"The Guy In Your Mirror Is Freaking Lazy"

Brought to you by the EveryDollar app. Start budgeting for free today. I'm wondering if you would recommend cashing out principal in a Roth IRA to pay off debt? Not unless you're bankrupt. Not unless bankrupt, okay. Because it's going to cost you millions and millions and millions of dollars in tax-free growth later because you didn't address the real issue. So how much debt have you got? What's the problem? We have about, well, we bought a new house last summer and we had a HELOC from that at about 50k and we have a retirement loan at about 28k to the 401k. I'm trying to take out the 401k retirement loan first. So we've been paying that down probably like 4k a month. I'd say... Wait a minute, so you got a 50,000 and a 24,000. What other debt have you got? We've got a car loan of about, I don't know, 13k. We've got some credit card debt of maybe, I don't know, 15k. And then we've got savings. How much savings do you have? We have, well, we don't have full emergency savings, but we have about 11k in savings currently. Good. And then our Roth principal though is, the question is really about the Roth principal. I understand the question and I'm still telling you no. I completely understand the question. It's a stupid butt idea. Don't do it. What's your household income? We make about 83, or sorry, 8,300 about every two weeks. Okay. Are y'all 27? No, no, we're both about 40. 40. Okay. Hmm. Missed that one. All right. So, Mike, in doing what we do here, helping people walk out of debt and become wealthy, what is the shortest distance between where you are now and wealth? It is to become debt-free, not by destroying your nest egg that's going to make you wealthy later. And so that's why I keep coming back to no, I'm not doing that. So in listening to you, you're fairly new to our information. And so what we teach is a process that's very detailed and very intense and dialed in. Like eyes wide open. So you start with a thousand dollars in savings, only not counting your retirement. You temporarily stop all retirement. And then you go to what we call baby step two, and you list your debt smallest to largest. And you pay off everything, but the house in that order with great focused intensity, anything you can do to increase income and reduce debt as fast as possible. Because the sooner you've gotten rid of this 110,000, the sooner you now have flex called your now have your income to create the, uh, which is your largest wealth building tool. And right now you've given it all away to all these stupid things you bought that you couldn't afford. So one of the questions I have is, um, are we have, you know, pre-tax retirement and that's, I would say close to 900,000 at this point. Um, but that's where I'm feeling like the Roth. I mean, I, I appreciate the tax free growth for sure. Hey, Mike, Mike, Mike, the guy in your mirror is freaking lazy and disorganized with his money. That's you. Hey, you got to take care of your vehicle. If you want to keep it on the road and the smartest move is regular maintenance. I recommend Christian brothers automotive, the official auto repair partner of the Ramsey show your local Christian brothers shop provides high quality maintenance and repair services. You can trust visit cbac.com slash Ramsey to find a location near you and get an exclusive Ramsey discount of 10% off your visit. 10% off up to a $250 value. See store for details. The guy in your mirror is freaking lazy and disorganized with his money. That's you. That's not going to be fixed when you take that money out of that Roth and all of this freaking debt is going to grow back in five years because you've never addressed the fact that you all have overspent. You're looking for a quick fix. You're looking for a shortcut. And that is not a good plan. I would stop adding to your retirement and you've got to address the misbehavior. You don't even know your numbers. Oh, sorta, kinda, maybe I think is all the language around your numbers. You don't even know where you are. You're just wandering along buying crap. And you guys are going to have to stop that whether you crash out your 401k or not. If you can't afford to live off of what you told us $200,000 in take-home pay, I don't think we can help. I thought it was 80. You said 8,300 every two weeks. Oh, that's what I heard. So I'm going, dude, you guys make too much to be fooling around with all this debt. Okay. Yeah, that's even worse. And so if those numbers are true, you're right. The behavior is not going to change. You're going to keep robbing that 401k every chance you can get because you guys are living a lifestyle you can't afford. So my hope is to offend you enough to make you look at this. I love you enough. I want you to get mad at me. That's fine. I'm good with that. I want to piss you off just a little bit and make you grow up and sit down and go, I'm running this thing. This company called me incorporated very poorly. If one of my VPs sat down and use the language about their budget in one of our profit centers, the way you've discussed your home, I would fire his butt for being incompetent. Okay. You don't know. I think I got sort of kind of bull crap. You need to know exactly. And you guys need to get focused. You make too much money to be this broke, which all have been intellectually lazy and how you've addressed your personal finances. And if you'll, if you'll roll up your sleeves and attack this and get, get some muscle tone to what you're doing, get some intensity to what you're doing. You can clean up this mess in about a year and a half and not have to mess up everything. But if you don't, you're going to make a bigger mess later because there's no in-between in this discussion. There's not a, there's not a mediocre landscape because you guys have consistently added to the problem. And until you stop adding to the problem and being people that do that, you're going to create more messes. That's what it comes down to folks out there in the listening land. This is why debt consolidation doesn't work too. And this is why when you get an inheritance from your grandmother and you clean up everything and four years later, you're right back in the same mess because your habits haven't changed. Your household processes haven't changed. You've got to address what is wrong with our systems and our hearts and our relationship that's caused us to get to that. We can run up these debts with this kind of money, but we feel better because we, the junk drawer, we cleaned it up by putting it all in one bucket. And so we, Hey, look at that. It looks better and feels better. Except now you still got the same mountain to face and you can't debt snowball it. So debt consolidation is scary because it makes you think you solved the problem. Yeah. And you didn't change the habits. And so 88% of the time someone takes out a debt consolidation loan, they're back in debt within five years, nine out of 10 times. Because the debt is not the problem. It's the symptom of intellectual laziness, immaturity, no good systems, bad discussions with, or no discussions with my spouse to where we're on the same page. Debt is the symptom. It's not the problem. And so when you just address the symptom, expect the problem to stay there and the symptom will grow back. It's that simple. If you're going to get dandelions out of your yard, you can't just cut them with a lawnmower. You have to dig them out by the freaking root or they will grow back. Create your free every dollar budget today. The simplest way to budget for your life.