethi?

  Jake, did you grow up religious too?

• 46:31Speaker 02

  I did.

• 46:32Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. And are you religious now?

• 46:35Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, got it. You raise a very interesting point, Chloe. Sometimes, in certain religious upbringings, the idea of this external locus of control being God and the idea that like, hey, I didn't really see the point of developing my financial literacy skills because in some way, in some form, God will provide. Talking to you now, it is like a stark 180-degree difference. When I asked, are you still religious? I was 95% certain you would say no because from the way that you grew up versus today, from a locus of control perspective, you're like, we could save more, we could use this money for a vacation, we could invest more. It's very, I can control what happens to me. And I hear that in the way you talk about money.

• 47:20Ramit Sethi?

  So just want to reflect on the journey that you have gone through because a journey growing up with many, many siblings and a religious upbringing, which was obviously very important to your parents, and then now to go to an internal locus of control with money is really powerful.

• 47:38Speaker 00

  Took a lot of work.

• 47:39Ramit Sethi?

  I can only guess. Anyway, thank you for sharing. It helps me understand much more about your view on money. Jake, let me ask you about your upbringing. What do you remember your family saying about money when you were young?

• 47:53Speaker 02

  As far back as I can remember, my parents always had, you know, one of those money guys who works off of a percentage, right? So I always had that kind of mindset that you invest your money, that you save your money, even if they weren't doing it. But then my grandmother, she actually had a huge impact, I think, on my, um, what I wanted out of money. My grandfather was a CPA. He died the year I was born, so I don't really remember or know anything about him.

• 48:20Speaker 02

  But she made some pretty lucky investments in Apple, IBM. So she always had that mindset about invest your money and save your money. And she was very open. Pretty much in every chance that she could get, she was going to give you her opinion or her advice, even if you didn't ask for it. So she was always talking about, you know, starting your own business, make sure that you're investing in the stock market, save your money, don't overspend, buy quality furniture and keep it forever.

• 48:49Ramit Sethi?

  I think I've been doing a disservice to my nieces and nephews. I don't really talk about money that much. I kind of love what your grandmother was teaching you. You know, that's valuable.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  It is very valuable. And then my dad had a lot of friends too that were more well-to-do than he was and they were very open. They would talk to me about that kind of stuff. And my parents were the same way about saving, right? Save 10% of your salary, what I did through, you know, all the early low-level jobs that I worked. My dad was, he was a cop. He was a state trooper. So very low, middle-class. I don't know that he ever broke six figures. We never hurt for money that I knew of, right? Like, we had everything that we needed. The lights were always on, that kind of thing. But I, I wanted something different than what my parents had because I could see that they like, couldn't have the things that they wanted.

• 49:39Ramit Sethi?

  Like?

• 49:40Speaker 02

  Or even the things that they needed, right? So like, my dad wanted to buy a motorcycle for a long time, but was very limited on, you know, what he could purchase. And, you know, you shift up or down $5,000 and you lose a lot of critical safety features on motorcycles. And for me, I didn't really, I didn't want to do that. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. And I also realized that money was kind of like a tool to buy your freedom.

• 50:07Ramit Sethi?

  When did you realize that you wanted your cake and wanted to be able to eat it too?

• 50:12Speaker 02

  Probably 14 or 15, like right when I was getting into high school.

• 50:15Ramit Sethi?

  Same for me. I was like, I don't want to compromise. I'll work harder than anybody, but I want what I want.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 50:22Ramit Sethi?

  Quick question, your dad was a state trooper, what about your mom?

• 50:26Speaker 02

  She was a stay-at-home mom for the majority of my childhood. She was also a police officer when her and my dad met.

• 50:34Ramit Sethi?

  Got it.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  Okay. But then, yeah, she was stay-at-home, homeschooled us and everything. We didn't go to public school, private school, any of that.

• 50:40Ramit Sethi?

  How many kids?

• 50:41Speaker 02

  Uh, there's two of us and then my dad had another marriage before my mom. So there are four of us total.

• 50:48Ramit Sethi?

  What part of the country did you grow up in?

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Uh, I grew up in Virginia as well.

• 50:52Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, okay. All right, so, um, did you go to college?

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Not initially. I put myself through, you know, a year and a half of community college. After graduating high school, but I actually quit community college because I started working in my field. So I started working at a hospital at 19 doing IT. Chloe and I met around that time as well, actually. And then a couple of years later, she started working at a school and got 90% off tuition. For her and it was like five friends or something.

• 51:21Speaker 00

  They were doing a scholarship thing at the time, but you also got it because we were like domestic partners. So.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  You got that either way. Yeah.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  And get my bachelor's degree. And that was, what was that, 2018 is when I graduated.

• 51:34Ramit Sethi?

  How much did you make after you graduated?

• 51:35Speaker 02

  A hundred thousand. And then I've been with them ever since.

• 51:39Ramit Sethi?

  Do you ever think you'd make 60-plus thousand dollars a year?

• 51:43Speaker 02

  No, no, that number was absurd. In my mind, I don't know what it was with like the nineties, you know, you thought six figures, right? A hundred K, that's all you're ever gonna need.

• 51:52Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  You get to six figures and you're like, where's my mansion, right?

• 51:56Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  It's really not that much when you tip over from like 80 to 100 or something like that. And I think, okay, you know, 140,000, that's all I'll ever. But Chloe will even tell you, I mean, like, we would have conversations. I'd be like, I can't believe I make, you know, $50 an hour. I was like, next goal, a hundred dollars an hour.

• 52:10Ramit Sethi?

  What does it mean to you to have that goal increasing?

• 52:13Speaker 02

  It will advise me my freedom. The more that I front-load the beginning of my life, the easier the latter half of my life.

• 52:21Ramit Sethi?

  And freedom means what?

• 52:23Speaker 02

  I would like to start my own business and have enough runway to get me there. Uh, and I would also like to make sure that, you know, Chloe and I are set up for retirement as early as possible. And that's a, that's a big reason why I want to sell the house, right? Like, we have $250,000 equity in this house. If we take that out and put it in the S and P 500 and you don't put a dime in for the next 30 years, right? You'll be at $10 million. To me, it makes way more sense for us to just front-load that now.

• 52:54Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  And then we don't have to invest anything if we don't want to for retirement at that point. And we can scheme, as Chloe likes to call it, as much as we like. And it's not going to send us back because we already set ourselves up there. And it's just, you forget about it.

• 53:09Ramit Sethi?

  Got it. I felt a connection with Jake when he told me that he did not want to compromise at the age of 14. I don't know if it's something about men at 14 who are just like, nope, not gonna do that. I'm going to work my ass off so I can have a lot of money. If you were ever a 14-year-old young man who decided that, leave a comment below. Cause I want to know if it's just the two of us or more. His example was quite amazing. My dad couldn't get the motorcycle he wanted, therefore he had to compromise on the safety. So I decided I'm never gonna do that. And to his credit, he followed through, very determined. Went to college on his own later, built up this high-income career, works a lot of hours.

• 53:54Ramit Sethi?

  It's all very impressive. I think that probably the way he talks to Chloe about money almost certainly is focused on numbers and ROI and calculations. But I don't get the sense that there's a lot of rich life joy in when he talks about money. And she doesn't also talk about money that way. It's what could go wrong and, you know, we're here, we're supposed to be here. So neither of them are bringing that vision. And so of course, money is not this fun, joyful, bountiful, alive thing. It's just a series of numbers and things that could go wrong and calculations to happen decades from now. You have to build the skill of talking about the joy of money.

• 54:40Ramit Sethi?

  You already know how to do it. When you sit there and talk about the spaghetti you're gonna eat tonight, you're not sitting there, hello, everybody. I'm having 52 carbohydrates tonight. You go, this is gonna taste great. I don't care if the sauce gets all over our daughter's face. It's gonna taste great. We have so much fun eating. Oh my God, it's like that one time we went to that one Italian restaurant and on, on, and on. There's a joy in it. There's a meaning in it, more than the component parts of it. Your rich life is not just made up of your calculations, although they are a part of it. It is your vision, it is your memories, it's how you talk about it. So you've got to build that skill as well. I want to thank our new partners at Monarch for setting up our couples on their platform to see their exact conscious spending plan categories.

• 55:24Ramit Sethi?

  Monarch is a private personal finance app that brings all of a household's accounts, checking credit cards, loans, and investments into one clean dashboard on your phone or computer. If you're trying to pay off debt, Monarch makes it easy to see your progress. You can see your whole payoff timeline for credit cards and car loans in a way that you can clearly visualize. No more juggling apps or manually updating spreadsheets. I've always said that a rich life is lived outside of the spreadsheet and Monarch lets you save time so you can do exactly that. Try Monarch for free today and get 50% off your first year of Monarch's core tier with code REMIT at monarch.com/remit.

• 56:06Ramit Sethi?

  And when you sign up with my link only, you'll get your Monarch account customized with my exact CSP categories. So you can see how you are stacking up to your plan each month. That's monarch.com/remit with code REMIT. Chloe, when, when you hear Jake proposing that plan, sell the house, take the equity, 250K, invest it, let it just sit and grow. What's your take?

• 56:32Speaker 00

  We've been having this conversation for like, I don't know, eight months now. And whenever he shows me the numbers, I'm like, okay, yeah, good, let's do it. And then 30 minutes later, I'm like, uh, I don't know, actually. Because like this house will also appreciate, right? And like, we're already paying less on interest than we are on principal. Like, I don't want to be kicking ourselves down the road because we didn't hold on to a good asset.

• 56:54Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. Let me push on this. First of all, is the dynamic that Jake is proposing, we should sell this and like start business or businesses? And Chloe, you're like, that kind of sounds good, but also I don't know. And like, I'm not sure. Is that the dynamic here?

• 57:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  Well, it's mainly let's sell the house. Don't necessarily have to start a business. Take that money, throw it in the stock market, don't think about it.

• 57:19Ramit Sethi?

  Got it.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  And then we can do whatever we need to do with the rest of our money.

• 57:23Ramit Sethi?

  Cool. And if you sold the house, could you move and keep your current jobs?

• 57:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:28Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, at least it's a viable option. So it really isolates the variable over this house. Cause your jobs are not tied to this location. Okay, cool. Chloe, you have a great, you have a great point. I mean, hey, we don't want to make a bad decision. Jake, you also have a good point. That money compounding over a long period of time turns into a huge amount. Yes, it's true. So what is the way that you two have decided you're gonna make this decision?

• 57:58Speaker 00

  We've pretty much just not made the decision. The problem isn't that we're not talking about it. It's just that we keep talking about it and we can't seem to come to a agreement.

• 58:06Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. Is there one decision that's probably gonna make you more money? Yeah. But we don't only make decisions because of money. What I'm more interested in is what is your individual and joint vision of a rich life? Because that makes things very, very clear. Just as an example, I do a lot of things that seem irrational from a numbers perspective. Okay? We have two apartments. Why? Well, we know what our rich life is. On the other hand, we don't have a variety of other things that other people pay for. So I kind of love that you have seen examples, you know, of your parents, for example. We're gonna spend a lot on this and very little on that.

• 58:51Ramit Sethi?

  You have that heritage. Let's talk about it. What is your rich life, Chloe?

• 58:55Speaker 00

  It's not landscaping. I want a fancy gym membership. I want a gym membership where they have like a pool and like massages and tanning beds. I'm not supposed to use them, but I still want to. Once we have the home equity loan, we have the money for me to have $400 a month in gym membership cost. It's fine. I want freedom though, like I want to travel. I've never been outside the United States and I want to so badly. I want to live in different cities. I've lived here my entire life. I want to move to the West Coast for a while. I want to live in California. I'd love to try living in Hawaii. I want to have a little bit more freedom. Like, I don't necessarily know that I want to be tied down to a house or a location or.

• 59:38Ramit Sethi?

  You want to have a nice gym membership. I love the specificity of that. I also love how modest it is. It's like, okay, you could do that right now. But I, it tells me about you, which I think is great. Chloe, is there anything else in your rich life that would get you like? If you really want that.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  A private chef.

• 59:56Ramit Sethi?

  What would they make for you? How often?

• 59:58Speaker 00

  Every day. I would love to. They would meal prep for me because I'm a big gym person and I do meal prep. It gets so boring to just like put chicken in the oven all the time. It's so repetitive. So I would love to have a private chef. I mean, that's kind of like a that's a someday thing, right? If we make it big or whatever, but.

• 1:00:17Ramit Sethi?

  I like it. So let me ask Jake. Jake, what is your vision of a rich life?

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  My vision of a rich life, it does, it includes travel. A lot of it. But in order to do that, I have to be able to leave my current position. Not that I could not travel today. It just is increasingly difficult and I do have to make sure that I am available. Because it's like I'm on call 24/7, 365. And I know that Chloe was saying that we work nine to fives, but I I don't work a nine to five. I work well over that.

• 1:00:49Ramit Sethi?

  How much, how many hours would you say per week you work?

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  On average, these days, which has gotten better, 50 to 55s, but frequently it will be 70 hours, 75 hours. This last week I had to work 25 hours straight, like.

• 1:01:03Ramit Sethi?

  Wow. It's important for people to know this because here we have somebody, you know, your early 30s making 260, 280. It's a lot of money. But also often, not always, but often those jobs are quite demanding from a time perspective, certainly mentally. I think people need to appreciate that if you're making a lot of money, you are probably working. Companies are not stupid. They're not just handing out $300,000 jobs. There's a lot of work to be done. Okay?

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  A lot of work to be done.

• 1:01:38Ramit Sethi?

  All right. Tell me more about your rich life.

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  I mean, my rich life, again, does not include landscaping at all. It includes, you know, going out to dinner just on a random Tuesday or a Wednesday. Like, we don't do that today. Some of that, again, is my job. And some of that is just like the compounding chores. So it's like, we constantly feel like we're fighting the house and that's I don't like that. So I really enjoy technology. It's why I do what I do.

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  So I would like to have the disposable cash to purchase some of these things, like what? Like, for example, you know, generative AI is a big thing right now, but it's very hard to actually run any local labs unless you have the capital to do so. So like, I would need to invest 14, $15,000 probably in equipment in order to do what I would want to do. I would love to front load our retirement so that way it's just a complete weight off of my mind where if I want to take a low-stress job, I can.

• 1:02:40Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, that's interesting. They seem quite compatible. The one thing that seems to be a bit of a consideration is Jake, your job, which, you know, maybe makes travel a little harder, things like that. But okay, we can work around that. I can see why you would propose taking the equity and investing it because then that reduces the focus on your high income. All right. So I got it. And everybody started off by saying it's not cleaning lawns and pools. Okay, fine. So that's like one strike against the house. Fine. So Chloe, the concern is like, hey, are we making the right financial decision or are we doing another impulsive scheme?

• 1:03:25Ramit Sethi?

  Am I hearing that correctly?

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Is it just stupid across the board to sell a house with a 2.7 interest rate?

• 1:03:32Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe not. I'll tell you what, let's do this. Chloe, why don't you argue against yourself? So pretend that you are making the case that you should sell the house and XYZ. Make the best argument you can.

• 1:03:45Speaker 00

  I want to see my husband happy and relaxed and I'd love to see him retired at 55. And we can either invest heavily, like, once we finish getting out of debt, we invest my entire salary and we keep our expenses low. And that's how we'll get there. Or we can take the equity out of the house that we don't like anyways. And we can invest it and then he doesn't have to think about it. We can just keep investing modestly.

• 1:04:16Speaker 00

  Which seems like easier.

• 1:04:18Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, great job. First of all, that was, I know I put you in an interesting position there. You did a great job. I noticed that your argument centers almost entirely around investment returns. I mean, y'all are wealthy. Do you know that? When you get comfortable with the idea that one way or another, you both are going to have a lot of money, that is a given. Do you both accept that?

• 1:04:42Ramit Sethi?

  Jake says yes. Chloe?

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  I mean, kind of, like, something could change tomorrow. Like, he could fall off the ladder and not be able to work anymore. And then that all goes out the window because like, I can barely support us. Like, our goal was to try to get our spending down to where we could live off my income. It hasn't been possible for us. So it's like, if something happens to him tomorrow, yes, we have some money in the stock market, but everything would change.

• 1:05:06Ramit Sethi?

  Did this happen to somebody you know?

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  I'm worried that it's going to happen to my parents because my dad's health is starting to decline and my mom has never had a real job. And they still have two kids at home.

• 1:05:17Ramit Sethi?

  And if that happened, what would they do?

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  We would have to support them.

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  We're like the only ones in my family that have the capital to do that.

• 1:05:26Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. Have you talked to them about this?

• 1:05:29Speaker 00

  Kind of. My dad, so my dad had, he had like a health episode last year. And that's when I kind of started talking to my mom about it. And my dad will not talk about it because it gives him too much anxiety.

• 1:05:41Ramit Sethi?

  That's difficult.

• 1:05:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. So my mom, like, she's aware. And I know they have, like, they own a rental property. I don't think their house is paid off. I don't really know all the specifics of their finances. My mom seems to be kind of like, you know, we'll be okay. Your dad has life insurance. And I'm like, okay, but what if he doesn't die, though? What if he needs 24/7 care? Like, he has a stroke like much of his family members have.

• 1:06:03Ramit Sethi?

  So can I ask you a question? In the worst case that this happens, would your house help or hurt you?

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  It could help. Because we have an HOA, but it's extremely lenient. We could put a second structure on this property. We have plenty of room. I can't live with my parents. I love them so much, but the religious, political differences are just like, it's a little much. I mean, we could build them a little in-law suite very easily here. And our interest rate's low. Our mortgage is incredibly affordable for us. Like, what happens if, you know, we want to move away and then something happens to my family and we decide to move back? And now we have to spend six grand a month on a mortgage because we're trying to have them live with us. So like, it could help. It also could hurt because at the same time, right, we could technically just rent something for them and have them live separately.

• 1:06:47Ramit Sethi?

  What's this circular paralysis that I see? Because in other parts that I've talked to you, you're quite decisive. Am I reading that correctly? Are you decisive in other parts of life?

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

  That really depends.

• 1:06:59Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  Sometimes I'm extremely indecisive and sometimes I can be very decisive.

• 1:07:03Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. What parts of life are you indecisive about? We already know money. What else?

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  What to eat for dinner, sometimes.

• 1:07:10Ramit Sethi?

  That's why you get a private chef.

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, that would be nice. I'd just tell him what to eat.

• 1:07:15Ramit Sethi?

  But what else?

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  What to wear.

• 1:07:17Ramit Sethi?

  What to wear. Well, is there any commonality among all three of these? Because the two of them seem low stakes. What to wear, what to eat. It's like, ah, all right, whatever. But money, much higher stakes. What's the commonality, if any?

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  I have this thing that Jake and I have talked about where I won't wear my nice clothes. Like, I bought these Lululemon leggings in like 2016. I only wear them for like special workouts.

• 1:07:42Ramit Sethi?

  What? What's a special workout?

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  If I'm going to like a fancy gym or something, or like I'm working out with my friends and doing like a yoga or something with, you know, I'm doing puppy yoga or something, I'll wear my special legging. But otherwise I wear like, like really cheap stuff most of the time.

• 1:07:56Ramit Sethi?

  Cheap like what?

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  Like stuff I got from, like a hand-me-down from my cousin when I was 15.

• 1:08:01Ramit Sethi?

  Interesting. Even though the two of you make near $400,000 a year in your early 30s.

• 1:08:07Speaker 00

  I do buy stuff. I just, I don't want, I like, it just kind of sits in my closet and I don't wear it unless it's like a special occasion.

• 1:08:14Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, got it.

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  I'm working on it.

• 1:08:17Ramit Sethi?

  You know, I have found that it is much easier to increase income than to substantially change your money psychology. Money psychology usually follows. And because we don't really take it seriously, we will like over-focus on investment and allocation. All that stuff is good, but we're just like, yeah, whatever. Psychology is just for like dumb college kids. They don't, you know, it's not that important. I'm cool. No, it actually can cause a lot of the things that I see on this podcast, which is people who make a lot of money and they are kind of still living the way that they were in their early 20s or even childhood. I love the specificity of a Lululemon set of leggings, only pulled out, okay, today I'm going with my friends, better put this on, you know?

• 1:09:00Ramit Sethi?

  Whereas in my experience, what I have come to love is I might have the, a nice sweater or whatever. And I was inspired by seeing people who have money and they're like, yeah, I just wear this like every day. Or like, you know, the old Jane Birkin bag. She literally like threw stuff in it. She had like fruit sitting in there. She really used these bags. And wealthy people often are just like, this stuff is meant to be used. It's not a museum piece. So anyway, psychology changes often after the income changes. Okay, back to your argument. You were making the best argument against yourself.

• 1:09:35Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:36Ramit Sethi?

  Go back. Make the argument again in like two sentences.

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  I want to see Jake retired early and I want to see him less stressed and this is the fastest way to get there.

• 1:09:46Ramit Sethi?

  Great. Remember, we focused a lot on the numbers, but what I noticed is that there was no vision of a rich life. Can you make the argument again, but this time I don't really care about the investment numbers. I care about the vision of our rich life. Go ahead.

• 1:10:03Speaker 00

  It's living somewhere where it's sunny most of the time. And I get to try new places and try new coffee shops and travel. And next week I'm going to go to Spain with like some girlfriends. Maybe Jake has to work. That's not part of my rich life that you have to work.

• 1:10:20Ramit Sethi?

  Put this guy to work. It's your, you could make it up. Put him to work. You go, listen, it's the girls' trip. This guy's going to be working. And by the way, Jake, you're also meal prepping from now on. This is my rich life.

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  I'm the personal chef here.

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  Wow, I'm the main character.

• 1:10:36Ramit Sethi?

  Quite a different energy level on that one, Chloe. What do you notice?

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  It feels happier. It feels like very like optimistic and dreamy.

• 1:10:44Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. In a way, you two have earned the right to be able to dream. I actually think everybody should be dreaming more, but you have really earned the right to be able to put those dreams into motion today versus having to wait many decades, as many people do. Being good with money does not only mean you are good at calculating investment returns. That's trivial. Everybody should be able to do that. And if you can't do it in your head, which nobody can, do it online. It's easy. Being really good with money knows when to balance the numbers with the feelings. So Chloe, what are you picking up right now?

• 1:11:19Speaker 00

  There's more to spending money than just the numbers?

• 1:11:22Ramit Sethi?

  Yes.

• 1:11:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Ramit Sethi?

  What is there?

• 1:11:24Speaker 00

  Happiness? I don't know.

• 1:11:26Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. Yeah. You have a big smile on your face right now. That's kind of what I love to see. Money should make you happy. It should make us feel awesome. It should make us feel like, oh, my God, I wake up in the morning like, I love this. I love it. I love having food prepped. I love having Lululemon leggings that I can wear every workout, and I love the gym that I go to. The irony is, you could do it today. You could. So what do you think is stopping you from doing it today?

• 1:11:56Speaker 00

  I'm just too tired.

• 1:11:57Ramit Sethi?

  Too tired, but okay, let's say that you took a trip, rejuvenated, et cetera. What's stopping you from getting the nice pair of pants and the nice gym and all that stuff?

• 1:12:07Speaker 00

  Some of it, I think, is anxiety about the house. Like, we're on a well and a septic, right? That's 50 grand if the septic goes out, like on the high end, but like, that's what we have to think about.

• 1:12:16Ramit Sethi?

  Why do you have to think about that stuff? I don't think about that stuff.

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  Well, we have to plan for it, right? Like, because when we first bought the house, we didn't have any savings. And a lot of these things crept up on us.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  It's because we have a house. You have to think about the well pump because we have a house. You have to think about the septic because we have a house. We didn't have the house, you wouldn't be thinking about that at all.

• 1:12:41Ramit Sethi?

  I don't even know what septic is. I don't know what it is, nor, and don't explain it to me. Don't care. What a luxury. Just be like, not interested. But one thing that I have learned in my life is to not let the tail wag the dog. Meaning, you make a decision and then you find yourself doing all kinds of stuff you never wanted to or would choose to do, all because of that initial decision. Do you find that maybe that's happening here, Chloe?

• 1:13:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually, because now that you say that, I definitely said it to Jake. Like, if I would look in this area, if I were, if I were a real estate investor, I would look in this area. I would never buy this house to rent it out because there's too much that can go wrong. There's too much that can ruin. There's too much maintenance that we'd have to pay to have somebody else come do. This is a lot of people's dream, right? Like, having a house like this.

• 1:13:34Ramit Sethi?

  Is it yours?

• 1:13:35Speaker 00

  No. But like, what if it is one day?

• 1:13:38Ramit Sethi?

  Tell me. Play that out. What if it is?

• 1:13:39Speaker 00

  What if we sell the house, we move, I start living my rich life, and it's not what I thought it was?

• 1:13:46Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

  Right? I'm like, oh, I'm not actually happier with the gym membership. I actually want to have a garden.

• 1:13:51Ramit Sethi?

  What would you do?

• 1:13:52Speaker 00

  Well, like, if we wanted to come back here, we'd have to pay a lot more money because prices have inflated a lot.

• 1:13:58Ramit Sethi?

  That's one option. What else would you do?

• 1:14:01Speaker 00

  We'd probably rent at first.

• 1:14:03Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, so you would pay more in this neighborhood to be back in this neighborhood, or what would your options be?

• 1:14:09Speaker 00

  Not to come back to this neighborhood?

• 1:14:11Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. Are there potentially any other neighborhoods in a country of over 330 million people? Maybe?

• 1:14:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, maybe. Yeah, probably.

• 1:14:21Ramit Sethi?

  Why, why keep yourself playing so small when you don't even like your day to day?

• 1:14:27Speaker 00

  Better than the devil, you know, than the devil you don't?

• 1:14:29Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. Yeah. As you said, it feels comfortable. It's all I have known. And yet I hear this yearning to travel, to try different things. I'd like to live on the West Coast. I'd like to try this. Maybe it'll work, maybe not. Would you be comfortable if you tried something and it didn't work out?

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, because I need to try something else.

• 1:14:48Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. Would you be embarrassed?

• 1:14:51Speaker 00

  Probably a little bit. The RV thing embarrassed me, but I'm still here.

• 1:14:55Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, that's a good answer. Like, yeah, actually, it is kind of embarrassing a little bit, but it's also what it takes to learn what I like to do, especially because we've both lived in the same area for our entire lives. I like hearing the two of you talk about this because it's actually not just a money question. One way or another, both of these decisions will be fine. It reminds me when I was deciding whether to take a job offer at Google. It was like existential to me. Should I take this offer or should I go do my own startup? And I was going around asking people for advice, very similar to what you're doing right now. And then I had a professor of mine who was like, look, both of these decisions are going to be great. You are going to be great no matter what decision you choose. So now the question is, what do you really want?

• 1:15:41Ramit Sethi?

  When you think about your day to day, what do you really want? And for me, I feel resentful that I would ever have to wear a badge and badge in at work. It's just like, not my thing. I'm like, nah. That made it so obvious and so easy for me to decide what to do. Now, of course, I missed the high salary I would have gotten at Google early on in my career. But eventually, I made more. But more importantly than the money, the money is not how I think about the decision. I was free, free to make my own decisions, free to accept the consequences of when I did it right or didn't. I lived a very modest lifestyle. I had multiple roommates after I graduated.

• 1:16:24Ramit Sethi?

  It was not that glamorous, but it was [bleep] cool. It was cool for me. That's what I wanted. Chloe, as I say this, what's coming up for you?

• 1:16:32Speaker 00

  I guess the point that you're making is that we'll be fine either way.

• 1:16:35Ramit Sethi?

  Yes, and if you accept that you're going to be fine, not only fine, you're going to thrive either way. You're both going to become very wealthy, either decision. So if you accept both of those things, then how would you think about the decision? What would you optimize for?

• 1:16:53Speaker 00

  Probably free time and travel and being able to like, do what I want.

• 1:16:58Ramit Sethi?

  Not asset value of a 1.5 acre house?

• 1:17:02Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:17:03Ramit Sethi?

  Jake, what about you?

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  I would optimize for happiness.

• 1:17:07Ramit Sethi?

  Now, I do want to point one thing out. I'm not trying to weigh the scale here and be like, sell this thing. You all could actually pay a lot of your problems away. You can have somebody come in and do the meal prep. You could certainly have a more serious type of firm that would come in and handle all the stuff outside. Yeah, it will cost a lot of money, but you have the money. You could do it. What do you think? It's a very valid option.

• 1:17:31Speaker 00

  We don't.

• 1:17:31Speaker 02

  It is, yeah.

• 1:17:33Ramit Sethi?

  Chloe says no. Both say no.

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  We talked about that before, too. We were like, technically, we could just pay somebody to come in and do all these things. But to us, it feels like it would be a waste of money because we don't necessarily want to be here.

• 1:17:44Ramit Sethi?

  To me, that makes it a very obvious decision. And if you definitely don't want to do it yourself, because you told me we feel grumpy and we don't like it and all that stuff, and you both resolutely do not want to pay someone else to do it, then what is the only available option?

• 1:17:57Speaker 02

  To sell it.

• 1:17:58Speaker 00

  Well, technically, if the renters were doing it.

• 1:18:01Ramit Sethi?

  You want to rent it out and they're, they're maintaining it?

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  I mean, that's the thing. They won't, right? But like, this house was a rental for a while, and that's how it got so overgrown.

• 1:18:10Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, okay. So that doesn't work either. Well, look, you could theoretically find the magical person, but history suggests maybe it'll be more difficult than you think. So you could do it, but realistically, do you want to?

• 1:18:23Speaker 00

  Not really. It just felt like, it just felt like, you know, everybody's like, oh, real estate investing is the best. And like, I mean, you know, there's like so many people online that are just like, you gotta buy your house, then you gotta like, take out, cash out refinances and buy five more houses. And then you gotta like, do all this stuff and like rental properties are the way to freedom. And it's like.

• 1:18:42Ramit Sethi?

  Who the [bleep] does that?

• 1:18:44Speaker 00

  I don't know. I feel like there's so many influencers saying that.

• 1:18:47Ramit Sethi?

  I look at their advice and then I look at my lifestyle and I'm like, why would I ever take advice from you? Why? Please tell me. It's insane to take advice from people whose lifestyle and whose morals and ethics you don't agree with. Here's a potential compromise suggestion. You could rent the place out for a year, make a very clear measure of what would be success or what would not, and go travel or rent somewhere else and see how you like it. And you would have one year to make a decision. But if you did that, you would need to really discuss the options, such as if things break down, how are we paying for it? Who's going to go back and fix it? Are we going to hire somebody?

• 1:19:31Ramit Sethi?

  Like, you need to really think it through. And you should also ask yourself, is this worth it? Because if this works, how's it going to change our financial and lifestyle picture? Let's say we actually find a great renter. First of all, who's finding the renter? Who's interviewing them? Who's maintaining? All this stuff needs to be dialed in. Chloe, how does that strike you?

• 1:19:51Speaker 00

  It's probably going to be me doing most of that stuff.

• 1:19:53Ramit Sethi?

  Okay.

• 1:19:54Speaker 00

  Just because he's got such an unpredictable work schedule. So like, I tend to take on more of that kind of stuff.

• 1:19:58Ramit Sethi?

  You want to do it?

• 1:19:59Speaker 00

  Not really. I just kind of felt like maybe I had to.

• 1:20:03Ramit Sethi?

  I'll tell you, the craziest thing about living a rich life is you realize so many things you thought you had to do are only in your head. I have to own a TV. No, I don't. I have to own a car. No, I don't. We have to do this. We have to do that. Maybe, and sometimes, yeah, I actually like doing that. That's cool. I love that. But a lot of times, no. What do you think? What is something you thought you had to do and now you realize you don't have to?

• 1:20:30Speaker 00

  Have kids.

• 1:20:31Ramit Sethi?

  Great. That's probably the biggest example of all.

• 1:20:35Speaker 00

  It was one of those things that everybody tells you, like, it's just the next thing. And most people don't think about it.

• 1:20:40Ramit Sethi?

  So you must have had a lot of critical conversations talking about this topic.

• 1:20:46Ramit Sethi?

  Wow. And you both affirmatively decided, although other people do it, love it, we've decided it's not for us, even despite knowing probably there's a lot of pushback and societal things and stuff like that. But you decided that's not part of our rich life. How did it feel to decide that?

• 1:21:06Speaker 00

  Really good.

• 1:21:07Ramit Sethi?

  It feels empowering to make an affirmative decision for the two of you. Your decision, again, a lot of other people could disagree with it, but like, it certainly feels good to create your own internal culture. What if you did that here?

• 1:21:21Speaker 00

  That's what we want. That's what we want to do. Yeah.

• 1:21:24Ramit Sethi?

  Jake, what do you think? Hearing this conversation, how is it reaching you?

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  You're bringing up a lot of good points to think about.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  And I feel like I've mentioned some of these things to Chloe before, too. Like, we don't have to mow the lawn if we don't want to. We can sell the house and. Rent somewhere right down the street from here if we really wanted to. And

• 1:21:46Ramit Sethi?

  I think that the two of you have been very successful financially speaking. It's very impressive, especially considering how you grew up. It's like, wow, this is incredible. I also am impressed that the two of you have taken this journey together, talked a lot about money. It's clear that you've talked a lot. I love seeing that. I love that. I'm actually really glad to be able to talk to you because not all money conversations have to involve scarcity or deprivation. I speak to a lot of people in those situations, but I think there are plenty of other important decisions. Like, hey, we've made a number of decisions and sometimes they're embarrassing. And are we doing this impulsively?

• 1:22:31Ramit Sethi?

  Or, hey, like, property is a good purchase, even though we don't like this, isn't it still a good decision? To me, here's what I see. I see that despite being very successful, I don't see money currently brings you a lot of joy. It just seems like kind of a bummer. Like, where does all our money go? It goes to pay off the home equity thing and then it goes for this and like, I don't, the shrubs we could do, but we don't and whatever. And then the things we do have are so rare and scarce that we don't really even pull them out, except in special occasions. I don't believe in special occasions. I wear my best stuff all the time. I freaking wear it to 7-Eleven.

• 1:23:13Ramit Sethi?

  I don't believe that if you are in your 30s, making almost $400,000 a year, that you have to wait until, what, 60? To like, live your life? Ah, I reject that. So I think, yes, you need to be making a certain amount of money. You need to be covering your costs and saving. You did all that and you're doing all that. Can stuff happen in the future that's bad? Yeah, put a little extra aside for it. If you're gonna need to take care of your parents, okay, let's put a little bit extra aside for that. No problem. But gosh, I would love for you, six months from now, to wake up and be like, my day looks awesome. I'm going to the gym. We're gonna get an early dinner.

• 1:23:57Ramit Sethi?

  It's funny, in a way, you may have over indexed on the numbers and under indexed on the feelings about money. I mean, we look at the numbers. If you retire, 25 years from now, Chloe, you'll be 57, okay? On your current trajectory, you would have $4.8 million. It's pretty good. Safe withdrawal rate of $192,000 a year. We might need to bring that down a little because you're retiring young, so maybe a little bit, but okay. And if you sell the house now, add it to your investments, let's say home equity is 250K. You'd have $6.2 million with a safe withdrawal rate of $250,000.

• 1:24:38Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, of course, you would need to pay rent now, so your investments would probably decrease relative to owning. But compounding early on is huge. What do you make of those two numbers, Chloe?

• 1:24:51Speaker 00

  That's still more than most people have.

• 1:24:53Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:53Speaker 00

  Like, either way.

• 1:24:55Ramit Sethi?

  Yes. When I look at those numbers, I go like, alright, either one is good. And honestly, if I'm the two of you, I'm like, I'm gonna beat that number anyway. The [bleep] we're not gonna only stay at our salaries that we have at age 30. If it's me, Jake, the way you were talking, like at age 14, you were like, yeah, I'm, I'm never gonna compromise. Exactly me, sitting here, if in your shoes, I'd be like, yeah, that's like hilarious. I'm only gonna have $6 million. What a joke. We're willing to work hard.

• 1:25:22Speaker 02

  Rookie numbers.

• 1:25:22Ramit Sethi?

  Yes, rookie numbers. In your situation, not for the median or average person, but the two of you, you're like, we're, we're gonna work. We're gonna have more than we will ever need. So, once we accept that, how do we wanna live from now until then? Chloe, what do you wanna do?

• 1:25:38Speaker 00

  Go get a gym membership.

• 1:25:40Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, let's do it.

• 1:25:41Speaker 00

  And wear my leggings.

• 1:25:42Ramit Sethi?

  I like that. I think you should wear them. Not now, I'm saying like, when you go to the gym, like, why not? You have them. You deserve them. Alright, let's just change some of these numbers, okay? I wanna start having a little bit more fun. What should we change, Chloe, that would make you actually live a rich life right now?

• 1:25:59Speaker 00

  We could hire someone to muddle on until we move.

• 1:26:02Ramit Sethi?

  Great. Let's just put it under subscriptions. How much are you gonna pay this person?

• 1:26:06Speaker 00

  At least 500.

• 1:26:07Speaker 02

  I guess it'd be 450 would be probably.

• 1:26:10Ramit Sethi?

  450 a month?

• 1:26:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, because they come once a week.

• 1:26:14Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, cool. Watch this number, 43% fixed costs. Wow, jumped to 46%. Alright, problem solved. What else? Where's the gym?

• 1:26:24Speaker 00

  The one near us is like 200, I think, a month.

• 1:26:26Ramit Sethi?

  200 a month? Alright, let's make it 650 for subscriptions. Alright, 47%. Done. What else?

• 1:26:34Speaker 00

  Vacations.

• 1:26:35Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. How much do you wanna put aside for your first vacation abroad?

• 1:26:40Speaker 00

  Probably like a thousand a month, right?

• 1:26:41Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, and how long until you go?

• 1:26:44Speaker 02

  That'd be minimum 10 months if it's overseas.

• 1:26:47Ramit Sethi?

  Minimum 10 months.

• 1:26:48Speaker 02

  10 grand.

• 1:26:48Ramit Sethi?

  Alright, let's say 1,200 a month for that. Okay, this is good, except now we're down to negative numbers. But I don't really believe that because you didn't really put your RSUs in here, did you?

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:27:01Ramit Sethi?

  Instead of 20, can I just say 22,000?

• 1:27:04Speaker 02

  That's fair.

• 1:27:05Ramit Sethi?

  22,000, so what do you wanna say here, like, 13,000?

• 1:27:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:10Ramit Sethi?

  Alright. Yeah, that's about right. So you still have a thousand dollars left over, which, I mean, basically, you have more than enough money. And this freaking huge payment here is done at the, at this year, correct?

• 1:27:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, pretty soon, yeah.

• 1:27:27Ramit Sethi?

  Alright, so watch this. Let me just zero this out. Oh, wow, 40% for guilt-free spending. What are you gonna do with $8,000 a month?

• 1:27:35Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 1:27:37Ramit Sethi?

  She's like, I've only been thinking about landscaping for the last three years. Think about it, though, Chloe, it's a real question. $8,000 per month, most people will never be in this position. You are, and you're in your 30s. What do you want to do on a monthly basis with this money?

• 1:27:56Speaker 00

  I'd like to travel, so I guess I would bump up the vacation fund and maybe do like, weekend trips, like.

• 1:28:02Ramit Sethi?

  Nice, that's it, that's it. So we have vacations, 1,200 is for your big one. I actually think that's a bit low. You got the money, let's take it up to 1,500, okay? And then, you wanna do a little, a couple of weekend trips throughout the year? How much are each of those?

• 1:28:18Speaker 00

  We usually keep it kinda low key, like 500 to 1,000, maybe, like hotel, gas.

• 1:28:24Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, let's call it 300 a month, give you a little bit more on that. You still have $7,410. What are you noticing?

• 1:28:32Speaker 00

  I have a lot.

• 1:28:33Ramit Sethi?

  Yes. What'd you say that you wanted to do in your rich life? And then Jake, I'm coming to you too.

• 1:28:37Speaker 00

  Oh, also, private chef. But I don't know if we can afford a private chef with that money.

• 1:28:41Ramit Sethi?

  You're thinking a chef that freaking lives in your mansion. You can have somebody come twice a week, cook your food, they leave it in the fridge, all ready to go, and you're good to go. You can give them your macros and everything. It's like, awesome.

• 1:28:54Speaker 00

  I was worried about that. I was like, are they gonna make, are they gonna hit my protein goal?

• 1:28:58Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, exactly. You're like, listen, I'm cutting right now, so my chicken costs are going down, so it's great. Yeah, I think you can pay, let's just say, $3,000 a month, let's say, okay? Just to show you, because you at one point said like, that's someday down the line. If we did that, and we go to groceries, I'm just gonna put it here, 3,000. Your fixed costs are at 59%. Wow, they did go up, but you still have $4,400 a month to distribute. What are you noticing, Chloe?

• 1:29:28Speaker 00

  That I have enough.

• 1:29:30Ramit Sethi?

  More than enough. As an example, just to fast forward on the house thing, let's say you sold the house. Let's say you got 250K. I would put 200K of that and invest it, and I would take the other 50K and just put it in like a fun fund. We'll use it in the next 18 months. That's the goal we're setting for ourselves, okay? So now your rent's gonna go higher, because you have an enviable position that you're in, but you're gonna be paying, I don't know, 4,500 a month. You're up to 67%, which is, that's a little high. But we need to remember something. Why is that okay in your situation?

• 1:30:04Speaker 00

  Because in this case, that we would have the money invested, that we don't have to think about it.

• 1:30:09Ramit Sethi?

  Exactly. So where other people would have to be putting 10, 11, 12, 13, 15% aside, you're like, we're good. So instead, we can take the money that we ordinarily would have invested, and we can redirect it to living our rich life today. Should we still invest? Yeah, probably, certainly. Get the 401K match, if you wanna put a little extra, go ahead. But, gosh, that's a lot of money that we would normally be investing that we could instead put somewhere else. Also, no utilities, no lawn guy or lawn person, just simple. And then, what about up here? What does it feel like to not have to think about, is my septic gonna go?

• 1:30:47Speaker 00

  Takes a lot of weight off.

• 1:30:49Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. Jake, what's your take on the changes that we have financially made so far?

• 1:30:54Speaker 02

  I like them. I like the idea of a chef coming in once every few days. We still have 3,700 left over here.

• 1:31:02Ramit Sethi?

  What do you wanna do with the money? Didn't you want some gadget?

• 1:31:04Speaker 02

  I would probably put like 500 away for saving towards something that I wanted to purchase. A lot of my purchases are higher than, I guess, the average consumer.

• 1:31:13Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, so 500 bucks a month, that's 6,000 a year for stuff you want. Great.

• 1:31:18Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:31:18Ramit Sethi?

  I like that. I like how you just owned it. Yeah, hey, I like to buy some expensive stuff. That's cool. Great, 500 a month. You still have $3,268. What do you wanna do?

• 1:31:29Speaker 02

  Personally, I would probably bump the vacations up.

• 1:31:32Ramit Sethi?

  Okay.

• 1:31:33Speaker 02

  Even more.

• 1:31:34Ramit Sethi?

  Tell me.

• 1:31:34Speaker 02

  I would do like 2,000.

• 1:31:36Ramit Sethi?

  Great, 2,000.

• 1:31:38Speaker 02

  And then, obviously, if we're, we have that extra money, I would probably put some of that into the stock market as well.

• 1:31:46Ramit Sethi?

  Sure. Let's just say 500 bucks a month. Make it 1,000, just for kicks.

• 1:31:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:52Ramit Sethi?

  You still have $1,768 left. As you can see, this is not a cash problem. This is a problem of what do we want? And are we willing to close certain doors in order to open up an entirely new set of doors? Chloe, what do you think about that?

• 1:32:09Speaker 00

  I mean, I was thinking about what doors could open, but I also was just, wasn't sure. I don't know if we could close this door and still be fine. It kinda seems a little ridiculous. I'm like, oh, like, what if something happens and we regret this? It's like, then we'll deal with it.

• 1:32:23Ramit Sethi?

  There you go.

• 1:32:24Speaker 00

  Right? We can buy another house if we want to. We have the money.

• 1:32:27Ramit Sethi?

  That's the breakthrough. That's the breakthrough, which is, we Can trust our future selves to deal with what happens. We can trust ourselves today, so of course, our future selves are going to be even more capable. We're going to have more money, more know-how, more maturity. So if things come our way, we are strong enough that we can withstand those things. Do you believe that?

• 1:32:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:53Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. The other thing I want to talk to you about is the schemes, as you put it, Chloe. I do think that you have correctly identified that you have both gotten into a variety of kind of like off-the-wall ideas, like the Airbnb, the RV. What is the pattern among all of those things that you got into?

• 1:33:17Speaker 03

  We don't properly research. We impulsively jump in and we don't consider all of the work that has to be done, the time that needs to be invested, all of that. And it ends up just burning us out.

• 1:33:30Ramit Sethi?

  That sounds kind of like the house.

• 1:33:32Speaker 03

  Oh, it does. But.

• 1:33:35Ramit Sethi?

  If you want to run a business at some point, you can. It's also not clear you need to think about this right now. Can I just tell you like how I would think about this? So if it were me, and I'm Jake, I'm like, hey, I love making this money and I know that my salary is going to go up, but being on call all the time is not for me. So I would like to start bringing it up with my boss or bosses that, hey, I love doing what I do, but over the next 18 months, here's where I would like to be. I would like to be where I am not on call, X, Y, Z. And who knows if that's possible or not, but at least I want to bring it up because obviously I'm getting paid a lot of money. They respect me. But like, here's what I need in my lifestyle. And by giving them a lot of lead time, you can actually like often shape companies.

• 1:34:19Ramit Sethi?

  A lot of times the companies just don't know. They're like, well, we keep putting him on a call and he keeps doing it, so why would we not? But gently working with them, especially at this level of pay, companies really are, want to keep their top performers happy. So that's one. Chloe, really deciding where do we want to go next? If we were to sell this house, let's make a plan ahead of time. Let's look at the places that we might want to live. Let's think about every aspect of it. If we're on the West Coast, what does it mean for us waking up in the morning? Or we have to wake up on East Coast time? What's cost of living out there? What if we love it? Maybe we stay there. What if we don't love it? Where would we go next? You don't have to know all the answers, but you just want to at least pose the question.

• 1:34:59Ramit Sethi?

  And I honestly think that once you are not like spending eight hours a weekend or more on this house, you're going to have so much perspective. Cause right now you are literally in the weeds. But to zoom out and be like, whoa, what do we do if we're not spending all our time just keeping this house alive? You will be shocked in a good way at how much else there is out there for your rich life.

• 1:35:27Speaker 02

  I agree. I think we'll get bored without the house.

• 1:35:32Speaker 02

  Sounds great.

• 1:35:33Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. What surprised you both about today's conversation? Chloe?

• 1:35:37Speaker 03

  I guess I was surprised at how this is kind of a silly thing that we're worrying about, or that I'm worrying about.

• 1:35:45Ramit Sethi?

  Maybe not silly. Maybe there are some very valid reasons why. And probably there's some further work you could both do to uncover. The kind of focus on security and safety is understandable, but also maybe slightly incongruent with your financial situation. You're like, hey, we may need to do X, Y, and Z. I'm like, yeah, totally. You could totally do those things and more. So let's check the box. But that's me just seeing numbers. You, Chloe, have a lifetime of upbringing that has shaped your view of money. And though you've done a ton of work in so many different parts of life, money takes work. And you're actually doing it right now by starting to say like, hey, my rich life doesn't actually have to be playing small.

• 1:36:30Ramit Sethi?

  I don't have to save my nice things for a special day. What if I just accept that every day is a nice day?

• 1:36:38Speaker 03

  I know.

• 1:36:40Ramit Sethi?

  It changes a lot. It takes work to get there, but you're there. You're there. It just takes some more tweaking. I'm really impressed, Chloe, in our conversation today. Jake, what surprised you about our conversation?

• 1:36:51Speaker 02

  Honestly, it is surprising to see the numbers. And when you shift them around, that's a big thing. We haven't really done that much with the shifting around. Like what if we were to spend more money on groceries? Or what if we were to spend more money on vacations? Like, we haven't done that math yet. We haven't gotten that far. So just looking at, once we're debt-free from the equity loan, like how much money we'll have to play with? It's kind of absurd.

• 1:37:15Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. I always think, you know, my wife and I, there's this phrase that I started using, which is, what do we get? We're both entrepreneurs. We work really hard. What do we get? And if there's something in our life that we are not loving, it's like, we, we better get freedom from that thing. And we should be so lucky that it's something that money can buy our way out of. Cause you know, as you know, health is something that sometimes money cannot solve. But if it's something like, ah, we don't want to have to shovel the sidewalk or something like that, then wow, we are so grateful that we have the money to be able to solve that problem. So that might be a question for the two of you to start asking.

• 1:38:00Ramit Sethi?

  We literally put our hands out, palm up. We say, what do we get? And boy, that makes us really feel grateful for the work that we do and the jobs that we have. Cause what do we get means we can afford to pay people well to solve these problems and give us a rich life every day. I am thankful that we got a chance to talk. I don't think this is a silly conversation at all. I think it's really important. I think that you both have done a great job with your careers. You have really made impressive gains in your knowledge of money. And now I just want to see your life start to match up with it. Not just the life you're living, but also like how you feel about it. Should be awesome. Because you two have worked really hard. This couple's very capable. I feel extremely confident they are going to make changes in their life.

• 1:38:45Ramit Sethi?

  Just the way they talked about their house in the first two minutes of our conversation, I'm like, oh, they're sick of it. Now, what are you willing to do? After talking, I think there were some major unlocks that they had, particularly Chloe. I think that they will make a plan. No doubt about that. I think that the plan will probably involve some months from now, them selling it or even renting it out for a year. Either one to me is perfectly fine. I think that they will start spending more money immediately because they realize we have a lot of money. What are we doing? Why are we playing so small? And to me, this is the joy of the journey with money. You can start taking small steps.

• 1:39:30Ramit Sethi?

  You build that confidence. You realize, oh my gosh, we bought an extra pair of pants. Nothing happened to us. It actually makes me feel good. Oh my gosh, we had somebody come and do the lawn. No problem. We can afford it. And you start to make bigger and more consequential decisions. So I'm personally really looking forward to hearing more from them. My greatest joy of all would be seeing them on a trip somewhere, having a great time, working out in a gym in Greece, and just enjoying their hard work and what it's gotten them.

• 1:40:03Speaker 03

  Hi, Ramit. Thank you again for having us on the podcast. We really enjoy it.

• 1:40:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had a great time. Thank you again. I appreciate it.

• 1:40:10Speaker 03

  My biggest surprise, I think, was finding out that I have a lot of anxiety around money. Even though I have enough of it, I have, I have a lot of anxiety.

• 1:40:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. My biggest surprise was honestly just hearing that we were doing okay. I, I find that like, it's beneficial to have somebody external, you know, review your finances because it's very easy to get stuck like in your own mindset and your own budget, you know, whatever you want to call it. Where it's like, you can constantly, I could do better. I could, I can do more. I could, you know, cut here, cut there, not pay for ads.

• 1:40:43Speaker 03

  Optimize, optimize, optimize.

• 1:40:45Speaker 02

  Constantly optimize, but like at our income level, it's like, we don't really need to be doing all of those things. So it was like really nice to hear from you, Ramit, that we were doing the right things and we're on the right path. My biggest takeaway was that it doesn't really matter if we sell the house or keep the house. It's really a matter of what we want to do, not what we should do or what might be the most financially optimal

• 1:41:15Speaker 02

  decision to make. So what's right for us matters more in that scenario. And also at our income level, like we can sell the house and put that in the stock market and not worry about retiring.

• 1:41:27Speaker 03

  And I think also too, um, you know, the world is our oyster. If like moving forward, if we're intentional about how we spend our money,

• 1:41:36Speaker 03

  we can afford to do, to live whatever lifestyle we want. Which is great. We've worked very hard to be where we are and the time to enjoy it is, is now, not in 40 years.

• 1:41:48Speaker 02

  Starting now, we'll be alive in 40 years.

• 1:41:49Speaker 03

  Exactly. Within reason. I will get my gym membership and I will wear my leggings to the gym. That's fancy. And some of the changes that we're going to make moving forward, we are selling our house. We talked to a realtor today. We're getting in on the market and we are going to move to the West Coast. And we are also going to

• 1:42:10Speaker 03

  have a waiting period before we make any large financial purchases that might incur some debt, just to make sure that we don't get ourselves into debt again. And I think that should do it. Again, thank you for having us on the podcast. We really appreciate it. We got a lot out of it.

• 1:42:23Speaker 02

  We had a great time.

• 1:42:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  Great time chatting with you. Thanks again.

• 1:42:27Ramit Sethi?

  I want to thank our partners at Monarch for setting our couples up on their platform to see their exact CSP categories. Monarch is a private personal finance app that brings together all of a household's accounts, checking, credit cards, loans, and investments into one clean dashboard on your phone or computer. One thing I love about Monarch is it allows you to save up for your rich life goals. Like for example, if you want to save up for a wedding or an amazing vacation or your emergency fund, a house, having a baby, college, or retirement, Monarch makes it easy. You set up your goals. You tell it how much you want to save towards that goal every month. And Monarch lets you see your progress visually along the way.