This is How We Build TRUE Wealth

was that hard when you talk about like cut up the credit cards stop going into debt it was very hard because we weren't going into debt at that time we weren't going into debt doing frivolous stuff we were going into debt paying bills wow yo what's going on fam it's your boy anthony welcome back to the table and it's monday morning and i am so pumped because uh i have three amazing guests in the studio with me today uh jade uh warsaw did i say it correctly you you're the first person who's ever said my name right the first time yo jade watch out let's go now she is in the building she is an entertainment uh entrepreneur from the sunny south florida uh she co-owns a company to where they actually helped put musicians on the boat but check this out she's debt-free her and her amazing husband and then my brother and sister from another mother of the same kind uh is in the building faith and leo you all know them um i wore their shirt got det nope uh just the other week and they are in the building i've been married for how long y'all been married for three years three years and played off about 200 000 in debt yes and you paid off 460. good god so today's show is going to be absolutely amazing um and so i want you all to make sure you stay stay tuned uh no matter how you're listening whether you're on youtube podcast instagram you name it i want you to keep a lot cause today we're gonna have a good conversation about how we could do this and i love it let's jump straight into it because we only got like a 28-minute show and i'm gonna put this on the table and you anyone can answer it all right what's the mindset that people need to have number one to get out of debt and to start building wealth well uh i'll just jump in i know for sam and i with the debt that we had the mindset we had um you know people will say oh man you must have been so determined or you must have you know had so much you know drive and i was like yeah but the bigger thing is knowing that you don't have a choice like there's no way to live if you don't do this and i think it's kind of having like back against the wall like there's no other choice um mindset was what well that's what we needed so to get out not just not just having a determined mindset but saying you know what this is the only mindset that i can have right now that's it there's no other options and i remember saying that in my mind several times like i don't have a choice like it almost freed me you know it almost took a little bit of the weight off to go okay well you know sometimes you can think i'll do this try this try this try this but when you just go no there's one route and that's it then it's it's freeing i mean it's still tough but at least you know this is the road that's good yeah and for faith and i we didn't know how we were going to pay off our debt what we were going to do about it all we knew is that we couldn't stay there and so that was a big eye-opener for us when we looked at you know we were making two thousand dollar minimum monthly payments it would have taken us 15 years to pay that off and would have cost us 125 000 of interest you're saying how much an interest alone if you would have stuck to the minimum payments 125 000 did that open you all up when you saw that number absolutely why though because the average person in america watching this right now and saying hey i can afford the minimum payments i'll just suck up the interest back here like why was that such a huge deal to you this is 125 000 of free money that i'm just giving away when that could just be in my pocket to be used towards other things so why would i continue to just live off of the minimum payments giving 125 000 to the debt collectors just makes no sense and every dollar you use towards interest is a dollar you can't use to build wealth okay so that was a good one leo so 125 000 is what you all save that now you can put towards building true wealth you can invest that into some property you can invest that into a 401k or a roth ira or however you invest rather than giving it to another company and that can build them well but you want to know what what you said is really really thoughtful every dollar that is not going to debt goes to wealth and you guys were talking about interest but one thing with us our last big student loan was 80 000 okay it was a debt my husband had from school but the payment this this was the hardest part was our last debt to pay off the payment was only 233 dollars a month now most people would be like hey it's not a 2 000 a month payment it's 233 that's chump change right right and so changing your mindset and going okay that payment we probably could have made that payment easy for the rest of our lives but really knowing that deep why the deep why because that's the only thing that's going to get you through spending the energy of paying off 80 000 of debt to only gain back 200 in your pocket so you really looking towards what you said which is hey if i'm investing that money it's still it's still wealth building money even if it's 200 it was 233 000 or 233 dollars that is every dollar like you said going into building wealth and not going to sally may you know what i'm saying so even though small dollars count small dollars dude one of my good friends by brian bullock he said um like we give we take all of our money and we give it to another company we give it to another person when it's an owner we're building someone else's future we're building someone else's last name and we're taking that 128 thousand dollars that 200 something dollars giving it away from our family rather than keeping it in so we can build wealth for ourselves exactly and it's like for me that gets so frustrating when i hear individuals say that's fine i'll just i'll do this and i'll do that and i'll just pay the minimum i can afford that but can you afford missing out on the opportunity yeah to build wealth for not just yourself but for your kids and for your kids kids okay and uh that's what i love about you all now do you have kids you have to i have two kids two kids uh-huh i have you you all have a six-month-old two and a six-month-old isn't yours like he's 18 months 18 months yes he's 18 months yeah i have a baby i love it my man said we're dead free we can go in that way i ain't wasting no time look at the congratulations thank you yeah that's exciting do you know the gender we don't we're going to be surprised whoa wait yeah when it comes out when it comes why not i can send it my brother and sister did that for their last three they knew about theo but the last uh three kids we didn't know your dad was scared yeah i'm sitting there like waiting to get a call but what [Music] so leo and faith you all have a newborn um on the way and you have an 18 month old you all paid off 104 000 in just 12 months wow wow amazing and i have to say this amazing not just because you paid that off but i know people watching us right now saying how did this young minority couple do this and i want to talk about what are some practical things that you all did to pay off your debt what helped you all get out of this in 12 months like dude some people don't make that in a year okay yeah and y'all paid off that much money in a year talk to me give me some practical stuff so we did that in our first 12 months of marriage so as soon as we got back from our honeymoon we got to the table and said hey we need to address this now and so the thing that we started off with was our why so a lot of people start with the numbers but the numbers can be overwhelming especially if you owe you know six figures in debt yeah but we started with our why where did we want to be 20 years down the road 30 years down the road and then we reversed engineered it so how do we get to where we say we want to be yeah yeah so we start with values okay values yep so we started with you know the type of life we wanted we wanted options yeah yeah we didn't want to be tied down to a job working 30 40 years okay like like someone come on you know like they teach us the american dream right they they teach us that get a job get 401k get a good credit score and you'll be all right that's right and so we wanted to change the trajectory of our family okay and that started with you know owning back our time essentially yes and so if you owe a bunch of debt you don't you owe all of your energy you owe all of your time all of your resources to those companies because you can't decide one day not to go to work because you have a payment to make yeah yeah and so we just had to get ownership of our time but that started with our why and so we started there and then we started budgeting [Music] got to know where you are you got to know what's coming in what you're working with okay then you can know what you need to do do you need to decrease expenses do you need to increase income and so we did both wow so we did both like we we yeah budgeting and inside your budget what is the greatest thing you two had i mean let's just be real you all just got married that's the honeymoon season oh yeah and y'all are like no i bumped the honeymoon season let's get to work i think like y'all been married for three years now seems like the last year y'all been in honeymoon season the first two years like y'all were like in this we've been married for 20 years let's get our act together right what was the hardest thing y'all had to do during that time what was the hardest no the hardest no so for me the hardest no was i just started working okay so i was like man i went to school all this time i just started working i'm getting my paychecks forget paying off debt like i want to spend it yeah so that was the hardest part for me is you know staying focused on our why um and yes working a lot working my regular job picking up side hustles that we did wow um and putting all of that side hustle money toward our debt so that was the really hard like mindset shift how old were you two when you all got married um i was 26. and how were you leo you're twenty no you learned yes i was i was turning 27 yeah yeah i mean normally the females do know that number yeah you're right you're right you're right are you trying to check me all right so 26 yeah going on 27 i was 29 all right cool so y'all were in the 20s right yeah where did the mindset come from i'm just curious about it because i'm like when i was in my 20s i started thinking like that only because i had a very dramatic shift in my life happened but it doesn't sound like you all had a very dramatic shift you know so why like where did the mindset come from were you scared of something i think there were three uh a few things at least in my personal situation so i had already been working for a few years and so i was three about two to three years into my working career okay and i met this young lady okay and you know at one point during our dating season i started looking for a home and so i went to look for a home got the pre-approval and everything yeah she came along with me because i knew this was you know the future misses yeah yeah and so i had to get her approval and uh came back we decided on the home um downtown atlanta and i got a call from uh the mortgage lender and said unfortunately we can't approve you for this loan because your student loans are in forbearance so i had my loans on forbearance when i started working because i was like forget that just like her and i was like okay i want to enjoy my money so let me put these on forbearance yeah um and they told me that you couldn't get a loan because that shows hardship so how in the world are you gonna pay off this mortgage if your student loans are in forbearance so that was one of my wake-up calls right there and so i put that house on hold and got back to the drawing board and i started paying off on my debt individually okay okay so that was one um eye opener the other eye opener for me is a conversation with my mom and she was telling me that mama dukes uh love her to death hardest working woman i know works six days a week for as long as i could remember in her 60s she told me during one conversation that she doesn't know when she'll be able to stop working or if she'll be able to stop working how did it hit you hearing your mama say that that was tough that was tough for me to swallow um i just thought about you know if i had only known what i know now back then maybe i could have given her some advice to help her along the way so she wouldn't be in this situation wow and so the big thing for her is she owed a lot of debt wow and because she owed a lot of debt she didn't see a way out but to work so she couldn't enjoy our baby boy because she had to work right so that was another eye-opener for me is you know i want to emulate her work ethic but i cannot allow this debt to control what i do in my lifestyle no jay you paid off you and your husband paid off four hundred thousand four hundred and sixty thousand ao okay okay let me know um and with kids how long did it take you all well when we started we didn't have the kids so we similar to you guys you know we got married i think i was 23. okay and uh we got married one week after graduation so we didn't have no careers and we were musicians so we were just out here just in the breeze what do you play um i'm a singer oh okay so my husband's a bass player and a keys player oh good good and so um we were living in nashville at the time and uh you know i don't think either of us knew that that's the kind of debt we had matter of fact i don't think we knew it until um i had auditioned for a job to work on cruise ships to be in a cast and uh the audition was in florida and so i had to travel to florida to do it and when i tell you i don't even think i ever even like looked at our accounts and sam said to me my husband he was like we need to come up with the money to get to florida because we literally just didn't have it so we were like looking around the house for things to sell so we sold some stuff had the gas to drive down to florida i did the audition this was before like stuff on your phone so i didn't even know i had the job until i got back wow saw the email on my desktop right so that was once i got that job it required us to move and once we were in the process of moving and kind of getting things together that's when we started figuring out how much debt we had um and um to be honest with you it really took probably the better part of three years to really get to that number and i say that because my husband at the time had a lot of student loan debt and that's shameful like it's shameful and when you don't know how to view it like you're looking at the website and you're remembering in your mind okay i remember signing the promissory note for 30 000. right but why does it look like you know 37 000 now like not like understanding interest and how it builds and how it accrues and all of that so in the beginning he would tell me a number but the number that he was telling me it was like the old number like the original number like okay yeah when i signed up it was probably somewhere around 120 or 150 right and i'm like but when i look at this online why is it looking suspiciously close you know a little over 200k like what's going on here and then like even numbers like you know when you go when you go to the admissions office okay you're looking okay how much is this how much is it going to be to go to school here and then you're finding out oh it's more because you're out of state like all of these things it's like it's all coming rushing back to him so in the end when we realized how much money we had to pay off it was i mean it's taxing you know it was taxing on our marriage to to realize okay i thought it was 300 000. okay wait now you're telling me it says i thought you said you know it's all a lot of going back and forth so when we finally got to the number we were living in florida we were two years into marriage and i was like okay i remember hearing dave ramsey so we went and got the book the total money makeover yeah yeah and we are so excited you know we're sitting here reading like okay okay let's go and it was like you know the first step we were like okay then the second step is like okay we just didn't have when i tell you we didn't have any money like there was no starting spot for us wow save a thousand dollars are you kidding me wow you know so the only thing that we could do our first baby step was stop going into like stop creating more debt right now like nothing no credit cards nothing so that was our that was our baby step one was that hard when you tell them i like cut up the credit cards stop going into debt it was very hard because we weren't going into debt at that time we weren't going into debt doing frivolous stuff we were going into debt paying bills wow because i mean when we came out i was working at the mall like when i came out of college i was working at the mall my husband was doing some studio work around town he was just like getting started but we didn't know how to manage money so we were spending we probably could have been doing way better at the time we just didn't know um so when we finally started paying off debt the first two years like i said was just don't create more and then once i started working for royal caribbean you know i was making a steady paycheck and so is he and so we had that margin to start putting you know 500 extra dollars a month towards debt and we did that grind out for about three more years so now we're like five years in and during the course of that time we started our own business and it started taking off so really the last two years is when we were able to hit it hard and probably got the majority of it paid off i think we probably paid off the last 250 like the last two years yeah we paid that off really fast um two to three years about three years um because you know at the time when we were living in nashville we sold our house to move and we were thinking okay we'll make some profit on the house hit that broke even broke even yeah which that was like dang and the house was only worth 120. so it you know it's not like people go oh you must you must have sold your house and i'm like that house was 120. we paid off 416. like don't do me like that so so i'm gonna ask y'all a hard question and always ask this hard question if you don't wanna answer it you don't have to answer it okay uh people will look at this table and say i i think they're lying there's no way she's not doing any credit cards she's not borrowing any money there's no way they paid off a hundred thousand dollars in just 12 months um then let's go deeper uh people watching this will say you know what the average minority doesn't even make 60 000 on a household income um minorities cannot get ahead we cannot do this for those watching what would you say to those who question minorities actually able being able to win in the area of finances i would say they're selling themselves short um okay okay and it's easy to make excuses i i mean i've heard so many excuses on our debt-free journey of why people can't do certain things yeah yeah and i mean i don't make enough money oh um you know i have kids at home i'm a single parent i'm a single that's a big one i'm single in general and you need a spouse to be able to do it yeah and all of those are myths um we created 000 in extra income on our debt free journey in our first first year first year first year so when we say we paid off 104 000 in 12 months during our first year we made six thousand dollars in additional income and that's because we worked five jobs wow five jobs my wife was averaging 72 hours a week worked 94 one time oh my gosh so she averaged 72 but she had weeks when she was working 90 to 94 hours in one week so why why like like i'm just asking a question thinking of someone watching why is the wife yeah the woman putting in all this work right when some would say he should be putting in all this work but y'all were like you know we're gonna do this thing together and you stepped up why yeah so i think going back to our why and our vision for our marriage even before we got married we sat down and we came up with the vision of our marriage what we want our marriage to look like and if we stay focused on that why like i had to work he worked too i mean he worked every single day he worked every single holiday every single saturday every single hour one year i worked every holiday but christmas right and i work saturdays so you can imagine working she was working three jobs i had two jobs working six days a week 13 weeks in a row wow just working six days a week yeah and so not being able to take that money and use it well choosing not to do that and put it all towards debt was hard but you got to choose your heart so being broke is hard paying off debt is hard you got to choose your heart at the end of the day so we can come up with so many excuses as to why uh minorities can't do certain things but we're selling ourselves short the the the possibilities are endless for what we what we can do and i think over the past couple years i mean when you look at the stats with what black women in general have been able to do like it's amazing and so i think the sky is the limit yeah um for that and i think we should start you know taking more action yeah and stop making excuses well y'all put y'all hitting on something man i'm trying to be careful and where i go you know what i'm saying because i think i think sometimes we make excuses rather than say you know what here's what i'm going to do and just be willing to go through some speed bumps to get there yeah right you know and i feel as if sometimes we play the culture game rather than sit here and say you know what hey i can win and oftentimes i'm accused well you work with dave ramsey a white man so of course it's easy for you no it's not i had to work to get here myself and i'm still working in here um for the income that i have so it's it's like but i was like you i had a vision and my vision was before i got married i want to make sure that i am financially healthy and i am debt free now whoever i marry um hopefully she's debt-free you know what i'm saying but if she ain't you know then then i'm back in debt and we're gonna grind to pay off her debt but i'll never forget man um i i would just never forget watching my mom and my stepfather grow up you know they never had a wedding my mom didn't have a ring for her first two three years wow we never went on family vacations we never went to disney world or disneyland we we never went out of the state for a family getaway if we went out of state it was to see a grandma granddad because somebody was sick not because we just went to get away with the family holidays my mom worked like you three four jobs just to make sure we had a decent christmas not a dope question right right just like make sure we had some gifts and i said i don't want that for me and my family yeah and i'm like i just i can't i can't afford uh to get in my future with my family and tell my kids no i can't get you a pair of shoes because of the poor decisions i made in my 20s and my 30s i just can't afford to do that and so um i want to commend y'all on it um for what you all are actually doing what's on the other side of this like you're debt-free uh you're married uh married newborn on the way like what's on the other side of bondage and people hear freedom but what does freedom look like in you all's world man opportunity open doors pathways like right now as a you know i'm a freelancer so you know i've always done a little of this a little of this want to open a business okay we do this and it's been really great because i don't feel like i have to do anything i feel like i do what i want to do i feel like i earn money in the ways that i want to earn money i feel like i can be motivated by things other than money like when you have debt you're motivated by earning more money so you can make the payments right and yes there's a bigger why at the end of that but in the moment it's like i got to do what's making me money right now that's why you end up working 96 hours you know what i'm saying but now it's like okay what what am i true it's almost like you get to know yourself better like what am i truly interested in what do i truly enjoy doing like what do i truly want to spend my time on and that's a really cool layer of freedom that i don't really think people stop and think about like i was in the car the other day with my mom and she you know she's been in the school system forever and she was like you know what i think i'm thinking i think i don't want to go back to the school system i was like okay i'm like well what do you what do you want to do and she was like i never thought of it she was like i never really thought of it i'd have to think about that and i'm like how can you be in your 60s and haven't thought about what you want to do and i'm not yeah oh my mom my mom is my mom but my point is when you're not when you're when you're you got your head down you know you're going towards your goal you sometimes you don't even stop to look up and think like what do i what do i even like what do i want to do like what makes me tick and i think being debt free you have access to a space within yourself that you wouldn't have had before um for us the other side is building wealth right now so i mean and for me as soon as we made that last payment i stopped working well i stopped working my side hustles i'm still working she got her yeah i did so that that's good but now we're we're building wealth now so yes we're still working but it's investing now money that we were paying toward our debt can now be used to grow us which is really nice i mean opening up things for our babies on the way and thinking about their future so that's what it looks like for us right now yeah and you know we're transitioning to you know having those conversations about um reducing work hours i know i'm excited i was gonna start with the misses so is it going to bring her home yes yes in stages like man what's the time frame like what's the goal have you talked about that i want to call you out on my shows in the next three to five years we'll reduce okay reduce her work hours so that she could be home with the baby because that's important to us so okay the idea of sending our son to school five days a week for 18 years and you know getting the leftovers um getting the leftovers after work left that's just not that's just not that's what we're about so you've never heard a family say that yeah i mean that's a perfect word though that yeah they get all their time all their energy is spent at school and then we get them for a few hours before bedtime and by that time i've worked all day yeah and i'm tired and they're tired they're tired and there's just not enough quality time and someone else is raising our kids so we at least want to give us the opportunity to raise our son and you know it starts at home everything starts at home we can't expect the school system to do okay well we should be going they should reinforce yeah yeah what we've started in the home and so that's important to us so ownership of our time is huge yeah and so that looks like reducing our work hours so that uh we could be at home and we can be a presence in in our um family so so is that like home school private school in the future um ideally home school okay um i would love to teach my children and not have the school system teach them because i don't know what they're learning there um so ideally home school and i mean if we can't homeschool then maybe like a hybrid hybrid program so that's what my brother-in-law and sister do with my nieces and nephews my brother actually rose flipped my sister stayed working and my brother came home and i didn't like that at first like why is the man at home yeah i'm gonna not get your butt to work right but he his philosophy was like no the ladies are always raising the boys when do we as men raise our boys that's good so he came home and raised theo and uriah and then when anaya was born then he best said nope i'm coming home she quit being a school teacher and then she homeschooled she homeschools all of her kids i still feel a certain kind of way about that you know i still feel like i still like our education system but i also believe that our education system is specifically when it comes to minorities we don't really teach them all the history that i really believe that they need to know and so i love the home school that's why i like the hybrid part you know give them some around give them some time around other people but bring them home to where we can get specific into into learning true history all history right not just one particular set of history right right so i i commend y'all along that uh i love it i love it what man listen yo listen i just want to thank y'all if i had another 30 minutes i would dive in some more to talk with you all but this is only a 30 minute show and i just want to make sure i'll be respectful to you all this time and our listeners time uh who's listening on our podcast or youtube or watching us on ig because i want to get quick and straight to the point so uh one last thing before y'all go i want you to think of one thing you can tell someone who's listening right now um they're struggling they're like hey i need that extra i don't know what it is i need that umph to get me there to start this journey what is that one thing that you all can think about that you can leave them with that can say you know what hey this will help you focus on this and you should be able to be good what's that one thing that's a really good question take your time think about it cause this is important somebody's listening to this right now and hey man i can do it but i'm loaded i'm a little discouraged but i think the thing that comes to my mind is whenever i look at somebody who's done something that you know i wish i could achieve the first thing you want to do is say there must be something special or super or extraordinary about that person and i'm just gonna go out and say there was absolutely nothing extraordinary about me i was just or my husband we were just two people we weren't exceptional jesus does that make sense and i'm not i'm not putting us down i'm just saying we were just out here but we made a choice yeah and it's just you believing that you can do it it's not it's literally there's no secret sauce there's nothing more than you saying i'm no different than this person i can do this and i think it's just that on that you can't escape the work so you know looking at someone and saying there must have been a special circumstance here or they must have had this or they must have had that as a way to kind of avoid why you can't do the work you can do the work you can follow the steps i know for me i did dave ramsey's program and it was just hey just follow this step one day at a time one morning at a time one grocery trip at a time you know whatever it is um it's nothing extraordinary here it's not superheroes at work it's just making a choice you know and you can make the choice to believe that you can't or you can make the choice to believe that you can and that's daily maintenance believing you can do something is daily sometimes by the moment maintenance in your own mind so um and i would say along those lines is to just get started like start doing it a lot of people are constantly looking at other people and like man i don't make six figures like them i mean leo and i didn't make six figures but yet we still just did it so just just start i mean you can start tomorrow so let's start writing a budget oh man maybe tomorrow i'm not going to use my credit card like just start and then also along those lines i would say surround yourself with like-minded individuals um because for us that was important we needed accountability partners we needed people to motivate us because this isn't an easy journey at all so definitely surround yourself with people um that are like-minded yeah and along the lines of what these two beautiful ladies have said i would say it goes along with the choice you are one decision away from a completely different life just one decision and we make thousands of decisions each day yeah yeah so you just have to make a decision to say at some point in time you just have to say enough is enough you have to draw the line in the sand and say enough is enough and make that decision put one foot in front of the other and no matter how small you think your progress is compared to someone else's forward is forward yeah forward is forward well let's leave it right there i have nothing else to say this was a great show you know i mean just being surrounded by you all you all paid off double to triple the amount of debt that i did and so i look up to you and i thank you all for spending some time to talk to our community and to encourage them so uh real quickly where can they find out more information about leo and faith um tell them about your book tell me your website and then we'll come over here to you jay all right you can find us at freedom is a choice mvt.com and my book is called got debt the seven bulletproof steps to debt freedom you can find it on our website or on amazon there you go jade very cool well if you're interested in entertainment you can find us on warshaw that's my last name w-a-r-s-h-a-w entertainment.com and uh we'll get you hooked up with some entertainment work there you go and we will make sure to put that in the description so make sure you all subscribe to their channels check them out i hugely uh support and endorse uh these ladies and gentlemen but y'all it's been a great day uh thank you all for tuning in and we'll see you all on the next show peace [Music] out [Music] you

Channel: The Table With AO

Views: 58,708

Keywords: anthony oneal, anthony oneal debt free degree, anthony oneal student loans, money, budget, how to save money, personal finance, debt free, how to budget, debt, how to make money, how to get out of debt, student loan debt, student loans, african American, black, hiphop, culture, millennial, student, This is How We Build TRUE Wealth

Id: ZASSN5usosk

Length: 36min 10sec (2170 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021