Yesterday You Said "Tomorrow"... Just Do It NOW!

[Music] this is the ramsay show you can be intentional about your character you can have money and a career you are the hero in your story [Music] live from the headquarters of ramsey solutions broadcasting from the dollar car rental studios it's the ramsey show where debt is dumb cash is king and the paid off home mortgage has taken the place of the bmw as the status symbol of choice this hour is dedicated to what has been called the greatest legal fraud in america today timeshares timeshares you've heard me talking about timeshares and if you're a current timeshare owner or you are a former timeshare owner and you want to talk today is your day the phone number is triple eight eight two five five we'd like to hear from you maybe you worked for or do work for these scumburgers and you want to tell what really goes on behind the curtain pay no attention to the men behind the curtain right mikey yeah mikey is mike flasky the ceo of diamond international one of the three largest timeshare providers in the world and by far one of the scummiest so mikey and i have had interaction on twitter he calls me davey by the way [Laughter] it's a it's a mutual lovely affair we have going so if you want to take our uh survey we would love to hear from you if you also are a time share owner or former owner uh text to timeshare to 33 789 we're doing a research project on how dissatisfied the customers are and if you're satisfied that's fine tell the truth maybe you love your timeshare that would make you statistically unusual but um that's fine we'd love to hear from you one i want actually real data on what's really going on out there in the real world not from timeshare world not from uh somewhere else university of central florida did a survey that said 87 of the people they surveyed hate their timeshare they felt like they got ripped off how do you stay in business when 87 of your customers think you screwed them let me that let me just tell you there is nothing greedier and hungrier than a timeshare salesman when you make this bargain effectively what you're doing is the zookeeper comes up and says hey we'll give you a free pass to the zoo for a year but all you gotta do is go into the tiger cage and sit and pet the tiger for two hours by the way the tiger's not eating in three days he might be a bit hungry he might be a little greedy and so you're supposed to go into the tiger cage and pet the tiger for three hours and then you get a free pass to the zoo if you survive no one does very few people get out of the tiger cage alive most of them get eaten and you know what eating means now you're a time chair owner oh joyful you've been screwed that's what this amounts to you want to talk about timeshares obviously i'm going to be doing that for the next oh 45 minutes or so you jump in the phone number is triple eight eight two five five two two five i wanna hear from you this [Music] hey folks i got a great option to help you pay for your education the army national guard the army national guard believes you are the next greatest generation because you have proven that even in adversity that you have what it takes to succeed that's why they offer benefits like tuition assistance career training and a paycheck to help you avoid debt no matter what your goals are the army national guard can help you get there visit nationalguard.com to find out more [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] so hilton is buying diamond international for 1.4 billion dollars hilton you're going to screw up your brand several of the shareholders at hilton are objecting to the purchase and there's some activist shareholders that are jumping out there trying to block the purchase it's not closed yet it should close in august i think the hilton board is going to go ahead with it because they've got their heads stuck up their timeshare because all they see is how much money diamond makes but they don't realize the brand damage they're going to do to the wonderful name of hilton sad i wonder if enough of you stockholders at hilton actually raised your hand and said we don't want to own scummy stuff if they would actually stop the deal that'd be interesting debbie is in el paso debbie tell me your time share story hi dave well speaking of helsin that is who i bought my time share from hilton grand vacations oh back in 2018. in las vegas suckered into going to a presentation for of course a free weekend in vegas all expenses paid and all of the good stuff they try to throw in um we were promised a cruise as well which we never took and uh we went to the timeshare we had um our two boys with us that at the time were i think 12 and 15 years old and they stayed back at the room while we went to the presentation and we were there probably at least three hours and our our presenter um you know after meddling into our lives he found out we were christian and he kept throwing christian scripture after scripture at us how god wanted to bless us and god's blessings were abundant and we should bless ourselves and our family with this great vacation home and uh we ended up doing it unfortunately how much did you pay for it um well the total price on our contract was almost 35 000 and they were adamant about well we have this great offer american express is teaming up with us hilton and we are offering this credit card you guys can put 8 000 down on it and you get extra points right away and everything will be great so we signed up for the credit card put a thousand on that card right away and they um swooped us off to a different room to sign papers and this and that and and then uh they took us on a bus ride to a condo that was supposed to be exactly excuse me exactly like our condo that we just purchased supposedly it was a a great place it was overlooking vegas with all the fancy things it had was like i think a five-bedroom suite and had pop-up tvs and every amenity you can think of and they just told you you know you can invite your family and friends and come to vegas on the new year's eve and so we were pretty excited about it until we got home and you know we we thought okay well let's see if we can book this place for new year's and of course no that's not available it's been booked out for years and you only have a certain window that you can stay at one of our places which we didn't know at the time oh wait a minute so they lied to you oh yeah oh okay just making sure just making sure we're clear that hilton grand vacations lied to debbie in el paso okay i'm just making sure we get that straight they did lie and yeah in fact they said it wasn't a time share this is a vacation opportunity and you can vacation not only in vegas but you can vacation all over the world and go to different places and have new experiences and uh you know after a couple of months of paying our monthly payments and trying to get a even just to go to vegas back to vegas they had nothing available except maybe a one bedroom place that wasn't even the location that we saw and uh you know that's when we said okay we've been had and we're not gonna we're not gonna do this anymore and we had heard about your timeshare exit um the people that you share with people online and so we contacted them and after about a year and a half of going through dealings with the timeshare exit people we uh we got released oh they got you out good yes good they got about 20 000 people out so that's good oh yeah yeah they did get us out way to go so that that was uh but that cost money too of course they charged you two or three thousand dollars for that right oh it was more than that was it okay uh but you got out you got out of a 27 000 loan and you had to pay the 8 000 credit card debt i'm sure yes yes but we're out and we will never do that again well for that matter you probably won't even go into a hilton again like for a hotel still anything that says hilton on it after you got kicked in the teeth that bad you're not going to want to do business with yeah exactly wow i'm so sorry well thank you for sharing your story so your advice your advice obviously is don't go to the presentation do not go don't go don't go for the free vacation don't go to the presentation and whatever they say you can tell they're lying if their mouth is moving yes exactly don't don't even listen yeah debbie thank you for calling and sharing your story jonathan has a story he's in richmond virginia jonathan tell me your time share story hey dave how are you today better than i deserve what's up fantastic so this is a story about getting out of the lion cage or the tiger cage with my limbs intact all right so you made it this is this is wild this is almost sounds like a movie and i swear it's true so my wife had found something online about if we went to this presentation down in williamsburg virginia that we would get free airline tickets and a hotel room to use anytime we wanted and we're like okay that sounds pretty good so we go down to this thing and we get put into this room with and i don't know what company it was it might have been wingate i'm not sure i don't remember about four or five years ago and we got put into this room and this guy comes running into the room and he goes oh my gosh guys i'm so sorry the normal person who does these presentations isn't here today so i'm gonna do your presentation but i'm sorry i'm not used to doing them so it's going to be kind of kind of winging it and we're like oh okay yeah whatever we're eating our granola bars and drinking our orange juice that they provided and you know we're like cool whatever and so he launches into this thing and the first thing they show us is a presentation and the very first five minutes is that first scene and up remember where they if you've seen the movie where the uh he meets his wife and they go through their life and she passes away and it's heartbreaking right so their whole push is it's about family and your well-being and enjoying your life which by the way showing a video clip like that that's copyrighted would be illegal exactly and that's one thing we kind of look at that's a whole other ball game but anyway so he gets off he stops the video because his mom calls him the dude's mom calls on the middle of his presentation oh it's amazing and he answers the phone and really she's like should i answer it's my mom and she he puts it on speaker and this woman on the other end i say woman because there's a we we question that later on my wife and i are like i don't think so like she talks about her ailments and stuff and anyway we go to this woman um they send us off in these individual um i'll tell you what man i want to hear the rest of this this is fabulous i'm gonna put you on hold we're gonna talk about it after the break it's a time share special hour talking to real people with real experiences [Music] [Music] still on baby step number one how'd you guess with health care costs rising learn how christian healthcare ministries can help you make the most out of your budget visit chministries.org budget don't worry it's worth it [Music] we're talking about the what has arguably been called the largest legalized fraud in america today time shares and the crazy extremes these people go through to sell them we're talking with jonathan in richmond virginia and he starts telling a story of a guy who busts in to do the sales presentation claims he had to show up and do it because but he's never done it before she's not going to be very good at it gets his mom on the phone while he's on stage because he's talking about how important it is to your family to have a vacation together and that's where we left jonathan off so the mo that's obviously not his mom on the phone yeah that's honestly when my wife and i went to leave we sat in our car and literally laughed at the whole the whole experience because it was like that movie ten men or ten yeah ten men those guys richard dreyfuss remember that and they're selling aluminum siding it's it's it was like a movie i'm telling you dave it was wild because it gets even better so if you're ready let's let's finish this puppy up the rest of our experience so we this guy finishes up and they then send all the couples so this is about 25 couples each with an individual representative to show us the property and how beautiful it was let me tell you dave the property was not that beautiful it was probably about as nice as the old apartment complex my wife and i lived in when we got married oh i had one of those yeah i did that oh gross gross so anyway so she go meet our rep is this young lady probably about you know late twenties and we go she's like oh it's a big property let me go in my van so we go to her van and it has european license plates on it which i'm like okay that's and i recognize that right away having lived in a foreign country for a while i'm like okay that's weird it's hard to bring a car into this country from another country um okay whatever and she's like yeah my husband was military and he recently left me and i'm single mom now and she's like she's the booster seats and all the toys and the mess in the car we're like okay sure so we get in and she drives us around look at this property and we go blah blah blah we come back to the the finishing room kind of like they're they're they're where they gather everyone at individual table and we sit there with her and she just drills into us the costs and what do we like about this and we're we're not we're stone-faced we're sitting there going uh-huh okay cool can we get out of here now and no no no we're telling them now or this isn't working for us and they could then they bring in the big guns so this guy comes over and says hey what do we need to do for this and what price point can we give you he starts breaking it down by day how much it will cost us by day and we're like oh my gosh you guys are kidding me and this guy has a sob story too like oh it's so important to your family i had uh stage three cancer and i feed it and i had pictures to prove it of me and i had i not done this it would have ruined my family or like oh my gosh just get us out of here and so we finally just said you know what no we're done give us what we came for and they finally relented and the lady who took us around the sweet young girls like oh what a shame you don't care about your family and we're like yeah whatever we just we actually we actually did get two free airline tickets and a free hotel night and we used it to go to new orleans for free we actually did get something out of it and the guy who even gave it to us said oh that's a really good perk he said it's a shame you didn't take this are you sure you don't want this great um product and we're like oh my goodness get us out of here and my wife and i we got in the car we laughed and felt like we need to take a shower afterwards because it was felt that slimy it was awful so now the big question is you you got out alive and you got and you got a great story out of it because this is just it's so it's the it's so ridiculous that it is kind of comedic but that is their model i mean this is who these people are now would you do it again for airline tickets absolutely not no we have the money we're going to pay cash it wasn't worth it no it wasn't worth it so yeah your advice is even though you got out of the tiger cage alive your advice is don't pet the tiger i love it all right troy is with us troy is in columbia south carolina troy tell me your time share story hey dave thanks for taking the call sure um wow we started back in 2008 um my wife was going to the beach and i was to join them later on during the week um we officially bought the world's most expensive beach portraits um that was the the catch to get us in i guess you would say you're taking a picture of you on the beach and this is this is this is the prize that's it yeah 24 000 later the lions and tigers and sharks ripped us apart which company was this this is wonderful westgate westgate all right and you were aware myrtle beach myrtle beach all right westgate and myrtle beach you should get a beach portraiture go pet the tiger you buy a twenty four thousand dollar timeshare in myrtle beach yeah yeah and this 2008 so you still got it we still have it it's paid for we want to get out of it um you know every time we go somewhere every time we go on vacation we can't seem to get the week that we want to go and you know it's always booked up you might have to book two months out from the date that we want um you know it's almost as if you would ask for the wrong date you would get the one you wanted yeah maybe so how many times have you actually used it used it every year since 2009. okay but never on the date that you wanted it correct yeah okay yeah well we're not gonna get it i have my wife here with me too her name's tanya so you hear her in the background yeah what'd she say [Laughter] so has the uh has the property maintenance fees gone up through this time oh yeah every year goes up um it was you know when we first started out the property maintenance fees weren't so bad but we were shown the model of what the site was going to look like uh new buildings parking garage swimming pool on top of buildings um they have the model still in the resort and they selling it they still sell it to uh they're still selling the model and they never built it since 2009. that is correct sir and that's what you were promised that's fraud that's that's what i've been saying not to mention the fact that they held our kids for six hours um wouldn't bring them back to us until we finally said fine just whatever here let me sign the paper and let me get my kids back please yeah um it was a mess and it still is every year we get told we're vip people y'all must be very important well i told my wife i said i think i've figured out what vip stands for is very ignorant people and we fell victim to them even though we tried we tried hard not to they just they were relentless they relentless man i appreciate you having a sense of humor and being willing to tell your story because it's hard to tell a story when you mess up i tell my mess-up story all the time and i've gotten used to telling it but uh man when you pay stupid tax it hurts it really is 24 000 and basically you've gotten a handful of weeks out of it and really you with what you paid in maintenance fees alone you could have rented the hotel for that right absolutely absolutely yeah but a secret for a long time because we were pretty embarrassed that we fell for it oh yeah a shame we didn't want anybody knowing we're gonna have to build we're gonna have to have dr john deloney build a timeshare buyers support group i'm sorry so we're gonna have to have dr deloney build a time share buyer support group my name is troy and i bought a timeshare that's right this is right yeah oh my gosh we're looking to try to get rid of it we've been contacted by uh west financial group which is a lawyer that wants to help a little bit pricey and we had a j t solutions call us um i i don't know enough about these places but i don't want to get scammed again yeah um so you know i'm being very cautious yeah i know the wesley folks i don't know j t and i don't know enough about the uh either one of them to to endorse either one of them but i don't blame you for checking it out that's for sure so hey man thanks for calling in we appreciate you sharing with us you know [Music] [Music] [Music] one of the other interesting phenomenons that has happened with the timeshare people is attorneys are occasionally contacted by time share owners and like that last guy where they've been straight up you know we promised you a building this model and 10 years later they've not built the building so that would be under the heading of fraud which is an actual thing by the way and your timeshare people don't seem to know that but it's an actual thing fraud is a thing and uh fraud is a reason to get contracts invalidated in court always if you were defrauded then the contract can be easily set aside in court so attorneys often will take a case like that and contact the timeshare company and the timeshare company will go oh okay and they just let them out but they wouldn't let the people out before but you get an attorney involved well if an attorney does that too many times the timeshare people get pissed off and what's happened is they've put this concerted effort to put the attorneys out of business so they sue the attorney that has been getting people out and bury him in legal costs and discovery challenges and everything else to where a small practice attorney you know three four person attorney office can get run out of business by get by them being sued even though they didn't do anything wrong but it's just they just bury you in legal costs because the timeshare business they make billions of dollars billions with a b and so to chase down some attorney one of the attorneys several of the attorneys that have been sued got together and hired an attorney so as a group now they are countersuing again and trying to stop the timeshare business from doing this to them because several of them have been run out of business one of the guys that got sued regularly by them is a guy named scott montgomery he's an attorney in missouri and uh that's a true story about what happened to you wasn't this guy didn't run you out of business but they tried they sure did dave they're they're trying the best their best but we're hanging in there we had a a hearing yesterday down in the federal court in in florida on our motion for an injunction to try and stop this sham litigation against attorneys who represent timeshare owners did it go well i i think it i think it did dave you know the the judge is is a scholar of the law and if we don't win on this motion i know that we will ultimately prevail on the merits but you know these timeshare pushers they're like drug dealers we hear from our many clients you know that that they have even divorced they've they've separated from their spouse because of the financial ruin caused by these timeshare pushers i know of one man who who lived by your advice dave he never had a debt that he didn't pay he was a hard-working man and he paid his debts until he went into the tiger cage and when he came out of the tiger cage he had more debt than he could handle and you know what happened to him the timeshare pusher they published a notice for all of the world to see that they were foreclosing upon him and they said this man could not pay his debt and he was so embarrassed he was so ashamed that that he took his own life oh my god he took he committed suicide after he went into the tiger cage so if you think that you can go into the tiger cage because you want two free knights or the body snatchers got to you and you're gonna come out on the other end okay well you're wrong yeah you're wrong so you've been pretty regularly uh suing the timeshare business and getting people out that's why they're pissed at you and suing you trying to count trying to bury you uh what is most how many people have you gotten out can you say is that is that something you can talk about sure sure we've been doing this for several years we've gotten out about 1500 people we represent about 17 000 people in a class action against blue green and we are working for many other defrauded mostly elderly people to try and get them out as we speak so out of the out of the one-offs not the class action but the one-offs um what is the typical uh reason from a legal perspective that they would you know that basically you're saying you did this you're you're accusing them of wrongdoing of some kind what is the typical wrongdoing that causes them to bow and release the consumer well dave there are dozens of different timeshare pushers in this country some are more reasonable than others and some will negotiate a settlement with you when you point out that look you're your timeshare salesperson that that felon that you employed to sit across the table from a buyer they committed fraud they committed negligent misrepresentation they violated a state unlawful merchandising practices act or you charge them illegal document preparation fees when when we point out how they have violated the law a reasonable time share company will often negotiate a settlement others will not negotiate a settlement and you have to go to litigation you have to go to arbitration you have to file a class action and it's extremely difficult you know these timeshare pushers they like to sell their finance backed securities every year to wall street banker types you know wyndham sells hundreds of millions of dollars of timeshare mortgages to wall street bankers so if you're one of those people who agreed to sign a timeshare mortgage to to finance the purchase of your timeshare it's a whole lot harder for me to get you out of your timeshare obligation than if you're a person who just financed it who just paid out of pocket and who's paid in full who's current on their maintenance fees it's much easier for a lawyer to negotiate a settlement for that person who is known in the industry as paid in full yeah well because they no longer in like that example with windom you said they are or westgate who was it they sold anyway they're they're packaging them together they're selling them on hedge funds much like a mortgage-backed security except there's no mortgage because there's no actual real estate they're selling air but these are basically unsecured loans but they don't own the loan anymore and you go to them and say you committed fraud and they go yeah i know but we've sold the loan so you got to deal with hedge fund company over here that now owns the loan and you can't get that forgiven because that company hadn't done anything wrong they just bought bad papers the only thing they did wrong you're exactly right dave and the insidious thing that is going on here i'm sure you know more about dodd-frank than i do but that was the law that was passed by our united states congress to try and deal with the uh subprime home lending crisis back in 2008. well the timeshare pushers got together and they lobbied congress and they got an exclusion for themselves where dodd-frank does not apply to timeshare mortgages so they're doing the same thing they're engaging in the same tactics with the same big banks that occurred back in 2008 and caused a home lending crisis that's going on now in the timeshare space because they had one captive congressman from down in florida and he snuck the word time shared mortgage into an exclusion from dodd-frank so they can prey on unsuspecting consumers who have zero ability to repay and sell them time shares and sell them a mortgage and dodd-frank doesn't apply to them now they can make knowingly make a bad loan and then sell that loan in bulk those those bad loans in bulk to hedge funds and uh they put them on the books looking for a great rate of return and and of course if the ti if the consumer doesn't pay it's not windham or westgate or diamond then that's calling them it's the hedge fund that bought the loan that's who they now owe the money to and that's who's going to sue them if they don't pay on their timeshare right that's exactly right dave that's what's going on and our government needs to fix it and god bless you dave for being a champion for all of these people who have been defrauded by these timeshare pushers thank you scott scott montgomery from missouri he's an attorney there that has successfully removed 1500 people and has 17 000 in a class action suit on blue green right now wow this is a nasty nasty space when you get in a room with those people you really do feel like you need to take a shower when you're done look this is the ramsey show [Music] have a friend or family member that needs a daily dose of ramsay advice in their life let them know about the ramsey call of the day podcast it's a quick hit of advice about life and money in under 10 minutes check out the ramsey call of the day podcast wherever you listen to podcasts is the ramsay show [Music] you can be intentional about your character you can have money and a career you are the hero in your story live from the headquarters of ramsey solutions broadcasting from the dollar car rental studios it's the ramsey show where debt is dumb cash is king and the paid off home mortgage has taken the place of the bmw as the status symbol of choice i'm dave ramsey your host christy wright ramsey personality number one best-selling author is my co-host today open phones as we answer your questions about your life and your money the phone number here triple eight eight two five five two two five that's triple eight eight two five five two two five sam's with us in new york city to start off this hour hey sam how are you i'm doing well it's a pleasure to speak to you you too what's up that's great quick question for you i am newly married i am expecting our first child god willing in about advice yay thank you um we have about 50 combined about 50 or 60 thousand dollars sitting in an account jointly between our two accounts uh about 16 000 so far in some like 10 000 is in like the s p 500 and 6 000 mutual funds that my wife had before we got married i have about 28 000 dollars sitting in canada and some investments i'm originally canadian my question to you is with this 50 60 000 which by the way this is including the uh emergency fund we didn't like split it out yeah just sitting in an account uh my question to you is to take that money to put it into real estate as opposed to the market i know you're a big fan of mutual funds okay do you have any debt no you're that oh that's cool good for you well um i'm a big fan of having a huge pile of cash when a baby's on the way and when baby comes and baby and mommy are okay and you come home then we kind of push play on what we call our baby steps and uh so if you're debt-free then your first baby step would be to set aside use as you said the emergency fund i'd carve some of that out and christy we always say three to six months of expenses yeah and i think one of the cool things is you guys already have this in place before the baby comes a lot of people are trying to stockpile cash for a baby and you're already there and so once the baby's here and healthy then you can put any of that extra on your investments maybe four baby steps four or five and six paying off the house do you guys own your home okay so we're renting we're renting now i mean we're the planets to buy in the next couple years so you're saying is to wait it out the next until after my wife gives birth yeah just hold on to that yeah just hold on to the cash because it's just good to have that extra cushion when you're bringing a baby into the world just for any unexpected medical expenses that type of thing and then whatever your next goal is if your next goal is to buy a house at some point then some of that can go into savings to save up for a down payment on a house so really just the baby steps are there to guide you what the goals should be but where you are with having your emergency fund and then you know your investments and so on then you can start looking at that that goal of saving for a house as well got it and you think our emergency plan should be a little bigger being that my weights on maternity leave she's not going to be working the next couple months and she stopped working a couple weeks ago just wanted her to like have a lot of shields coming up to the delivery can you make it on your income so i'm self-employed i know can you make it on your income i think anywhere between 600 to 3 000 a week so it's like a little nerve wrecking like it hit me last night a little bit but uh today next two days and i'm making like almost two grand so well realistically during the time your wife is on maternity leave can you make it on your income i should be able to yeah okay then you shouldn't need the emergency fund it shouldn't come up i think i think you can i think you're just being a new daddy worrywart which means you're which means you're a good dad okay you're concerned about your family that's a good thing but i i think you're going to do it i think you're going to bust it and make sure that you make enough to live on while she's on maternity leave and you won't need to touch it but i would have a fully funded emergency fund and i would set the rest of the money aside for my house fund and then i would begin putting 15 percent of my income away in retirement in good mutual funds but i think you're fine to park that money for for real estate for a purchase but no i would not buy real estate as an investment right now i think you're saving for your first home a big down payment above your emergency fund and that's how i'm going to start allocating this stuff out well that's the reason too that we even suggest a range for your emergency fund three to six months different people have different comfort levels different uh incomes and so if it gives you more comfort sam to have a six-month emergency fund instead of three months and you can do that as well if it gives you peace of mind yeah i would do that but i again i would do that and plan not to use it yeah plan a plan to live on your income yeah because this is all we know this is all coming jeff's with us in cape cod hi jeff welcome to the ramsay show hey how we doing today better than i deserve what's up excellent so uh just trying to find out kind of what you would do in my situation or if i'm handling this uh correctly uh back in october my uh wife wanted a divorce and uh left leaving me with the house two dogs and two children as they stayed home dad for the last three years wow she uh then uh lied in court and got awarded the house resulting in me and the children having to leave with no income and no job uh i've since started a handyman home improvement business and i have about four thousand dollars saved but i'm having trouble finding an apartment or and i definitely can't get a mortgage so kind of just looking to see what you would do why are you having trouble finding an apartment um one just getting call backs from real estate agents or landlords two they need um they're requiring pay stub which i don't have because i'm self-employed for they rent apartments all the time to self-employed people is there a place to find those i don't i've never had the rent before i've always i've been able to buy a home until now uh is the only place i know is you know apartments.com or zillow yeah well no i mean you make a list of the rental properties in the area uh off of several different sites that you can find and you call them one at a time and you call the real estate agent that's involved one at a time and you make a list of the apartments in the area and you start calling them one at a time you don't have to go through zillow you don't have to go through a website or apartments.com you can just look up and go there's an apartment right over there i'm gonna call those people there's one over there i'm gonna call those people and there's one over there and i'm going to call those people and just sit and you don't have anything more important to do than to get you and the kids off the street that's your number one goal right yeah we currently live in a camper at a campground i picked it up for a hundred bucks that's the beginning of the spring um the best thing i could think of at the time yeah um jeff jeff i just i just hear fear in your voice and listen exactly like you can do this listen you can do this you're going to start looking at the apartments one at a time you're going to take one step at a time you're scared but you can do this how old are your kids two and three okay yeah the three-year-old's gonna write a best-selling book that when he's extremely successful it talks about the time that he lived in a camper and how he and his dad came all the way back from that it's going to be a great story now go ride it [Music] stop paying your overpriced wireless provider and switch to pure talk they use the same network as the larger providers for much less for just 30 a month get unlimited talk text and six gigs of data with no contract the average family saves over 70 dollars a month by switching to pure top just go to puretalk.com and enter the promo code ramsey to save 50 off your first month pure talk simply smarter wireless [Music] christie wright ramsey personality is our co-host today open phones eight at five five two two five at some point every business owner has to stop daydreaming about their business idea and actually go do it uh once you're working hard to grow your business you'll need advice about how to take it to the next level no matter which stage you're in you can make money doing what you love and the business boutique conference will show you how to make it happen october 14th through the 16th i will join a lineup of rockstar speakers including christy wright anthony o'neil jasmine starr nona jones and bianca oltof you got it and i'm making sure i said that right and walk you through all the different ways you can build your business starting and running a business is a big deal we'd love to have you we've been doing this event this business boutique event for many years christy is a rock star and uh three day event in person in nashville 89 or guess what you can also look at the live stream text boutique to 33 789 boutique 233 789 christie this event has a different level of energy that's an understatement i don't know if it's because it's all women and there really is something about that crowd that the fact that it's a women's conference is so it feels safe but it's also exciting and what's cool is you have a variety of people represented in the crowd it's some small businesses some side businesses some women are running you know uh medium small medium-sized teams you've got home-based hobby business you know you got non-profits you got everybody in there but they're all moving forward chasing their dream trying to figure out how to do this thing and we give them the tools and the solutions to do that talk about marketing money social media all those things that they need help with october 14th through the 16th business boutique in nashville 89 text boutique to 33 789 boutique to 33789 our question today comes from blinds.com they have a 100 satisfaction guarantee that means even if you mess up if you mismeasure you pick the wrong color like i've done before they'll remake your window blinds for free this is a great company free samples free shipping new promos all the time blinds.com use the promo code ramsey today's question comes from matthew in south carolina i'd love your opinion and tips on how to start a cleaning business i work a full-time job making 38 000 before taxes i've always had a niche for cleaning and want to start my own business i have no clue about where to start what to save up how to apply for business loans etc i have no debt and i'm on baby step three i'd appreciate any help you can give me what's interesting about this question dave is i get a similar question often which is this idea that you've got to have this big huge savings account you've got to apply for loans you've got to do all this stuff to start a business look get you some cleaners and start cleaning get some cleaning supplies reach out to people start cleaning in your neighborhood start word of mouth post on your facebook page get a little bit scrappy matthew in south carolina and start doing this thing on the side you do not need business loans not for any business but especially not for this business and you can start really small with the cash that you have to get some cleaning supplies and start doing this it doesn't have to be a big deal yeah this is um what we've done matthew here it started on a card table in my living room um coming up on 30 years ago and never borrowed money 100 we took what we had and went and made some money with it and we took that money and grew the business and took what we had and we made some money with it and that's called organically growing your business meaning the money that's here is the money we use to grow this business and it has worked all the way up to where we are today and so uh and it can start with a bottle of 409 and some rags that's right that's right of all businesses this is a very easy business that you want to do to start small with what you have with some cash on your hand yeah and the trick is to get the first job yeah and then they give you money and you take that money and you can upgrade your supplies your tools and some printed materials or a business card or whatever you want to do and then you take that money from that next job and you can grow a little bit more and then you get to actually start making some money beyond your costs and you keep adding revenue and the revenue is what you use to grow this business with nothing else yep uh a business alone in this situation uh not what would be ludicrous that's what's uh christie's saying and she's exactly right so we're gonna avoid that at all costs chuck is with us in orlando hi chuck how are you i'm doing great miss ramsey it's a pleasure to speak with you you too what's up well i was just wondering if you could um well personally just qualify by saying thank you guys so much for the advice that you give um you guys have helped our family so much me and my wife are so grateful we're actually debt-free we paid our home off wow no debt whatsoever thank you so much um but i was wondering if you could just speak into a little bit that feeling of i don't know if you call it restlessness or you know kind of to me i i i kind of define it by saying you feel like you're drowning in a sea of options a little bit once you're debt-free and i know it's a wonderful problem to have but for us it's just felt um at least for the past several months since we paid our home off and officially became debt free that we are kind of looking for what to do next and we're kind of a little bit fearful you know the purpose is so baked in when you're you know gazelle intense you're paying off debt you're paying off debt you're frugal it changes a lot of things about your life and you know for us we're very happy to be where we are we definitely are very grateful but we just seem to be a little stuck on kind of kind of what to do next i'm so curious your answer to this dave because i was just talking to a friend about this the other day where she was saying someone had said once you become completely debt free it's almost a uh you struggle to find what's the next goal what what do you talk to people about that that's so interesting well you need a goal that's what you need and because that's what's missing you had a goal it was very clearly defined it was right in front of you in this case it was the villain the debt you're trying to kill the villain right and uh but now we get to switch gears and we go from villain as a goal to prosperity as a goal and generosity is a goal and so there's three things you can do with money and you need to be doing all three and you need to be doing them in writing and on purpose towards a goal and number one is uh you know generosity number two is investing and number three is uh is just you know lifestyle enjoying fun and so i have a goal to take a trip and spend uh three weeks in africa or three weeks in australia which i've done both of um in the last three four years um you know the uh have a goal of buying a lake house uh these are these are lifestyle things you're gonna do and you start saving towards that goal put a number on it and it becomes the part that portion of your budget that you're putting towards fun or lifestyle you go towards that i have a goal of uh you know building an orphanage i have a goal of uh i had a goal that was pretty cool i i i saw a guy one time he told me he had given away uh that year he had given away a million dollars and i thought man that was pretty cool and i did that and then okay now what am i going to do because i climbed that mountain now what are you going to do i said i want to give a million dollars in one day and then i was able to do that like you're before last year yeah so uh with with the christmas presents we gave to our team and some support to for a local orphanage and some other things we did we were able in one day in one morning we gave away a million dollars so you know you got to have uh something that just go okay i'm gonna go this is my new thing i'm gonna go for that and i'm gonna go for that and and on the investing side uh uh i just i keep up with net worth just because uh not because i i'm building bigger barns or something but but it's just a way i got to keep score somewhere on my goal and so you know you hit a net worth of a million dollars and you want to hit a net worth of 5 million dollars and you want to hit a net worth of 10 million it's not because you're just greedy and trying to gather up money but it's just you need to be aiming at something with this investing otherwise it just seems to be spinning off into nothingness and so a clearly defined measurable goal um and uh just like i want to have my house paid off by this date i want to be on a million point five net worth by that date you know that kind of a thing and so it is all about goals but you ought to really have some acquisition goals for fun or travel goals or whatever they want to buy that sports car goal for fun and you ought to have some for generosity do you know i don't care what is you i want to fund missionaries or fund 400 missionaries i don't care whatever it is you know but figure it out and write it down and put a dollar figure to it and put a time limit on it and that'll give you your traction back [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] in the lobby of ramsey solutions on the debt free stage lauren is with us hey lauren how are you good how are you better than i deserve welcome where do you live carlisle pennsylvania all right fun what's that near that is right outside of harrisburg oh okay cool cool know where you are so all the way to nashville to do a debt-free scream how much have you paid off seventy four thousand five hundred fifty five dollars and seventy four cents there you go how long did this take 21 months yeah and your range of income during that time 42 000 up to 50 000. wow okay so what kind of debt was the 75 000 all student loans whoa what'd you go to school for i have a bachelor's degree in sociology and a master's degree in higher education all right good for you okay what do you do for a living i work as a student affairs professional in higher education ah good okay and so that income should be heading right up then hopefully good very good okay so did you get out of school 21 months ago what happened 21 months ago that started this journey so this really started for me back in well back when i was a kid actually um i remember watching my parents struggle with money so much and i would have conversations with myself and i would say whenever you grow up you're never going to have this fear and anxiety that you're fearing that you're feeling right now watching your parents struggle so then i grew up went to college and did everything normal i took out student loans because i didn't know anything different um and then in 2018 um in like november 2018 right before i was heading into my last semester of grad school i remember talking to my dad and just saying how fearful i was of these student loans and that i didn't know how i was going to make these payments and he happened to mention your name oh so it kind of started off from there i dove into the podcast and i ended up taking financial peace university in january of that year oh wow and then once i graduated in may i landed a job and then once i got my job i started running in june yeah just going wide open live like a college student and pay it off yes and you basically did 35 000 a year for two years is basically your numbers yeah and and and hardly made that yeah you've been on beans and rice well luckily my mom picked up the pieces a lot and let me lived at home for free ah that helped nice to have a cheerleader in your corner very good and some help like that very very cool so what do you tell people the key to getting out of debt is now i think there's really three things that drove this home for me the first one is really know your why and turn it into a vision every day get up and visualize what your why is because that's gonna that's what's going to drive you through this problem what was your why no no anxiety my why i was remembering that feeling that i had as a kid and never wanting to feel that again yeah that's a good one the second thing is commit to the plan just do it stop questioning it no commitment yes um and then the third one is believe in yourself if you don't believe in yourself it doesn't it doesn't matter if somebody else believes in you or what you're seeing on social media i actually took a social media hiatus for a year because i couldn't take the anxiety of it yeah that's really powerful lauren like that those three points are really really powerful and that could apply to lots of things right like the believe in yourself that's really but one of the things you said that i love is when you were talking about a little bit your journey that you just went to college and did things normal and i think sometimes inside this building i'll say you know for myself dave i can take for granted that what we do here is weird it is different when you go to college it's just normal to take out loans it's normal to have credit cards you don't even question it you didn't even feel like you were doing anything wrong you're like oh no this is just what you do how you go to school and and gosh good for you for just so quickly turning around paying that off doing things weird so now you can be standing on this stage completely debt-free of those loans well done that's impressive way to go we're proud of you thank you excellent excellent job you know the uh i i have never heard anyone say uh you know i spend most of my day on instagram and twitter and and facebook and it just gives me such a peace it makes me feel so good about myself i'm so peaceful as a result i never have any i never heard seoul say that ever no these are not things people say so that hiatus was a really good idea and it gives you it allows you to stay focused and be around you can control the voices that are coming at you only have the cheerleaders around get rid of the debbie downers and focus and go very well done good stuff what was the hardest part for you i thought a lot about this question preparing for this actually and my answer isn't the typical it was budgeting or committing to the plan for me it was the fact that i had just left school and i lived there for six years i had my i created a new family there i had everything there and then my job search actually landed me going back to my hometown which i was not prepared for so i think the hardest part of me was dealing with these two worlds these two seasons that would normally be happening at separate times are now clashing so for me it was really taking care of my mental health and dealing with the mourning process of everything that i lost moving back home yeah and not only back to your own hometown but you moved back into your parents after being away yeah and that's that's a that's a that's a a gutsy courageous move because that's a step down it was a nice gesture and it was very generous and it helped you mathematically but emotionally that was kind of a punch wasn't it oh yeah definitely hurt my ego a little bit yeah yeah i can imagine i can imagine you're a sharp young lady i know your parents are proud of you we are very very well done we got a copy of the legacy journey for you that is the next chapter in your story for sure you have a uh you've used this why to change your life and you'll never have those issues around anxiety because now you'll always tell money what to do uh and you discovered that it's not when you got out of debt but when you started the process of getting out of that the piece came didn't it right away yeah pretty quickly as soon as i start telling the money what to do i get peace from it i don't have to get there yet yeah but yeah very well done and we're going to give you a copy of the total money makeover for you to give away and uh we'll start somebody else's journey pay it forward a little bit so good stuff all right it's lauren from the harrisburg pennsylvania area 75 000 paid off in 21 months making 42 to 50. what a great life change count it down let's hear a debt free scream three two one i'm debt-free i love it you know her other point was what you believe to be true yeah and um the old story um dan miller used to tell the circus elephant um and i don't know we all heard it somewhere from somebody but uh you know you go in there's a bull elephant that's you know many many tons could push over a house and he's standing there with a rope a small rope around his ankle and a small stake driven in the ground he could easily just flex that ankle and that stake would go flying and you say why would he stand there how can that rope possibly hold him and the trainer says well the rope can't hold him what holds him is his belief that he can hold him because when he was a baby elephant we put a chain with a big stake right and around his ankle and he pushed against it pulled against it to no avail and now he believes that the chain is still there yeah and he can't do it so he won't do it he won't try it you know really believing you you might find that what's holding you back is just uh is some kind of shadow from the past not the reality of the truth and i think that's what kills people like me and you when we see people like that stuck whether it's in their finances or in some other area of their life with ken coleman with you know people in careers they hate they think well this is just as good as it gets this is what i have to do this is life this is my my car like me can't get ahead yeah you don't know how my story you don't know what i've and you know maybe you don't but gosh it's like there's so much of it that you can do that you may not even realize because of that belief keeping you stuck and it's just it's it's painful to watch honestly yeah and it it's it's he kind of give it the kind of german shepherd look though you know that yeah well how's that rope holding that elephant how is that how is it a person that looks like that and is educated like that believes they're stuck they're not stuck right but they believe they are so tada they are right right and uh that's a beautiful point that lauren just made very powerful very powerful this is the ramsey show [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] christy wright ramsey personality is my co-host today elena is with us in lexington kentucky hi elena how are you i'm doing well how are you better than i deserve what's up okay so thank you so much for taking my call um my question is so my husband retired from the military in february of 2020 in processing the retirement paperwork there was an issue with enrolling in the survivor benefit program so it was denied since then we have appealed to try to overturn the denial but have not been successful so the last open enrollment for the sbp is what they call it was in 2005 and to have the sbp it cost six percent of the retirement income if we are to buy into the program we would owe any miss premium so my question is should we continue to pursue this no okay not worth it no so the goal is for you to get a portion of his military retirement upon his death but what you are paying for that with the scenario you laid out is outrageous right not only in lost current benefits but in the back pay where they're going to go back after you on the whole thing no it's you're fighting for something you don't even want really at the end of the day so what what is his retirement income uh 3 000 a month okay 36 000 a year all right and how old is he he is 59. okay what kind of shape is he in great shape medically medically good medically good yes yes go to zander insurance dot com and get a term life insurance policy for four hundred thousand dollars on him okay if he dies four hundred thousand dollars goes into a mutual fund if it paid ten percent for easy numbers right now that would be 40 000 a year which is more than his retirement is okay which is 36 000 a year okay okay so what we're doing is we're offset yeah and that term policy will cost you a whole lot less than what you're getting ready to pay for survivor benefits that won't even amount to three thousand dollars a month yeah i should okay sure yeah okay if you so if you only want to buy a 300 or even a 250 000 policy 250 000 be 2 000 a month coming in if you invested that at 10 you follow me now here's the other thing you're not going to keep this policy forever he's 59 you're probably going to get it for five years maybe 10 years something like that okay now the uh because and during that time you're going to have money in savings that you would live off of because you're going to drop that uh that life insurance policy when it gets super expensive later okay but if he's healthy at 59 you'll be surprised how cheaply you can buy a couple hundred thousand dollars on him okay and that's what i would do no you don't want that survivor benefit interesting call thank you and tell him thanks for his service to his country we appreciate it so when you sign up for a pension plan of any kind but certainly the military uh you can agree to take a reduced amount while you're alive and then your spouse gets the money it gets a further reduced amount upon your death or your spouse gets nothing and so the survivor benefit is who survives after the death the uh of the person that's supposed to be getting the pension um and so you can it kind of you know when you run the numbers back out the amount you end up getting what it costs you in reduced benefits currently usually doesn't work very that makes sense yeah and usually you're better off to self-insure through the death of that person or buy a policy like a term policy like we were just talking about and that gets them out dawn is with us in phoenix hey dawn how are you hey dave thanks for taking my call and thanks for all the advice you give everybody appreciate it sure what's up hey so i have um no debt except for two properties that i own one of them's my primary residence and one of them is a rental property i'm getting ready to um sell my rental property and i'm thinking that i should use all the proceeds that i get from this to pay off the mortgage for my primary residence yay is that the move i should make is that a question should i do this and what else i mean that's that sounds brilliant so what do you uh what's your income um so jointly we're about 275. okay and how old are you guys um i'm 53 and my husband's 55. okay and so you have this wonderful income and now you have not a payment in the world right and then the other question is should we bump up our for our retirement investment to like 50 of our income or what should we do with this extra money i know we want to invest you know we're very generous with our community friends family you know people in need so just trying to figure out how we need to take care of the old people us when we get that age somehow i got a feeling you're going to be all right but uh the uh you know here's the thing how much should you're a hundred percent dead free you've got your emergency fund how much should i invest and the que the answer to the question is a question how wealthy do you want to be because the more you invest you know i want to be as wealthy as i can so i can continue to you know help others yep so you're you're the point is you're the obviously the more you invest the wealthier you're going to become right right and so the more you consume instead of investing the less that formula works there's three things you can do with money when you get to baby step seven you can give it and you should you can enjoy it and you're better and you can invest it oh you definitely better do that one the thing is you need to put a very specific dollar amount on your generosity and say this every year we're going to give away this percentage of our income every year we're going to invest this percentage of our income every year we are going to enjoy this percentage of our income and that allows you to buy something silly guilt-free because it's budgeted okay because you ought to buy something silly guilt-free right you're rich you've been working hard for a long time that's very nice that's right you have yeah you've been working your butts off you make 275 000 a year you have not a payment in the world you did it touchdown do the dance spike the ball okay it just seems so weird to be at this point it is it's a good way i gotta tell you it is it is an emotional problem when you get there because it's almost like you have survivor guilt like everybody in the plane died but me why was i spared you know right and it's like how did i get here i'm a kid from antioch tennessee i'm sitting in a uh you know a 150 million dollar building and i paid cash for it how did i get here i can't get my head around that emotionally and yet i do mathematically know how i got here and i do know the calluses on my hand and on my brain from all the hard work i've done to get here i get all of that but then you still go holy crap right i sit here and you freaking utopia yeah it's got my name on the outside of it look sharon it's got our name on it you know it's like you have these moments where you don't you survivor guilty that kid from antioch inside you know you're like how do we do it but like you said dave it's the hard work and i love that that advice that's so similar to an earlier call like what do we do at baby step seven you need a new goal a new percentage you need to know what your vision is in this new stage it's gonna it's gonna take a minute to wrap your head around what this looks like and even feels like with that that different type of problem but it's a good different it's a good kind of problem to have yeah and oh by the way um you know just go ahead and warn you guys these baby steps like work yeah yeah you will get there you're going to have this emotional problem yeah if you keep doing the stuff i teach you to do because you're going to become wealthy and then you're going to go i just spent on a car more than i made one year how and it doesn't even matter it's not even close it's just a tink distinctive you know you can't get your and and you know and it doesn't even compare to what we did generosity-wise it doesn't even compare what we did investment wise but it still feels weird yeah like oh this really does work this really does work we're doing it yeah expect to have emotional whiplash when you get there yeah uh you know it feels like it's an out-of-body experience if you get used to it you're kind of arrogant or weird i'll just go ahead and tell you expect the emotional whiplash it goes with the territory this is the ramsey show [Music] hey guys this is james senior producer for the ramsay show did you know over 18 million people listen to the ramsay show every week and a lot of those people listen on one of our 600 plus radio stations across the country to find a station near you head to thermsyshow.com [Music] this is the ramsay show [Music] you can be intentional about your character you can have money and a career you are the hero in your story live from the headquarters of ramsey solutions broadcasting from the dollar car rental studios it's the ramsey show where debt is dumb cash is king and the paid off home mortgage has taken the place of the bmw as the status symbol of choice i'm dave ramsey your host christy wright ramsey personality is my co-host today as we answer your questions about your life and about your money jason is with us in phoenix hi jason welcome to the ramsey show hey dave hey chrissy thanks for taking my call sure what's up so um me and my spouse we make a combined income of uh almost 400 000 a year wow and i started listening yeah we're incredibly blessed and we started listening our show about a year ago and we've been cranking away on debt but i i gotta admit i haven't been completely following the steps we have been uh continuing to completely fund our 401 k during baby step 2 and my question is because of deferring taxes should we continue to completely fund our 401ks or should we shut that off until we finish out this last 105 000 in debt how quickly you're going to finish um a year and a half okay if not sooner well i tell people to stop their retirement temporarily so what's that going to cost you a year and a half of investing um and which is certainly not the end of the world it's not going to mean that you are bankrupt it's not going to mean and if you don't follow our guidance and keep doing what you're doing are you still going to win yeah you'll still win that's a year and a half if you're funding the 401 k it's a year if you don't right correct you should pay off a hundred thousand a year making 400 really i mean really that leaves you 300 to struggle through on barely squeezing out what kind of debt is it um it's uh one vehicle one rv and a uh home equity home equity loan okay yeah the the point is that um the the reason you're ah you're going to be fine either way and you kind of know that before you asked right the reason we tell people to stop even though it is mathematically incorrect to temporarily stop their retirement savings even if there's a match while they get out of debt is simply this personal finance is 80 behavior it's 20 head knowledge and the power of focus supersedes short-term mathematical gains and so getting this done and leaning in with a singular focus and a growl in your voice when you write down your budget each month ah you know that is actually 10 years from today will have made you more money than what than this one year of investing would have made you and so that's the argument and that's why we tell people to do it uh because doing three things at once causes you to get nothing done now in your case you've got so stinking much wood that you can throw on this fire that the fire's gonna keep burning anyway you're gonna make it because my god you just make so much money i mean you're overwhelming the question with your income you know gotcha and i mean in other words you can get away with you can get away with screwing this up and still come out you're gonna be okay either way the thing is jason is it's up to you how long you want this to last because if you want to be out of debt in a year stop your retirement if you want to be out of debt sooner put more than whatever you're putting on it you take the money you're putting in retirement put that towards your debt maybe you live on less for a shorter amount of time you could be out of debt even faster it's up to you how quickly do you want to be out of debt all right here's the here's the only in your situation it's it's a harder argument to make is what i'm saying but still philosophically and conceptually what we teach people to stop stands in your case maybe there's one other argument because you're obviously high performance people and me too so i sometimes will engage in a behavior that is not necessary for me to win because i want new grooves in my brain i want the old sewage washed out and so this is like breakthrough behavior you know you're shifting your behaviors you're shifting your habits and it it kind of pisses you off that you have to stop this and it's like this makes me never go into debt again and if i kind of play around and wallow out i i didn't get the groove in my brain i didn't get the crap washed off my brain from the bad way of doing it this is this is like a cleansing uh a reset yeah uh uh you know it's the cold shower thing you know yeah uh the the the what are they calling the cooling pool when you jump into the coop you know it shocks the system and resets and for high performance people that's necessary well and it's the people that stand on this debt-free stage that tell their story is this visceral never going back because of the sacrifice they had to go through to get to that point and if you don't have that sacrifice if you don't have some type of man this is uncomfortable and hard and i'm a little mad about it then you may go back that's a good point you may go back you're like oh and that hard let's do it again i don't think he's going to go back but what i'm saying is it just retrains you it's like i'm the the the groove my my habit my my behaviors are permanently shifted yeah because i forced myself through some discomfort right yeah that's a high performance activity people that are high performance do that kind of thing so that that's um i catch myself doing that in all kinds of different areas of my life i'm like okay i got to break that in order to break that i got to go over here and like i got to create an uncomfortable thing so that never go back over there yeah you know and that kind of a deal so that's kind of where i would throw this to but either way dude you're going to be just fine you keep cranking that guy if you do either one of these two plans mathematically you're gonna be fine but that's the argument for stopping your retirement temporarily while you're in baby step two and the rest of you don't even call me ask that question cause i'll just tell you don't do it i'm not going to give you as much grace i gave him because you're not making 400 grand all right get to where you are i'm gonna just hear it right now i can hear him dialing up right now quentin isn't smart you told him hey click quentin what's up hey dave hey christy thanks for having me huge fan of the show thanks um okay so i have kind of a two-part question here uh so earlier this year in february uh my new bride and i uh were married um because of the whole kobe thing obviously we pushed off a larger wedding ceremony until the summer of this year um that that's coming up next month um one of the questions that we've been struggling with is uh and we've honestly tried to do the dave ramsey plan starting with baby step one like twice and we've blown through our emergency fund like twice only because obviously the wedding's coming up and we've needed to take care of some expenses that's not an emergency that's a piss-poor planning you're already in trouble with quentin you're already in trouble you've already done you know you need to budget this wedding out it's not an emergency when you decide you're going to hire a photographer it's a decision so you don't touch your emergency fund for that so hey hold on we're gonna give you a wedding gift we'll put you through financial peace university with a ramsey plus membership hold on i'll take care of you we'll get you straightened out here brother [Music] what makes our show unique is that we genuinely care about our listeners we're intentional about choosing the best advertisers to recommend blinds.com is no exception they offer high quality window treatments at unbelievable prices and they make it simple to shop blinds shades and interior shutters with easy online ordering free shipping and a guaranteed perfect fit go to blinds.com and take advantage of this week's special savings [Music] imagine what your income could do for you if it wasn't going to somebody in the form of payments like credit card companies or student loan companies or your car payment what if you had no payments [Music] you know what you were just feeling in your heart you that could really happen for you it doesn't have to take as long as you think it does either you can get there and get you can get there with financial peace university it's the class that's helped over six million people learn the proven plan to get out of debt and become wealthy but it's not enough just to learn the plan you've actually got to do the plan put it in action every day and the way you do that is by budgeting with every dollar and you get both financial peace university and every dollar with a ramsey plus membership you can create a life where your money works for you not against you it's time to ditch this debt fast and for good start your free trial at ramsey plus by texting trial to 33 789 a free trial by texting trial two three three seven eight nine christie ryan ramsey personality is my co-host open phones at triple eight eight two five 825-5225 louise is in akron ohio hi louise how are you hi dave and christy thank you for taking my call sure what's up um i have a question about starting a roth after retiring my situation is i have a little over a hundred thousand in a 457. i'm 56 i retired a couple years ago and i don't plan on needing it anytime soon so i wanted to about take out about ten thousand a year from it and put that in a lot of 450 strain of roth so that it grows tax-free the 457 plan sent me the paperwork for it but they also sent me a lot of information about how i make more in the 457 because their fees are lower so is moving some of it to a roth a good idea what's it invested in in the 457 it's invested in um a couple of what they call it large cap mid cap and small cap funds what kind of what kind of returns have you been getting i've been getting some pretty good returns i'm averaging about 12 percent yeah okay that's about what you should be able to do good okay so i i don't know that they're correct on the fees i think that's probably just them trying to protect their accounts their portfolio but um i don't think you're going to gain a huge amount by moving money out of this uh to an ira in the in mutual funds that perform similarly i think you're going to have about a break even there the only thing you could have is the money from this point forward could grow tax-free however you're going to have to pay taxes on whatever you move so do you have some extra money that's not this account what they do is they will hold 20 of it no that's not that they don't either uh that's not up to you that's that's if you withdraw it if you withdraw it they withhold 20 but that's not going to be their option you can roll the whole thing to a traditional ira and they don't withhold a dime then when you roll it from a trigger then when you roll it from a traditional they're not allowed to withhold on that that's a true that's a direct transfer rollover okay indoor traditional enough to cover i would have enough to cover the taxes on about 10 000 a year okay if you roll it all to a traditional get with a smartvestor pro put it in similar mutual funds you're going to make about the same money and if you roll 10 000 a year out you're going to have about a 2500 tax bill on that you can go you're going to cash flow that tax bill that's what you're saying right yes correct so you don't have any other money yeah i've got an emergency fund and some other money in a fun for like home repairs car repairs okay and are you working uh your encore career after you retire because you're young yes right yes i'm running a small farm okay so what kind of money are you making there uh not a lot last year i grossed about 3 000 but i'm having the time of my life yeah okay so i want you to start making some money while you're having the time of your life too okay uh okay yeah let's let's get a little better business model i'll turn you over to christy on the farm here uh she's also someone who's lost money on a farm i'm with you louise i was having a lot of fun a lot of work but a lot of fun yes you know in addition to everything dave's talking about i'll send you my book business boutique uh woman's guide for making money doing what she loves it you can do both you can have you can have fun you can play enjoy the farm and also make some income that will help take the pressure off give you some options and uh just get that income up a little bit so we'll send you that as well yeah here's the reason i'm pushing you on that okay number one you're young and you've got a lot a lot of time left a lot of runway left to on-ramp to go do something big and fun make some money number two you kind of need to 100 000 bucks in that much money true so your nest egg's not huge and uh i would love for it to be if you told me if you had a million in there and you wanted to goof off on the farm and make no money we can talk about it but i need you to grow this nist egg for you and uh screwing around with ten thousand dollars is not fixing this um adding tens of thousands of dollars into your investments every year is going to fix it and get this thing up and that's going to require income so that's what i would tell you to do is work on this side of the equation too hold on we'll have madison pick up we'll send you a copy of christy's book open phones at triple eight eight two five five two two five rachel is in california hi rachel welcome to the ramsey show hi what an honor to talk to you both thank you for taking my call sure what's going on my question today for you is um me and my husband um we have about fifty thousand dollars in a savings account in the bank um it was going to be used towards me going to school however we had a child he's about a year now and i'm a stay-at-home mom and my husband loves being the breadwinner i'm itching to go back to work i'm itching to go back to school but he wants to use that 50 000 um that we have to start a business and he's always had businesses and in this case he wants to start a trucking business and we we both really just need some wisdom and guidance what to do next hmm this is this is interesting rachel this is an interesting question because uh this isn't as much about money as it is about values what you want to do with the money versus what he wants to do with the money so i'm curious if you uh go back to work what do you what do you do what do you want to do i'm a veterinary technician and i would be going back to that and the money was going to be for veterinary school which is i understand a huge commitment with a child and even just to go back to work would be great but i want to respect what my husband wants for the family structure yeah this is a this is a conversation that i think would be so beneficial to have with a counselor not because y'all are broken and your marriage is having a hard time but sometimes it can be so helpful to have a third party walk through what are his fears of you going back to work what are his desires what are your desires to go back to work what are your fears around money and that type of thing and dig to the deeper layers going on in this conversation that that i believe is a lot more than just financial but here's the here's the key both of you need to be heard both of you need to be a participant both of you need to be respected he does need to be respected as do you rachel both of you need to be respected heard seen and both of you need to speak into the decision if you do something that makes you concede your life in the name of respecting his view of the structure of the family that is creates an unhealthy relationship 10 years from today you will resent it that's not going to work you can only hold your breath so long so it needs to be where both of you have worked this thing through and you went you know what i like that i don't like it as much as b but i like a and let's go do this and uh there's you know you're gonna both of you are going to concede something but where you just say well i'm going to completely walk away from what i care about my dreams my thing because of his view of the family structure yeah that sounds bad when you just when you say that yeah so um i i think that the the beautiful music is made when both of you can play your instruments loud and um and even if they're not in perfect harmony but at least you're both playing them loud so i think christie's right on seeing someone and having them help you unpack that [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] brad and marisa are with us in new haven connecticut it says on my screen you guys are debt free congratulations thank you hi dean hey how much have you guys paid off we've paid off 88 608 dollars and 27 cents awesome way to go how long did that take that took us 22 months wow and your range of income during that time uh 140 000 up to 175. good awesome what do you guys do for a living i'm in finance and i was a teacher now i'm a stay-at-home mom and a freelance writer cool yeah and uh good so what kind of debt was the 89 000 oh we had it all uh two car loans 401k loan student debt medical bills and of course credit cards of course you guys were like normal how long y'all been married 10 years 13. 13 almost like i guessed it right good okay so after uh 11 years of marriage you looked up 22 months ago and said something's got to change tell us the story what happened yeah absolutely we were just sick and tired of living paycheck to paycheck and especially not knowing where all our money was going at the end of the year yeah the the end of the month was always like where did it go we had no idea and then um dave viewer a guest on another podcast that we both listened to and he came home from work one day and said hey did you yeah this guy dave ramsey was was on and i really like what he had to say and asked if i can grab the total money makeover the next time i went to the library and i had said oh i heard that today too and i really liked it so i'll get the book and i'll read it with you and the next day we got the total money makeover read it and oh gosh maybe two days and we drank the kool-aid cool who's podcast uh you were on ben shapiro's sunday special oh yeah yeah yeah good yeah ben and i ben and i have become friends since then that's very nice oh that's awesome he's a great guy he's a great guy their whole team just moved to uh to nashville to get out of california just a little while yeah well cool way to go guys that's so fun i'll have to tell him that happened he'll like hearing that so 89 000 later the total money makeover told you how to do it you go and do it right we did talk a little bit about what this was like in your marriage because y'all been married for over a decade when you started this plan talk a little bit about what it was like to to work as a team and have such an intense goal yeah absolutely um this is probably the biggest thing for imagine our marriage too is just having the joint commitment to to tackle this and change our spending behavior and especially change our family tree wow it all started off with you know us coming together reading this book like we said drank the kool-aid and then we uh sat down together for the first time did a monthly budget and together you know we took that first step on on this new lifestyle change yeah good for you i would say it actually uh you know we we've been through quite a lot in 13 years and but i would say that this was probably um just brought us so much closer than any of the other things we've done over the years yeah it does it's really it's it's it's just amazing in that sense what it did for our marriage yeah the only way to pull it off is to work together and the only way to work together is to be more unified than you've ever been so yeah it's a pretty pretty intense transformative process for sure what do you tell people what do you tell people the key to getting out of debt is i just like brad said just the joint commitment and being willing and able to to make those changes especially in your behavior doing it together and communicating your goals and your you know hopes for the future and we've done a lot of those dream meetings over the last two years and and that's and of course the budget the budget's huge because we never did that before when we when we wrote out our debts i put it on like this little drawing i made it like a big brick wall you know smallest to largest and just staring at it you're like this is going to take forever but you got to take the first step and it happened a lot faster than we thought and i know you preached that too on your show and it's true but it still feels when you're at the beginning like oh god this is going to take forever yeah yeah yeah it's a huge mountain sitting in front of you eighty nine thousand dollars worth yeah yeah we thought it was it was going to take a long time it was very daunting yeah what was the hardest part what was the hardest part that the dauntingness i think it was actually the hustle marisa also did waitressing to help accelerate this payoff so we would just be passing each other i would come home from work and she'd be on our way out and you know we have three young kids so uh no breaks we went since so i think just getting at it that was that was hard and we did that for for a while um but it paid off in the end so it could have taken a lot longer but that's right she's a tough woman so she got after it yeah we didn't see each other much yeah well you increased your income thirty five thousand dollars during this time had to you know unless somebody just got some inordinate raises you guys have been after it that's pretty cool we hustled well that's what it takes and uh the good news is now that you're free how's it feel now that you're free oh my gosh i think for me the freedom was was the biggest part and that really um hit me um back in the fall when it was time for schools to reopen and our school district was so wishy-washy and they're going back they're not and at that point we were on our last debt and our snowball was big enough where we were able to still you know make our snowball payments but also cash flow private school for our oldest daughter for the year and i felt like this is what freedom feels like this is you know i'm not not um yeah using debt to support it or just not knowing how we're supporting it just doing it yeah and just being able to to know that we didn't have to be at the mercy of you know teachers unions or politicians it was a big like that so that for me was was i think when it really hit that like wow look what we can do yeah money money has no value at all except what it will do and one thing it does is it gives you options yes that you don't have if you don't have money and you had options you could reach over to a private school keep the kid rolling and uh you know uh you know you you can avoid this that's one of the reasons that the pandemic had such a hard time the heart the hardest people hit in the pandemic the economic suppression from the pandemic was the uh folks on the bottom rungs i mean you know who who got who lost their job so it wasn't white collar executives on wall street they didn't lose their jobs who lost their jobs were the maids at the hotel because the hotel was closed down the waitresses you know but you you're waiting tables you saw it and those those restaurants closing up those are the people the people that could least afford to lose their jobs were the ones that lost their jobs it was a horrible thing a horrible inequality of how the economic suppression brought on by the governments and this how it affected everybody so anyway enough of that way to go you guys i'm so proud of you so proud of you we got a copy of the legacy journey for you that is the next chapter in your story for sure you have changed and set your legacy it is a new thing for you so proud of you also got a copy of total money makeover because that's what changed you guys and now you can give it to somebody when they ask and they say oh read this and i'll give you an extra copy to give away and i'm glad i'm glad the book was there to help you in the podcast and everything else brad and marissa 89 000 paid off in 22 months making 140 to 175 count it down let's hear a debt-free scream [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] this is how it's done that's awesome wow wow wow great job great job [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] our scripture of the day ecclesiastes 10 10 if the axe is dull and its edge unsharpened more strength is needed but skill will bring success john maxwell says small disciplines repeated with consistency every day lead to great achievements gained slowly over time open phones at triple eight eight two five five two two five j is in orlando hi jay how are you hey dave hey christy how are you guys today better than i deserve how can we help that's great so um i have an i hope a unique question i wrote um so i'm a cyber security architect and i wrote a framework similar to your baby steps for cyber security addiction cyber no sorry cyber addiction and um i want to know what to do with it next you know as cyber guys we are always writing like root cause analysis and i wrote that i wrote a cause a condition and a cure and it's very there's a lot of parallels to your baby steps and that kind of thing and it kind of like i got it like i've figured out what to say now i got to get people to say it to you so i wanted to call and ask what you would recommend who's it for people that are addicted more specifically than that right i mean like what's the what's your persona sorry uh so the groups would be um so family like used to do a lot of pastoral counseling is javelin families interpersonal marriages just people right people the way things are working now with a lot of applications there's a lot of addiction type like uis that are being created where where it's kind of like you walk in the front end of a casino right and there's lots of things going on there's i don't want to get too geeky on you but um there's there's this psychometric mapping that um anyway i've got a way to prove all that i got a way to help people out of that um i got a method very similar like i came down and i said can i can i figure out what happened can i figure out how it's changing people and then can i figure out how to actually help them get out and i got something in terms of uh cyber addiction are we talking i'm a little bit just a little more clarification are you talking about like uh people addicted to online porn are you talking about people just addicted to checking their facebook 73 000 times a day or playing games on their apps or something great great question so actually it's my opinion that in all those cases the same thing is happening in all those cases right it's like being addicted to food or addicted to anything else there's still there's a there's a change that occurs with a um high adherence to any type of ui like that so your your mind is being remapped no matter what so um i think the cause the the cure would be uh very similar in all those well i think the reason i ask the question is i think not not about the the process but what i'm trying to get clarification on is your customer base is different if you're going after people that are addicted to porn than if you're going after 52 year old women who can't get off of facebook that's that's why i was asking who's your market like who's who are you specifically creating this for i would start out with families okay the the first questions that i get most of the time is i can't connect with my kids anymore so they're they got their nose buried in a that's what you know it could be like with young adolescent males that there's a lot of porn going on right now and there's a lot of push towards there it's like prevalent but when you're talking with um teenage girls right it's a different thing right and if you look at the whole family unit really everybody's got their hook everybody's got their different from fathers like me to um you know everybody so um i i would approach it from the family point of view first of all i think that's the way i would do it but okay what what you're going to struggle with is you're you need to in order to get this to market you need to narrow your persona um we've asked you the question three different ways and we've gotten broad answers every time i want to get this to families you know that's just too broad so you need to say i want to get those families that are doing x y and z yeah okay that have families that are disconnected that aren't having conversations with their kids what what that's all families yeah that's all families but built but building that out from even a income level a psychographic geographic however you want to and then you'll know how to talk to them because where to find them yeah where to find them because that's the trick is is um i mean the irony is is that you'll probably find them online yeah yeah you know you may you may be doing some blogging you may be doing some stuff to get their attention uh and then with keywords and then set that out into the facebook universe and out into the uh google universe and and begin to pull back with seo but um but again you need to be targeting something more specifically than you are and the person in the family that's going to do something about it so either and it could be it doesn't have to be a certain gender just just moms or just dads but but pick a person that you're speaking to the one that is motivated to fix this problem because what's interesting about your situation jay with this specific problem is many people have this problem and don't know it's a problem ironically they do with money as well they have a money problem they don't know that they do is this something telling them they have a problem is this something you get to the marriage counseling community the pastoral counseling community and then they deliver it to their uh constituents um or are you going direct to the consumer and if you're the more you're going to go direct to the consumer the more you're going to have to decide exactly who it is at least for the first wave right you can broaden it later yeah but for the first wave um you know for the first wave of financial piece the book uh we were not going after uh 65 year olds back then in 1994 65 year olds most of them had common sense and the book was about common sense i'm not sure i could say that today about 65 year olds but the ones from 30 years ago yeah uh you know that are now 90 uh had common sense yeah and uh so i was not going after them i was going after the 34 year old mom sitting in a car pool line with student loan debt credit card debt and i had a fight with her husband about the money and so that's that's what christie means about a persona now once i know that she's the target then that changes the content message the uh the narrative that you use and you know where to locate them uh you know where where do you find a 34 year old mom sitting in a carpool line uh you know and where do you find a 65 year old white male you know i don't need him and so i don't need that's a rush limbaugh listener uh when rush was alive you know and uh no disrespect or anything but i just know that that's not my market right and that's not where we're going with it right and so who are we trying to help and then we're going to get it very narrow and go straight to them and then that'll help you locate the pool of potential prospects yeah let me give you something real specific and tactical that you can do jay because it sounds like to me that you're in the early stages of this it's still somewhat theory i know you said you have steps and you have a plan and it's proven it will work and so on i think that's great what i want you to do is take that to market on a really small kind of experimental research basis so reach out to anybody you know that could be family friends your church workplace community facebook i don't care just people that you know that fall within the general target market of who you're trying to help maybe some families that represent you know that ideal customer and i want you to take them through it maybe it's for free just for feedback and then as you walk them through this framework have them go through the plan you're gonna get testimonials you're gonna get feedback on things that need to change you'll learn more about your messaging how they describe it we'll give you some words to put to it of how you can describe it to more people it will also give you a base to start to ask for referrals and word of mouth it's a very organic way to start as you're getting this thing to market and then you can get a little more sophisticated through online marketing whether that's through social media or other paid marketing that type of thing uh once you get your language right but that you need to have real people help you with the language of how they talk about it so you can talk about how they talk about it so just start with start with what you have the people that you know take some people through it that'll give you some feedback to begin to grow it a little bit now the language that the customer uses is more important than the language that you think they should use yes actually that informs everything we do yeah the words that they use and how they use them and how they truncate um some of your thoughts into single words yes and that kind of a thing and so that's what you're looking for because that that causes you to build your content and your narrative out there so very interesting discussion jay it sounds like you're onto something sounds like it's needed for sure oh i know it's needed don't don't lay it down uh but let's get it narrow enough that you can get it off the ground that it has some power and some oomph so good question sir christy good hour thanks it's great good job to james childs and kelly daniels in the booth i'm dave ramsey your host will be back with you before you know it in the meantime remember there's ultimately only one way to financial peace and that's to walk daily with the prince of peace christ jesus [Music] hey it's kelly associate producer for the ramsay show this episode is over but if you heard about an event product or service and didn't have a chance to write it down don't worry we list everything you've heard about during this episode in the podcast show notes section or head to the ramsay show.com thanks for listening you

Channel: The Ramsey Show - Full Episodes

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Id: iPYPdipGLrQ

Length: 116min 52sec (7012 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021