How Do I Convince My Wife We Need To Downsize?

[Music] ephraim is with us in atlanta to start off this hour hey ephraim what's up hey dave uh first off you what you've done for me and my wife and our family's just been incredible we've listened to you we've read your books and uh you've just been life-saving so thank you for that well thank you actually you did it i just told you what to do how can i help well so i've been married for about 30 years my incredible wife we are living in the house that we've raised our girls in so we're at the point now where we're empty nesters and of course like a lot of people have a house that we just it's it's too big for our needs right now so with the housing market being what it is i threw out the ideas of my wife to consider selling it and her point was well if we sell high we got to buy high well he's right about i encountered that with with going into living in an apartment in an area that we love it's a multi-use development with retail with restaurants we're there probably three or four not five days a week and we love it there so i propose that we get an apartment there for a year to enjoy living there and wait for the housing market to come down and then be ready when that time comes to build a house or move into one or whatever options we want to move forward with we can but she's i think it's a lot of sentimental that she doesn't want to sell the house but the rental is about 4 000 a month which we could easily afford and we would make probably close to half a million dollars on the house net okay so she her her ultimatum was well call dave ramsey and see what he has to say oh i'm the breaker yeah yes you will i don't know if i can handle all this responsibility a lot of pressure i got a lot of pressure here all right so let's uh let's change a couple of um a couple of the variables in the conversation okay sure number one i'll give you a 99 chance that the housing market is not going down okay okay it has gone down two times in the last 100 years the 1930s and in 2008 it's only time it's calmed down okay and then it snapped right back almost instantaneously in the 2008. less than a year those how even the areas like for instance las vegas was the worst hit by the bubble burst it was overbuilt it was the fastest growing city in america and it was in it basically the bubble exploded there and we saw values come down pretty substantially and uh it was 18 months and they were all back and then it's gone nowhere but north since then so i don't predict housing is going to go down at all in this turn in this round uh my personal i do think it's gonna slow down its rate of increase but that does defeat your premise okay as far as renting until then so is there a property in the area you're talking about buying a condo for instance that you guys could just buy and move into well we could okay hypothetically there is actual properties around the area you're talking about where you're not a renter it's obviously very very difficult to find it you have to be ready to to almost make a cash offer because it's it doesn't it's not in the market long okay okay so uh if you could pull that off it changes the discussion i'm not going to tell you to go rent you're going to lose that argument so she wins okay uh okay because i think you're going to end up going in the hole with a rental amount and values are going to increase albeit not at the rate they're currently increasing so you're gonna you're gonna lose money two different ways by going to be a renter i'm not opposed to you moving to that area and moving into a less expensive property in selling your property and buying high and selling high which is her point uh but buying high and later buying higher after having rented it and no i'm not doing that one usually and dave you and sharon just did something similar so you all have lived this um eve from normally i see couples have this conversation and it's all about the house and the math yeah and this is a much bigger conversation which is this is we're we're sliding this into phase three right we've had our time together we've raised kids and we're empty nesters and we built a tremendous home together and a tremendous life together the next phase is what do we want this next this next season to look like and that it will include discussions about home where we live and we want to go to coffee shops and concerts we want to be that couple we move out to the country but that's a broader conversation that as a part of that conversation will involve grieving the the leaving the house that you raised your kids in it's got a lot of cool memories yeah and it will what are your thoughts about renting the house renting it out yes why do you want adventure rental income i'm just ready for change it's a it's a 5 000 square foot home that just we we live in a keeping room kitchen and bedroom yeah okay so i think that's the part you all need to start talking about before we try to do a real estate deal i'm with john so the two of you need to get aligned on what the future picture is of your life and what the future picture is okay it's a smaller more efficient use of the re of the square footage for you uh for her what is the future picture and then what is the thing that we can do that has all of the future pictures in common yeah okay um and uh and you know you're gonna give up some you know like if you have five things i want your bottom two you might not get in terms of forced forced ranking and she has five things she might not get her bottom two and that's kind of what sharon and i just went through honestly um we did a little bit of a similar discussion and we had this huge house and um it was a good time to get out of a huge house and so it's kind of stage two empty nester for us um and uh it was a good opportunity to cash in and but we did immediately or simultaneously buy another uh property half the size that we moved into as a temporary measure until someday we build and uh but uh but we had a lot of different goals with that that we both aligned on the future now the deal is i think if you if you'll start if the two of you will sit down like john said and start working on a future picture let's paint the picture together what five years from now looks like all right now what are the what has to be true for us to get to that picture then you're going to start making moves that are going to cause you to sell this house move downtown into a smaller condo as a temporary move than later on build or something like that you're going to develop a game plan to end up at the same place uh this could be a romantic fun it's an exciting night the word we kept using over and over is this is a pain in the butt and it's an adventure there you go we're signing up for an adventure and uh you know moving is a pain renovating a household moved in slightly was a pain with no workers available moving is a pain did i mention moving is a pain it's the worst it's kind of like having a root canal and you know but it's an adventure because we and those are the steps we took to get to where we wanted to be five years from today

Channel: The Ramsey Show Highlights

Views: 76,008

Keywords: the dave ramsey show, budget money debt cash, real estate, insurance, how to make money, dave ramsey, save, credit card, compound interest, buying house, buy, snowball, How Do I Convince My Wife We Need To Downsize?

Id: PauTpr7ZN3o

Length: 7min 42sec (462 seconds)

Published: Sat May 21 2022