{"id":327999,"date":"2025-12-16T02:38:47","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T07:38:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/episode-236-she-spent-5k-behind-my-back-how-can-i-trust-her-2"},"modified":"2025-12-16T02:39:22","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T07:39:22","slug":"episode-236-she-spent-5k-behind-my-back-how-can-i-trust-her-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/episode-236-she-spent-5k-behind-my-back-how-can-i-trust-her-2","title":{"rendered":"Episode 236. \u201cShe spent $5K behind my again. How can I belief her?\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"\u201cI spent $5K behind his back. It changed everything.\u201d\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/JrF-Grzj-lY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border-radius: 12px;\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/episode\/7rtW4nZM04ZDyoAiZpvT7o\/video?utm_source=generator\" width=\"100%\" height=\"400\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-testid=\"embed-iframe\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Alex (34) and Jackie (33) have been married for 11 years, raising four young kids while navigating a financial dynamic that\u2019s been strained for nearly as long. Alex is meticulous and cautious \u2014 he\u2019s tracked every expense since 2016 \u2014 while Jackie follows her instincts and believes God will provide. But when she secretly enrolled in a $5,000 coaching program and later pushed for a $16,000 photography course, Alex\u2019s trust shattered. Now he feels like he\u2019s carrying the entire financial load, while Jackie feels discouraged and untrusted. Their arguments spill into daily life, even in front of their kids. Can Ramit help them rebuild trust, confront their conflicting money beliefs, and finally create a system that brings peace instead of panic?<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><b>In this episode we uncover:<\/b><\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Why Alex has tracked every dollar since 2016\u2014and how control became his default coping strategy<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Jackie\u2019s belief that \u201cmoney will come\u201d and the role faith plays in her financial decisions<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">How a secret $5,000 coaching purchase shattered Alex\u2019s sense of safety<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">The emotional toll of raising four young kids while constantly feeling financially behind<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">How Jackie\u2019s childhood of scarcity and inconsistent money messages shaped her impulse-driven spending<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">How Alex\u2019s upbringing around saving, stability, and tithing taught him to equate control with security<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Why relying on miracles and unexpected windfalls creates a fragile financial foundation<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Jackie\u2019s desire to feel heard, supported, and validated\u2014instead of managed<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Why Alex feels lonely and burdened in the role of financial gatekeeper<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">How a shared money system can shift them from crisis-mode to long-term partnership<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">The first steps they take toward rebuilding trust, financial clarity, and a plan they can both commit to<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h4><b>Chapters:<\/b><\/h4>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(00:00:00) <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">\u201cDo you trust each other?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(00:17:40)<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">\u201cWe had $300 and no plan\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(00:29:15)<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Ramit breaks down their numbers<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(00:37:15)<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">\u201cIf we just made more, everything would change\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(00:50:52)<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">\u201cI wasn\u2019t taught to dream \u2014 just to survive\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(00:58:53)<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">\u201cHope isn\u2019t a financial strategy\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(01:07:33)<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">\u201cI want the positive behavior without the crisis\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(01:16:36)<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">\u201cThe house is on fire\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(01:29:07)<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">\u201cThat changes <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">everything<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(01:36:56)<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\"> Where are they now? Alex and Jackie\u2019s follow-ups<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><b>This episode is brought to you by:<\/b><\/h4>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Gusto | Try Gusto at <\/span><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/gusto.com\/ramit\">https:\/\/gusto.com\/ramit<\/a><\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\"> and get 3 months free when you run your first payroll<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Leesa | Go to <\/span><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/leesa.com\/\">https:\/\/leesa.com<\/a><\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\"> for 30% off mattresses PLUS get an extra $50 off with promo code RAMIT, exclusive for my listeners<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Factor | Go to <\/span><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/factormeals.com\/ramit50off\">https:\/\/factormeals.com\/ramit50OFF<\/a><\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\"> and use code RAMIT50OFF to get 50% off your first box, plus free breakfast for 1 year<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Rocket Money | Cancel unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster at <\/span><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/rocketmoney.com\/ramit\">https:\/\/rocketmoney.com\/ramit<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Trust &amp; Will | Protect what matters most in minutes at <\/span><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/trustandwill.com\/ramit\">https:\/\/trustandwill.com\/ramit<\/a><\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\"> and get 10% off plus free shipping<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><b>Links Mentioned In This Episode:<\/b><\/h4>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">If you want help with your finances, join my Money Coaching program at <\/span><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/iwt.com\/moneycoaching\">https:\/\/iwt.com\/moneycoaching<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<h2 aria-level=\"2\"><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Transcript<\/span><\/b><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;134233117&quot;:false,&quot;134233118&quot;:false,&quot;134245418&quot;:true,&quot;134245529&quot;:true,&quot;201341983&quot;:0,&quot;335559685&quot;:2010,&quot;335559737&quot;:2010,&quot;335559738&quot;:375,&quot;335559739&quot;:375,&quot;335559740&quot;:768}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1JiOYxY-9TUJmhyFJGlKNuggZqeX3arNx\/view?usp=sharing\"><span data-contrast=\"none\">Download the full transcript PDF<\/span><\/a><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;134233117&quot;:false,&quot;134233118&quot;:false,&quot;335559685&quot;:2010,&quot;335559737&quot;:2010,&quot;335559738&quot;:150,&quot;335559739&quot;:150}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:00:11]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Do you trust each other when it comes to money?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:00:13]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:\u00a0<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Not completely. No.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:00:14]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:\u00a0<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When was the example where you lost financial trust?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:00:20]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:\u00a0<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She was like, I got to tell you something. And then she&#8217;s like, I spent $5,000 thousand dollars on this coaching program. That for me was like, Whoa. It was dizzying.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:00:32]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0How did you feel?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:00:32]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Just like the floor dropped out. It hurt really bad.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:00:35]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0The next morning I had an extreme panic attack and I thought that I was going to die in my sleep because I had made that decision.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:00:41]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I know that this tracking system is archaic and doesn&#8217;t work.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:00:45]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You&#8217;re at least not counting 20% of the stuff you&#8217;re spending, which is why your savings account&#8217;s dwindling. Which is why you&#8217;re going to be in a real financial problem in a matter of months.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:00:56]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0God was very much like, &#8220;This is not what I have for you.&#8221; We saw the miracles that happened to bring us out of that, that it&#8217;s almost like, oh, it&#8217;s okay if we&#8217;re in debt.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:01:05]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Hope is not a financial strategy. God is not a financial strategy. We need to make a plan.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Narration]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:01:11]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Alex and Jackie live in North Dakota. He&#8217;s 34. She&#8217;s 33, and they&#8217;re raising four children under the age of eight. Let&#8217;s take a second to just acknowledge how amazing it is that they could find a few hours to spend with me today.\u00a0In his application,\u00a0Alex said this about Jackie.\u00a0&#8220;In 2024, she took us $15,000 into debt for a photography business course so we could make more money. It took nine months and a lot of miracles to pay it off, and I&#8217;ve had a lot of trouble trusting her financially after that.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:01:45]\u00a0Now, there are layers here. Today you&#8217;re\u00a0going to\u00a0hear how their faith shaped their money decisions, sometimes as guidance, but other times as a crutch to avoid responsibility.\u00a0And before we dive in, I\u00a0want to\u00a0hear from you in the comments, when was a time you lost trust with your partner over money? What happened,\u00a0and did you ever get it back?\u00a0Today the question is whether they can stop repeating the same cycle and finally build a plan that they will both follow.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:02:14]\u00a0I&#8217;m about to open Alex and Jackie&#8217;s conscious spending plan, which breaks down their net\u00a0worth, income,\u00a0and where they spend their money.\u00a0You can download and create your own CSP for free at iwt.com\/csp. Assets,\u00a0300,000.\u00a0Investments, 98,000.\u00a0Savings, 16,000.\u00a0Debt, 224,000, which leaves them with a net worth of 189,000. Their gross income is 91,000. Here&#8217;s the real problem. Their fixed costs are 87%.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:02:46]\u00a0That means that almost every dollar they earn is already spoken for before they ever get to savings, investment,\u00a0or guilt-free spending. And with four young children, that is a very dangerous place to be. Can these two learn to trust each other and pull themselves out of this financial hole?\u00a0Let&#8217;s get into it right now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Interview]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:03:07]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Alex, in your application, you wrote something that really caught my eye. You wrote constant bickering about spending.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:03:17]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:03:18]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I track everything meticulously, but we still overspend, and I blame Jackie. What&#8217;s going on there?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:03:29]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I am able to track things and meticulously organize things and have a lot of trouble with what to do with that. And yeah, I guess leading in a way that makes us both on the same team instead of me putting myself in this role where I feel like I have to be a task master or in charge or something.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:03:54]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I see. And what does it feel like to you to be in that role?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:04:00]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It feels like I am a farmer running after 20 chickens, and nothing works. And it just feels like loud chaos.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:04:08]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Who are the chickens in this example?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:04:11]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I guess Jackie.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:04:17]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0And in what ways, taking the metaphor and extending it, does it feel like you are chasing after her?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:04:26]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. I feel like I want and need reassurance of, &#8220;Hey, I&#8217;m committed to living within the means that we have right now, and I&#8217;m aware of where we&#8217;re at each month, and I care about that, and I&#8217;m taking that into account as I make purchases.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:04:48]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Do you feel you have that reassurance or no?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:04:50]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Most of the time, no. Sometimes yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:04:53]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. Jackie. Curious what your reaction to that is.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:05:00]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I feel sad because there is some element here where I do feel like he is in control. And not in the bad way. It&#8217;s just I&#8217;ve managed my money in a way that it&#8217;s like, oh, Alex is the tracker. Alex is in charge. Alex is the one&#8211; and I forget to text him sometimes, a lot of the times, and now we&#8217;re at the point where we&#8217;re not even texting and&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:05:26]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What does that have to do? Texting means what?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:05:29]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. So that&#8217;s how we track our budget. So whenever we spend something, we text each other how much we spent. So if we&#8217;re at the grocery store, we just checked out, it&#8217;s like, okay, I spent $200 at the grocery store, and we send it off.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:05:41]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What? Wait a minute. Hold on. What? Am I in the stone age right now? Can you just pull up your phone? I just want to see like, what do the texts say? I know you haven&#8217;t done it in a while. That&#8217;s fine. Just go back to the last time you did. I want to see what some of them say.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:05:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:05:56]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I live for this. All right. What do you got, Jackie?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:06:00]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0$40 groceries, $307 groceries. $26 groceries. $21 Angelic Gardens. 162 Target groceries. $125 bird curriculum for homeschool.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:06:19]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What? Oh, you homeschool your kids?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:06:21]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:06:22]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. And you bought a curriculum for how much?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:06:24]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0$115.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:06:28]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. I notice you&#8217;re avoiding eye contact as you say that. All right. How often do the two of you talk about money? And we can include these texts, but also talking.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:06:39]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Via the text, almost daily. And then talking about it, gosh, I&#8217;d love to hear your perspective too, Jackie, but think it was almost every day&#8211; some comment or something. Almost every day. Yeah. But in terms of a actual sit down, full conversation about it, we were meeting weekly to talk about budget, vision for the family, homeschool, all the things every Friday. But then some of the kids would go down late and we wouldn&#8217;t do that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:07:11]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s impressive, though. How long were those meetings that you used to have every Friday?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:07:16]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0An hour to an hour and a half. And we weren&#8217;t just talking money. We were talking beyond that. But money was a piece of it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:07:23]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It was big vision. Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:07:24]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Cool. Wow. That sounds great, honestly. Very rare and extremely impressive. Do you trust each other when it comes to money?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:07:33]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Not completely. No.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:07:35]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Jackie?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:07:36]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I trust that he is not going to spend anything, so yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:07:43]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I have a follow up to that. Does not spending anything make you good at money?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:07:49]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No, no. It&#8217;s horrible. No. But I think that&#8217;s what I can count on him for. I can count on him not to spend money.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:07:57]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Jackie, what can he count on you for?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:08:02]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0To either not know what the budget is like, to overspend, and to, yeah, not communicate about money.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:08:18]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Hmm. Okay. That&#8217;s pretty interesting. Alex, would you say that that is why you applied to speak to me today?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:08:25]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, definitely part of it. I definitely know that I&#8217;ve created an environment&#8211; I know that this tracking system is archaic and doesn&#8217;t work. That&#8217;s why we stopped using it this month, especially after filling out the conscious spending plan. It was very clear, like, why have I been wasting all this time?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:08:44]\u00a0So everything that Jackie just said is part of it, but also I know that I&#8217;m 100% responsible and complicit in creating that environment in which she felt like that. If I was having kinder, gentler conversations with her, I&#8217;m sure it would&#8217;ve went differently. And so I just want to be able to be more compassionate about it and more responsible.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:09:06]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0With the old system where, Jackie, you would occasionally text the expenses that you had incurred, like groceries, etc., you would text Alex. And then what would happen next?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:09:18]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0He would put them on our budget. He always updated the budget, especially before meetings, if we were to have a meeting.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:09:27]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Alex, how often would you edit the budget?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:09:33]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Three or four times a week.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:09:34]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Three or four times a week. And how long would you say you spent per week on that budget?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:09:39]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Probably an hour a week.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:09:41]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Hour a week. And how long have you maintained that budget for?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:09:45]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Since 2016.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:09:49]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Wow. Almost 10 years.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:09:51]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:09:52]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Do you have it? Can I look at it?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:09:54]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:09:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Oh, throw it up.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:09:56]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. Okay.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:09:57]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Love a good budget.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:10:00]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. So I guess it would be&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:10:02]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Oh, hold on. Let me just describe what I see. This just popped up on my screen. I got to look. First of all, I see a lot of numbers, a lot. I see all categories. There are from row seven, which is mortgage. Let&#8217;s scroll down a bit. Tithe, Zoom. Zoom is a category, by the way. $17. $18 a month. I do see a lot of colors.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:10:26]\u00a0So I see gray, red, and green. I can tell that some of them are just standard, automated. Like Spotify doesn&#8217;t change. Gym membership appears to be pretty much the same. But then we have these spiky ones, which are in red and green, like groceries and gifts, which cycle red to green. Am I reading this right, Alex?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:10:48]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Absolutely. Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:10:49]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. Are there any other sheets on this? I&#8217;m very suspicious. Where&#8217;s the rest of this stuff on here?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:10:54]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. So there&#8217;s&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:10:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Oh God. Savings and investing is another row. And then there&#8217;s&#8211; scroll down. What is all this[Bleep]?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:11:03]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0This is random stuff to remember. So if this category says kids activities\/Jackie&#8217;s business, if any category was really high, I put the large purchases here to remember why it was like that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:11:18]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0This is\u00a0[Bleep]\u00a0crazy. All right. Hold on. Before we go on, I just want to say I\u00a0[Bleep]\u00a0knew it. I knew that it looked too simple. I was like, &#8220;10-year budget? This is pretty simple. Where&#8217;s the rest?&#8221; And then we scroll down. There&#8217;s all these weird notes. And what&#8217;s on the right? I&#8217;m seeing some more numbers. Sums.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:11:37]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So totals. So then the goal was, here&#8217;s a budget of what we were trying to hit every month and did not hit ever. And so it was red if it didn&#8217;t fall within what we had thought it should, and green, if it did.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:11:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I love tracking something for an entire decade that I never actually win at. Really motivates me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:12:00]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It&#8217;s the worst.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:12:01]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So what did you do differently after spending an hour a week for 520 weeks of this budget?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:12:10]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We would have conversations about things and try to make adjustments. So if groceries were really over, we would say, &#8220;Hey, how could we meal plan to do something different next month?&#8221; Getting actual results from doing that was very hard for us.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:12:29]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Hmm. Jackie, what&#8217;s your take on this budget?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:12:32]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Just to go back to what Alex said, even we meal planned in order to cope with the budget so that next month would be better, and it was higher. It was higher. Our systems are broken.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Narration]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:12:46]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0The system you build is supposed to guide you, not make you feel overwhelmed and lost.\u00a0But that&#8217;s exactly what happened here. I don&#8217;t think Alex is trying to control Jackie. He&#8217;s trying to control chaos through a spreadsheet. 10 years of budgets,\u00a0over 500 hours, and they still feel like they&#8217;re drowning.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:13:08]\u00a0Do you see why I\u00a0[Bleep]\u00a0hate budgets? How many people have come on this show totally overwhelmed by their financial situation,\u00a0and yet they are meticulously tracking every freaking number?\u00a0And I go,\u00a0&#8220;What&#8217;s the point of this?&#8221;\u00a0And it&#8217;s like they look up.\u00a0They are visually startled. I don&#8217;t know. I&#8217;m not sure.\u00a0Why do you do it? I don&#8217;t know.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:13:30]\u00a0You do it\u00a0because\u00a0you crave control.\u00a0And it&#8217;s easier to control cell D 46 than to actually zoom out and look at the real problem. And I am begging you,\u00a0put your stupid\u00a0[Bleep]\u00a0spreadsheets away. This is exactly why I created the conscious spending plan.\u00a0Tracking every little tiny detail does nothing for you. It feels good.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:13:51]\u00a0I\u00a0got to\u00a0say this. I&#8217;m\u00a0going to\u00a0get in trouble from a lot of workout people. I don&#8217;t give a [Bleep]. It&#8217;s like people who go to these workout classes and they&#8217;re like,\u00a0&#8220;Oh, I feel so good. I&#8217;m sweating.&#8221;\u00a0Okay. You might be sweating. I could make you sweat right now.\u00a0Put you in a freaking airport at 72 degrees and walk around with your heavy-ass backpack. You&#8217;re sweating. That doesn&#8217;t mean it&#8217;s a good workout.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:14:10]\u00a0It&#8217;s the same thing with the way you manage your money. Just\u00a0because\u00a0you&#8217;re tracking 5,000 numbers does not mean you&#8217;re actually getting ahead. You might feel like you are, but I&#8217;m less interested in your feelings sometimes and more interested in objective progress.\u00a0Hold on.\u00a0Now I&#8217;m sweating. Oh, such a good workout,\u00a0everybody. Ramit Sethi, sweating in his all. It&#8217;s not a\u00a0[Bleep]\u00a0workout.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:14:32]\u00a0Budgeting is backwards looking. Here&#8217;s what you spend on Brussels sprouts. Look into my eyes. I do not care. The CSP says,\u00a0&#8220;Here&#8217;s what we care about.\u00a0Here is where our next $100 is going to be allocated.&#8221;\u00a0If your system is just making you anxious and guilty and resentful, it&#8217;s probably time to change the system. Now I\u00a0want to\u00a0hear about why this behavior even started in the first place.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Interview]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:15:02]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0How long have the two of you been married?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:15:05]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It&#8217;ll be 11 years in a couple of days.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:15:08]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Cool. Congrats. That&#8217;s awesome. So before kids, did you text each other expenses?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:15:17]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No. We didn&#8217;t do that. I don&#8217;t even know. Do you remember, Jackie, when we started that? That was the last couple years, I think.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:15:23]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I didn&#8217;t know how much money&#8211; I&#8217;ve never known. I don&#8217;t think I knew how much money we had in our budget during that time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:15:30]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You didn&#8217;t talk about money in the beginning.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:15:35]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Not back then.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:15:35]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:15:36]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. When was the first time you substantively talked about family finances?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:15:41]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Hmm. The first time I remember was&#8211; let&#8217;s see. We got married in 2014. 2015, I quit my job, and I was the sole provider, from a financial standpoint, and we were couple hundred dollars away from running out of money completely. And I was looking at our account on my phone, and we were in bed. I turned over to Jackie and said, &#8220;Our rent&#8217;s due in, I don&#8217;t remember, 15 days. We have $300. What are we going to do?&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:16:19]\u00a0And she looked at me, and she laughed and said, &#8220;There&#8217;s nothing we can do except for go apply for jobs and go make some money.&#8221; And the next day she applied for a bunch of jobs and got five job offers. And then got a job at a coffee shop and started making money that week.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:16:34]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Wow. What do you make of that, Alex? What do you make of Jackie&#8217;s response and her reaction?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:16:42]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0She just doesn&#8217;t have the stress that I have and the need for control that I have. And I admire that freedom and secretly wish that I could be like that, but I also don&#8217;t see, if both of us were like that, how it would work.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:16:58]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Hmm. What about you, Jackie? Hearing that story, reflecting back, what do you notice about your reaction?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:17:06]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I haven&#8217;t been a steward of my finances. My goal and financial goals have just been pie in the sky dreams and haven&#8217;t been intangible reality, being able to be measured.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:17:27]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. That&#8217;s interesting. My reaction&#8217;s a little different. Okay, I&#8217;m sure what you&#8217;re saying both of you is true, but from that specific story, the fact that Alex, you were like, &#8220;Hey, we&#8217;re running out of money. I don&#8217;t know how we&#8217;re going to pay rent.&#8221; And Jackie&#8217;s like, &#8220;All right. We got to find a job. I&#8217;ll go out.&#8221; And then she goes out and gets one tomorrow.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:17:46]\u00a0To me, that is a sign of somebody who&#8217;s pretty resourceful. And I think especially when you&#8217;re married, you want to know that you can count on your partner. They&#8217;re going to step up and know what needs to be done and just do it. And to me that is a great example of a resourceful partner.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:18:02]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Absolutely. I really admire that about her. That story actually makes me happy. I feel really good hearing that story.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:18:10]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. Okay. Alex, when was the example where you lost financial trust in Jackie?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:18:19]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So a couple of years ago, she had some entrepreneurial dreams, and so she signed up for coaching program for a third of what we had in savings. So it was $5,000, and signed up for that while I was at work.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:18:39]\u00a0And then I came home, drove, pulled in the garage, got out of the car, and she was like, &#8220;I got to tell you something.&#8221; And then she&#8217;s like, &#8220;I spent $5,000&#8211; I don&#8217;t remember if it was five or six or something thousand dollars&#8211; on this coaching program. And I don&#8217;t remember what you said after that, but that for me was like, whoa. It was dizzying.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:19:01]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0How did you feel when you heard that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:19:03]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Just like the floor dropped out. Like, whoa, I didn&#8217;t know you could do that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:19:11]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I didn&#8217;t know you could do that. That&#8217;s cool, or something else?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:19:14]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No, no. Like betrayed. Yeah, betrayed basically. It hurt really bad. Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:19:21]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Did you ever use that word and tell Jackie that before now?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:19:24]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;m not sure.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:19:27]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, I definitely got that. The next morning I had an extreme panic attack and I thought that I was going to die in my sleep because I had made that decision.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:19:36]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:19:37]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:19:37]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What happened next?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:19:39]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I was upset and emotionally affected by that for a while, for months I think.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:19:46]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Did you ever ask her to cancel the coaching program?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:19:50]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, I did.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:19:52]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What happened?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:19:54]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0She said she couldn&#8217;t.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:19:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I said no. I said I couldn&#8217;t because I was so depressed. We had had three children at the time. We lived far away, around the middle of nowhere. All my friends were really new, but I just felt so depressed, so without direction. So not able to function as a human being. And I needed someone who was outside of it all to give me just a broader perspective.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:20:23]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So when you told him, I can&#8217;t cancel it, were you saying, I can&#8217;t cancel it because I need this coaching program right now, or I can&#8217;t cancel it because it&#8217;s literally not cancelable?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:20:39]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I can&#8217;t cancel it because I need this right now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:20:41]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. Alex, did you understand that at the time?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:20:44]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No, I thought it was not cancelable, as in no refunds. Can&#8217;t cancel it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:20:50]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Did you just learn that just now?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:20:53]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That was the clearest I&#8217;ve ever heard it said, and I actually don&#8217;t think she&#8217;s wrong about that. It ended up being a really good thing for us because&#8211; aside from the trust piece of it, it ended up being a good thing for us because we had to have more conversations that were hard. And I think that was a good thing.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:21:14]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I don&#8217;t think he knew at the time how&#8211; yeah, you didn&#8217;t know how deeply depressed I was. I don&#8217;t even think I knew.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:21:23]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm. Did the coaching program work?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:21:28]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. It didn&#8217;t work what&#8211; I signed up for it for our finances, but what I got was just that Jesus loves me. I don&#8217;t even know how to explain it, but my coach was more spiritual, and it was exactly what I needed for the whole year.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:21:46]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What type of coaching was it?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:21:49]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Tony Robbins coaching.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:21:50]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. And when you say, &#8220;I originally signed up for our finances,&#8221; what do you mean by that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:21:58]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0One of the goals that they have you fill out on the intake form was what&#8217;s your goal? And I was like, &#8220;Oh, I want to be able to make $40,000 this year. That way I can contribute to our family. Alex doesn&#8217;t have to stress anymore about money. I don&#8217;t have to stress anymore about money. And I can become a new person.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:22:18]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. That&#8217;s interesting. And since then, just to stick on the earnings part of it, that was several years ago. Have you earned $40,000 a year?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:22:33]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No. No, I have not.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:22:35]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. I understand that programs and coaching can often work in unexpected ways. I&#8217;ve had people join my Earnable business program and then they realize like, I actually don&#8217;t want to start a business. I actually find that really valuable. Better to know that now, spend a few thousand bucks, than to go down two years of heartache. But I also think you got to be able to afford these things. And you certainly have to be able to talk to a partner about a 5,000-dollar purchase.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Narration]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:23:09]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0There are two key things here that I want to address. First, did you catch when Jackie said she was depressed?\u00a0I really paid very close attention to that. We throw that word around a lot. I&#8217;m so depressed.\u00a0But real depression is extremely serious. Jackie said she felt like she could not function, isolated, lost.\u00a0And instead of talking about it, she signed up for a $5,000 coaching program, and then she told Alex after the money was gone.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:23:36]\u00a0If you are listening and you&#8217;ve felt like that, like you&#8217;re drowning, directionless, like you have no energy to do anything, then I would highly encourage you to talk to a therapist.\u00a0Get the support you need before the damage becomes even harder to undo.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:23:50]\u00a0Now I\u00a0want to\u00a0talk about that $5,000 course. Jackie admits that she spent the money because she felt lost.\u00a0However,\u00a0she was able to do that because she and Alex did not have an agreed upon number that either of them could spend without discussion.\u00a0And it also feels like a little act of rebellion by Jackie too. Oh, you want me to text you every time I spend money? You need to have control?\u00a0Well,\u00a0take this.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:24:14]\u00a0Nobody wants to live their entire life asking permission, especially not from their spouse. There is a simple fix here. Set up a clear spending threshold.\u00a0If you are below that number at the end of the month, amazing. If you are above that number, first of all, don&#8217;t get above it.\u00a0But if you do, then it is your responsibility to bring it up and come up with a plan going forward.\u00a0And if necessary, discuss why you might want to adjust that number\u00a0overall.\u00a0The point is you have to start somewhere more nuanced than simply spend as little as possible.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Interview]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:24:49]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0If I say the word money, how do both of you feel about it? Jackie?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:24:54]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0In this moment, sad.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:24:56]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You feel sad about money. How come?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:24:59]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Because I don&#8217;t have enough to give and live the life that I want to live. It&#8217;s hard. It&#8217;s a point of contention in me, and it&#8217;s been a point of contention in me essentially since that time, where I decided I was going to try to hustle and just also being super dishonest about what I wanted to do. My dream job is to be a songwriter. And yet when I put all of my energy into photography, it was not fulfilling at all.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:25:44]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. I hear that. There&#8217;s a sorrow in looking at some of the choices that we made. Sometimes the results that they got us, sometimes that we made a choice out of fear instead of what we really wanted to do. I can understand why even bringing up the word money can make you instantly sad. Okay. Alex, how about you? When I say the word money, how do you feel?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:26:15]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Dizzy. Dizzy and confused and conflicted. Feel like I should want to make a ton more money or care about money a lot, but my emotions don&#8217;t match that. My emotions feel resigned.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:26:33]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Oh, resigned. That&#8217;s interesting. I wouldn&#8217;t have expected you to say that. I would&#8217;ve expected the opposite. I would&#8217;ve thought you would&#8217;ve said, &#8220;I feel like I shouldn&#8217;t care about money, but I actually do.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:26:45]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:26:45]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0And I say that because your behavior of tracking money for a decade communicates that, that&#8211; it&#8217;s very hard for people to spend an hour a week for a long time on something they don&#8217;t really care about. What do you make of that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:27:02]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. I&#8217;m open to that, for sure. It feels that I liked the system though, and not the money piece of it. That I like just fiddling around with systems. If you can even call that a system. Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:27:17]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I think I understand a bit. All right. Let&#8217;s take a look at the CSP. Jackie, I would like you to read the word in bold and then the full number next to it for this entire box, please.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:27:29]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, we have\u00a0assets, $300,000.\u00a0Investments, $98,358.\u00a0Savings, 16,000. And\u00a0debt, $224,953.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:27:45]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Total net worth?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:27:45]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Total net worth\u00a0is $189,405.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:27:50]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. What do you think about those numbers? Jackie?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:27:54]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0There&#8217;s regret tied into it. I still think there&#8217;s a lot of regret tied into these numbers. And so that&#8217;s how I feel.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:28:05]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. What regret?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:28:07]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Just our first decisions, like me not getting a job right away.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:28:13]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You feel like it could be more had you done that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:28:15]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:28:16]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. All right. Alex, how do you feel about those numbers?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:28:20]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Unsure. Just unsure of whether they&#8217;re good, bad, how it matters. Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:28:28]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I really appreciate the honesty in your answers because I think what you both just told me is actually how pretty much 99% of Americans feel about their numbers. First of all, they don&#8217;t even know what their net worth numbers are. These are four numbers, assets, investments, savings, and debt. You just add them all up, make sure you subtract the debt, and you have your total net worth.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:28:52]\u00a0The vast majority of people have never done this. So that&#8217;s part one. Part two is, all right, what the hell does this mean? We need to turn money into meaning. Just seeing a number, whether it&#8217;s negative 52,000, 189,000, or 1.8 million, what does it mean? We are not taught to think about that. And so we just ignore it like the way Jackie did.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:29:21]\u00a0Your first word was about regret. You went back into this story. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Let&#8217;s talk about the numbers. But numbers are just numbers to us. They actually don&#8217;t really change the way we feel unless we are trained on how to think and feel about them. All right. Let&#8217;s keep going here. We have a total net worth of $189,000. And let&#8217;s talk about income.\u00a0Alex, can you give me the combined gross monthly income, please?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:29:46]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes. 7,664.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:29:49]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right.\u00a0So the household income, which I think is your income exclusively, right, Alex? Okay.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:29:54]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0At this point, yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:29:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0$91,968 per year. And then let&#8217;s go down to big number on this.\u00a0Fixed costs. What&#8217;s that number?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:30:04]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a087%.\u00a04,951.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:30:07]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. So 87% of your take home pay is spent on fixed costs. That&#8217;s it. That&#8217;s the ball game. When you&#8217;re at 87%, I never even need to meet you. I can already tell you&#8217;re stressed out about money. So let&#8217;s take a look at the rest of the CSP and see how it plays out.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:30:25]\u00a0Investments are at 2%. That&#8217;s $90 a month in post-tax with a 401k contribution of $460 per month. All right.\u00a0Savings at zero.\u00a0And savings amount in the bank is 16,000, which is about three months of expenses roughly. Okay. Three months of fixed costs.\u00a0And then finally down to\u00a0\u200aguilt-free\u00a0spending. We are at 11% or $651 a month. Is that number true?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:30:58]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It&#8217;s not. We&#8217;re spending way more than that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:31:01]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Exactly. Okay. That&#8217;s what I thought. So then if we go back up, you&#8217;re in debt. So I want to ask about the quality of that debt. What is this $224,000 in debt? Break it down for me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:31:12]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Everything in that is the mortgage, except for we owe 5,000 on our car.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:31:22]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0On your credit card&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:31:25]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No. To a family member who loaned us money with no interest for car.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:31:31]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Oh.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:31:31]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes. No credit card debt.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:31:34]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Oh. Hold on. You&#8217;re telling me you spend way more than $651 a month. Where&#8217;s the money come from?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:31:42]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Our savings. It just goes down every month.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:31:45]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You&#8217;re drawing from your savings. Each month?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:31:49]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:31:50]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What did your savings used to be at the peak?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:31:54]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Right before we bought our house, we had 35,000 in there.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:31:59]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm. How long until you run out of savings?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:32:02]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I haven&#8217;t ran that calculation, but it would eventually. Yeah. A couple of years.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:32:10]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Maybe sooner.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:32:11]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:32:13]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Jackie, what do you think about this?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:32:16]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I feel like my attitude is the same as that time. It&#8217;s like, okay, let&#8217;s go make money. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Okay, well let&#8217;s be resourceful. Okay, what are we doing?&#8221; That&#8217;s why we&#8217;re having meetings, so that we can really get a bigger vision.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Narration]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:32:34]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0With Alex and Jackie, you can see the pattern. They are reactive instead of proactive. Their fixed costs are too high.\u00a0Their savings are shrinking every month.\u00a0And when things go wrong, they retreat into spreadsheets and meetings.\u00a0It&#8217;s also dreary. What they really need is a system to get them off the hamster wheel.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:32:53]\u00a0And if you are in the same spot, if you&#8217;re tracking every dollar, you&#8217;re having endless money talks that just feels so negative and nothing&#8217;s really changing,\u00a0you don&#8217;t have to figure it out alone. I cover exactly how to build a real system\u00a0inside our\u00a0Money\u00a0Coaching program. You can sign up at iwt.com\/moneycoaching.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Interview]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:33:14]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Right now you make 91,000 bucks, and you are spending more than you make every month. Let&#8217;s say you made $150,000 a year. Would it change the financial dynamics that we see here?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:33:30]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0100%.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:33:31]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Tell me how.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:33:34]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We would have guilt-free spending with groceries. I feel like every month there&#8217;s this expectation that it&#8217;s less than 1,400 or 1,300, however much there&#8217;s that threshold. And it&#8217;s just not like it really is, just around that number each month.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:33:49]\u00a0And so that wouldn&#8217;t be that much. But then we would have the freedom to redo some of the parts of the house that really stress us out and that&#8211; I feel like everything would be organized in a better way. And I feel like right now things are just disorganized because we have this mindset that we don&#8217;t have enough money.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:34:12]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Wait a minute. Hold on. I asked if you make 150k, would it change? You were like, &#8220;Absolutely yes.&#8221; I was like, &#8220;How?&#8221; And then you proceeded to tell me all the ways that you would spend more money. We would spend more on groceries. We would spend more on home renovations. And by the way, things would somehow be organized, somehow, some way. Isn&#8217;t this the problem? If they&#8217;re not organized at 91, how are they going to magically be organized at 150?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:34:40]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I guess we could set a higher savings budget.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:34:43]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Hmm. Let&#8217;s take a look. Net income or take home pay after taxes and pretax withdrawals, $5,692 a month.\u00a0Your mortgage is $1,567.\u00a0Your car payment is $370. Okay. Debt,\u00a0zero. Interesting though, even though you have $5,000 owed to family.\u00a0You&#8217;re not making payments on that, right?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:35:12]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Oh, I put that in the wrong category then. So 200 a month is going towards that from that 370.\u00a0So then\u00a0170 is gas. I wasn&#8217;t sure where to put all that stuff.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:35:22]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. Let me\u00a0just fix it.\u00a0170 is gas.\u00a0200.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:35:26]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:35:27]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. Fine. That&#8217;s fine.\u00a0Groceries at $1,550 a month. Okay. Clothes\u00a0at 100.\u00a0Phone at\u00a0148.\u00a0Tithing at $569 a month,\u00a0and subscriptions at $123 a month. What do y&#8217;all think about those fixed costs?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:35:47]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Grocery sticks out to me as being really high. We have four kids, but still it feels pretty high.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:35:52]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. Jackie?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:35:56]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Groceries is as much as our mortgage.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:36:01]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, that&#8217;s true. Groceries and your mortgage are the same. Yeah. What else? If you just zoom out, how do you feel about the overall way that you are spending your fixed costs?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:36:15]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I don&#8217;t like the result.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:36:18]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Keep going.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:36:19]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Because of the tension that it&#8217;s creating in our marriage.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:36:24]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Uh-huh. You had mentioned earlier, we could save more. It&#8217;s unclear to me where you would get the money to save more.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:36:32]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Right. I think that&#8217;s where it was like, oh, if we made 150k, we would have more to save more.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:36:39]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. I think that&#8217;s probably true. You would probably be able to save a little bit more. But my guess is you would end up spending just as much.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:36:45]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:36:46]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Do you have a list of things, Jackie, that you want to buy when you&#8217;re financially able to?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:36:52]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:36:53]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm. What&#8217;s on that list?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:36:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. I think it would be just a lot more giving. Being able to maybe even open up a storefront. Something small is having the money to record music. Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:37:22]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Hmm. Alex, do you have a similar list?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:37:26]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Not really. Yeah, not really.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:37:30]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s exactly what I suspected. Alex doesn&#8217;t have a list because he doesn&#8217;t dream. He&#8217;s just a mechanic. He&#8217;s a money mechanic. Just turning the wrench. But it&#8217;s an interesting&#8211; some people are like, &#8220;I want to be able to take this type of vacation.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:37:50]\u00a0Didn&#8217;t hear that from you, Jackie. I did hear, &#8220;I want to be able to give more.&#8221; That&#8217;s interesting. &#8220;And maybe I want to be able to spend some on my hobbies, songwriting, things like that.&#8221; Interesting.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:38:03]\u00a0What happens in the \u200aguilt-free spending? It says 600 and something dollars, $651. What do y&#8217;all spend each month on discretionary purchases?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:38:16]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Homeschool curriculum, kids&#8217; extracurricular activities. Whether that&#8217;s homeschool, PE, or co-ops, or music, or swim lessons.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:38:34]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Is there a limit on how much you spend on for kids?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:38:41]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:38:42]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No limit. But there&#8217;s a limit on a lot of other stuff, huh?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:38:46]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:38:47]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Oh. Did we assign a limit? Yes, but it&#8217;s arbitrary because we don&#8217;t follow it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:38:52]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s okay. That&#8217;s common. But just the idea of like, can you imagine saying no to something for kids, something that they really want or that you think they really need for financial reasons?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:39:09]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I can.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:39:10]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Would you do it?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:39:11]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I would.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:39:12]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You would. Jackie, would you?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:39:15]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No. I think we&#8217;ve talked about&#8211; music is a very big expense. And I don&#8217;t know, Alex, where that falls. Where does that fall in the budget?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:39:30]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Like on our system?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:39:31]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, on our system.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:39:34]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Kids&#8217; activities.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:39:36]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Throw that up, Alex. Let&#8217;s just look at that for a second again.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:39:38]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:39:39]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Let&#8217;s look at the single source of truth for the last 10 years. This&#8217;ll be good. Quite an interesting swing here. Some months it&#8217;s $1,000. Other months it&#8217;s $120. So if I had to guess, I&#8217;m guessing this is an average of 600 bucks a month just for kids activities. All right. Hold on. Hold on a second. Miscellaneous, holy\u00a0[Bleep]. $398 in a month. $409, 978, 904. What&#8217;s miscellaneous?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:40:14]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Let&#8217;s look at the footnotes. Let&#8217;s bring&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:40:16]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0These are actually coming in useful, even though I made fun of them for 10 minutes straight.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:40:19]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. Oh, we bought a new couch&#8211; a used couch, garden stuff. Hotel. Oh, for a kids&#8217; activities.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:40:30]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Keep doing the miscellaneous. What else are y&#8217;all spending on miscellaneous?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:40:35]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Kids&#8217; birthdays.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:40:36]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, that&#8217;s a good one. Homeschool curriculum. Plants for the yard.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:40:40]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:40:40]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Dodgers game, Zoom membership. Okay. These are all normal family expenses. I get it. You could take it off screen. But what I notice is there is no strategy. It&#8217;s just random stuff. And when you&#8217;re making a good income, $91,000, those things do add up. They really add up. Because we&#8217;re not talking about one or two things.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:41:09]\u00a0We&#8217;re talking about every month there&#8217;s at least $1,000 of expenses that are not accounted for here. Your take home pays 5,600 bucks per month. You&#8217;re at least not counting 20% of the stuff you&#8217;re spending, which is why your savings account&#8217;s dwindling. Which is why you&#8217;re going to be in a real financial problem in a matter of months. Jackie?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:41:35]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Oh, no. I don&#8217;t like that this excites me. I don&#8217;t like that this excites me. Why does this excite me? Because then I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Now we have to go do something.&#8221; Whereas Alex, I think that it&#8217;s hard when I want to make more money and you don&#8217;t care about money. Because I feel like I can&#8217;t care about money, but I do care about money.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:41:57]\u00a0But then I work at home and I&#8217;m like&#8211; I stay at home. I don&#8217;t work at home. I stay at home. But it&#8217;s like, should I be working? And then it&#8217;s like, I don&#8217;t want to work, so I want to be with the kids. I don&#8217;t know. It&#8217;s an interesting dynamic. Sorry, I went on a rant.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:42:15]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Does that happen a lot, this spinning about money? Or is it only now that we are looking at it?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:42:23]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Now that we&#8217;re looking at it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:42:25]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm. Alex, have you ever wanted Jackie to look at the budget that you kept?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:42:32]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:42:32]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Did you ask her to?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:42:34]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:42:35]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What&#8217;d she say?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:42:37]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Sometimes she&#8217;ll look at it and sometimes&#8211; I can&#8217;t even think about it, which is sad. I actually don&#8217;t even know. It hasn&#8217;t resulted in us really looking at it closely.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:42:47]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Jackie, what&#8217;d you do when he asked you to look at it?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:42:50]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0The last time I was willing to download the app so that I can see how much money we have in our bank account before I spend.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:43:01]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0How much you have in your checking account, right?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:43:05]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes. Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:43:06]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. So what does that tell you? It&#8217;s 200 or 4,000. What does that tell you?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:43:14]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It says whether or not I can spend X, Y, Z on groceries, if I&#8217;m out buying groceries.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:43:25]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0But what if it says 200 bucks in the checking account and you have 500 bucks of groceries? What are you going to do then?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:43:31]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Go put some back.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:43:35]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Can I tell you something? I understand the dynamic if you were poor. I understand that. When people are truly poor, they actually have to know how much they have in their checking account, and they are literally putting stuff back on the shelves because the money is just not there.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:43:58]\u00a0Y&#8217;all make $91,000 a year. I don&#8217;t think looking at your checking account to gather information about your financial situation is the right level you should be operating at. You actually have to be upleveling in the way you think about it. That&#8217;s thinking about net worth, thinking about investments, fixed costs.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:44:21]\u00a0It&#8217;s as simple as what&#8217;s on the sheet, but it&#8217;s more complex than how much you have in your checking account. To put it another way, I would never allow myself to get to the point where I have to put a bag of cookies back onto the shelf. That needs to be sorted out months prior.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Narration]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:44:36]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0When I asked Alex and Jackie if making 150,000 would change everything,\u00a0they said yes instantly. Yeah,\u00a0nice fantasy. That&#8217;s not\u00a0going to\u00a0happen. All of us believe that more income will magically solve our money problems.\u00a0But in reality, they would probably just scale up the same mistakes.\u00a0More groceries, more hobbies, more stuff for the kids.\u00a0More money, same problems.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:44:57]\u00a0And they even know it. Jackie admits that she gets excited by a crisis because it forces her to\u00a0act.\u00a0Now,\u00a0I used to feel like that when it came time to write an essay,\u00a0because\u00a0it was due the next day in college. That&#8217;s\u00a0funny when you&#8217;re 20 years old.\u00a0It&#8217;s not so funny when you have children at home and you&#8217;re talking about 80-something percent of your net income going to fixed costs.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:45:21]\u00a0And she spends about whether she should work or stay home or just hide from money altogether.\u00a0It&#8217;s classic avoider behavior. And meanwhile, Alex has been attempting to engage over a spreadsheet for 10 years, a spreadsheet she won&#8217;t even look at. I talk about this in\u00a0Chapter\u00a06\u00a0of Money for Couples,\u00a0my new book.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:45:39]\u00a0This is the Chaser Avoider Dynamic. It is exactly as it sounds. One partner chases.\u00a0The other avoids.\u00a0And both of\u00a0them\u00a0end up exhausted,\u00a0basically in exactly the same places where they started.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:45:51]\u00a0If you&#8217;re\u00a0going to\u00a0spend time agonizing about money, worrying about money, stressing about money, my feeling is you might as well actually get some results. It&#8217;s like those little annoying kids who sit there and they pretend to brush their teeth.\u00a0They don&#8217;t actually brush. You&#8217;re standing in front of the freaking sink. You might as well just brush your dirty,\u00a0little teeth.\u00a0Get that filthy plaque off it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:46:09]\u00a0I&#8217;m not\u00a0going to\u00a0name who, but I was taking care of some little kids. My limited experience with kids, I did not realize they lie about brushing their teeth.\u00a0So we&#8217;re like,\u00a0&#8220;All right.\u00a0Go brush your teeth.&#8221;\u00a0They&#8217;re like,\u00a0&#8220;Yeah, I brushed my teeth.&#8221;\u00a0And then I was like,\u00a0&#8220;What&#8217;s this antenna going up in the back of my head?&#8221;\u00a0I was like,\u00a0&#8220;Let me smell your breath.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:46:25]\u00a0A phrase, by the way,\u00a0that I have not uttered in about 35 years,\u00a0I just had this intuitive feeling.\u00a0So intuitive. I smelled that\u00a0[Bleep]\u00a0like it was from hell.\u00a0I said,\u00a0&#8220;What the\u00a0[Bleep]?\u00a0I forgot that kids lie about brushing their teeth.&#8221;\u00a0I sent them straight back in there. Go back in there. Don&#8217;t come out for 10 minutes. Every parent on this podcast, I really feel for you. I truly do.\u00a0Some disgusting\u00a0[Bleep]\u00a0happening in bathrooms across America.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:46:54]\u00a0All right.\u00a0Now back to Alex and Jackie.\u00a0The truth is, unless they break this cycle, they&#8217;re\u00a0going to\u00a0be having the same fights 10 years from now. I&#8217;m not\u00a0going to\u00a0allow that. I\u00a0want to\u00a0find out where their relationships with money came from right after this break.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Interview]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:47:07]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Alex, what do you remember your family saying about money when you were growing up?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:47:12]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We didn&#8217;t talk about it a ton. I remember being told to if I&#8217;ve ever put anything on a credit card, to pay it off that same month and never carry credit card debt. When I was 15, my first job was a busser, and I made tips. So I put everything into a savings, and I only spent tips.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:47:36]\u00a0And so in my head, if I&#8217;m not saving everything, it&#8217;s not enough. But that&#8217;s not what&#8211; my parents never said that, but that was what picked up from that job because I did that when I was 15.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:47:49]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0And what did your parents do?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:47:52]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0My dad worked for an insurance company and was in sales management. My mom was a kindergarten teacher.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:48:01]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, got it. Got it, got it. Were they religious?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:48:05]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:48:06]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0They were. Okay. And you two are both religious, correct? I saw the tithing.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:48:10]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:48:10]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, cool. What&#8217;d they teach you about money besides save and pay off debt?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:48:20]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Always give 10%. Be faithful with that no matter what, and it will pay off.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:48:25]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:48:27]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s pretty much it. Give if you can and help people out. They were really good about that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:48:33]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0And then after you graduated, you got a series of jobs. What&#8217;d you do with the money?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:48:41]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0At first we were saving a lot and then we had two times where it dwindled. The first time was because of quitting that job basically for mental health reasons. Having no income for six months, blowing 16 grand in six months.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:49:01]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0A lot of parallels. You had money. You saved it. You only spent the tips. And then something happened after accumulating all this money. You spent it down, then it happened again. Here we are again. It&#8217;s at least the third time. What do you make of that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:49:20]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. I don&#8217;t know where it came from, but there must be something stuck in there about this is the level of person I am or some amount of worth tied into that. Yeah, I don&#8217;t know. It&#8217;s hard because I feel like I&#8217;m grateful for how much I make and how much we have. And I want to steward it better. I don&#8217;t know. It&#8217;s all a tangled mess. That&#8217;s as far as I got.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:49:49]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. All right. What about for you? What do you remember your family saying about money when you were growing up?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:49:59]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0A lot of it. My mom being a single parent from in my elementary years, and it was like, we don&#8217;t have the money, or we took I think one family vacation. It was the most special time ever. But yeah, we didn&#8217;t have the money to do or to have the things that I wanted.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:50:25]\u00a0Even when my mom got remarried, the conversation was, we&#8217;re not going to buy those clothes. Those are too expensive, or we&#8217;re not going to do that. But we spent money on other things. We ate out very regularly. So the money was there, just that our values were different.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:50:47]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. So you get older, Jackie? Did you go to college?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:50:53]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes. Yeah. Alex and I met in college.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:50:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Oh, cool. Okay. How did you pay for college?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:50:58]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0My parents paid for college. The first quarter I paid for it because I had actually run away from home at that point. And so all the money that I had saved since I was 16 to 18 had gone into a bank account. And when I ran away from home, I took that money and I decided that I was going to pay for my first quarter of college and then see what happened. Basically just living on faith. I didn&#8217;t really have a plan.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:51:28]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Do you mind my asking? Why did you run away?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:51:31]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. I ran away because I didn&#8217;t feel like I could talk about my feelings and that they would be heard or receipted.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:51:40]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm. Your family&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:51:41]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Or received. Yeah, yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:51:44]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0But then one quarter later, your parents began paying for your college. How did that happen?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:51:51]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We met, and there were apologies made. And so I think there was just like a, this was the plan from the beginning. They had already planned to pay for me to go to college. So it was like, &#8220;Okay, let&#8217;s just resume the plan.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:52:14]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What is your relationship like with your parents now?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:52:19]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0With my mom, it&#8217;s good. I feel like there&#8217;s been a lot of forgiveness present, so that&#8217;s been good.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:52:28]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0And your dad?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:52:29]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0My dad actually just passed away two months ago.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:52:32]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;m sorry.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:52:33]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, yeah. That&#8217;s okay. He was my best friend. And he was the money guy, so it was really&#8211; but at the same time, looking at his lifestyle, if he would&#8217;ve shared his knowledge, he would&#8217;ve been able to make more.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:52:54]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:52:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0But he was just such a good, funny, really good at his job, really a go-getter, very resourceful. He started working for an RV business about three years ago, and he just took it to number three in Yuma, Arizona last year. And I was just so proud of him. He just had a strong work ethic. But whenever it came to like, dad, how do I do these systems? Or will you teach me? He was just so secretive about it. He is like, &#8220;I can&#8217;t tell you the secrets.&#8221; I can&#8217;t&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:53:28]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What do you mean?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:53:29]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0He didn&#8217;t share. He didn&#8217;t share how he did it. He didn&#8217;t share&#8211; I would always make comments like, &#8220;Dad, I should just come down and be your apprentice for a year. I would love to do that.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:53:43]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What did he say when you told him you want to apprentice with him?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:53:47]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0He just laughed it off. He always held me at an arm&#8217;s length away. He just didn&#8217;t know how to be present with me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:53:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That is confusing and sad and beautiful all at the same time. I really appreciate you sharing that. Sorry for your loss.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:54:09]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, thank you.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Narration]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:54:10]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Notice the pattern here. Alex was told, save, tithe,\u00a0never carry credit card debt.\u00a0Jackie was told, we don&#8217;t have the money for that.\u00a0And Jackie&#8217;s dad was the money guy. He was resourceful and successful, but secretive. He never shared what he actually did. When parents don&#8217;t openly talk about money, it really disadvantages their kids. You leave them to guess.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:54:36]\u00a0And the truth is, kids usually get it wrong.\u00a0Like Jackie for example, she learned that money is contradictory and confusing. Sometimes it&#8217;s scarce, sometimes it&#8217;s plentiful, but it is never explained. You&#8217;d be amazed how many parents don&#8217;t talk to their kids about money. Oh, they have a all kinds of convenient reasons why.\u00a0We\u00a0want to\u00a0let kids be kids.\u00a0That&#8217;s for adults. Those are just excuses.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:55:00]\u00a0The real truth is most parents don&#8217;t even understand money themselves. So how can they ever teach their kids about money? Their lack of money education to their kids is more shame than strategy. And I&#8217;m\u00a0going to\u00a0say something direct to the parents here, coming from a non-parent, fix this.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:55:19]\u00a0This is so important that if you don&#8217;t improve your own relationship with money and you and your partner&#8217;s relationship with money,\u00a0and then educate your children, you are leaving them at a lifelong disadvantage. This is not like,\u00a0&#8220;Oh, I never taught my kid how to ski or how to swim in a current.&#8221;\u00a0No.\u00a0Money affects them every single week of their lives.\u00a0Fix it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:55:44]\u00a0Alex and Jackie never got that education, which is why today they&#8217;re still chasing and avoiding,\u00a0still replaying those childhood money scripts.\u00a0And you can see exactly how those scripts are shaping their relationship right now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Interview]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:55:57]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0When you both think about the way that you were raised with money with your families from being young, what lessons do you think you&#8217;re bringing from your childhood into this relationship with money?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:56:10]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0For me, definitely the 10% tithing every month, regardless of what the circumstances are. I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve ever missed that ever. And then having an extreme aversion to debt. I think those are the two things that&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:56:32]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Not that extreme. You have debt?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:56:35]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Right. Yeah, right. So talking out of two sides of my mouth, It feels uncomfortable, and I feel uncomfortable about it every time I think about it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:56:43]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm. Okay. Jackie?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:56:47]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0But to speak to that too, Alex, I think like, because we were in debt and we saw the miracles that happened to bring us out of that, that it&#8217;s almost like, oh, it&#8217;s okay. God was very much like, &#8220;This is not what I have for you.&#8221; Do you feel like you budged a little bit or compromised in this area of debt?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:57:06]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What&#8217;s this miracle we&#8217;re talking about?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:57:09]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I purchased another program after the Tony Robin&#8217;s program.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:57:18]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:57:19]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0And it was $16,000 instead of $5,000. And I did ask Alex this time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:57:28]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What kind of program was this?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:57:30]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It was a photography business, essentially going back to school to get your studio certificate, kind of.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:57:41]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a016,000. And then?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:57:43]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0And then I made 6,000 that year.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:57:46]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Uh-huh.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:57:47]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0And so I didn&#8217;t make the money back. And so we had $9,000 that we owed on our credit card in November. And we knew that it was going to hit again in April. So we were like, &#8220;Okay, we have five months to make this money. What are we going to do?&#8221; And so that&#8217;s when we started meeting regularly, and money just started showing up.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:58:12]\u00a0We had a random person give us an envelope of $1,000 at church. We got into a car accident that paid us $1,200, and nobody was hurt. No one was injured. At that time I gave up my photography business. I had a heart to heart with God. It was like God was very much like, &#8220;This is not what I have for you.&#8221; So I laid that down and I just saw how much he loves me and cares about us. And by the grace of God, we made $9,000, and I could not tell you how that happened.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:58:50]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Wait, that&#8217;s what I want to know. Where&#8217;s the rest?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:58:54]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0The church wanted to hire me to redo their website and work for them. So that was $1,000 a month. So that&#8217;s $5,000.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:59:04]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s great. That&#8217;s impressive. So what was your takeaway from that experience going from November to April?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:59:13]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I just felt so supported. I was just like, &#8220;Man.&#8221; When we come together and have an intention and a goal, it can happen.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:59:25]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. Alex, what was your takeaway from that experience?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:59:30]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Grateful, but I also felt like it was really lucky. Yeah, gratitude, and like, wow, we were really lucky. That was close. Hmm. Jackie, you agree?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:59:43]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, yeah. There was this element of like, wow, God really supported us. Yeah. It felt otherworldly. It wasn&#8217;t me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[00:59:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;m asking, and I&#8217;m probing here because you came to talk to me, not for example, somebody who works in the church and probably talks about money. You came to me. And so while I appreciate your religious beliefs, for me, hope is not a financial strategy. God is not a financial strategy. In my view and the way that I work, and in my material, we need to make a plan.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:00:24]\u00a0And if other things happen that we cannot explain, I&#8217;ll accept them. Great. But I don&#8217;t need them. I need my plan, and I&#8217;m going to work the plan, and I&#8217;m going to engineer a Rich Life for myself and for my family. That is my approach. How do you both feel about that? I just want to check in right now. Alex is nodding his head.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:00:47]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:00:48]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Jackie&#8217;s pausing and smiling and thinking carefully about her next words. Go ahead. You don&#8217;t have to walk on eggshells. Say what you feel.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:00:57]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No, I think a lot of my decisions are conflated with God. And people have told me that. I&#8217;ve gotten that before, where it&#8217;s just like, I think you have religion and morality and X, Y, Z conflated. It&#8217;s not related.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:01:19]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Oh. And how do you receive that feedback?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:01:22]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know what that means. That&#8217;s great. I&#8217;m glad that you see that, but if you have any more insight to show me, I would appreciate that.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:01:29]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I do. That&#8217;s interesting that you&#8217;ve received that feedback.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:01:32]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:01:33]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Here&#8217;s my take. Two of you are religious, and a lot of religion based on faith&#8211; what religion are you?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:01:43]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Christian.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:01:44]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, Christian.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:01:45]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. All right. So a lot of religion based on faith. Totally get it. Great. When it comes to money, you&#8217;ll often see an intersection between dreamers and faith. Dreamers, one of the four money types in Money for Couples will use words like, if we are good people, God will provide.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:02:14]\u00a0They&#8217;ll sometimes say things like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t want to work a 9-5. I&#8217;m not into that. They will look for alternative types of income streams, often finding themselves in things like MLMs, crypto, schemes, things like that. They often believe that success is just one gig away or one deal away.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:02:36]\u00a0And if we just get this one thing, if we just increase our income to 150k, problem solved. We can pay off the debt. Dreamers don&#8217;t usually like to engage about money. And I find it very interesting that you have shown me some really strong clues that you will engage about money.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:02:54]\u00a0You&#8217;re like, &#8220;Hey, break it down for me.&#8221; Or, &#8220;I&#8217;m getting excited.&#8221; Or, &#8220;Oh, we can&#8217;t make the payment? Got to find a job.&#8221; Whoa. So you have this interesting dichotomy, but I am almost certain that your faith informs the way you see money. If we do the right thing, if we sit down, we will be provided for. Maybe. I hope that&#8217;s true. But I can&#8217;t depend on that. I need to make a plan, and I need to make sure that even if nothing external happens to us, this plan works. How does that strike you?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:03:29]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, it feels very secure.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:03:34]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Whoa. What do you mean by that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:03:37]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Inside of hoping, it&#8217;s like there&#8217;s a lot of reliance on God. And while I love relying on God, I would love to rely on God for other things and not financial security.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:03:51]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Love it. Maybe God needs to take a break from the financial advising. He&#8217;s got other things to worry about right now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Narration]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:03:58]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Listen closely to Alex and Jackie&#8217;s story. They talk about miracles and luck and envelopes of cash at church, but in reality, they can only afford to talk like this because they have a built in bailout.\u00a0An interest-free loan from Alex&#8217;s family. This is the hidden cost of relying on miracles.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:04:15]\u00a0You start to live as if someone will always step in to save you.\u00a0And sometimes they actually do. A family member floats you money or a windfall shows up. But each of these bailouts just reinforces the idea that we need to wait to be rescued.\u00a0You don&#8217;t build a real system. You don&#8217;t make hard choices. You simply wait for the next rescue to appear.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:04:39]\u00a0Well, rescues don&#8217;t last forever. At some point, the money doesn&#8217;t show up. And when that happens, you are exposed, especially because you never learned how to handle money yourself. The funny thing is that when Jackie&#8217;s back is against the wall, she actually stepped up very well.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:04:54]\u00a0She told Alex,\u00a0&#8220;I&#8217;m\u00a0going to\u00a0go out and get a job.&#8221;\u00a0She did the next day. But why do we have to wait until you are running out of money? People living their\u00a0Rich Life\u00a0never wait until their back is against the wall.\u00a0They make plans well ahead of time. That&#8217;s why I&#8217;m pushing Alex and Jackie so hard here. Faith can bring comfort, but in the long term, faith doesn&#8217;t pay the bills.\u00a0A system does.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Interview]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:05:19]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So let&#8217;s bring it back to trust here. When the word trust gets brought up, it&#8217;s like a red flag for me. I lean in. I want to know what&#8217;s going on. So when we reflect on what has happened in the past with money, we have Alex who says, &#8220;I sometimes trust Jackie, but not always.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:05:39]\u00a0Alex, you&#8217;ve created this Byzantine system where Jackie has to text you all this stuff. What do you even do with it? You fiddle around with it, you process the data, but does nothing. And then we have the history of buying these, what I might call dreamer purchases.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:06:01]\u00a0If I buy this multi-thousand-dollar course. No, not that course. Actually, let me buy this course. This&#8217;ll be the one thing. What do you notice as I illustrate what I&#8217;ve heard today? Jackie?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:06:17]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;m definitely a dreamer. Yes, you&#8217;ve nailed it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:06:22]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0How do you think being a dreamer affects the dreamer&#8217;s partner?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:06:29]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Probably have some running around, trying to catch all the chickens, because there&#8217;s so many dreams. So I&#8217;m not the chicken. My dreams are the chickens.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:06:37]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Wow. Well said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:06:40]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:06:41]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Alex agrees.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:06:42]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, I do. That&#8217;s true. Because I love her and I support her, and that&#8217;s why I went along with the things that I was brought into. But it&#8217;s hard, yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:06:53]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0One of my favorite things is when people go through an experience and then they take away completely the wrong message. And I love it. They&#8217;re like, &#8220;Hey, Ramit. I was running late to this thing, so I decided to run the red light. I was going 80. And there was a cop. They turned on their sirens, but then they took a left. And I realized, as long as you are going 80 and your car is green, cops don&#8217;t pull you over.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:07:24]\u00a0I go, &#8220;What the\u00a0[Bleep]? That&#8217;s not the takeaway from that story.&#8221; There was a bank robbery, and you just got lucky because they had to go to something more important. That&#8217;s the wrong takeaway. In some ways, I feel there might be the wrong takeaway here, because the takeaway of, oh my God, we have this debt&#8211; so you both sat down.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:07:43]\u00a0You both had an honest conversation about your financial situation together. There was a sense of urgency. We have this many months. Third, you made a plan. And what did you do during those months? By the way, were you meeting regularly, some might even say religiously, all the time? Never missing it. Right?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:08:05]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes, sir.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:08:06]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:08:06]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0And then good things started to happen. Now I&#8217;m glad good things started to happen. That&#8217;s awesome. And perhaps there was something in the air. Perhaps it was faith. Perhaps you were more attuned to opportunities like at the church. Great. Doesn&#8217;t matter to me. But the fact is, you were doing specific behaviors. And then once the debt was paid off, what happened to those meetings?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:08:27]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I think it got sporadic.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:08:28]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0They stopped. And then the debt or the spending has gone up. There&#8217;s a very strong correlation here. The behavior affects the outcomes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:08:40]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, that makes sense for sure, 100%.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:08:45]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, but I don&#8217;t want negative behavior to&#8211; it&#8217;s like our poor choices to fuel our desire to have positive behavior. I&#8217;d rather just have the positive behavior outright.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:09:02]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Agreed. So let&#8217;s all agree that we want to minimize the &#8220;negative behavior.&#8221; Once in a while, things might happen. That&#8217;s okay. We&#8217;ll give each other some grace. No problem. But in general, let&#8217;s optimize for a positive Rich Life, not preventing all the bad things that can happen. Everybody&#8217;s good with that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:09:23]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Absolutely.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:09:23]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Cool. All right. Alex, what would you need in order for you to financially trust Jackie again?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:09:32]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I realize I&#8217;m basing it on a feeling. I don&#8217;t know how to explain it. A feeling of trust that anything that&#8217;s going to be significantly impactful for our family, that we&#8217;ll be able to discuss and have an honest conversation about it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:09:50]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0She needs to be willing to talk to you about money. That&#8217;s it?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:09:54]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I want to see results obviously. I&#8217;d love to have six months of expenses in the savings and to be trending positive instead of trending negative. And obviously that&#8217;s on both of us. But if I saw that, I would trust her also, because my perception is that a lot of the downward trend is from purchases that she&#8217;s making.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:10:26]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Jackie, what do you hear there?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:10:27]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. Alex, I could be completely wrong and off base, so let me know, but I remember meeting a couple of times after our debt was gone and we were trajecting up, and it was like, okay, we&#8217;re going to meet four months. This is awesome. It was really like, okay, we&#8217;re going to have that money in the bank so now we can start putting money towards these dreams that we have. And I just feel like you have such resistance to that being a reality because of the fear of actually having these dreams come to pass.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:11:03]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:11:05]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0And so I remember feeling discouraged. I remember it&#8217;s like suddenly there were these expenses that were coming up that were preventing us from getting to four months. And I just wanted to snowball stuff so that we could just get that four months tucked under.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:11:20]\u00a0Because I think that&#8217;s been a huge conversation too, is like, &#8220;Okay, we can once we get three months.&#8221; But then it changes. It&#8217;s like, oh, once we get four months. Okay. Once we get six months. And it&#8217;s like, it&#8217;s never going to end. And then I get discouraged and then it&#8217;s like, what&#8217;s the point of even saving anything?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:11:38]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. But Alex, I think she makes some good points though. Is there a fear that, okay, we hit this thing, but now I need to move the goalpost. It needs to get bigger and bigger. Are you afraid of Jackie spending money on music or another course?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:11:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I feel like our current financial situation, the way it stands now, without intervention, which is why we&#8217;re here, we can&#8217;t afford to do those things. And it seems impossible from where we stand now without changing a lot. And so, yeah, I guess. There is a fear of like, &#8220;Hey&#8211;&#8221; It doesn&#8217;t show up to me as a fear, but I&#8217;m totally open to the fact that it might be.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:12:20]\u00a0To me it feels like reality says, &#8220;Hey, if we&#8217;re losing money every month, we don&#8217;t even have enough to cover expenses if something happened. I don&#8217;t feel comfortable spending that on music.&#8221; So that&#8217;s what it feels like to me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:12:35]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Can you both be right?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:12:38]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:12:40]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Jackie, is it possible that Alex is right? You&#8217;re spending more than you make. You&#8217;re in a critical financial danger zone. And you are also right that you want to eventually be able to record some of your songs.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:12:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. Yeah, totally. That&#8217;s good.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:12:58]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;ll tell you something. Life cannot simply be putting out fires for the rest of our life. How do both of you feel about that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:13:07]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I love that. Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:13:08]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s why both of you have to be involved. And I actually have a lot of confidence you can do it, because you&#8217;ve proven in the past that you can do it. You sat down. You made those freaking meetings. You put those kids to sleep. You said, &#8220;We have a goal.&#8221; We&#8217;re going to solve this. And you did.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:13:22]\u00a0The problem is that you did it in a very episodic way. Means a one-off way. Let&#8217;s just do this one thing, fix it. You basically put a patch on the wall, and you&#8217;re like, &#8220;Ah, this [Bleep] thing looks good enough. We&#8217;re out of here.&#8221; We can&#8217;t do that. This is for the rest of your life. It is a totally different relationship with money, and we&#8217;re going to tackle it by looking at the conscious spending plan.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Narration]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:13:48]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, Jackie is a dream. But I relish the rare opportunity to work with a dreamer because wanting to spend money is not selfish. It&#8217;s normal. It&#8217;s actually healthy. That&#8217;s why guilt-free spending is an integral part of my system. Money is meant to be enjoyed. The real problem isn&#8217;t Jackie&#8217;s desire to spend.\u00a0It&#8217;s that she and Alex don&#8217;t actually have a real plan.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:14:11]\u00a0So of course, spending feels episodic and arbitrary. And when Alex changes the rules, like three months of savings or four or six, of course, Jackie feels like she&#8217;ll never get her turn.\u00a0This is why it is so important to have regular monthly money conversations and a conscious spending plan that you both understand.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:14:32]\u00a0They focus you on getting clear about what you actually want, what you need, cutting back on the things you don&#8217;t care about, and even protecting the things you really do care about.\u00a0A monthly money meeting allows you to create space for both partners to share your dreams.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:14:48]\u00a0Now, you can do this on your own. You can use\u00a0my Money for Couples book that just came out. I have the exact words to say. Or if you want us to help you do it even more and make it effortless,\u00a0you should just join my Money\u00a0Coaching program. We do this.\u00a0We meet every single month. You are going to love it.\u00a0As for Alex and Jackie, it&#8217;s time to face an uncomfortable truth.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Interview]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:15:08]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Here are your numbers. My assessment of these numbers is that you are in considerable danger. I&#8217;ll tell you why I see that. When I look at your income, you&#8217;re at $91,000 gross, and you have a big family. So with that income and a big family, even with relatively low housing costs, the numbers really matter. The numbers really matter.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:15:38]\u00a0We can&#8217;t just be randomly spending an extra $800 or $1,200 a month, which is exactly what&#8217;s happening here. Your fixed costs are simply too high. You are actually spending more than you make every single month when you factor everything in, and you are putting yourself at risk because you don&#8217;t have very much going to investments, and your savings are at zero.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:16:03]\u00a0You are very close to running out of money, like within a matter of months. And while I hope you have people to save you, if you don&#8217;t, you are really screwed. How does my analysis strike you both?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:16:18]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;m just back there again, where Alex is like, what are we going to do? It&#8217;s like, okay, let&#8217;s go make money.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:16:29]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Your natural tendency is to apply a patch on the wall quickly. Let&#8217;s make money quickly. And that mindset has to change. I&#8217;m surprised you&#8217;re not freaking out.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:16:42]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Me too.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:16:43]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Why is that? You&#8217;re months away from running out of money. Is it that somebody will provide? It&#8217;s always been fine. It&#8217;s going to be fine again.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:16:54]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:16:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Alex will protect. Alex is in charge. He&#8217;ll figure it out, that thing?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:16:59]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, Alex will figure it out. Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:17:02]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. Here&#8217;s what we&#8217;re going to do. I&#8217;m putting these numbers up on screen. What I want is for us to try to get these numbers back to the standard conscious spending plan numbers. 50 to 60% for fixed costs, 5 to 10 for savings and investing, and 20 to 35 for guilt-free spending.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:17:22]\u00a0It&#8217;s not going to work exactly the same. Everyone&#8217;s is different, but we&#8217;re going to use that as our benchmark, and you&#8217;re going to have to make some tough decisions. The way I think about it, my mental model is right now the house is on fire. We got to put this freaking fire out. Once that fire&#8217;s out, we rebuild some stuff. But first we got to stop the fire, make some tough changes. Are we all down for that approach?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:17:45]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:17:46]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. Let&#8217;s do it. Jackie, what changes should we make on the fixed costs, which are currently 87%, to try to bring them to 60%?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:17:54]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I need to look at groceries and look at what meals that we like to eat that don&#8217;t require a lot of ingredients.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:18:07]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Great. Groceries are $1,550 a month. How much do you think you could get that number to realistically?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:18:18]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I want to do 1,200.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:18:20]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Fine. Take it off screen. All right. So watch what happens. I want you to look at this number,\u00a0this fixed cost number of 87% as I change your groceries from 1,550 to 1,200. Ready? What did the number drop to?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:18:37]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Whoa,\u00a081.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:18:39]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a081%. Okay, cool. I feel very confident you can get to 1,200 with some planning. All right, what&#8217;s next? Alex?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:18:48]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We could drop subscriptions a bit, but I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s going to make a ton of a difference.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:18:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Tell me the number.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:18:57]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Let&#8217;s see.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:18:58]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Camp is 14. I can get rid of Amazon. And we have MLB.\u00a0That&#8217;s 37.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:19:04]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I think we can get that to 70.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:19:09]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a070. All right. Here&#8217;s the number.\u00a0From 81% fixed cost down to?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:19:13]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a080%.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:19:14]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What&#8217;s next?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:19:15]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I could do $50 in clothes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:19:19]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. Instead of 150. Four kids. Are you sure?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:19:23]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We don&#8217;t need clothes every month.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:19:25]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Great. That&#8217;s a good answer. 50 bucks.\u00a0Down to 79%. What&#8217;s next?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:19:34]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So the part that says car payment and transportation, that 170 that&#8217;s showing is gas. I&#8217;m confident we could fill up each car once in the month, which would be about 140.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:19:49]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right.\u00a0140.\u00a078%.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:19:53]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Here&#8217;s the tricky part. The easy call here for a lot of people would be eliminate tithing. Because that would bring us immediately down to the number. And then it&#8217;s hard with the beliefs around that. So to me, the answer then is just make more money.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:20:16]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0How do you feel about that, Jackie?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:20:19]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0The same. It&#8217;s like when we give 10% of what we&#8217;re receiving, that is our way of trusting the Lord.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:20:32]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;ve spoken to several people who tithe and they&#8217;re in financial distress. So I have a couple of questions for you. What if you did 2%?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:20:47]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I think for me, to be honest, there&#8217;s fear around the whole thing of just like&#8211; what was that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:20:54]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Fear of what?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:20:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Oh, fear of that being wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:20:56]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What do you mean?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:21:00]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Morally wrong to not tithe 10%. Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:21:03]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. And Jackie, what if you tithe 2%?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:21:08]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0God would be like, &#8220;Hey, I&#8217;ve given you $91,000 a year, and you can&#8217;t give me 500?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:21:19]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, let&#8217;s keep going. What if you were like, yes, that&#8217;s correct? I actually can&#8217;t give you 569, but I can give you less. What happens then?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:21:38]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0He would not support us financially or spiritually. I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;re going to hell.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:21:49]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0This is a very important question. Again, I appreciate your religious beliefs. And again, if you tell me like, &#8220;Hey, we&#8217;re just going to do 10, and let&#8217;s move on to something else,&#8221; I&#8217;m totally down for that. But to me, it&#8217;s such an important question to probe. And what I&#8217;m hearing are quite murky answers. Notice I did not say zero.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:22:09]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:22:09]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It&#8217;s a different set of lenses to put on. Again, I&#8217;m not saying give up your religious beliefs. Not at all. In fact, keep going to church. When I was growing up, we would go to our temple, our gurdwara, and we would do something called seva. We would serve people food, and we would pass out prasad and stuff like that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:22:28]\u00a0That&#8217;s how we do it. And there are lots of ways to do it. I know tithing is how you were raised, Alex. But what I&#8217;m trying to do is expand our possibilities here because $569 a month, right now you&#8217;ve made all these changes. You&#8217;ve essentially cut almost everything you could, and you are still at 78%. You are broke.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:22:51]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:22:53]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Jackie, what&#8217;s going on for you? I see you thinking.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:22:57]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I just don&#8217;t know. I&#8217;ve never considered cutting tithing and how that would affect me mentally and spiritually.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:23:11]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. Fair enough. Alex, what about you?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:23:17]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I think for me, what&#8217;s present is, yeah, just fear around it because of that being such a deep belief. And not even so much from a&#8211; it&#8217;s weird. More so from a, this is just the way I was raised, what you&#8217;re supposed to do. For me, it&#8217;s, I think, more that than it is like, I believe God&#8217;s going to lightning bolt me if we don&#8217;t tithe.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:23:43]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Tradition.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:23:44]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:23:45]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It&#8217;s like, I&#8217;ve done this my whole life.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:23:47]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:23:47]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You&#8217;ve your parents do it. And if I don&#8217;t do it, then what happens? And also, who does that make me?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:23:54]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:23:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Because I&#8217;m the kind of person who has tithed and never missed it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:23:59]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Sure.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:24:00]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Can I ask a provocative question? What if you brought your tithing down dramatically, but you both said, look, this is important to us. We don&#8217;t like that we are in this situation. And one of the compromises we have to make right now is that we can&#8217;t tithe the way we want to as a family. Here is our plan, and this is going to light a fire under us.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:24:26]\u00a0Number one, we are going to pay off our debt. We&#8217;re going to build up our emergency fund to this amount. We&#8217;re going to set our investments and get control of our money. Two, once we hit those numbers, we are going to increase our tithing by 1%. And then at the next milestone 1%.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:24:46]\u00a0And eventually we will bring our tithing back up. And when we hit X, Y, Z milestone, we may even pay back the old tithing that we missed. But right now, our house is on fire, and we have to protect our family first. How do you think that would go over?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:25:04]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I think I&#8217;m in support of that for sure.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:25:09]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. That sounds like the slow growth that you were talking about.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:25:13]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. Wow. So you would both be open to that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:25:18]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:25:19]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I love that. Okay. That&#8217;s amazing. One thing I really like about talking to both of you is this is perhaps the most fraught question of all that we have discussed. This goes deeper than a number on a spreadsheet. This is who you believe you are, your relationship with God. And even still, when I&#8217;m pushing and probing, you are listening and you&#8217;re dancing with me. And I appreciate that. That to me, shows me you are ready to make some changes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:25:49]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No, it&#8217;s just really cool. It&#8217;s really moving. I&#8217;m really moved right now that the possibility that God doesn&#8217;t like that either and that he wants to help us get back up to 10%.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:26:01]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Great. Yes. Let&#8217;s make it happen. All right, here we go.\u00a0So I&#8217;m\u00a0going to\u00a0take this $569 a month,\u00a0and I&#8217;m\u00a0going to\u00a0drop it to 50 bucks just to see what happens.\u00a0From $569 a month, tithing at 10%,\u00a0to $50. Watch this fixed cost number. Whoa. What just happened?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:26:24]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It\u00a0dropped\u00a0to\u00a069%.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:26:27]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a069%. What do you both think of that right now?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:26:30]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It&#8217;s a lot better than were it was.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:26:33]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:26:35]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, yeah. It&#8217;s a bit high still, but we are within striking distance. It is way better than where you were, way better.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Narration]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:26:44]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I thought this was extremely interesting. In almost every situation where I&#8217;ve had somebody on the show and they tithe to their church, I&#8217;ll ask them,\u00a0&#8220;Are you willing to change that?&#8221;\u00a0Almost 100% of the time they go,\u00a0&#8220;No.&#8221;\u00a0And you know what I say? Fine. We&#8217;ll work around it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:27:01]\u00a0The people I talk to who are tithing are often in severe debt.\u00a0And still even facing bankruptcy, even facing running out of money with kids, they&#8217;ll go,\u00a0&#8220;No, we are\u00a0going to\u00a0continue tithing.&#8221;\u00a0I go,\u00a0&#8220;Okay, fine.&#8221;\u00a0That&#8217;s not because I necessarily agree with it.\u00a0It is that it is hard enough to get people to cancel a 10-dollar\u00a0streaming subscription. You think I&#8217;m\u00a0going to\u00a0get someone to cancel something that is part of their identity? Not likely.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:27:29]\u00a0Instead, my approach is, let me acknowledge that&#8217;s important to you. I&#8217;m totally fine with it. Let me show you what else we can do.\u00a0Sometimes,\u00a0if you tithe, it means that you cannot buy a new car for 16 years. Sometimes it means you cannot buy that house. You cannot send your kids to college. I just\u00a0want to\u00a0lay out the ramifications in black and white, and then you decide what&#8217;s important to you.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:27:52]\u00a0In this case,\u00a0as I asked them, I could tell they were slightly open to changing it, and that&#8217;s why I decided to go down this path and take some time to show them a different way of thinking about tithing.\u00a0Notice that I did not try to get them to cut it to zero. That&#8217;s not my place. It wouldn&#8217;t work.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:28:11]\u00a0Instead, what I was doing was understanding what it means to them and then showing them different options. Most of us operate in the world of money in a very simplistic, sometimes even childlike way. I like this, therefore I pay for it,\u00a0and that&#8217;s it. That&#8217;s the extent of why we pay for a certain type of supplement that we take, or Netflix,\u00a0or whatever.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:28:32]\u00a0What we often don&#8217;t realize is that we can almost take our spending and turn it into multiple dimensions.\u00a0I don&#8217;t mean to sound super woo woo, but we can spend less for six months and then spend even more. We can invest over here and allow us to 10X\u00a0our spending 10 years down the line. There&#8217;s so many different ways to look at our spending. It&#8217;s almost three-dimensional the way I see it.\u00a0And that was some of what I wanted to share with Alex and Jackie.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:28:58]\u00a0I will say I&#8217;m extremely pleased\u00a0that\u00a0they finally opened themselves up to a new way of looking at their tithing. That is incredibly impressive. It almost never happens, and in my opinion, it&#8217;s a very positive sign for how flexible they&#8217;re willing to be in order to live their\u00a0Rich Life.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Interview]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:29:16]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So all that extra money that we just cut, dropped all the way down to your guilt-free spending. Right now you have $1,653 per month to spend or allocate however you want. Now, obviously we don&#8217;t want you to be spending that much because you have other priorities. What are those other priorities?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:29:35]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Savings.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:29:38]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. Yeah. You need savings.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:29:40]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0And investing.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:29:40]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes, savings and investing. I might argue prioritizing savings because your current savings of $16,000, just very risky. Very risky. I do want to point something out. By bringing your fixed costs down, your savings now provide a longer runway. So you&#8217;re actually four months, which is good. That&#8217;s good. I really like that. I think you should do more. So let&#8217;s take some of this money, $1,653, and let&#8217;s put it towards your emergency fund. How much do you want to do? Let&#8217;s try it. If we get it wrong, we&#8217;ll change it. Jackie?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:30:24]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. Let&#8217;s do 200.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:30:25]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, great.\u00a0So 200 bucks. Watch what happens to this number and this number. 200 bucks a month means you are now saving 4% of take home pay. Usually I like to see that number at 5 to 10%.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:30:41]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:30:42]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So right now we&#8217;re not hitting the number, but we&#8217;re within striking distance. And usually I like to see this guilt-free spending number at 20 to 35%.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:30:51]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Oh.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:30:52]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0But can I ask you something? You&#8217;re at 26% right now. If you had to guess, since I recommend that most people are at 20 to 35%, what number do you think you should be at for guilt-free spending? Higher or lower? At the high end or the low end of that range?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:31:11]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Maybe the higher end.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:31:15]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I probably would say the lower end or even lower because you have debt, and you&#8217;re not tithing. So how can you be spending more on eating out and all this stuff if you&#8217;re not tithing the way you want to?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:31:27]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Totally.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:31:28]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, cool. So I would probably have that number below 20%, which is almost like, &#8220;Hey, we&#8217;re going to, as a family, come together, hit these milestones as quickly as possible, and then we can loosen up and go out to pizza once in a while.&#8221; How do you feel about that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:31:45]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s so good. Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:31:47]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So I candidly feel we can do more than 200 bucks a month, a lot more.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:31:52]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Let&#8217;s bump it up.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:31:54]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Really?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:31:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I think so.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:31:56]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, tell me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:32:00]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What&#8217;s $800?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:32:02]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Damn, I like it.\u00a0800 bucks put you at 14% for savings and 15% for guilt-free spending. Is there something about a bonus in here, Alex?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:32:18]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. So that is something that I did not account for in the sheet. 10% once a year in the spring.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:32:26]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Wow. 9,000 bucks.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:32:28]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:32:28]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Wait a minute. That changes everything. So what do you do with the money?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:32:31]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That covers all the costs that we&#8217;re bleeding. But we&#8217;re still overspending though.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:32:36]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Still?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:32:37]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;m pretty sure.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:32:39]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, okay. We&#8217;re going to fix this\u00a0[Bleep]\u00a0right now. Even with the extra $9,000, you are still losing money. Even with $100,000 salary. So we got to fix that systematically. So what are you going to do with the $9,000 now? Because notice, you are actually not overspending anymore if you actually stick to this plan.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:33:03]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:33:04]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You every month are saving 800 bucks a month. You&#8217;ve cut your tithing. You&#8217;ve cut your groceries. What are you going to do with that roughly $9,000 that comes in as a bonus?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:33:18]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:33:19]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Pay off the car.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:33:21]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s one option. What else? Throw them out.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:33:25]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We put a ton of it in savings, toward the emergency fund, until that&#8217;s locked down.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:33:29]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You could do that. Yes. What else?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:33:32]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Bump to giving back up.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:33:33]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm. Here&#8217;s how I might think about it. I always like to have rules for unexpected income. And we do it by percentage. So for a lot of people, if they have no debt, they might do something like 70% goes to investing, 30% goes to guilt-free spending, something like that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:33:55]\u00a0Of course, if you have debt, you want to put more towards debt, etc. My suggestion is save like 50% of it. What that does is it takes your bonus, and in a systematic way, it builds savings even more. So that&#8217;s 4,500. Y&#8217;all want to do something for yourself? Maybe put some money aside for a dream.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:34:21]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, I&#8217;d love to put it towards the music that Jackie was talking about. I think that&#8217;d be awesome.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:34:25]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I love that. As long as the bonus comes in, I&#8217;m going to have some money put aside in a specific savings account called Jackie&#8217;s Music. What do you think about that, Jackie?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:34:39]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes. Yeah. This is great.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:34:42]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. What do you need to do in order to make this work?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:34:47]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I feel relatively confident, but Jackie, stop me if this is not correct. We don&#8217;t want to do the text message thing. That&#8217;s archaic and terrible. How do we track the stuff to meet these numbers, but in a way that&#8217;s not that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:35:04]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, I totally agree. So Jackie, do you remember how much the grocery amount is per month?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:35:10]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. It&#8217;s 1,200.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:35:12]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, 1,200. How many times a month do you shop?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:35:15]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Three times a week.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:35:18]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. Three times a week. So basically each time you go, do you know how much you spend on average each time you go?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:35:26]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. Probably 200 or around $200.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:35:32]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. If you go three times a week as you&#8217;ve been doing, $100 each time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:35:37]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:35:38]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So you have to manage to the number.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:35:40]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:35:41]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So now you have a number. It becomes a whole different type of shopping experience. This is my mission. This is what I have to hit. And you are responsible for it. You may need to talk to Alex and be like, &#8220;Alex, I can&#8217;t do this with all the kids. I need you to figure out how to help. I need to be able to build up my intuition.&#8221; I&#8217;m sure the two of you can discuss that. But over time you&#8217;ll get really good at it. I give it a month. You&#8217;re going to be sailing, sailing. You&#8217;re going to nail this.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:36:14]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:36:15]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Both of you working together, realizing it&#8217;s not about micro numbers. It&#8217;s about the big picture. There are two or three key numbers that need to be tracked. They need to be hit. And all the rest of it, put a system around it. Reduce your tithing number. Reduce your subscriptions number.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:36:30]\u00a0And the two of you should really be talking, not only at the in the weeds level, but like, &#8220;Hey, how many months until our savings account is full? We can actually look at the numbers. How many months until we can start increasing our tithing by 1%? How many months until you can go record your first song? That&#8217;s the level I want you talking at.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:36:53]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s huge. That&#8217;s huge.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:36:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. It&#8217;s incredible. So those changes to me are incredible. They are actually changing who you are and giving yourselves an even better tomorrow. And you can do it all on one income if you are dialed in and systematic about it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:37:10]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I really feel confident in owning my identity, that I can show up for Alex, and that&#8217;s going to bring us the connection that I was so deeply looking for.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:37:22]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. Even just having the conversation and having a plan, I already feel trust restored. And I see what the part I played in that and the part that Jackie played in that, and how that all came together to make that whole thing. But that we can easily move past that, and with a plan, that we won&#8217;t have to worry about falling into that again. Because when you have a plan and you execute, it just keeps going.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:37:48]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. I love that. It goes up. It gets better, not harder. It gets better. That&#8217;s awesome.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Narration]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:37:55]\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Do you remember where these two started? Alex didn&#8217;t trust Jackie with money, so he tracked every dollar for 10 years on a spreadsheet that only he understood. But the system did nothing. It never actually changed their reality, and Jackie noticed. So she kept doing what she always did, chasing dreams, waiting for a bailout from family, from strangers, from God.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:38:15]\u00a0This is how couples get stuck. They take on roles without talking about them. Those roles calcify,\u00a0and soon it&#8217;s 10 years later and neither one is happy.\u00a0Rich Life,\u00a0forget about it. My partner won&#8217;t even look at my spreadsheet.\u00a0The breakthrough for Alex and Jackie wasn&#8217;t just cutting back on groceries or even rethinking their tithing.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:38:37]\u00a0It was realizing that neither of them could keep playing their old roles. They needed a new shared plan that made room for their dreams and their finances. And if you&#8217;re wondering how Alex and Jackie are doing today, check out this update they just sent me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:38:53]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Biggest surprise working from Ramit was just that Alex felt like he had to manage my ideas.\u00a0And I am genuinely excited about being responsible for my ideas, for sharing in this new partnership, to create this financial budget that really works for the both of us, so that both of us can be stress\u00a0free about ideas, dreams, and the state of our finances.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:39:22]\u00a0And my biggest takeaway has been that tithing doesn&#8217;t have to be a fixed number. That it can be fluid. So that&#8217;s been really freeing. We sat down and talked about the budget already that we&#8217;re going to be using.\u00a0I feel like there&#8217;s just more intention,\u00a0and it&#8217;s fun. It&#8217;s become a game. I already feel like things are changing in a really positive way.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:39:50]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0My biggest surprise from the conversation was just how willing and excited Jackie is about partnering with me in the finances and coming together\u00a0and\u00a0each of us having our own areas of responsibility. So that&#8217;s a huge blessing.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:40:04]\u00a0Biggest takeaway is that building a better financial future for our family is something that will happen via small but consistent changes over time rather than trying to solve everything all at once. And so watching those dollar amounts build every month until we can build that emergency fund back up is\u00a0going to\u00a0be really exciting.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:40:27]\u00a0We have already resumed our weekly meetings where we talk about a bunch of different things,\u00a0like our kids homeschooling, but specifically adding the financial piece back in there and really spending time getting on the same page.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:40:39]\u00a0We are\u00a0abandoning our archaic and complex spreadsheet to use the conscious spending plan,\u00a0and so it&#8217;s nice to have those streamlined categories that actually make sense and lead to change rather than our craziness that we&#8217;ve been doing for the last almost 10 years.\u00a0And then just, yeah, adjusting those category amounts so that we&#8217;re saving every month instead of losing money every month.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:41:04]\u00a0<\/span><b>Jackie:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It&#8217;s been about three and a half weeks since we chatted with Ramit, and the biggest insight I received is that I could be in control of my own spending. Before it was me texting Alex my spending habits, and he would keep track of it all in the spreadsheet. And I didn&#8217;t get to see the numbers.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:41:27]\u00a0And how we&#8217;ve changed our direction now is I&#8217;m in charge of all of my spending. So I&#8217;ve been given control back. I no longer feel out of control,\u00a0and that&#8217;s been really nice to have these categories really set in stone per se.\u00a0But even combining guilt-free spending with groceries gives me a little bit of incentive\u00a0because\u00a0I&#8217;m like,\u00a0&#8220;Okay. If I spend less on groceries, I&#8217;ll have more in guilt-free spending.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:42:00]\u00a0So there&#8217;s a little bit of mind game I play with myself, but it&#8217;s been really effective. We came in under budget last month with $8, so\u00a0hallelujah. Thank you,\u00a0Ramit,\u00a0so much. We have been keeping track of receipts. We add up all those receipts at the end of the week so we&#8217;re not texting each other anymore.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:42:27]\u00a0And the money has a place, especially when we&#8217;re doing our weekly meetings.\u00a0So thank you, thank you, thank you\u00a01,000\u00a0times. It&#8217;s changed so much for us.\u00a0It&#8217;s so nice to have self-control in one area. I just hope that it continues to bleed over into other areas.\u00a0So thank you.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:42:50]\u00a0<\/span><b>Alex:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It&#8217;s been a little over three and a half weeks,\u00a0and the biggest insight that stuck with me is just the simplest one, which is that sharing responsibility for the finances within a partnership works wonders. And so Jackie and I have started doing that,\u00a0and it&#8217;s been incredible.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:43:06]\u00a0We&#8217;ve just been synced up in a way that we haven&#8217;t been in a long time.\u00a0So we&#8217;re really grateful for that. We eliminated $50 worth of subscriptions that we realized we don&#8217;t really care about or need. We have shared responsibilities with certain categories of finances.\u00a0We came in\u00a0under $1,200 for the first time in a long time for groceries.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[01:43:28]\u00a0It was amazing to just live within our means for the first time while still dreaming of the things we\u00a0want to\u00a0save up for and do. So not only did we put away the big chunk that we were saving, but we also spent a tiny bit less than we had planned on spending, and we didn&#8217;t feel deprived in any way. So big changes have been happening for us,\u00a0and we&#8217;re really grateful for it.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com\/236-alex-jackie\/\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\ufeff Alex (34) and Jackie (33) have been married for 11 years, raising four young kids while navigating a financial dynamic that\u2019s been strained for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4557],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-327999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327999"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":328001,"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327999\/revisions\/328001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}