253. "I’m 53, exhausted, and still living paycheck to paycheck"

Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich talks to Tania and Mike who are in their 50s, married 21 years, and earning over $225,000 a year. By most measures, they should be fine. But they’ve been trapped in the same debt cycle for two decades. Cashing out 401(k)s, borrowing from family, and digging themselves out only to fall right back in. Again and again. When Ramit opens their Conscious Spending Plan, the numbers are genuinely shocking. Fixed costs at 155%. Savings at 0%. Guilt-free spending at -73%. They are spending more than they make every single month and they have barely one month of savings to show for it. But the money isn’t even the most revealing part of this episode. Ramit works through the psychology behind the cycle, the “dreamer” pattern that keeps pulling them back in, and what it’s actually going to take for them to change together. In this episode we uncover: A $228K income with 155% fixed costs… How does that even happen? The parent-child dynamic Ramit identifies and why both of them are miserable because of it Mike’s $23,000 tractor purchase and the pattern behind it Why Tania has been a “money transcriptionist” instead of a money manager The “dreamer” trap: Believing the next thing will finally fix everything How Mike’s upbringing shaped his complete shutdown around money What real money conversations between couples actually look like The follow-up update from Tania and Mike Chapters: (00:00:00) Introduction (00:07:04) Looking at the numbers: $228K income, 155% fixed costs (00:11:41) "I've never talked about feelings, we've been married 21 years" (00:30:35) The tractor: how every big purchase actually happens (00:43:26) Cashing out retirement AGAIN! (00:47:14) The dreamer pattern: why the next thing never fixes anything (00:53:46) Michael's moment: "I don't know how to talk about money. It scares me." (01:07:56) Ramit walks through their house: where did all the money go?(01:16:07) The alter ego exercise: imagining a different life (01:31:27) Tanya's moment: "I'm the hero. I always say yes." (01:34:05) Ramit draws the caricature (02:01:48) Follow-ups This episode is brought to you by: Gusto | Try Gusto at http://gusto.com/ramit and get 3 months free when you run your first payroll 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 expires March 31, 2026. #FacetAd Gelt | Book a tax consultation with Gelt at https://joingelt.com/ramit. As a member of my community, you can skip the waitlist Shopify | Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at https://shopify.com/ramit Fabric by Gerber Life | Join the thousands of parents who trust Fabric to protect their family. Apply today in just minutes at https://meetfabric.com/ramit 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 Has your partner recently been obsessed with investing? Maybe not telling you what they're doing with your shared money? If so, I'd like to talk. Apply to be coached for free on this podcast at iwt.com/apply

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

• 0:01Ramit Sethi?

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• 0:46Ramit Sethi?

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• 1:26Ramit Sethi?

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• 2:10Ramit Sethi?

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• 2:36Speaker 01

  I've just always lived paycheck to paycheck since I was in college and it's not gotten any better. I just move money from one place to another and put it in a spreadsheet. There's not a plan. There never has been a plan.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  I'm guilty of coaxing her into buying stuff.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  He knows exactly what to say to end up getting what he wants.

• 2:55Ramit Sethi?

  What is the emotional cost of living this way?

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Gray hair, stress.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Anxiety and less years on my life and a lot less sleep.

• 3:02Ramit Sethi?

  You are both spending like you make a million dollars a year and you're in your 50s and you don't have enough retirement, not nearly enough.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  It's the same cycle 20 years. We seem to dig ourselves out and as soon as we dug out, we find a new hole.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  I'm not good at not giving people what they want.

• 3:18Ramit Sethi?

  What happens if nothing changes?

• 3:20Speaker 02

  We don't retire. We die working.

• 3:24Ramit Sethi?

  What would you do if you were stuck in a cycle of debt for over 20 years? Today I'm talking to Michael and Tanya. They're in their 50s, married for 21 years and they earn over $225,000 a year. But they've been trapped in the same debt cycle for two decades. They've cashed out 401ks. They've borrowed money from family multiple times. And no matter how many times they dig themselves out, they seem to fall right back in. Some of the numbers you're going to hear today are truly shocking. I'm about to open up their conscious spending plan, their CSP. It shows their income, their fixed costs, investments, savings and spending. If you want my help creating your own conscious spending plan, join my money coaching program

• 4:09Ramit Sethi?

  at IWT.com/moneycoaching. Here's what I see in their numbers. Assets, $65,000. Investments, $434,000. Savings, $22,000. Debt, $197,000. That gives them a total net worth of $325,000. But here's where the numbers become shocking.

• 4:35Ramit Sethi?

  Fixed costs, 155%. That means they are spending way more than they make every single month. Savings, 0%. Guilt-free spending, negative 73%, which we know is impossible. So let's just talk about that 155% fixed cost number. That number means they're not just overspending, but every single month, they are burning through way more than they make. Their investments are dangerously low for their age. They have barely one month's worth of savings, and any unexpected expense could push them over the edge. Candidly, if nothing changes, they will not be able to retire. But the good news is they have a high income,

• 5:20Ramit Sethi?

  and that gives them a possibility at turning this around. But only if they're willing to make major changes and to do it together. Let's meet Michael and Tanya. You have been in a cycle of debt for over 20 years. Getting in, getting out. You're here again. What happens if nothing changes?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  We run out of money, and I would probably go back and ask my parents for help, which we've had to do in the past. We've also cashed out some retirement plans in the past. So nothing that I want to do or look forward to. And that's why I think that we're just at the point where we have to figure it out.

• 6:01Ramit Sethi?

  Michael?

• 6:02Speaker 02

  We run out of money. And we keep dipping in the savings and taking that away. Tanya said we borrow money to help catch up. And you can only do that so many times before you're, you those resources up.

• 6:16Ramit Sethi?

  How do you feel about the potential of what might happen?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Scared. Don't want that to happen. Tanya's worked hard her entire life, and she needs to enjoy it. She almost works 24/7. So she needs to reap some of the rewards. And right now, she's not able to.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  I don't know if I'm more scared or it's just anxious and stressed about it. So, you know, and I've always been the one that does the bills and knows the balances and everything like that. So I also feel very much responsible for the financial situations we end up in, even though most of the time, none of the money is getting spent on anything I want to do.

• 6:54Ramit Sethi?

  How often do you talk about money?

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Before we started listening to your podcasts, very rarely, because I will talk and he will sit. It's not a conversation. And I'm sure part of it is, he's never been the greatest communicator, especially about money or feelings, but also because I get very upset about it. And so we don't talk about it as a good time. It'll be like, I balanced the checkbook. Now I know where all the money is gone. It's not a good time to have a conversation. I'll usually say something like, why did we spend the money on this? Why did we get this? What did you go do this for? And it's, you know, it's not one thing. There's a whole bunch of things and it's both of us doing it, but I know that's not how I come across.

• 7:37Ramit Sethi?

  That's pretty perceptive. Michael, how about you? How often would you say that you talk about money?

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Not a lot, because usually it's like, all right, come sit down with me and do the bills. And I'll sit there and literally just sit there. And she'll finish the bills. And then it's like, all right, we have to quit spending. Yeah, can't buy us up. No more coffees, no more this. And that's about the extent, because then we won't go in, I won't ask questions of what can we do?

• 8:01Ramit Sethi?

  Why not? Fear?

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Afraid of having the argument, not knowing how to talk about it?

• 8:06Ramit Sethi?

  Like, have you been doing this since the beginning of the relationship?

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 8:10Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. Can we actually simulate one of these conversations? So when was the last time you had a conversation like this? Tanya, you come over, you're like, we gotta talk about the bills.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  A month or so before we applied to this, I was doing the bills, literally like going through and putting everything in. And I have a huge bill spreadsheet that's pages and lines long. And I go through and I pay everything and then I look at the balance of the account. And then I'm usually like, hey, we don't have money in this account anymore. What are we gonna do? How are we gonna fix this? How are we gonna make extra money?

• 8:44Ramit Sethi?

  So then what happened?

• 8:46Speaker 02

  I say, I don't know.

• 8:47Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, sorry. Where was the part where you each talked to each other about this?

• 8:52Speaker 02

  That was it.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  That was the whole part. That's the whole conversation.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, we don't have good conversations about it.

• 8:58Ramit Sethi?

  So Tanya, you pull up this, like you bring your laptop to Michael? And do you go like, look at this? Where's the money gonna come from? Is that how it goes?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  I usually don't even have the laptop. I've already done the bills and paid them. Cause we get paid on the same day of the month. And I will go through and I will pay them all. And then I will see what the balance is. And that is very triggering for me, especially as I'm watching our savings account deplete. And so then I will be like, we need to make more money or figure out what we're doing with our money. What are we gonna do? And that's pretty much where the conversation ends. Cause the answer I will get is, I don't know. And there's no further questions or I wanna talk about it.

• 9:37Ramit Sethi?

  What does that feel like for you?

• 9:39Speaker 01

  I feel responsible for our finances and every penny we spend. And a lot of times I feel like he doesn't care.

• 9:45Ramit Sethi?

  What's the feeling?

• 9:47Speaker 01

  I don't know how to describe it, other than like feeling, well, hopeless about our finances and us getting anywhere. And then it's, I feel hurt that I'm like, I don't understand why you don't care that we're in this position again.

• 9:58Ramit Sethi?

  Can I put something up on screen for you? Something that our therapist showed me, cause I also struggle describing my feelings. Like a lot of people, especially a lot of men. And I'd love to just put this up and see if it helps guide how you feel in one of those conversations. So we have feelings like angry, fearful, bad, surprised, happy, sad, disgusted. And then they go out and out. Tanya, when you look at those bills and you finish making the payment, right when you go up to Michael, what do you feel?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  I would say I'm probably angry and I'm pretty hostile.

• 10:35Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, Michael, how about you?

• 10:37Speaker 02

  I'd go with sad and depressed, guilty.

• 10:42Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. What else?

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Inferior.

• 10:45Ramit Sethi?

  You feel powerless?

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:47Ramit Sethi?

  Tanya, how about you? Anything else?

• 10:49Speaker 01

  I'm fearful. It usually makes me feel very insecure and inadequate because I don't have what I need to give everybody around me what they need.

• 10:59Ramit Sethi?

  How did you find that? Looking at that wheel of emotions?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  There's a lot more emotions than I thought there were. But I mean, I think it helps like break it down to really where it's coming from.

• 11:10Ramit Sethi?

  If you two think about that conversation that you have surely had many, many times in your relationship, how would you describe the role that each of you is playing in that conversation?

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Servant? How do we couple more money? Yeah, I need to cooperate with more money to pay bills.

• 11:28Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, that's an interesting response. Tanya, what's yours?

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Trying to be the fixer.

• 11:33Ramit Sethi?

  Fixer.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Fixer or director, try to figure out how to get us out of what we're in. Even in my career, I do a lot of projects, things, project management type things. So I think I take on the bills as sort of like the finances or a project and we have to fix the problem and it has to have a path to fixing it. But I think where it goes wrong is we don't find the right path.

• 11:54Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, so let's, let me take you both at face value. Fixer, to the fixer, is your fixing working?

• 12:01Speaker 01

  No.

• 12:02Ramit Sethi?

  And to the person who called himself a servant, are you serving effectively?

• 12:08Speaker 02

  No.

• 12:09Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. Good. We've established that what we are doing is not working. Michael just called himself a servant. Tanya called herself the fixer. And when I asked if their approach is working for them, they both said no. In my newest book, Money for Couples, I talk about one of the most damaging patterns that couples fall into, the parent-child dynamic. In this case, Tanya is the parent. She manages everything alone. She feels angry, insecure, inadequate, like she has to fix every single problem by herself. Michael is the child. He feels sad, guilty, powerless, and inferior. He doesn't know how to engage, so he just doesn't.

• 12:54Ramit Sethi?

  If you want to understand more about the money dynamics in your relationship, I want to encourage you to get a copy of my book, Money for Couples. I'll add a link in the description below. Now, neither of them actively chose these roles. But after 20 years, they're cemented, and those roles are making them miserable. Now, I need to help them understand something critical. Tanya cannot keep fixing things alone, and Michael can't keep waiting to be told what to do. If they want to get out of this precarious situation, they will both have to step into completely new roles. Let's keep going. Now, Michael, you told my producer that having those type of conversations is very difficult for you.

• 13:39Ramit Sethi?

  Why is that?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  I've never talked about feelings growing up, and we've never really had conversations. I don't know how to do them.

• 13:48Ramit Sethi?

  How long have you two been married?

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Just over 21 years. 21 years and about three weeks.

• 13:53Ramit Sethi?

  Wow, congratulations.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 13:55Ramit Sethi?

  When you met, did you know this, Tanya, that Michael struggled to talk about his feelings?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 14:03Ramit Sethi?

  You didn't know? How's that possible?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Because he talked to me about everything.

• 14:09Ramit Sethi?

  Really?

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:11Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, that's interesting. So, Michael was more open back then? And what changed from your perspective over time?

• 14:19Speaker 01

  We got married, and it was a total shift in where he was going with the career, how much he talked to me, how we were planning things. And then I think we started following my career. And I don't know. I don't know if he resents that, but the conversations just stopped.

• 14:39Ramit Sethi?

  How soon after getting married?

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Probably a year. I mean, I remember I would get letters, texts. He would leave cards on my pillow. I would give him cards. I would send stuff, and it just went away.

• 14:54Ramit Sethi?

  Are you both comfortable with us talking about this a bit?

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:58Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. I ask because I think this is very, very related to money, and it would be challenging for me to go straight to the numbers right now without understanding this momentous change that happened 20 years ago. Michael? From what Tanya says, when you were dating, when you were early on, you were very vocal. A year after your marriage, something changed. Would you agree with that?

• 15:24Speaker 02

  I don't know if it's a year or not, but I'll go on. I don't know when it truly was.

• 15:28Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, what happened?

• 15:30Speaker 02

  I mean, the only thing I can come up with like a word wise is routine. We started getting into a routine and it just kind of settled in and I don't know.

• 15:39Ramit Sethi?

  Did you grow up in the Northeast?

• 15:40Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 15:41Ramit Sethi?

  You did. Did your parents ever say, "I love you"?

• 15:45Speaker 02

  No.

• 15:46Ramit Sethi?

  Okay.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  My dad said it for the very first time about three months ago.

• 15:51Ramit Sethi?

  What was the circumstance?

• 15:54Speaker 02

  It was a text message.

• 15:56Ramit Sethi?

  What?

• 15:56Speaker 02

  It blew me away. He texted me and said, "I love you."

• 16:00Ramit Sethi?

  How did you respond to that?

• 16:01Speaker 02

  I texted back, "Love you too," and that was it. That was the end of the conversation.

• 16:05Ramit Sethi?

  Never said it again?

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 16:07Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, how did you feel hearing that from your dad?

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Strange. It was just odd for him to say something like that.

• 16:15Ramit Sethi?

  And I assume your dad did not show a lot of feelings when you were growing up as well?

• 16:21Speaker 02

  No.

• 16:22Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, so part of this is like, like father, like son. I get that, but I'm more interested in what happened after you got married. So you were in a routine, coming home every day, same thing. What else?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Money happened. We combined our finances and it became a, "How are we going to pay these bills? What are we going to do with this? Let's work more shifts." So we worked all the time. I had kids and then we had a kid together and just, you're either at work or you're sleeping or you're with the kids. We were speaking words about money, but we were not having conversations about it, which I think led to just not wanting to talk about certain things anymore.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  I think we also, we purchased things to benefit our kids, benefit us, like, "Oh, let's go buy an RV. Let's go buy," I mean, I bought a motorcycle at one point and that was for me, obviously, not for the kids. We now have payments. And now we gotta pay those payments. So how we do that? We just work.

• 17:29Ramit Sethi?

  When you think back to the early years of your marriage, what words would you use to describe those early years?

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Fun.

• 17:37Ramit Sethi?

  Tanya?

• 17:38Speaker 01

  It was complicated. Not that it wasn't enjoyable. Not that I don't love him to death, but our relationship was complicated because we still had to deal with other people that had been in our lives.

• 17:50Ramit Sethi?

  Let's go five years forward, 10 years forward. How would you describe your marriage then? Tanya?

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Five years forward, I thought things were better. I think we were on the same page with a lot of things. Had settled into like how life was with kids. You know, I thought we had a really good family life.

• 18:07Ramit Sethi?

  And if you had to describe it today, how would you describe it?

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Challenging, but good.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  I think the challenge is the money now. It's not our relationship. I think work wise and things, we're both in a good place. I think that we enjoy our company. We try to make time for ourselves. We try to do some fun things now. But I think that the money piece of it still hangs over the relationship.

• 18:31Ramit Sethi?

  Is money more stressful or less stressful than your first few years of marriage?

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Right now, more.

• 18:37Ramit Sethi?

  More.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  I think we pay attention to it more. We did not pay attention to it before.

• 18:42Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. Can we take a look at the numbers so I understand the context here? So we're gonna look at the CSP. Did you both do this together or not?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  I did it myself the first time before we even like contacted you guys. And then we did it again after we talked to your people.

• 19:01Ramit Sethi?

  And how was that, doing the conscious spending plan together?

• 19:04Speaker 02

  It was good. It was informative and we talked about things and tried to figure out where do we classify stuff? How we put this in here? Where does it go? There was a lot of back and forth communication.

• 19:14Ramit Sethi?

  Good. Okay, cool. Let's pull it up. I'll take a look at it and we'll look at some numbers. Here we go. Tanya, I'm gonna ask you to read the word in bold and then the number in full next to it for this entire first box. Go ahead.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Assets 65,236. Investments 434,524. Savings 22,638. Debt 197,380. For a total net worth of 325,018.

• 19:49Ramit Sethi?

  What do you think of those numbers?

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Some are surprising and some are scary.

• 19:54Ramit Sethi?

  Okay.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  I did not realize honestly that we had that much in retirement because we've cashed several out, but I've also been working very hard to put more money into our retirement. So like mine increases automatically every six months.

• 20:08Ramit Sethi?

  And which part is scary?

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Well, our assets. So because we moved into a multi-generational house, the house is not in our names. So I didn't count that as an asset, even though we're supposed to get the house and that's all legalized, but it's not our house currently. And then our spending is, you know, obviously the problem that leads to not having a great net worth.

• 20:32Ramit Sethi?

  Well, we haven't looked at the spending yet, but I do see $197,000 of debt. Is that what you mean?

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:37Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, we'll get to that. Michael, what do you think about those numbers?

• 20:41Speaker 02

  I wish there was more savings. I know we don't have a lot in there.

• 20:45Ramit Sethi?

  All right. Net worth of $325,000. Let's take a look at the income. This time, Michael, I'm going to ask you to read off your combined gross monthly income. What is that number?

• 20:59Speaker 02

  The combined is $19,027.

• 21:02Ramit Sethi?

  So collectively, the two of you make $19,000 per month, which is $228,328 per year. Who knew that's how much you make per year?

• 21:16Speaker 02

  No, because she, I did not know how much she made.

• 21:19Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, so Michael says no, Tanya says yes. Okay, you didn't know how much she made. How much did you think she made?

• 21:26Speaker 02

  I didn't have a clue. I knew it was over $100,000. How much over, I had no clue.

• 21:30Ramit Sethi?

  Did you care?

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Not really.

• 21:32Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. So hearing $228,000 a year, what does that number mean to you, Michael?

• 21:38Speaker 02

  That we should be able to pay off our debts.

• 21:40Ramit Sethi?

  Because?

• 21:41Speaker 02

  We're making pretty good money.

• 21:42Ramit Sethi?

  Got it. What do you each do for a living?

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Organ donation.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Both of us. I do muscle skeletal recovery in the OR.

• 21:50Ramit Sethi?

  Ah, okay.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  And I do, I manage the team that does organ donors.

• 21:54Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, okay, got it. Okay, cool. All right, so who is the, who's the one who makes $12,724 per month?

• 22:02Speaker 01

  I do.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  She does.

• 22:03Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, that's you, Tanya. And Michael, your gross salary is $6,304 per month. Okay, for a total of $19,027 per month. Got it? That's a pretty high income.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  I'd agree with you.

• 22:15Ramit Sethi?

  Let's keep looking at the rest of the numbers. I'm curious. I'm gonna put this up again. Here we go. Tanya, fixed costs, what is that number in blue?

• 22:23Speaker 01

  155%.

• 22:25Ramit Sethi?

  Say it one more time?

• 22:26Speaker 01

  155%.

• 22:29Ramit Sethi?

  This is a major, major problem. This is why you said, early on, you might run out of money. Everyone at this percentage would run out of money. It's just a question of time.

• 22:42Ramit Sethi?

  I want you to understand what it means to have fixed costs at 155%. Remember, we like to see that number between 50 to 60%. They are more than double that. If your fixed costs are over 100%, you are spending more than you earn just to keep the lights on. So where's that money actually coming from? Well, sometimes it comes from savings. A lot of times, it just builds up debt. So if your fixed costs are 100% or higher, you're basically eating into everything you've got, and then you are eating into your future. Every single month, it's like you're putting another arrow in your back. Michael and Tanya have been living this way for years, but I'm not sure they understand how dire their situation actually is.

• 23:27Ramit Sethi?

  Like, there's no planning. Their entire approach is built around one question. How do we make it to the next paycheck? Anybody else here know people like this? That all they can think about is getting to the next paycheck. And actually, I have to tell you that planning even a few months ahead is actually a highly advanced cognitive skill. A lot of people struggle with it. People can handle planning a week out, maybe next month, but thinking three months out or a year That often feels impossible. And for a lot of people, it essentially is impossible. So when I talk about planning for retirement, like planning 10, 20, 30 years ahead, for someone who has been spending more than they make each month, I might as well be speaking a foreign language.

• 24:12Ramit Sethi?

  Because the target for fixed costs is 50 to 60%, in order to fix this situation, they will need to cut their spending by more than half. Right now, they don't understand the enormity of what they're facing. But they're about to. We're gonna get right back to the numbers right after this break. Let's continue. We're at 155%. We're gonna come back and dig into those fixed costs, but let's keep moving. Investments are at 17%. Your savings is zero. So each month, you are not saving any money?

• 24:43Speaker 02

  No, we're not putting any money in the savings.

• 24:45Ramit Sethi?

  And just so we know, you have 22,000 bucks, which is about one month's worth of savings. Okay, so we're very, very tight here. And then finally, your guilt-free spending indicates negative 73% or negative $9,302, which obviously cannot be right, because when was the last time you ate out?

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Yesterday.

• 25:05Ramit Sethi?

  Exactly. So we know that that's not being properly categorized. What do you make of these numbers?

• 25:11Speaker 01

  They're too high. And they can't keep going like that.

• 25:15Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, I agree. What would you say? Like, a lot of people's spending leaves clues. It's almost like if you see somebody's driveway and you can see the types of cars they have, it leaves clues about what type of person. What are the clues you see in this conscious spending plan?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  We don't really manage the money because we don't know where it's going.

• 25:34Ramit Sethi?

  Agreed. Are you hyper frugal?

• 25:36Speaker 01

  I guess I would say it depends.

• 25:38Ramit Sethi?

  Hmm, no, it doesn't depend when you're spending 155% on fixed costs.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  I'm hyper frugal about me, but I'm not good about saying no to anybody else.

• 25:49Ramit Sethi?

  Aren't we talking about household expenses and income here? And haven't you all been married over 20 years? We're talking about the two of you and your family. We'll get to the individuals for sure. But right now, we're talking about the two of you. Michael, what would you say you notice about the clues from this conscious spending plan?

• 26:09Speaker 02

  We're buying too many things on credit.

• 26:11Ramit Sethi?

  Okay.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  And we are way overspending. We're not saving anything.

• 26:16Ramit Sethi?

  Agreed. Is there anything you see in this conscious spending plan that you have not had the courage to say to your spouse?

• 26:27Speaker 02

  That I'm guilty of coaxing her into buying stuff.

• 26:32Ramit Sethi?

  Okay.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  But I just don't really control the money. I just put numbers on a spreadsheet because I've never learned how to do it. It's sort of ironic that I've done it for other places like charities and businesses and they would never look like this, I guarantee you. But I think I just get frustrated and it's like, we don't do anything about it because it's, I don't know how to fix it myself. And even when I say, how are we going to do this? What can we do? There's no answers.

• 26:57Ramit Sethi?

  You're asking your husband who's never engaged with money for 20 years. How are we going to fix this?

• 27:03Speaker 02

  And I just shut down.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  History has been if he shuts down and I can't figure it out, we've gone to my parents because he won't talk to his parents about it.

• 27:11Ramit Sethi?

  You've gone to your parents and they help financially?

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 27:16Ramit Sethi?

  How many times does that happen?

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Too many.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  At least two or three and we've paid them back for two of them. But the first one, they just ended up saying was a gift.

• 27:27Ramit Sethi?

  What'd they write the check for? How much?

• 27:28Speaker 01

  I think it was $15,000, but I can't swear to that.

• 27:32Ramit Sethi?

  And the next two?

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Probably around $10,000.

• 27:34Ramit Sethi?

  Can I just ask a question? Like, why not just go to them and ask them again? Why are you here? Why talk to me?

• 27:41Speaker 01

  There were lots of circumstances of a different kind. I had gone through a divorce. I was laid off at work. There had been different reasons that I felt like, you know, okay, I'll ask them for help and we'll pay them back and we did. But like, there is no reason other than we got ourselves into this.

• 28:00Ramit Sethi?

  Did you get yourself into this, Tanya?

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yep. We both did, but I got myself into it because I've done the finances and people, he knows exactly what to say to end up getting what he wants. And then he'll get what he wants and we'll get another payment.

• 28:16Ramit Sethi?

  Which is what?

• 28:18Speaker 01

  He'll just keep going on about something and he knows at some point I'm just gonna be like, forget it, just go buy it because I can't. He thinks it's fun to window shop and stuff, but then it's every weekend. Let's go look at this, let's go see this, let's do this. I need one of these, we have to have one of these. I can't live without this and I'm just done with it at some point.

• 28:35Ramit Sethi?

  What's a recent example?

• 28:37Speaker 01

  We have a truck, a tractor and attachments.

• 28:40Ramit Sethi?

  A truck, a tractor and attach, what's an attachment?

• 28:44Speaker 02

  We got a rototiller and then we got a bucket loader.

• 28:47Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, I don't know what any of these words mean.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  Rototiller for making a garden, digging up the ground.

• 28:53Ramit Sethi?

  Okay.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  Our house has five acres. We're gonna make a big garden and try to support ourselves.

• 28:59Ramit Sethi?

  I have a lot of questions, but I don't, this is like how people must feel when they come on here sometimes. And I'm talking about some complicated investment thing and they're just like, what's an investment? Okay, I have two questions, I'm gonna try to keep it simple. First of all, how much does a tractor cost?

• 29:15Speaker 02

  I think combined or what, twenty-three thousand we have?

• 29:20Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, twenty-three thousand for the Homestead small tractor. And then what about this attachments? How much did those cost?

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Including them.

• 29:26Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, alright, wow. So you saw the tractor, you're like, we need a tractor, twenty-three thousand bucks all in. You buy it cash, you finance it, how does it work?

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Finance, um, I think we did eighty-four months, zero interest.

• 29:41Ramit Sethi?

  Okay.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  For the tractor, but the implements we bought separately and that is thirty-six months on that? And I think it's two and a half, two point nine percent.

• 29:51Ramit Sethi?

  So I want to understand more about how a purchase like this comes about. Cause Tanya, you mentioned that Michael will get excited and then he knows what to say to get you to basically agree. Walk me through that, Tanya.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  You will just start talking about something he wants and it will be brought up frequently and we'll have to drive past the tractor store and then we'll have to go to the tractor store and then it's like, well, my life would be so much easier and I could do all this on the homestead if I had the tractor and tractor's the answer to mowing the lawn and the tractor's the answer to this and I will just finally say then buy the tractor and I'll figure it out.

• 30:28Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, I'll figure it out. Famous last words. Tanya, do you figure it out?

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Most of the time.

• 30:36Ramit Sethi?

  I don't think so. I'm looking at your numbers right now. You're in $197,000 of debt. You have one month's worth of savings and you're spending 155% of fixed costs. I don't think you figure it out. First of all, is the premise of the question right? Are you the one who got both of you into this?

• 30:56Speaker 02

  No.

• 30:56Ramit Sethi?

  All right. Michael says no. So who got both of you into this?

• 31:02Speaker 02

  We do it together.

• 31:03Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. Tanya, do you agree with that?

• 31:06Speaker 01

  I would agree. I say yes. I wouldn't say we make the decisions together. I just decide I'm not going to make the decision because he's just going to keep going on about it. So then I'm just like, whatever, buy it and I'll figure out how to get another job or make more money or work more hours or whatever to pay the bills each month.

• 31:23Ramit Sethi?

  Did you grow up poor, Tanya?

• 31:25Speaker 01

  I was a military brat, so, you know, and my mother worked wherever we were stationed. So I wouldn't say we were poor. I always had food on the table and stuff, but the only stories I've ever heard are about my dad having to like be a bagger at the grocery store or to get us Christmas presents beside their salary because the military is like set salary and stuff. But, you know, I always had food on the table. We always had nice houses, nice clothes. But like our vacations were always when we moved and stuff like that. I guess it depends how you define poor. I mean, we live in Alabama and there's some rural places here that I would consider really poor and I wouldn't say I was that, but we also didn't have tons of money laying around by any means.

• 32:05Ramit Sethi?

  The reason I asked the question, it sounds like you did not grow up poor. People who grew up poor, they know that they're poor. They have very, very specific vivid moments from their childhood. They know that they are poor. I mean, we're talking about they count the number of slices of bread. Their shoes have holes in them. It doesn't sound like that was the case for you. One of the reasons I asked that, Tanya, was you mentioned if I need to, I'll just work harder. I'll just get another job. I'll just grind more. Typically, something that I hear from people who grew up poor, sometimes working class, the idea that I'll just, I'll just take the punishment on. I'll just work harder, more hours, second job, that kind of thing.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  I think it's because my father did not grow up well. So we always grew up with a very, if you need something, we're going to figure out a way to earn the money.

• 32:57Ramit Sethi?

  How are you going to figure out the situation you're in right now?

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Getting another job.

• 33:00Ramit Sethi?

  Can we play that out for a second? Because that's a common answer that a lot of people give. So you get another job. Right now, you make $12,724 a month gross. If you got another job, how much more would you make?

• 33:13Speaker 01

  It depends what kind of job I can get. I don't know, a few thousand dollars a month.

• 33:17Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. Is it income that's your problem?

• 33:20Speaker 01

  No, it's spending that's the problem.

• 33:23Ramit Sethi?

  I agree with you that it's not an income problem. I think your income is outstanding. There's probably something else, probably something a lot deeper than that. So the tractor and the spending is an example. Tanya, you mentioned that he wants something new and he wears me down. And eventually I just say, do whatever.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 33:43Ramit Sethi?

  Right, okay. Michael, I want to check in with you. Would you agree with that assessment?

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 33:47Ramit Sethi?

  Why do you do that?

• 33:49Speaker 02

  For entertainment, I like going window shopping and stuff. I like going to look at cars. I like going to look at toys. For me, that's fun. And I'll drag her along a couple of times. And then she's like, well, just get it.

• 34:02Ramit Sethi?

  Hold on. There's a difference between window shopping. The word means looking through a window, window shopping versus telling your spouse, "I want this, I want this. Wouldn't it be great? Wouldn't it improve our lives?" On and on and on. There's a difference. Which one do you do?

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Probably 80% window shop. But sometimes something that I really, really want, or I think will benefit us, I will push more.

• 34:28Ramit Sethi?

  Okay.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  And we've talked like the track and we talked about the Rota Tiller. And ever since we got the track, we had talked about it.

• 34:35Ramit Sethi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Well, now they're having a sale. Let's go get it.

• 34:39Ramit Sethi?

  Do you, when you are talking about these important things to you, do you consider if you can afford it?

• 34:45Speaker 02

  No.

• 34:46Ramit Sethi?

  Who does that?

• 34:47Speaker 02

  Tanya, if she does it. Or we just do it and then figure it out later.

• 34:53Ramit Sethi?

  Do you both see what's going on here?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  I'm not good at saying no because if somebody needs something, I always find a way to give it to them or I give them what they want.

• 35:02Ramit Sethi?

  Mm-hmm. You struggle to say no? You have credit card debt, right?

• 35:08Speaker 01

  No.

• 35:09Ramit Sethi?

  No credit card debt?

• 35:10Speaker 01

  No. I pay off my Amex card every month.

• 35:14Ramit Sethi?

  So you struggle to say no? And who's the one checking if your family unit can afford one of these major purchases?

• 35:23Speaker 01

  I try to, but sometimes I just don't.

• 35:27Ramit Sethi?

  I don't think anybody's doing it. See the dynamic that's been built up here?

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Tanya trying to please and me taking advantage of that.

• 35:36Ramit Sethi?

  Explains exactly the numbers that I see on the CSP. An extraordinarily high income, particularly for the area, and a high amount of debt and spending.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  Apart from that, that is our daughter's student loan.

• 35:50Ramit Sethi?

  Ah, let's talk about your kids. How many kids you have?

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Three.

• 35:54Ramit Sethi?

  Three kids, how old?

• 35:55Speaker 02

  31, 30, and 22.

• 35:57Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. And what's the student loan thing?

• 36:00Speaker 02

  She just graduated for her undergraduate.

• 36:02Ramit Sethi?

  How much is her loans?

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Seventy thousand and change.

• 36:06Ramit Sethi?

  What about the other two?

• 36:07Speaker 01

  They don't have any loans. They were paid off when they went to school.

• 36:10Ramit Sethi?

  Did you tell your kids before, "We will pay your student loans"?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  In a roundabout way. When I got divorced, it was written into the divorce decree by the court. So we had to pay for my boys as long as they were in college. And therefore, when Autumn went to school, we weren't going to tell her that we weren't going to pay for hers when we were paying for her brothers.

• 36:32Ramit Sethi?

  I see. Did you have a conversation about how much you would pay?

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Nothing.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  We told her we'd pay. I did. I had a conversation with her about we would pay for the in-state tuition in Alabama. Because I moved here and took a job that could get her in-state at several universities here.

• 36:50Ramit Sethi?

  So it's seventy K over four years?

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Actually, it was a little bit more, but I used some bonus checks and paid off her first two semesters in full.

• 36:58Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. Seventy thousand dollars approximately of debt. I want to understand the debt a little bit more. Can we walk through it? So you have a hundred and ninety-seven thousand dollars of debt. What's underneath that number?

• 37:07Speaker 02

  My truck.

• 37:08Ramit Sethi?

  How much?

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Forty-seven thousand.

• 37:10Ramit Sethi?

  What's next?

• 37:11Speaker 02

  The tractor. I think we owe sixteen thousand eight hundred or something like that.

• 37:16Ramit Sethi?

  Okay.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  And then those implements for the tractor is another six thousand dollars.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  We have money left on our furniture that we bought when we moved into our old house that we still have. We have flooring that we put into this house while we bought it, a massage chair we bought.

• 37:31Ramit Sethi?

  How much is all that?

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Two of them are probably seven or eight thousand dollars.

• 37:35Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. Tanya, didn't you mention you have a big old spreadsheet?

• 37:37Speaker 01

  I did.

• 37:38Ramit Sethi?

  Are you looking at it?

• 37:40Speaker 01

  No, but I can.

• 37:41Ramit Sethi?

  Can you share the screen with me? I'd love to take a look at it.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:45Ramit Sethi?

  Whoa. Okay. First impressions right off the bat, lots of numbers.

• 37:51Ramit Sethi?

  And I see everything denominated there. It's broken down by month. So there's columns for every month. October, November, December, all the way through the next December. Lots of green, which is a little confusing because I know that there's not a lot of green in the financial situation, but I assume it's just a color thing. On the left side, we have expenses. These are like MX Loan, Mass Mutual, GEICO, et cetera, Verizon. And then the entire spreadsheet is just number after number. Okay, now I'm looking at the credit card bill total. And per month, the credit card bill appears to be 14,000 a month, 11,000 a month, 11,000 a month, 19,000 a month, 18,000 a month, 13,000 a month.

• 38:35Ramit Sethi?

  And the last few months have been 7,000 and 6,000 dollars per month. What does this spreadsheet mean to you?

• 38:42Speaker 02

  We owe a lot of money.

• 38:44Ramit Sethi?

  It means you owe a lot of money. Okay, and Tanya, what does it mean to you, the spreadsheet, when you look at it?

• 38:47Speaker 01

  It's just trying to organize the money to make sure I don't miss any payments.

• 38:52Ramit Sethi?

  How long you been going through that type of relationship with money?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  My entire life.

• 38:56Ramit Sethi?

  You like it?

• 38:58Speaker 01

  No.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  It's an attempt to control, to try to see where it goes and how to control so we know where the money's going versus just blatant spending.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  There's a lot of stuff that's not on the spreadsheet. That is literally just the required bills. Groceries aren't there, gas isn't there, eating out isn't there, nothing else is there.

• 39:17Ramit Sethi?

  Why is that?

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Never thought to put it on a spreadsheet until I did the conscious spending plan and then realized, well, that sort of makes sense as to why money doesn't add up because if you're not tracking anything else you're doing and you're making decisions based on a spreadsheet that makes it look like you have money, it sort of snowballs.

• 39:34Ramit Sethi?

  Tanya, what are you getting out of maintaining this spreadsheet for almost two decades?

• 39:39Speaker 01

  I'm really just a way for me to say I'm... Paid the bill.

• 39:44Ramit Sethi?

  What does that get you? That's quite profound.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  Not in trouble with anybody and we can get to live till the next paycheck.

• 39:50Ramit Sethi?

  Right. Not in trouble? Can you explain that a little bit more?

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Well, it's not like I'm not gonna go into debt or have a collector at my doorstep or disappoint anybody that I didn't make a payment.

• 40:01Ramit Sethi?

  When you pay your bills every month, what do you feel at the end?

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Disappointed, stressed, anxious.

• 40:07Ramit Sethi?

  I noticed you're very passive and unclear about who is causing the problems here. But then it comes down to, we need this, etc. Who's saying that?

• 40:18Speaker 01

  I think it truly depends on what it is that like I, I'm trying to think of what I have

• 40:24Speaker 01

  spent a good chunk of money on. Recently, we've done some trips that I wanted to do. So there was that. But on a regular basis, most of the stuff that we buy has not been just for me. It's been either because we needed something for the house or it's been something that Michael has wanted, so we bought it.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  It's definitely both of us. I mean, it's definitely stuff that I want.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  When we're trying to cut down on costs, we had two vehicles. We now have one. And we traded in the two vehicles and my rationale was that our monthly payment is less, and it is. I mean, her vehicle needed a couple thousand dollars worth of work and it was easier to get rid of it than to do the work. And I was trying to help bills that way and I thought the truck would help with the property. And there's stuff that she'll do that's like, I go do it and some stuff works, some stuff doesn't work. Then she'll ask, can I spend money?

• 41:21Ramit Sethi?

  On what?

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Things that she wants to try. Right now, she's not really spending money on just random stuff.

• 41:27Ramit Sethi?

  How long you been doing that, Tanya?

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Not long enough, potentially, but I mean, I, I will get coffee out, which I probably shouldn't. Recently, I did spend a significant amount of money joining a gym.

• 41:40Ramit Sethi?

  How did you decide if you could afford that or not?

• 41:43Speaker 01

  I took $1,200 out of savings and decided I was going to do something to get less stressed and get healthier because I had a shoulder injury. I can't lift. I couldn't do anything.

• 41:53Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  And the stress of this and my job.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  I decided it didn't matter. I was gonna do it.

• 42:01Ramit Sethi?

  Gotcha. Okay, I want to just put all the pieces together here. There was something about retirement. You mentioned you cashed out retirement once or multiple times in the past. Can you tell me about that?

• 42:13Speaker 02

  I had cashed out part of mine to pay off credit card debt. So we thought it was smarter to cash it out and pay off the debt instead of paying the interest rates.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Cash out my retirement so we could buy, pay off debt and move. And then we bought a deli. That's a whole nother story.

• 42:28Ramit Sethi?

  So you did it? And, and what was the result?

• 42:32Speaker 01

  We paid off all of our bills except for, I think, one or two. And we moved across the country and we opened a deli.

• 42:39Ramit Sethi?

  Leading to more debt.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  They paid cash for the deli. Unfortunately, it did not make the money we'd expected it to make. She went back to the O P O world, working, and that was like an hour and a half away.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  Also, she did lots of driving. And then she got an apartment down there because it was too much driving.

• 43:00Ramit Sethi?

  Was that where the debt began to rebuild?

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Probably the fourth time.

• 43:05Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, that was the fourth time you had rebuilt debt. It started to rebuild again. I see. Did you realize that, like, there's a pattern here?

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Not until recently.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  I just don't think we paid attention to it. And it was like, okay, we'll, we'll figure this out or we'll find a way to pay this off. And then we'll move on again. And then just recently paying bills and looking at everything before we applied to the show, I was like, there, we sound worse than the people that are on this show half the time. It can't keep going the way it's going.

• 43:35Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, I think I understand some of what's going on. My question to you both is, what are you willing to do to make a change?

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Whenever I can.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  It needs to stop. But we gotta do something.

• 43:48Ramit Sethi?

  What are you willing to do to make a change?

• 43:50Speaker 02

  You have to cut out the spending.

• 43:52Ramit Sethi?

  Who's spending?

• 43:53Speaker 02

  Both of us.

• 43:54Ramit Sethi?

  Why, why even bother changing? I mean, you all have, I'm sure, is a very nice house and you got all the gadgets and

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Because we're gonna run out of money.

• 44:03Ramit Sethi?

  You always found a rabbit in a hat somewhere. You got some retirement, you can pull out of there, you did it before. You can ask the parents for help, you did it before.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  I want a different life. And I know that. I want to have a future where I can say, I want to go do this and be able to do it. And I don't want to work forever. So I want to have retirement. And I know that going down the path we're doing right now, it's not gonna happen. So I'm gonna do whatever it takes to make it happen.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  We were supposed to go visit a friend next month. And we decided it's too expensive that we're not gonna go do the trip. I want to be able to say, let's go visit. We can do that. It's not going to break the bank. We're not gonna look and say, what do I have to cut out to go do it this month?

• 44:46Ramit Sethi?

  What is the emotional cost of living this way?

• 44:50Speaker 02

  Gray hair, stress.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Stress, anxiety, and less years on my life, and a lot less sleep.

• 44:56Ramit Sethi?

  Do you know other couples like this?

• 44:58Speaker 02

  No.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Not that I know of.

• 45:00Ramit Sethi?

  There's a lot of them. It's very common. Couples earning above-average incomes, trapped in a debt of their own making. They have these habits and patterns that they don't even realize they are exhibiting. And their instinctive reaction is, we need to earn more. They don't know what to do. They know it's true that if they made more money, they wouldn't do anything with it. It would simply get racked up into more debt, but they don't know what to do.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  And we've proven that.

• 45:31Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, we paid off all our debt and then rebuilt it all back up.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  I've made more money. I mean, I make more money now than I've made previously.

• 45:41Ramit Sethi?

  So what do you think's going on?

• 45:42Speaker 01

  We don't talk about money, so we just end up spending money. We don't even know where we're spending it at.

• 45:49Ramit Sethi?

  As we dig into Michael and Tanya's finances, there's a pattern that's becoming impossible to ignore. For 20 years, they've been trapped in the same cycle, which is to get into debt, dig themselves out, then get right back into it. They've cashed out their retirement accounts multiple times, borrowed from family multiple times. And every time they think they've solved the problem, they end up right back where they started. Here's what I'm seeing. Michael and Tanya are dreamers. Remember the concept of dreamers from Money for Couples, the book? They keep believing that the next thing will fix everything. A deli was supposed to generate income, a pasta business, a tractor that would make life easier. And when the debt piles up, they tell themselves, once this payment ends, once we pay off this

• 46:32Ramit Sethi?

  loan, then we'll be fine. But they never are because they're not actually addressing the real problem. They've basically built a pyramid of financial dreams, each one designed to solve the mess from the last one. But the foundation itself was never solid. And now they're running out of time. They're in their 50s with $434,000 in retirement accounts, which might sound like a lot to some people, but at their current spending level, it won't last them through retirement, not even close. If they don't fundamentally change the way they approach money, they will not be able to retire. Now, if you are watching this and you're thinking, once I get that raise, I'll be fine. Once this car payment ends, then I will start saving money.

• 47:16Ramit Sethi?

  That is very likely dreamer thinking, and it doesn't work. It works for a while until you hit a brick wall and it is incredible pain. If you want to fix this, do not wait. Join my money coaching program. I will show you how. I will help you make a plan to get your numbers in order fast. Go to IWT.com/moneycoaching and sign up right now. When we come back, I'm going to show them what they've been avoiding for the last two decades.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Part of the reason for applying for the show and coming on is because I can't figure out how to plan things, which to me is even worse because that's what I do. I can plan things strategically. I can get it to a goal. I can put all the steps in place and 95% of the time I'm pretty successful at it, but I can't even get close to successful here.

• 48:07Ramit Sethi?

  Michael, what's going on in your financial situation?

• 48:10Speaker 02

  It just goes around. We build a debt and we say we're going to figure it out. And a lot of times we do, but we... We never look at the root cause.

• 48:20Ramit Sethi?

  Tell me what the root cause is.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  Workless spending, not analyzing, can we truly afford this? How does this affect our bills?

• 48:27Ramit Sethi?

  Who's we? We don't do that. Who would we be?

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Me. I do it. I'll push for something. A lot of times I think it's beneficial and Ty has it, okay, we'll figure out how to pay for it. And we don't figure it out first. It's okay, let's go do it.

• 48:43Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. What would it look like in a healthy dynamic?

• 48:46Speaker 02

  We would sit down and go over our bills and see where this would fit. And be able to either say, no, we can't right now, or adjust where we're putting money.

• 49:01Ramit Sethi?

  And that doesn't happen because?

• 49:04Speaker 01

  It doesn't turn into a conversation. I'm either the bad guy or he's just not gonna say anything.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  I don't know how to say, let's talk.

• 49:13Ramit Sethi?

  Want to do it right now?

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 49:17Ramit Sethi?

  Go ahead. I'll listen in.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  I don't know how to sit down and really go over the bills. I don't understand it and I don't feel comfortable with it. So I tend to just shut down. I want to. I don't know how to ask questions and I don't know how to talk about it. I don't know how to say, okay, if I want this, what do we have to do?

• 49:43Ramit Sethi?

  Tony, ask him why.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Why can't you talk to me about money?

• 49:49Speaker 02

  Just talking about money scares me.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Why does talking about money scare you?

• 49:54Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't feel like I have money. I don't feel like I have any control over money. It just scares me because I don't know how to do it. I've always just had someone else take care of it for me. Me and you, you've always done it and I've never done it. You tried involving me, but I don't get involved. So I tend to stay away from it.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  How would you want to be involved?

• 50:12Speaker 02

  I want to do it with you. So we can do it together.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  I guess I need to understand what that means though, because previously us doing it together means you sit there. I do the bills and there's still no conversation. And if I say we can't get something, it keeps getting brought up over and over again until I finally say, just get it.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  I don't want it to happen anymore. I don't want to be in that situation where you have to feel like you're the bad guy telling me no. I don't want it to be. That type of relationship.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  So how do you want us to sit down and discuss the bills? And how do you want to be involved?

• 50:47Speaker 02

  I don't need paying them makes a difference or not, but maybe me putting them in the computers, you're doing it. So I can be more part of it, so as you're sitting there, listening to you about it.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  I'm not sure that us sitting down and putting the actual bills in is the solution, though. I guess I want to figure out how to do that together because otherwise we're just sitting here going over the same thing month after month, which I've already been doing for years and it doesn't get anywhere.

• 51:14Ramit Sethi?

  Something subtle just happened. Tanya, you were doing a great job of pressing Michael gently. How would you want that to look? Why? How? And then in that last response, Tanya, you just took it all back on yourself. I want us to figure out how to do it. No, this is not about you right now, Tanya. It's about Michael. So stay on him.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Specifically, how are we going to handle the bills and have conversations about money?

• 51:40Speaker 02

  I think looking at more of the future, where we're going with it and like where we want to do stuff and how are we going to pay for it? And actually sit there and talk about it.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  And we talk about doing so, but we talk about, oh, it's going to cost us so much. And that's the end of the conversation. Talk more about where we're going to get the money from to do that and figure that out together.

• 52:07Ramit Sethi?

  Can we pause right here? Great job having this conversation. That was difficult, but it was very illuminating to watch. How do both of you feel right now about that conversation? Michael?

• 52:17Speaker 02

  Insecure.

• 52:18Ramit Sethi?

  Uh huh. Why?

• 52:19Speaker 02

  And I don't know how to cope with the answers. She's looking for answers.

• 52:25Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. So you're insecure because of your lack of knowledge about money and the bills?

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 52:31Ramit Sethi?

  What else do you feel?

• 52:32Speaker 02

  Helpless.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  I don't know how to do any of it and I don't know how to make it better and I don't know truly how to talk about it.

• 52:41Ramit Sethi?

  How about you, Tanya?

• 52:42Speaker 01

  I'm glad he says he wants to engage and I think it would be helpful, but at the same time, I don't really know how we're going to have a conversation that's going to solve the problems or that's going to be. Effective, because that's not been the history of the conversations we've had. I'm skeptical that we would be able to make it work, because it usually does not end up going well.

• 53:03Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, I can, I can hear that. Any other feelings you have?

• 53:07Speaker 01

  I hope that, you know, we can have conversations and do what he says, but also I worry then it's gonna come like, I'm gonna feel guilty about it, so I'm just gonna end up saying, "Let's do it." I'm not good at not giving people what they want.

• 53:21Ramit Sethi?

  Why don't you give yourself what you want?

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Because I've never done that.

• 53:25Ramit Sethi?

  Why not?

• 53:26Speaker 01

  I have no idea.

• 53:28Ramit Sethi?

  Tanya, I think you know. Why have you not given yourself what you want?

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Because I can't give other people what they need or want. I'm not gonna spend money on me if somebody else needs something.

• 53:41Ramit Sethi?

  I need a new sweater, so why are you gonna spend your money when you could just send it to me so I could go buy that new sweater?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  If you pass me board, I probably would.

• 53:52Ramit Sethi?

  How many time, how many time shares do you own? Just tell me the answer.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  None.

• 53:56Ramit Sethi?

  We got rid of it.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  We had one.

• 54:00Ramit Sethi?

  How did I know? I knew it. So, Tanya, your belief is by giving yourself something that you want, that means you cannot give somebody else close to you what they want?

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Financially, yes.

• 54:14Ramit Sethi?

  And that means that putting yourself first would make you bad? You don't wanna be bad?

• 54:20Speaker 01

  It's not a matter of bad, it's, there's not enough resources, so I'm not going to use the resources on me if my kids or my husband or our family need something.

• 54:30Ramit Sethi?

  Does that strategy work? Because you're in over a hundred thousand dollars of debt.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  No. I don't have a better strategy.

• 54:38Ramit Sethi?

  What I heard beyond the surface level conversation, which I thought was pretty good. Michael, I heard you Being really vulnerable, talking about, "I don't know where to start. I don't know what to ask." "You've handled money for a long time. I don't even know what these bills mean." I appreciated that. Tanya, I heard you, you know, asking how and why. I thought that was great. Beneath it, I heard two things. Michael, I heard the implicit assumption that conversations about money are really conversations about things you want to buy. I don't necessarily think that's true. I think that's part of what's gotten you into this predicament with your debt. That's not what money is about.

• 55:22Ramit Sethi?

  Money is not about talking between spouses as if one of them is a child and we need to talk about you wanting an ice cream cone or a tractor. That's not talking about money. Talking about money is, "What's our rich life vision? What do we want to accomplish? What is our culture of money in our family?" That's talking about money. Just saying, "I want to buy this thing," that's childlike. So I heard that beneath the surface. It's a total, um, deep, invisible script that you have. A deeply held belief that if you're going to talk about money, it's really primarily designed for you to get something cool that you want. Tanya, I heard you basically taking on the burden yourself.

• 56:05Ramit Sethi?

  And that is part of what's gotten you to this situation. You take the burden on yourself and you're not particularly skilled at managing the money. So you just take on the burden and you end up being not a money manager, but a money transcriptionist. You're basically just typing numbers into a spreadsheet and doing nothing with it. That's not effective money management. How do each of those comments strike you?

• 56:31Speaker 02

  I don't know how to talk about it, so I'm using stuff I know, I'm comfortable with. That's usually either buy something for me, something for somebody else. And I know how to sometimes just push buttons.

• 56:45Ramit Sethi?

  That's a game you're playing of like, "I want to get a treat. I want to get a thing." You could probably win because Tanya has admitted she's not good at saying no. So you can win at that game?

• 56:54Speaker 02

  Don't want it.

• 56:56Ramit Sethi?

  Look at the cost.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  I don't want that game. I want us to be comfortable and be able to do what we want, when we want. And we're nowhere close to that.

• 57:07Ramit Sethi?

  Tanya, how did my comment strike you?

• 57:09Speaker 01

  I mean, it's true. I just moved money from one place to another and put it in a spreadsheet, but there's not a plan. There never has been a plan. I don't think that's been effective. I mean, I showed how to balance a checkbook, but otherwise, I've never been told anything about money. I've just always lived paycheck to paycheck since I was in college, and it's not gotten any better. And I guess of all the different classes I've taken and things I've done, probably the one I haven't done is anything financial.

• 57:37Ramit Sethi?

  When you became a project manager in organ donation, did you know how to be a project manager?

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Well, it's not my official title, but I learned from different people how to do what I needed to do.

• 57:48Ramit Sethi?

  What's the difference between that and money?

• 57:51Speaker 01

  I'm not scared of what I do at work, and I'm scared of money.

• 57:53Ramit Sethi?

  Why?

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Because it's just never been something that I know how to control or deal with.

• 57:59Ramit Sethi?

  You didn't know how to do the technicalities of your job before you had it?

• 58:02Speaker 01

  But I had other people to teach me. I've never had anybody to teach me about money.

• 58:07Ramit Sethi?

  I hear you. You were in a job where those people were there, so you sort of showed up and they just started to teach you, right?

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Well, and I asked, and I went out and did other things to make sure I was good at my job.

• 58:20Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, did you do the same with money?

• 58:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 58:23Ramit Sethi?

  Why?

• 58:24Speaker 01

  I guess I just didn't even know where to turn, because I turned to a couple of different things and it sort of just blew up in my face. So then I'm like, okay, let me just try to figure this out myself. I've gotten more bad advice than any good advice, so.

• 58:36Ramit Sethi?

  What's the bad advice you got?

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Cash-out retirement. You can afford this or that or another when it wasn't, you know. Going through college, you know, go to this big university here, you'll get all this, and then ending up with hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt, but no actual return on it for the degrees I got.

• 58:58Ramit Sethi?

  Let me understand a little bit more about the debt that you've been in. You mentioned this debt cycle has been ongoing. When was the first time that you got into substantial debt?

• 59:07Speaker 01

  After college. I mean, I had all my student loans to pay.

• 59:11Ramit Sethi?

  How much?

• 59:12Speaker 01

  At least $130,000.

• 59:14Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. How'd you pay them off?

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Loan forgiveness plan, because I work for a nonprofit.

• 59:20Ramit Sethi?

  And once that was paid off? What then?

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Cars, houses. We put a lot on zero percent things and that we need or want. And then it'll end up, we have those payments for X amounts of months and one gets done and we'll come up with something else we need or have to buy.

• 59:39Ramit Sethi?

  Why do you do that?

• 59:40Speaker 01

  So I can put things that we feel or I feel or the family feels we need in our house.

• 59:47Ramit Sethi?

  Can I take a look around your house?

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 59:50Ramit Sethi?

  Go ahead, pick up the laptop or the phone.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Okay, let's see.

• 59:55Ramit Sethi?

  I asked Tanya if I could take a look at their house because after hearing about 20 years of debt and nearly $200,000 that they still owe, I was curious, where did all the money go? Now, as she walks me through this, I'm seeing a nice house. Cozy living room, comfortable bedrooms. They've got a nice concrete patio with outdoor furniture and a walk-in pantry where Tanya runs her pasta business. It's a lovely home. Nothing excessive, a normal, comfortable place to live. And I had to wonder, where did all the money go? I wonder because for a couple that's been in debt for two decades, I was expecting to see something that maybe explained it.

• 1:00:36Ramit Sethi?

  Not even a Ferrari, but a bigger house or multiple expensive vehicles or something. But I'm not really seeing that. There's no really expensive sports car in the driveway. There's no bespoke furniture, no massive renovation. So where did all the money go? Here's what I think happened. It went to things that seemed small at the time. A floor that they financed, furniture on a payment plan, a massage chair, football tickets, weekend trips to get away from the stress and picking up the tab when they went out with friends. None of those things feels huge in the moment, but over 20 years, especially with no financial controls, that added up to nearly $200,000 in debt.

• 1:01:17Ramit Sethi?

  This is extremely common for Americans. If you ask someone in debt, "Where did all the money go?" Their response will usually be one of deep shame and embarrassment. Because a lot of people know that they don't often have a lot to show for it. What I find most interesting is that a lot of the spending was just trying to feel better, to escape the constant financial anxiety, even though the spending itself was creating that anxiety. So after two decades, what do they have to show for it? A nice house, but no peace, no financial security, and this overwhelming sense that they are running out of time. Tanya, what do you think I noticed?

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  You were looking for some extravagant things, you said, and where are they? And they don't exist. There's really, there's nothing that really costs more than a couple hundred dollars or like the normal price of a living room set we got on sale.

• 1:02:16Ramit Sethi?

  It's... Here's my question for you. Where did all your money go?

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Just things we've bought. We really don't have that much to show for it.

• 1:02:24Ramit Sethi?

  Michael, what do you think?

• 1:02:25Speaker 02

  Nothing. I mean, only have a place to live.

• 1:02:29Ramit Sethi?

  I don't mind if you have a normal house. I don't even mind if someone has a tiny one-bedroom apartment and they tell me like, "Rameed, we, we love food and we eat out every night and we love it, or we travel five months a year and that's what we have to show for it. You're not going to see it in our big old house, but that's what we have." I don't even mind that. I'm asking you, what do you have to show for all of your spending for 20 years? The spending that has kept you in a cycle of debt, that has trapped you, made you feel stuck, created a massive wedge between the two of you, and put you in significant debt? What do you have to show for it?

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  Stress?

• 1:03:09Ramit Sethi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  I mean, poor communication.

• 1:03:12Ramit Sethi?

  Tanya?

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  There is nothing really to show for it because we just spend one thing and then we keep it for a while and we get rid of it and spend more on something else to replace that thing with.

• 1:03:21Ramit Sethi?

  How do you think other people live?

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  I don't think everybody else lives like this. I mean, my parents have what they need and they've always had what they want, pretty much. So I think they know how to control their money. I just never learned it.

• 1:03:34Ramit Sethi?

  I feel of two minds when you say that. On one hand, I feel a lot of compassion because there are a lot of things in life that I didn't learn. And I always felt like everybody else learned it and I was the odd person out who was just behind. On the other hand, I think at 50 years old and the fact that you have been, quote, "managing the family money for 20 years", that doesn't really ring true for me. At what point do we start to say like, wow, I have unlimited resources available to me, most of them for free? I can avail myself of those resources.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  I don't think it ever got in my mind or into a schedule that I could figure out because I was either, we were always working or we were moving. We have never stayed in a place for more than three years since we've been married.

• 1:04:26Ramit Sethi?

  Let me understand a little bit about how you grew up. Tanya, what do you remember your family saying about money when you were young?

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  I don't remember us sitting down and talking about money. I'm first-generation American, so my mother grew up in Europe. So it was very different. She came over here when she met my dad.

• 1:04:46Ramit Sethi?

  Got it. Did she work?

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  She did banking. She was a paralegals assistant or law office assistant.

• 1:04:53Ramit Sethi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  But she always worked.

• 1:04:55Ramit Sethi?

  How much do you think they made at the peak of their income?

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  I would say well over $100,000, but I've never asked and they've never told me. My dad retired at the top rank you can get in the military and then went on to take a federal job. So he had the retirement from one and another job. But I have honestly never asked and I never would.

• 1:05:13Ramit Sethi?

  You never would? Okay, got it. Is it, um, like money? You don't talk about money with parents? That's for adults? That kind of thing?

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  We talk about our money, so we don't talk about their money.

• 1:05:26Ramit Sethi?

  Ah, and when you talk about your money, what do you say?

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  I mean, we usually, the only time we've talked about money them honestly is when I said, hey, I need some money. We can't do something I need to do. And they've always helped me, but I don't think they have any idea what our money situation looks like.

• 1:05:41Ramit Sethi?

  Do you think they'll listen to this episode?

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Not unless I tell them it's there.

• 1:05:45Ramit Sethi?

  Out of curiosity, what do you think would happen?

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  They would probably sit down and say, what do we need to do to help? And how do we help you?

• 1:05:52Ramit Sethi?

  Wow. They sound like great parents.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:05:56Ramit Sethi?

  Looking back on your childhood as it relates to money, what lessons do you think you took away?

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  If you work hard, you can earn money or earn more money. I mean, I started babysitting when I was 10, maybe had had jobs around the basins and had two jobs while I was in college and two or three jobs while I was in high school.

• 1:06:17Ramit Sethi?

  And you have multiple jobs right now?

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a side sort of thing.

• 1:06:22Ramit Sethi?

  Did you learn anything about investing when you were a kid?

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:06:27Ramit Sethi?

  Got it. And last question on, I don't know, like things like self-care, whatever that means to you. Some people it refers to nails or hair or fitness. You mentioned a gym, whatever. Do you spend money on that? Is a priority for you? And if you could spend, what would you spend it on?

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  I do get my hair done, but I have extended the time period between getting it done because it is very expensive to get your hair done nowadays, even in Birmingham.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  I get my nails done.

• 1:06:58Ramit Sethi?

  Is it important to you?

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  It's important to me because I do a lot that I'm,

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  I try to be out in the public or out doing things. So I try to look nice because I think it makes a difference in how you engage with people.

• 1:07:10Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, that's helpful. Thank you for walking me through that. Michael, I'm curious to hear about what your family said about money when you were growing up.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  Not a thing.

• 1:07:20Ramit Sethi?

  Nothing?

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  Nothing. My parents had very little money most of my childhood. My parents would cry themselves asleep because they could have got a lot of food on the table. My dad's had his own business in that. Started doing very well when I was a teenager. To the point where he withdrew money to buy one of the first Lexuses that came out. He paid cash for it.

• 1:07:44Ramit Sethi?

  Is that a point of pride? Like, they paid cash for it?

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  It was for them, yes.

• 1:07:48Ramit Sethi?

  Are they both still alive?

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:07:50Ramit Sethi?

  Still married?

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:53Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. And how are they with money now?

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  Concerned. My dad retired at 52. And he just turned 80 in April. They don't do as many trips, they don't throw as many parties. They don't throw parties anymore like they used to. They're a lot more reserved with it.

• 1:08:10Ramit Sethi?

  You talk to them about money?

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:08:12Ramit Sethi?

  No feelings, no money? It sounds like a lot of people I know. Actually, maybe most Americans, now that I think about it. Did they ever teach you about investing?

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  No. They have an investor now. We always wanted to ask them. I was always afraid to ask if he's paying a percentage.

• 1:08:30Ramit Sethi?

  He's definitely paying a percentage, I'm sure.

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  The guy takes them out to a racetrack.

• 1:08:35Ramit Sethi?

  God damn it, I knew it! I was gonna say they take them out to a baseball game. They take them out to the most bull**** thing. The ticket costs 20 bucks for that. I'm like, you paid $800,000 in fees and they gave you a $20 ticket?

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, they put millions into that fund.

• 1:08:50Ramit Sethi?

  God, alright.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  I'm with you on that one.

• 1:08:52Ramit Sethi?

  I can't work miracles on this call, okay? I'm just here with you two today. Let's just focus on you two. Alright. What patterns do you see from your childhood with money? That each of you is now bringing to this relationship?

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  We don't know what the other one does with money or where money goes. And we don't know how to invest money.

• 1:09:15Speaker 02

  Not talking about money.

• 1:09:17Ramit Sethi?

  What else?

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  Believing there's not enough money.

• 1:09:20Ramit Sethi?

  Yep. Were you worried about money as a kid? As a source of anxiety for you?

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:09:26Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. How about you, Tanya?

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  I guess it depends on how you define kid, but yes. Not when I was really little. I don't remember talking about it, you know? And, you know, but once we started like, "Hey, I wanna get this. How do we earn money to do this? How am I gonna be able to get Christmas presents for my parents? How am I gonna be able to do this?" It was just always a, "I need to find a way to make money."

• 1:09:49Ramit Sethi?

  Does anybody see any patterns that you're directly repeating right now? Tanya worrying about money, also saying like, how do I earn more? How do I, let me start this business, let me buy that thing, let me do this thing, let me. Michael saying like, doesn't affect me, I'm good. Things always kind of work out somehow, magic, I don't know why, but they always just work out. Can you see another dimension where the two of you do not behave this way with money?

• 1:10:19Ramit Sethi?

  Like, you ever watch Star Trek or something where they open the door, they go through the holodeck into another dimension, whatever? All these Trekkies are gonna come after me like I don't know. I know every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation encyclopedically. Do not come after me, I know all about all the different dimensions. And I know you don't go through the holodeck to get to a different dimension. I'm just trying to use a metaphor that everyone gets. Take me through this example, Tanya, I'm so mad at myself right now.

• 1:10:45Ramit Sethi?

  Tanya and Michael, there's another dimension right now, you can see these, this couple, they look like you, they just happen to be mirror images. They behave differently with money. How do they behave differently?

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  They discuss spending.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  Sort of like come up with goals and plan for the goals, plan for investing.

• 1:11:02Ramit Sethi?

  Nice, great, what else?

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  I guess money is a positive thing and not a source of frustration.

• 1:11:07Ramit Sethi?

  Yes.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Because if you've planned for it, it'll be there.

• 1:11:11Ramit Sethi?

  Yes, do they do a 0% purchases?

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:11:15Ramit Sethi?

  No way! Do you know the last time I did a 0% purchase? Never. Why would I? It makes no sense, I don't even put myself in that room. Why would I do that? So your, your other dimension, alternative dimension person, they never do zero purchase. They don't do it, it's not, why would they? What else does this couple do? They talk to their kids about money?

• 1:11:40Ramit Sethi?

  What'd they say to them?

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  It's a good thing if you use it this way.

• 1:11:43Ramit Sethi?

  Nice.

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  Talk to them about how to plan, how to. Create goals.

• 1:11:49Ramit Sethi?

  Tanya, your alter image is called Tamea, okay? Isn't that a singer from the 90s? And does Tamea have the ability to say no?

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:02Ramit Sethi?

  What does she say no to?

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Anything that we can't afford or that isn't useful.

• 1:12:08Ramit Sethi?

  And is she always the no, like the naysayer?

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  Well, not always, but when it's appropriate.

• 1:12:13Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, and what does the alternate Mikael, what does he say? Is he always asking for, like, I want to buy some type of toy?

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:12:22Ramit Sethi?

  What is he doing, Mikael?

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  He is looking at the finances and realizing that it's not worth the asking because you know the answer.

• 1:12:34Ramit Sethi?

  Nice. He's not even bringing it up because he knows, like, according to our numbers right now, we can't do it. So I'm not even going to put Tamea in that place of having to say no. Why would I do that and make her the bad person? But every six to 12 months, when they sit down and really talk about big picture stuff, he goes, you know what? I do have my eye on this thing that I would like to get. Based on our numbers, it's going to take us a couple of years to save for it, but I'd like to start putting a little bit of money aside. Here's my plan. What do you think?

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  I like that.

• 1:13:03Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. Sometimes you can get what you want, but the way you bring it up and the amount of time and planning is different. Anything else you both want to point out about your alter egos? What they do differently?

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  I think we would just enjoy life more and not spend so much time stressing over it.

• 1:13:23Ramit Sethi?

  How would I know that you were enjoying life more?

• 1:13:25Speaker 02

  They're smiling.

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  Just spending time together outside of the house.

• 1:13:31Ramit Sethi?

  Ah.

• 1:13:32Speaker 02

  Maybe going on a real vacation.

• 1:13:34Ramit Sethi?

  What does it feel like going through that exercise of alter egos?

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  Kind of fun, actually.

• 1:13:40Ramit Sethi?

  Tell me.

• 1:13:42Speaker 02

  Because you can see there is a positive side. There is a way to do things right.

• 1:13:50Speaker 02

  And there's a way to make things work for us.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  It opens a window to thinking, well, that could be different than it is now. But then, you know, my automatic kickback response to it at the same time is, but how do I get it there?

• 1:14:02Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. I like, I like both of your answers. I think they're very candid. I think, Michael, you're right. Sometimes it helps to just see, oh, my gosh, there's a different way of looking at this. I think that comes easier to you, Michael, because you have basically given up the responsibilities of money. It's like when I used to go to the pizza place as a kid and I would put my hand out to my dad and he would give me two quarters and I would go play the video games. That's basically your role in the family finances. Of course, you earn money, yes. Not downplaying that at all. You earn money, great. But when it comes to spending, it's like, I want this, give me two quarters.

• 1:14:41Ramit Sethi?

  And Tanya, your role with the money is worrying, agonizing, saying no the first couple of times, but then giving in. And the only way to retake control is moving numbers on this spreadsheet. It's a challenge to redo the way you look at money, because you've been entrenched in this for 20-plus years. So Michael's like, ah, it's all gonna be good. Because the load usually just falls to Tanya. Tanya is like, I hate money. Money is a never-ending source of stress and guilt and I don't see a way out. It's kind of a negative. It's really negative, actually.

• 1:15:24Ramit Sethi?

  And Tanya, I understand why, but I'm also gonna be really honest that in order to move forward, both of you have to be able to change that. Do you see that there's even another dimension where it could be different?

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. I mean, I know it's gotta be possible, because tons of people do it. So it's not like it's not out there. We just have not done a good job of it. And that comes down to us having to change. But I think it's figuring out how we change, which is the whole reason we wanted to do this. It's because it's the psychology and not necessarily the dollars.

• 1:15:56Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, I agree. The how is actually the least of it. I know most people come on here thinking it's the first thing. And what they, deep down, they want me to wave some magic wand. Abracadabra, here's your money fix.

• 1:16:09Ramit Sethi?

  I'm not fixing anything. You are fixing it. I will help you look at yourself differently. I will help you see invisible scripts that you didn't know existed. I'll help you radically re-conceptualize your invisible scripts, but I can't fix it for you. You can though. So we'll get to the how. What is the vision of where you want to go? What is your rich life?

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  I would like to be able to, without thinking about it, go to a coffee shop, brewery, or winery once or twice a week and be able to sit there and write. I would like to plan some vacations that are vacations I really want.

• 1:16:46Ramit Sethi?

  Great. Keep going. What else would you like to do in your rich life?

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  I joined a group and have a certification to be able to do speaking and coaching, and I really want to do that. And I'd probably like to work a little less.

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  And then I'd like to have a plan for retirement, because I don't want to work forever.

• 1:17:02Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, cool. Thank you. Michael, what's your rich life?

• 1:17:05Speaker 02

  Going out to having a drink and not worrying about it. Doing some trips, being able to spend time with family, going to visit them more. Not having to worry about, if I went and bought something small, do I say something, not say something? Not have to worry about it's a small item.

• 1:17:23Ramit Sethi?

  Do you think that your rich lives are aligned? Like, can you make them both work together?

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:28Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, I agree. Have you talked about when you want to retire?

• 1:17:32Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:17:34Ramit Sethi?

  No? You're 53 and 55 years old. Well, usually this comes up around age 58. What's the thinking?

• 1:17:40Speaker 02

  It's not gonna be anytime soon.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  I would like to retire definitely before I'm 69, but I don't know if that can happen, so.

• 1:17:48Ramit Sethi?

  I ran some numbers on where you are currently on track for. We're gonna pull up my investment calculator. You have $434,000 today. Monthly, you're putting in $22,140. How many years are you gonna keep investing? Let's say 10, right? For Michael to be 65?

• 1:18:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:18:11Ramit Sethi?

  So that's $1.25 million you would have then.

• 1:18:16Speaker 02

  Doesn't sound like a lot.

• 1:18:18Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. So let's, let me tell you what that means. So at 4% withdrawal rate, you would take home about 50K per year. You know, we're not factoring in things like social security, but that's what we're talking about. How do you think you would do on 50K a year?

• 1:18:35Speaker 02

  Well, we don't do good on 225,000, so 50K is seen as almost impossible.

• 1:18:42Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. So what happens if nothing changes?

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  We don't retire. We die working.

• 1:18:48Ramit Sethi?

  What a tragedy.

• 1:18:50Ramit Sethi?

  To die working after making over about a quarter million dollars a year. What do you think you need to do to change things?

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  We either cut off the spending, the 0% interest buys, the big purchases we're making. Need to stop doing those and doing with loans and budget for them first.

• 1:19:08Ramit Sethi?

  Can we be specific? What purchases are we talking about? Name them.

• 1:19:11Speaker 02

  My truck's got to last 10 years before we get another car.

• 1:19:17Speaker 02

  Because then it'll be paid off and we'll save up money to be able to put down another car.

• 1:19:21Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. What else?

• 1:19:23Speaker 02

  At the moment, we need to curb more of the food spending.

• 1:19:27Ramit Sethi?

  How much you want to cut?

• 1:19:28Speaker 02

  I can't believe we're doing 1,400 groceries. I think that's way too much.

• 1:19:32Ramit Sethi?

  Who does the grocery shopping? Oh, God, this is about to happen again.

• 1:19:35Speaker 02

  Yes, you know the answer.

• 1:19:36Ramit Sethi?

  She does it and you're incredulous. You do it?

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  He will go to the grocery store and buy 10 items and then he'll come home and then he'll go to the grocery store and he'll buy something else and add a couple of items. And then there's not a plan for groceries. It's...

• 1:19:50Ramit Sethi?

  Now, this is... Michael, you're going to the grocery store basically every day?

• 1:19:54Speaker 02

  It's mainly me. She goes sometimes, but it's probably 95% me.

• 1:19:59Ramit Sethi?

  So what are you spending there?

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  Whatever's on our shopping list.

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  And the rest of it is just things. We go in and somebody wants a specific vegetable or a specific this or let's have a charcuterie board today and we'll go buy the stuff to make that or...

• 1:20:14Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, that's... Now we're getting somewhere. Hey, guys, in my opinion, somebody who has $197,000 of debt doesn't have a charcuterie board. Maybe it's just me, little crazy old Ramit, but that just doesn't happen. And I want to inform you that I've spoken to a lot of people about their spending. Almost nobody goes to the grocery store as often as you do. So my suggestion is you just cut that down, going once a week. And this right here is a good example of being planful, of building a plan. If you don't get it, you gotta wait till next Sunday to go get it. Guarantee that's gonna cut down on discretionary purchases. I don't think there's a lot of household planning going on at all. Planning is actually high value.

• 1:20:57Ramit Sethi?

  Planning is sitting down and it's gotta be two people. Sure, one person can be the grocery planner, that's fine. But having a culture of planning in the house has got to be two people. And it's like, everything from what's going on this week? Then it's bigger things. We gotta plan for retirement, or saving for kids' college, or taking this vacation. Planning. I don't think that's happening in this household. Am I right or wrong?

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  You're right.

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  You're right.

• 1:21:27Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, and do you know why you're not planning?

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  Because it's one-sided conversations.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, we're not talking.

• 1:21:34Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, so Tanya, you come. You probably tried to bring it up a few times. You got nothing back, so you're like, alright, forget it. Just, I'll do it on my own. You do it in your own kind of like, homegrown way with the spreadsheet and stuff. But the thing is, it's not just the money. It's planning vacations, it's planning groceries, it's planning all of this stuff. And so you live life totally reactively.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  Which is why those savings fields are all blank.

• 1:22:01Ramit Sethi?

  Exactly. And, and Michael, what is your role in this?

• 1:22:04Speaker 02

  Not talking, complacency.

• 1:22:06Ramit Sethi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:22:09Speaker 02

  Not saying no. Asking for too much.

• 1:22:12Ramit Sethi?

  Who needs to make the bigger changes in this relationship? I'm curious.

• 1:22:16Speaker 02

  Me.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  I don't necessarily agree with that. I mean, I feel it's just as much my fault, because I don't say no. And I don't say, no, we're not gonna do anything else till we sit down and fix this.

• 1:22:26Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, so I don't know who needs to do more work, but I know a good approach is like, both of you saying, I probably need to do more work. That's actually a really healthy approach to making big changes in the relationship. I think that, that's actually really cool to hear that from. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna put the... Conscious spending plan up on screen in a minute. And I'm going to ask you to take control. Michael, you first. Here's the way that I would encourage you to think about it. First of all, the fixed cost number should be 50 to 60%. You need to dramatically bring down those numbers. Right now, we know that you're on track to have not nearly enough money in retirement.

• 1:23:11Ramit Sethi?

  We're going to have to figure out a way for you two to dramatically contribute way more to your investments. If you want to make big changes, you will make bigger changes than you ever thought possible, and I can help you.

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:23:26Ramit Sethi?

  I will encourage you to be creative. I'll encourage you to think about things in a way you've never thought about it. But because of your income, even though your retirement investments are not enough right now, you have the ability to be able to contribute massive amounts. But it depends on the two of you. Are you ready?

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:23:51Ramit Sethi?

  Here we go. I'd like to start at the fixed cost, Michael. You tell me what changes you would like to make.

• 1:23:57Speaker 02

  The biggest one in there is $10,000 in debt payment. That's a huge number.

• 1:24:03Ramit Sethi?

  What is that for?

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  It's the furniture, the flooring, the tractor, the attachments. It's life insurance policies, it's student loans.

• 1:24:13Ramit Sethi?

  So what do you all want to do about that, Michael?

• 1:24:17Speaker 02

  I don't know how to get rid of all that. Groceries, $1,400 a month seems extremely high.

• 1:24:23Ramit Sethi?

  What do you want to bring it to?

• 1:24:24Speaker 02

  Maybe rather than the 800, it'd be a huge difference.

• 1:24:27Ramit Sethi?

  Can you both agree on that? 800 a month?

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Ramit Sethi?

  Great. I'm changing it to 800. Take a look at the numbers and watch what happens to the fixed cost number. We're at 155%. What number just happened?

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  Draw 5%.

• 1:24:38Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, we're at 150% now. Keep going.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  Eating out.

• 1:24:43Ramit Sethi?

  Where is that? That's not even shown on this.

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  I think it's under the miscellaneous.

• 1:24:46Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, okay, that's okay. How often do you eat out?

• 1:24:49Speaker 02

  Cornet number a lot.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  We probably eat out enough to make it about 800 bucks a month. Okay, I lied. In May, it was $1,900.

• 1:24:58Ramit Sethi?

  One, two, three. Yep, almost hit my magical number. Multiply it by three. So 1,900 bucks a month. What'd you eat out at?

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  Oyster bar.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  A lot of it is coffee, Starbucks. Part of this is meals because we went to see my daughter's new college. We went to Chicago and we ate out every meal for three or four days.

• 1:25:18Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, all right. So on a normal week, you eat at an oyster bar. How much would you spend at a nice restaurant out like that? For the two of you?

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  If it was just him and I, we wouldn't go out. We would stay home or go out and get something nicer to cook that night. But we go out with friends and then I'll pick up the tab.

• 1:25:40Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, what's that about?

• 1:25:42Speaker 02

  She always picks up the tab.

• 1:25:44Ramit Sethi?

  Wow, that Coke can suddenly got very, very important to Tanya. She can't stop sipping it. Oh, gotta finish this thing. What's that about, Tanya?

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  Goes back to always doing things for other people.

• 1:25:56Ramit Sethi?

  How much was a tab at a restaurant where you go out with friends?

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  $250.

• 1:26:01Ramit Sethi?

  $250. Tanya, do you see how your inability to say no is literally affecting your finances? You cannot afford $250 for the two of you, not even for your kids, much less for some friends. I'm not, all jokes aside, this is actually a crippling affliction to not be able to say no. You can't say no to your husband. It's cost you tens of thousands of dollars. And paying $250 for friends out to eat. What do you feel as you pull out your credit card? Because you know you're about to pay for everybody. What do you feel?

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  I guess I feel happy I'm giving other people something.

• 1:26:38Ramit Sethi?

  Yes, and then they see it. And what do they say? When everyone's about to pull their credit card out, but you pull it out? What do they say?

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  I have no idea.

• 1:26:46Ramit Sethi?

  They don't say thank you?

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, usually.

• 1:26:49Ramit Sethi?

  Tanya, that's the whole point. When they say, oh, thank you, Tanya, so generous. So you didn't have to do that. What's that feeling you get at that very moment?

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  I guess I'm happy about it. I don't know. I've never thought about it.

• 1:27:05Ramit Sethi?

  I'm the hero.

• 1:27:08Ramit Sethi?

  I'm the hero when I say yes to my friends. I'm the hero when I say yes to Michael. I'll figure out how to deal with all the inevitable stress, but that's my problem. Right now, I'm the hero. How much of that rings true?

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  I guess it does. I've just never thought about it.

• 1:27:25Ramit Sethi?

  My family comes to know me as generous. She always says yes. My friends come to know me as generous. She picks up the... She didn't even have to do that. Oh, my God, can you believe that? She's so nice. I, Tanya, am the hero. And Michael, where are you in this? How are you letting Tanya pay $250 for friend's meals when you guys have $200,000 of debt?

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  She just is fast. The check will come. She immediately throw a card on it and give it back to the person. The person, a lot of times, doesn't even put the check down.

• 1:27:52Ramit Sethi?

  Is everybody trying to bull on this call? Like, I love being lied to. I love it, trust me. But that can't be your answer. Come on.

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  She does it. I don't say anything. She's paying for me, her, and a lot of times it's what other person, and she just pays for it.

• 1:28:09Ramit Sethi?

  You know caricatures? Like, you go to a state fair or something and they draw? If I could draw, this is what I see in my head right now. And this would typify the relationship of money between you two. I would see Tanya sweating. One hand is out with her credit card. I'll pick up the check. The other hand is full of money, saying, "Michael, get the tractor." And inside, she's got this thought bubble saying, "I'll figure it out later." That's Tanya. And you know what Michael's doing? La, la, la. He's looking away up at the sky, seeing a nice plane and saying, "Ooh, nice plane." Totally unbothered. And in his head, he's going, "She'll take care of this." It's not a nice caricature.

• 1:28:54Speaker 02

  Mm-mm.

• 1:28:55Ramit Sethi?

  I'm not trying to insult the two of you. I have a lot of respect for the two of you. I'm sharing it because sometimes we need somebody else from the outside to give us a perspective we don't see of our own life, our own dynamic. What do you think about my description of that caricature?

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  It's probably true.

• 1:29:12Ramit Sethi?

  Would you be willing to not pick up the check?

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, honey. We don't have much of a choice at this point, but.

• 1:29:20Ramit Sethi?

  What do you mean? You can still pick up the check. You've done it when you still had 200K of debt.

• 1:29:25Speaker 01

  That's not where I want to live. That's not how I want to be.

• 1:29:29Ramit Sethi?

  And Michael, what about you? How would you change what happened at that restaurant? I find that to be a major red alert.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  I don't know how to say, why don't we split it? I guess we do two divided by three and we pay two thirds and the other person pays their third.

• 1:29:45Ramit Sethi?

  Better yet, have the conversation before you get to the restaurant. Michael, what this really requires is for you to be an active participant in the money.

• 1:29:54Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:29:55Ramit Sethi?

  The reason that you have not is you're just like, ah, she's got it. She'll take you. Money doesn't even occur to you when you go to a restaurant. You know, she's going to pick up the check or pull out the credit card or whatever. Maybe if it's the two of you, maybe you pull out the credit card. But in general, she's the one managing all the emotional financial load. And it's actually not working.

• 1:30:11Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:30:12Ramit Sethi?

  So you have to step up as an active participant and you have to be willing to have these conversations before you get to the restaurant. Hey, how are we going to think about paying for tonight's meal?

• 1:30:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:30:24Ramit Sethi?

  And Tanya, you're going to come up with a plan for eating out. You come up with a plan for groceries. You come up with a plan for all of this before you ever get there. What do you think?

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  I shouldn't go out.

• 1:30:35Ramit Sethi?

  I agree. I actually think that's the best solution of all. Can we get back to the CSP?

• 1:30:40Speaker 02

  Please.

• 1:30:41Ramit Sethi?

  So we're taking the miscellaneous. We're going to drop this down. I'm going to change this number from 2217 to 500 because I know you're still going to have a little bit of overflow. Okay, what's that number at?

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  137.

• 1:30:54Ramit Sethi?

  137%. Guys, we need to do something big here. Look at the numbers. What's the biggest number on this sheet?

• 1:31:00Speaker 02

  Debt.

• 1:31:01Ramit Sethi?

  I've never seen another couple paying $10,000 a month in debt payments. To refresh, here's what you told me you have on your debt. You have a truck, tractor, accessories, student loan, flooring and furniture and some other stuff.

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  So the flooring, we just made a final payment on.

• 1:31:16Ramit Sethi?

  Should we drop the CSP?

• 1:31:18Speaker 02

  So I'll drop $400 off.

• 1:31:19Ramit Sethi?

  All right, I'll change that. What's next?

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  The massage chair has two months left, so that's going to be gone. It's $100 a month. The furniture is $500 a month and it has one month left and that's gone.

• 1:31:33Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, so that's going to come down by 600.

• 1:31:36Speaker 01

  And then another 403 is gonna come off every month, starting this month, because we have football tickets.

• 1:31:43Ramit Sethi?

  All right, fine, I'm gonna drop 400 bucks a month off of that. All right, you're at 126%. Your debt payments are now $9,100. It's better, not nearly where it needs to be.

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  No, it needs to drop another 60%.

• 1:31:58Ramit Sethi?

  The invisible script that both of you have here, right now, is we got some of these payments and they're gonna end, and that's gonna make it all okay. Once this payment ends, or that payment ends, then it's all gonna fix itself. You have believed this for over 20 years. It doesn't work.

• 1:32:20Speaker 02

  I don't know how to get rid of those that are fixed like that.

• 1:32:23Ramit Sethi?

  How do other people do it?

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  Other people would do it by selling the truck, but we can't afford to sell the truck. We would actually lose money off it.

• 1:32:31Ramit Sethi?

  Here's what Michael and Tanya are about to face, and it's gonna be very difficult. They're in their 50s. They've been handling money the same way for over 20 years. Now they have to completely rewire how they think about money, talk about money, behave around money, and feel about money. At their age, this is incredibly difficult. When you're in your 20s, you're used to trying new things. You fail, you adjust, you're more flexible. Habits are not as set yet. By 50, you have been doing things a certain way, often for decades, and those patterns can run deep. Now, of course, it's possible to change. It is never too late. But changing, the longer things go on, the more they become concretized,

• 1:33:14Ramit Sethi?

  it requires a discomfort that a lot of people are not willing to face. Michael, for example, has been disengaged from money his entire adult life. Now he has to learn the mechanics, and the emotional work of actually showing up, and he has to execute at a very high level every day, starting right now. Tanya has been the family hero for 20 years, saying yes to everyone, putting herself last. Now she has to learn how to set boundaries, and she has to execute at a very high level every day, starting now. It's gonna be hard. I can't do it for him. Nobody can. And if you are expecting them to walk away from this conversation with their fixed cost magically below 60%, that's not how the show works. I'm not a magician.

• 1:33:58Ramit Sethi?

  This is going to take time, probably years. They have to be willing to feel uncomfortable and to admit what they have built is not working. And then they have to make changes, even though in the moment, it might not feel like they can do it. But I think they can. They say they want to change. I think they can. My experience with other people provides a bit of a sobering perspective because in my experience, most people in this situation don't. They say they want to change, but when it's time to sell the truck, or stop picking up the check, or close the pasta business, they find a reason not to. I'm wondering if they are really willing to change. What else? Why don't you sell that recliner? Why don't you sell those tickets?

• 1:34:43Speaker 01

  We could sell the tickets. I mean, they're in demand tickets and there's good games, so it wouldn't be a problem to sell them.

• 1:34:49Ramit Sethi?

  How much are you going to get for that?

• 1:34:50Speaker 02

  I really don't know of the tickets. It fluctuates so much.

• 1:34:54Ramit Sethi?

  Can we be conservative? Can we say 2,000?

• 1:34:56Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:34:57Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, 2,000 bucks for those tickets. What else can we sell? That recliner sure looked nice. It would look nicer being trucked out.

• 1:35:05Speaker 02

  I can hit Marketplace, see if there's any on there now.

• 1:35:08Ramit Sethi?

  Yes, this is the kind of action I'm talking about. What else? While Michael's looking that up, what else you got, Tanya?

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  We can close the pasta business and sell the pasta machine.

• 1:35:17Ramit Sethi?

  Yes. How much would you get for it?

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  What do you think, Michael? A thousand dollars?

• 1:35:21Speaker 02

  Maybe 800.

• 1:35:23Ramit Sethi?

  Thousand bucks for that? What'd you find, Michael?

• 1:35:26Speaker 02

  I think between 300 and about 800.

• 1:35:31Ramit Sethi?

  Let's say 300. I like to be conservative. I hope you get more. What else you got that could be sold?

• 1:35:38Ramit Sethi?

  Tractor, accessories? We got to get into big stuff.

• 1:35:41Speaker 02

  We sell that, we have to buy something else and take care of the yard. It's five acres we got to mow.

• 1:35:46Ramit Sethi?

  How much you pay a little 14-year-old kid to come and mow it?

• 1:35:49Speaker 02

  Probably about 200 to 400 dollars each mow.

• 1:35:53Ramit Sethi?

  Holy

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  Hey, we can sell and get a mower that's not a tractor.

• 1:35:57Speaker 02

  When I mow it with the tractor, it takes me about four hours.

• 1:36:01Ramit Sethi?

  What do other people do in this situation?

• 1:36:04Speaker 02

  Our neighbor has a tractor like ours.

• 1:36:06Ramit Sethi?

  Uh huh. I mean, I wonder if there's a way to team up or something. Two tractors sitting empty 99% of the time seems kind of wasteful. I don't know. What do you think?

• 1:36:14Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:36:15Ramit Sethi?

  I could see the wheels turning, Michael. I think the point here is like, holy [bleep]. We're sitting on like tens of thousands of dollars of tractor here. Even if you sold it, you would take a loss, but whatever, you would get some money coming in, pay off whatever loan is remaining. So I wonder how else you, Michael, could become more active and find out the solution to this. Surely there's got to be other people who have found this. I know everybody doesn't buy a $32,000 tractor.

• 1:36:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:39Ramit Sethi?

  All right. That's homework. So the tractor, we're going to figure that out. Guys, I'm not seeing a lot brought down here. I'm seeing you made $3,300 in sales. It's not going to cut it. I need you to truly grasp how much overspending you have been doing. You are both spending like you make about $800,000 to a million dollars a year. And you don't.

• 1:37:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:04Ramit Sethi?

  And you're in your 50s. And you don't have enough retirement, not nearly enough. If you had no debt and you had your low housing expenses, I would say, okay, yeah, it sounds great. You have a high income in a low cost of living area. Okay, great, do it. But you don't. You made purchases six months ago, a year ago, 10 years ago, and on and on, and they have cascaded and now here you are. So you can't spend the way that you might think someone making $228,000 a year does. You can't. Your spending has to be much more like someone making, I don't know, $65,000 a year. How does that strike you?

• 1:37:43Speaker 02

  Accurate.

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  It's accurate, but it's also sort of upsetting that we've done this to ourselves. Because I've always made decent money at least, and we just never did anything with it.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  And I think we go through a cycle of, okay, so we have some money, so let's try to go do something so we can enjoy ourselves because we work so much, but then we end up just having to work more because we've spent more money and it just never gets anywhere.

• 1:38:07Ramit Sethi?

  You've done that since you first started managing money.

• 1:38:12Ramit Sethi?

  And I noticed how hard it is for you to both change it. Even right now, we're like, there's so many things that are like off limits for us to even talk about. Have you noticed? What are the things that are off limits for us to talk about?

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  To me, there's nothing off limits.

• 1:38:27Ramit Sethi?

  So we can sell your truck? That's not off limits?

• 1:38:30Speaker 02

  We could, but we don't have the cash to pay the difference.

• 1:38:34Ramit Sethi?

  We could stop paying your daughter's student loans?

• 1:38:38Speaker 01

  Well, they haven't started yet, so.

• 1:38:40Speaker 02

  We're putting $25 a month on that right now.

• 1:38:42Ramit Sethi?

  And you owe 70K on that? What's the plan with that?

• 1:38:47Speaker 02

  It's just bound to ferment because she's been in school.

• 1:38:51Ramit Sethi?

  So there's no plan?

• 1:38:52Speaker 02

  There's no plan.

• 1:38:53Ramit Sethi?

  I think that you have been making impulsive decisions when it comes to money since you were married. I think that you have both taken on roles. You know, Tanya, you manage the money, which really just involves moving numbers around a spreadsheet. And you can't say no, you've admitted both to me. Michael, you are oblivious to money. The way you treat the family finances is you earn it and you go, "Give me this money to buy this treat that I want." And both of you have built a habit of overspending dramatically. And you're at a point where it becomes extremely difficult to make the changes you need to make. You can, but it would involve some very difficult changes.

• 1:39:38Ramit Sethi?

  Some of this is multiple layers deep. I don't think you could live in the place you live.

• 1:39:44Ramit Sethi?

  Because it requires a tractor, which you can't afford. And if you don't have a tractor, then you have to hire somebody to come and do the lawn mowing for 500 bucks a month, which you can't afford. So that would involve dramatically downsizing.

• 1:39:59Speaker 01

  That is probably the one thing that is off limits, is moving this house. We just made my parents sell their house to move in with us so we could take care of them. There is no way in heck I can ask my parents to move.

• 1:40:10Ramit Sethi?

  Finally, I hear one thing that you're not willing to do. First time this call. All right, tell me what you want to do. I'm gonna put it back up on screen. You tell me how you get this number down by half. Fixed costs are at 126% right now.

• 1:40:23Speaker 02

  That payment, find a way to get rid of that. It just goes down by more than half.

• 1:40:28Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, let me show you what happens. Let's say that we drop it by $5,000 a month. You're down to 87%. Better. Still too high. The pasta business, how much were you earning from that?

• 1:40:41Speaker 01

  More.

• 1:40:43Ramit Sethi?

  Why do you do it?

• 1:40:44Speaker 02

  And how what? Something for her to do? Chance to make some money?

• 1:40:48Ramit Sethi?

  Do you see that this is part of the problem? It's a recurring pattern, by the way. The deli, the pasta business, all this stuff. It's a distraction from the actual place that you were earning money, which is your job. Tanya, what are you realizing right now?

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  I was just actually looking at all the places that we spend money that was on this Rocket Money thing, and we should be easily able to put $6,600 out.

• 1:41:14Ramit Sethi?

  Tell me how.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  Well, because according to the month we used to do this, we spent $1,900 on dining out, $1,200 on travel, $1,000 on home and garden, $1,000 on shopping, $500 on entertainment, $516 on health and wellness, which is not medical stuff, that's just nails, whatever, and $381 on my pasta business. That all adds up to over $6,000.

• 1:41:45Ramit Sethi?

  What do you make of that?

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

  That we're just not putting money in the right places. We're just spending the money.

• 1:41:51Ramit Sethi?

  What do you have to show for it? $6,600 in a month?

• 1:41:55Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 1:41:56Speaker 02

  Debt.

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  We went on a trip. We got more debt.

• 1:42:00Ramit Sethi?

  Do you know why you went on that trip?

• 1:42:02Speaker 02

  Get away.

• 1:42:03Ramit Sethi?

  It's an interesting word you use, getaway. Get away from what?

• 1:42:07Speaker 01

  I want to get away from the stress of being here.

• 1:42:09Ramit Sethi?

  Yes. Think about it. You've created almost a tautology, like it's like a, those snakes eating themselves. You spend a bunch of money. You put it on all these weird recurring payments, 0%, you got to track all this [BLEEP]. It's like, it's like so insanely complex. And it never really adds up. It's just always putting you in the red. You're spending way more than you make. So you go, ah, I got to escape this. So what do I do? Let's spend more money to physically and mentally escape this place, which then causes more problems. It's not just about the travel. It's about the pasta business. It's about all these other, it's about buying this random thing here and there, either one of you. It happens a lot.

• 1:42:51Ramit Sethi?

  When I hear people tell me they love to travel, I'm all for it. Or they love to buy a nice car. Great, if you can afford it. What I don't like to hear is, oh, I bought this thing because I need a getaway. I need a stress relief. That, to me, tells me there's probably something deeper going on. So $6,600 a month, Tanya.

• 1:43:07Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:43:08Ramit Sethi?

  That is just the most recent cost of not being able to say no for you and Michael for you being passive with the family money.

• 1:43:18Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:43:19Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. This is what I want to have happen. You two have some homework to do. One, I want you to redo your conscious spending plan with accurate numbers. So we talked about the groceries. I actually want you to put the number down and then run this for a week. So like, Michael's in charge of groceries. Hit the number. 800 bucks. Don't exceed it. Same thing for this other stuff. And also, I'm like looking at stuff like your cellphone. 420 bucks? What's that?

• 1:43:51Speaker 02

  That's us, our daughter's cellphone, our son's cellphone, and our daughter's tablet.

• 1:43:57Ramit Sethi?

  Can't do it. Are you guys willing to tell her you'll have to find another way to pay for your own phone?

• 1:44:03Speaker 02

  I mean, we could. I mean, our son's married. He can pay for his own phone.

• 1:44:08Ramit Sethi?

  How about your daughter?

• 1:44:09Speaker 01

  We can ask. I don't know where she'll get the money right now. She literally does not have a job because she's moving to go to grad school, so I don't know how she would pay for it.

• 1:44:18Ramit Sethi?

  The reason I'm asking this is not to put your daughter in hardship. That's not the case. I have spoken to several couples who are older, who have adult children, and they're paying for some or all of their kids' expenses, but they themselves are in extremely dangerous financial shape. And the $100 is not going to dramatically change your life or hers.

• 1:44:45Ramit Sethi?

  But the ability to actually say no is.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  Right, and we've done that recently. Like, I did not pay. She needs furniture and a washer and dryer, and I told her we can't afford it. She needed somebody to co-sign her lease, and I told her I wouldn't do it. I told her we wouldn't pay for grad school. I've told her we can't help her buy stuff for the house.

• 1:45:05Ramit Sethi?

  I'm glad to hear that. Would you be willing to do that with a cellphone?

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  I will if she can afford, if she says she can pay for it, but I won't let her not have a cellphone because that's a security thing for me.

• 1:45:15Ramit Sethi?

  Mm-hmm. I, I respect that. It's, of course, it's your call. It's your daughter. It's your money. I can't tell you what to do. Would you be willing to do something like, "We can pay for your phone for six more months. After that, it's up to you."

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:45:26Ramit Sethi?

  I think that gives your daughter a long buffer notice well ahead of time, and it also gives you an extra hundred dollars a month, which can make a dent towards this debt. A small dent,

• 1:45:41Ramit Sethi?

  but these are important. They start to add up with all the debt that you have. I think they actually need to know,

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  "Mom and Dad, we're gonna have to make some changes.

• 1:45:50Ramit Sethi?

  We have been spending irresponsibly, and we have to make some changes. It's gonna be hard for us. It's gonna be hard for our parents. It's gonna be hard for you, but this is what we need to do in order to make these changes to be in a healthy financial spot."

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, we told them because they know we're coming on the show, and they're more likely to see it than my parents are, so.

• 1:46:08Ramit Sethi?

  What would they say about money?

• 1:46:10Speaker 01

  Autumn is pretty darn responsible because we've had a lot of conversations about what she can and can't afford to do, like apartments and stuff at school, and how you don't always get the luxury one you want. Sometimes you just have to have a one-bedroom. That's what you get.

• 1:46:24Ramit Sethi?

  Such great advice. I wonder if the two people in front of me could take their own advice. What do you think?

• 1:46:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. Wonderful.

• 1:46:33Ramit Sethi?

  Do as I say, not as I do. I get it. I get it. It's okay. I've broken my own rules a couple of times, too. Fine. But let's figure out how to fix this. So you've started talking to them about money. That's great. The best thing that you can do as parents is to actually show them the dramatic changes that you are making. Talking is blah, blah, blah. Kids don't even care. "Oh, Mom and Dad, blah, blah, blah." Show them through your own spending and sometimes through spending on them as well. Next time they come home, "Oh, let's go to this restaurant." You know what? That's not part of our plan right now. We're gonna stay home. We'll have a great dinner at home. "Oh, Mom, you're eating leftovers?" You never eat leftovers. "I do now because it's important." To the financial health of our family.

• 1:47:15Ramit Sethi?

  So it's actually a gift that you get to give to them to be able to show them the changes you're about to make. That's going to be amazing. It's gonna be hard, but it's gonna be amazing in the long term. Let's go back to the CSP for a second. Uh, I have a question for you. Did you double count your mortgage payment? Did you count your mortgage payment in your debt payment?

• 1:47:35Speaker 01

  I can't figure out how I got to that debt payment number now unless I just used the bottom number and not realizing that included the mortgage.

• 1:47:42Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. This is why I want you to do a little bit of homework. Clean up the CSP. Both of you will talk about the numbers, go through, talk about it together. There's a lot of work to do here, but as you can see, you're becoming more and more conversant about this stuff, which I love to see. A few things that I'm gonna highlight for your homework. Your utilities and your insurance, I would like for you two to split the labor on this and call all these places and see if you can get any reductions in cost. Some of them can cut a hundred bucks a month off of it. That's actually a lot of money. That money's gonna go either towards savings, investing, or debt payments. Your groceries, we already talked about that. Debt payments, this number, there's something wrong with it. I want you to go through it line by line. I want you to figure out what's going on with it, and I want you to get rid of as

• 1:48:27Ramit Sethi?

  much stuff as you can. We're gonna figure out how to pay it off aggressively using the extra 6,600 a month. Speaking of that, you're gonna create a debt payoff plan. You can search debt payoff calculator, debt payoff calculator, that will also help you, and you create a plan of what you're gonna pay off, when, in what order. With the amount of income you have, you can start to make some big changes fast. Finally, I would not put all of the money towards debt. I would put some of it towards savings, which you need right now, because if one of you loses your job, you're in a terrible financial situation. So we need to build up that emergency fund.

• 1:49:11Ramit Sethi?

  It's gonna take time, it's gonna take years to get there. We need to be putting money aside in that, like, a considerable amount of money. Let me pause there. How does that strike you? Tanya?

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  At the moment, it's a little overwhelming, but it's doable and something I want to do.

• 1:49:24Ramit Sethi?

  Good. Michael?

• 1:49:26Speaker 02

  It sounds like a plan, which is something we haven't had. So that's a good thing. We need it.

• 1:49:32Ramit Sethi?

  The biggest part of this entire plan is that it can't be done by one person.

• 1:49:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's gotta be together.

• 1:49:39Ramit Sethi?

  Yes, the biggest risk is that Tanya, you take this, the same old approach, which is like, I'm gonna go on my own laptop over here in the corner. I'm gonna get super frustrated and then be like, Michael, sit down with me. He's not gonna do it, of course. Michael's gonna avoid it, be passive, wait for the thing to be over. And then you're both gonna go back in your own corners. We cannot succeed if that.

• 1:49:59Speaker 02

  We're gonna schedule a day, a time every day and sit down.

• 1:50:04Ramit Sethi?

  It's all about planning. Planning is something that has been lacking for a long time. I think, deep down, maybe one or both of you think planning is like, bad, boring, somebody's gonna get in trouble. No, I actually find planning to be fun. It allows me to do the kind of things I wanna do. Yeah, it takes a little work to get it going. But it actually allows my life to be easy. I don't have to track spreadsheet after spreadsheet. We know where we can play. We know the bounds of play. And within those bounds, we can do whatever we want. So it actually makes my life so much clearer. How does that sound to you? Would you be willing to take the homework, work on it, put it into practice?

• 1:50:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:47Ramit Sethi?

  Awesome. Tanya, is there any question that I can answer for you right now?

• 1:50:50Speaker 01

  What do we do with unexpected things or things that come up? What do we do with those costs?

• 1:50:58Ramit Sethi?

  It's a good question. It's a really good question. Things are gonna come up. I get it. Cars break down, things like that. My suggestion is you're gonna have some money set aside in fixed costs for miscellaneous. Most people, I have them do 15% of fixed costs for miscellaneous. You can't afford that. And you, you have to be so tight that you actually cannot allow 15% to be unknown. You could put five.

• 1:51:26Ramit Sethi?

  Put that, keep that aside. Really, the truth is, Tanya, you're gonna have to become a lot better at saying no. No, we can't go out. No, we can't go out to eat. No, we can't get this extra steak. No. And it's just that simple. You've got a beautiful house, beautiful property, and that's gonna be where you spend time right now. Michael, any question I can answer for you?

• 1:51:47Speaker 02

  No, I think you answered it. The big thing is just communicating.

• 1:51:52Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, especially you.

• 1:51:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:54Ramit Sethi?

  What surprised you most in this conversation, Michael?

• 1:51:57Speaker 02

  I thought we were talking mainly about the money.

• 1:52:00Ramit Sethi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:52:01Speaker 02

  And we did not. We talked about us.

• 1:52:04Ramit Sethi?

  Numbers are always a reflection of the couple that I'm speaking to. If it were me, I would take a freaking machete to some of these numbers. But it's not my finances. It's not my life. And that's why it's so important for me to actually understand you, both of you, and the dynamic here. As much as people think they want me to come on here and do some razzle-dazzle, if I did that, the minute we stopped talking, you would just be like, [bleep] that. You have to be the ones to come up with it, not me. Because you're gonna be the ones who make it stick. So it's a great comment, Michael. I appreciate it. Tanya, what surprised you?

• 1:52:41Speaker 01

  Just how even though I thought I knew where we were spending or what we're spending on, truly, I didn't. And there's a lot of money that just should be going other places.

• 1:52:51Ramit Sethi?

  I want you to rethink of yourself not as a transcriptionist. You are way too valuable to just be transcribing stuff. And candidly, a computer can do that better than you or I can. The two of you have to be able to make meaning out of money. And that comes from talking. That comes from learning the basics. Read my book together. That comes from having healthy conversations. Sometimes, you know, you might butt heads. That's okay.

• 1:53:18Ramit Sethi?

  But healthy conversations probably also means being able to get some help, Tanya, speaking up and saying no. I would highly encourage you to do that, whether it's a therapist, a coach, whatever you decide to get help on, you will have to be able to get comfortable saying no and setting boundaries if you want to achieve the kind of life that you want. Tanya, how do you feel now versus how when we started talking?

• 1:53:45Speaker 01

  Slightly overwhelmed, but I think that at least we can come up with a plan that'll make a future that we want.

• 1:53:51Ramit Sethi?

  Do you feel a little unsatisfied?

• 1:53:53Speaker 01

  No, because I knew there wasn't going to be a magic button that you were going to go, hey, here we go. This is how you can fix it. It's all good. I mean, I can look at a number and tell you that's not going to work.

• 1:54:04Ramit Sethi?

  Michael, final question for you. How do you feel now versus when we first started talking?

• 1:54:09Speaker 02

  I can talk more than I can be scared to do so. I can't just shy away.

• 1:54:15Ramit Sethi?

  I'm happy to hear that. That's awesome. That is the next chapter. I agree. It's you speaking up, getting more in touch. I would also encourage you to get some help, whether it's a coach, therapist, etc. I think a couples therapist would actually be awesome to be able to allow these normal conversations to happen proactively, planfully. I think that would be amazing.

• 1:54:36Speaker 02

  That's an extra cost we can't afford.

• 1:54:38Ramit Sethi?

  You can find the money for that. I guarantee that.

• 1:54:42Ramit Sethi?

  I feel cautiously optimistic about Michael and Tanya. I think Tanya finally understands that she can't keep white knuckling her way through this alone. And I think Michael realizes, maybe for the first time, that his passive approach has had real negative consequences. But I'm also realistic. What they're about to go through will be one of the hardest things they've ever experienced. Just understanding the full scope of their financial situation is going to take time. They've made their financial lives incredibly complicated. And when they finally see everything laid out, the debt, the spending, the years of habits that have compounded, it's going to be depressing. But as I say, sometimes if you need to make a big change,

• 1:55:24Ramit Sethi?

  the only thing you can do is walk through the fire. There is no gimmick, there's no way around it. You've just got to walk through the fire. Here's what gives me hope. Their income gives them a real shot at turning this around. If they can stay aligned, if they can keep planning together, if they can develop that skill of setting boundaries, they do have a chance. And the next few months will tell us everything. Now, let's listen to their follow-ups.

• 1:55:50Speaker 01

  Hi, Armit. It's Tanya and I was just doing my follow-up video. So I think the things that I want to say is my biggest surprise in the conversation is how much we didn't spend time talking about money, but when you learn how your psychology around money is, which I think you did a great job of guiding us and giving us a lot of insight into, you can learn how the conversations can go and be smooth and not be a constant battle to talk about money. And we've had several money conversations since then, and they've been very positive. So that was a great win and a big surprise. My greatest takeaways are, first of all, that I didn't do the CSP correctly.

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  So we've redone it since then and gotten it right. But still, it was amazing that we spend a lot of money that we don't need to spend and how much we need to focus on savings, not only for an emergency fund, but investing in for retirement. So we're doing that. We're changing things to make that happen. We decided to redo our conscious spending plan and put limits to areas of our budget and eliminate some areas that we had been spending in before. So we can then put money into savings and into retirement.

• 1:57:03Speaker 02

  Hi, Armit. This is Michael. The biggest surprise I have from the conversation was how much time, not time really, but money was just spent. That, oh, we got a little bit of money, we'll go buy this. And yes, that was me a lot of times. I did not have any concept of where we were financially. Didn't realize what scenarios it was in. So for me, it was learning to have the conversation. My first, my biggest takeaway was actually having conversations that we could talk and discuss money and not have it be a one-way negative conversation. So changes is controlling spending.

• 1:57:48Speaker 02

  Talking with Tanya, making a plan, if we want to get something, putting it in a budget, saying, "All right, I want to get this. It's going to cost this amount of money, and we need to plan for it." We did do a revised conscious spending plan, and that made a huge difference as far as numbers. And we are putting a budget in the app saying, "This is a limit on each category." And having it say, "Hey, you're close to your limit. You can't spend anything else in that category for the rest of the month." Thank you.

• 1:58:24Speaker 01

  Hey, Remit and team, it's Tanya and Michael, and we wanted to give you the update. So we have put our Rocket Money budget into effect. We've done some really good adjusting of it. We were able to pay all of our bills this month without dipping into any sort of savings, so we're starting to build that emergency fund. I also was able to increase my retirement by 1%, so that's, I'm going to keep doing that every six months. We have opened some retirement, a separate retirement account that we're going to see about starting to fund next month. We'll see how that goes. We have sold some stuff that's been sitting around the house that we don't need. So I think that we've been doing a good job of trying to implement everything that Remit has asked us to do.

• 1:59:07Speaker 01

  I think there are some things that we're still working on, trying to figure out how to balance, but our new budget has been extremely helpful, and we do have our regular meetings, and we enjoy those meetings. It's gotten to where we talk about finances, what we're doing, and when we're doing it, and why, and we're starting to plan out the future. So now I'll let you, Michael, give you his opinion.

• 1:59:28Speaker 02

  I'm going to agree. We actually just did a financial meeting. We went over bills and how things went, and then compared it to our budget we put in, and how we were doing on that budget. And it was fun, actually. I enjoyed doing it with her, so it was good. We were both involved.

• 1:59:48Speaker 01

  Well, thank you very much. Bye.

• 1:59:49Speaker 02

  See ya.

• 1:59:51Ramit Sethi?

  Listen up. If you want my help with your specific money questions, there are only two ways to get it. First, you can apply to be on this podcast at iwt.com/apply. Or second, you can join my money coaching program instantly at iwt.com/moneycoaching. In that program, you get access to live virtual events, monthly group coaching calls, live Q and As, and an amazing, huge community of other people like you. Check it out at iwt.com/moneycoaching.