Should I Let My Girlfriend Pay Off My Debt?

Brought to you by YRefi. Refinance your defaulted private student loans today at YRefi.com slash Ramsey. So my, my question is more of a, like a principal's question rather than financial. So, um, I'll give you some context after, but my question is, um, should I accept my girlfriend's No. You don't pay off, you don't pay off dating relationships debt. You do that when you're, when you're married, when you're getting married. And the thing is we were in a long distance relationship. I'm in Canada, she's in Switzerland and part of the reason to pay off the debts and so that I can afford to save up for our trips to see each other back and forth. Why can't you save up? What's your job like? I'm trying to pay off these debts, right? But I'm, I'm currently on track to, um, trying to clear these before, uh, next summer. So before the beginning of next summer, that's my, that's my goal. How much is it? Uh, it's about 35,000. What do you make, sir? Okay. What do I make approximately 85,000 gross. And so what's it take to fly to Switzerland? How much money does it take to buy an airline ticket from where you are to Switzerland? Uh, 1600 approximately. Okay. So tell her to buy an airline ticket and come to Canada and visit. Yeah. She's done that a couple of times and already. So you want to increase the, you want to increase the frequency of the trips by her paying off your debt? No, thank you. Yeah. It doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't match up. What she's saying is I'd rather pay $35,000 than 1600 for, to go to Canada. That doesn't make sense mathematically or logically. Fair enough. Okay. So I can also go there back and forth and just be a little more Well, you don't really have the money to do that. I think if you set up the conversation and say, okay, we both agree that it's important for this debt to be gone. However, how we do it is where we differ. I think it's my responsibility to pay off my debt. We're not married. I don't want to put you in that situation. So what I need from you is to support me in the best way possible, which your support for me would be if you could come visit me while I'm busy paying off this debt and putting my income towards that, that would be the best way to support me during this time. Yeah, that makes sense. That's kind of, that's what I was originally thinking. And I just didn't know if I should. Yeah. You're going to change the tone of the relationship. You're going to change the whole thing. If she pays you off your debt, you know, the old joke, you know, you know, the old joke, if you loan your brother-in-law a hundred dollars and he never speaks to you again, is it worth the money? Right. Yeah. Because what happens when you loan people money is it changes the relationship. You know, now she's looking at you is like, and you're going, I feel like I'm didn't own a, you know, there's all this other stuff now enters into the equation rather than I'm a dude over here doing my thing, girl over there doing her thing. We'd be talking. That's way different than you got into my wallet. You already have distance working against you. You definitely don't need borrowed money working against you. Or, you know, just any kind of feigned obligation. I mean, what happens when she pays that off? And then this relationship goes sideways. Oh, now what are we going to do? Then she calls us on the air and goes, I was so dumb. I paid off this guy's dad over in Canada. And we're like, yeah, you were, that'll be the call right here. That is like, I know, I know that we're talking to Garrett, but I'm like, I want to talk to the girlfriend cause I need to make her understand this is a bad move to even offer. Yeah. So folks do not pay debts for people you're not married to do not, um, buy houses and cars for, or with people you're not married to crap happens and you're going to get sideways and you have a problem. The worst one I can ever remember was a guy bought a house with his girlfriend. They're going to shack up and he gets killed in the car wreck. And now she owns a hat and there's no will. She now owns the house with her future mother-in-law. She's now a partner. Oh my gosh. She's not his heir. They're not married. That's right. So the month that his half of that house goes to his mother, who she didn't like, of course, and now this is great. Now I have a partnership. This is the crap you don't think of when you think, Oh, we're just going to play house and really be instead of really being like grownups and get married. Yeah. Yeah. It changes the whole deal, man. I remember a guy called in. Yeah. He had a girlfriend. He co-signed on the car with her 17, 18,000 and they broke up and she got the car. Well, she stopped paying it. And he called in, he said, Hey, I've got a mountain of debt. She's not paying the loan. How do I get out of it? I said, is she going to refinance it over and put it in her name? He said, no. I said, well, you better add it to your debt. Snowball you better get better, get rid of that car. Oh my gosh. She wouldn't sell it. Oh yeah. That's the problem. So that's the kind of stuff we run into these days. And, um, it's the, um, unintended consequences, not thinking things all the way through the old, there's an old book out a hundred years ago by Dr. Stephen Covey called the seven habits of highly effective people. And one of the habits is begin with the end in mind. Smart. Yeah. So begin with everything possibly falling apart that could fall apart in mind and you'll go, Oh, I would never do that. Well, yeah, that's opposite of what you want to do. Cause when you're excited about something, you like to visualize all the ways that it works out and you know, there's only one way it works. And if it's all work and it never works that way, nothing ever works the way it's supposed to ever exactly the timeline, something changes. And then there you are caught. But that's not being, that's not being a Debbie Downer and it's not being, uh, you know, a pessimistic that's just being logical. We're not dream killers. We're nightmare killers. Cause your, your little dream is going to be a nightmare and we're going to kill it before we can let it grow. Kill it now. Stomp that thing. Yeah. Nip it in the bud. That's right. I'm happy to kill your nightmare. You just don't see it as a nightmare. You see it as a dream, but I'll help you with that. And so, cause I, we love you and we want you to win. We want you to prosper. We're thinking about the good version of you 10 years from now that has survived all of life's bumps and bruises and prospered anyway. And that's how successful people actually do it. They fail forward. That's right. They don't make a set of assumptions that things are always going to work out the way they are. So there's about 90 ways this could go wrong and only one way it goes right. So we don't do it. Most, I'm going to go out on a limb and say most success as a result of something that was learned, not a bright idea that was executed the right way the first time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the number of times we've launched a product at Ramsey that the prototype ever sees the light of day is precisely zero. What we think is going to work doesn't make it through beta. Right. It doesn't make it through alpha. It doesn't make it through any of those Greek letters. Why refi refinances delinquent private student loans for struggling borrowers. Learn more at Y R E F Y.com slash Ramsey.