Real English from Podcasts：Phrases Native Speakers Actually Use

Do you like podcasts? Podcasts are a great way to learn English, and in today's episode, I'm going to break down some clips from a wildly entertaining podcast called Financial Audit. The host is on YouTube. His name is Caleb Hammer. He is really harsh, really brash. Definitely, it's not a kid or family-friendly show. The language is very explicit, so be careful when you're listening. There'll be no explicit language on this show today, but he is very harsh. Every episode, he takes a guest and he looks over all of their finances, their student debt, their credit cards, their banking statements, and he tells them what they should be doing differently in order to get out of debt, save money, and be in a better financial situation, but he is definitely not nice or kind or friendly about it. He is just very blunt. We're going to look at some clips from episodes today, and then I'm going to break down the natural English phrases that are used. Some of them are finance-related, and some of them are just phrases that native speakers like myself use in our everyday language. The best way to learn English is just to pick it up from natural situations or from podcasts like the one we're listening to today. Let's get started with the first clip. We'll pause, and I'll break down the natural English. I'm just confused. Why today, making okay money, are we possibly at a point where our checking account would be at $0 and not being able to afford the minimum monthly payment on your decreased minimum monthly payment amount of your student loans? I'm wondering this too. Genuinely. I'm trying. Let's get into it. Trying. I am. I reduced my spending so much. I was making $65,000. I reduced it insane amounts because I was eating out pretty much every single meal. He was paying for my car and everything, so I didn't have all of that that was added in. Are you eating out still? I do still eat out. Instead of making student loan payments? I am eating out quite a bit less. Okay, how much? I'm trying to be so much better about it. Dollar amount? Dollar amount a month. Yeah. Maybe like $20 a week. Okay, $250 was spent on going out to eat, so your math is stupid math. Your math is not math. It's not math, and there's no math. Hopefully, you get a really good taste of what this show is like. Honestly, even if you don't like to listen to full episodes of the show, I follow him on social media, the host Caleb Hammer, and the clips from the show are just kind of hilarious. I mean, it's bad to laugh at people's difficulties, problems in life, but sometimes people are just being so irresponsible. It makes you feel a little bit better about yourself. Here in the United States, if you're not familiar, you have to pay your student loans, even if you very slowly pay them back. You just have to make the minimum payments, but this lady is not making any payments at all, and she is genuinely confused. She's saying, I'm genuinely confused. I would say she's kind of playing dumb here. She's acting like, oh, I'm not spending any money. Where's my money going? The host says, you're making okay money. That means pretty good. You should not be having financial hardship for the amount of money you make. So let's break down the phrases now. Genuinely. We just really use this phrase naturally all the time. We add it to things when we're just trying to say like, really, I genuinely loved that movie. I mean, I really love that movie. It means truly, and it means not fake, but like I said here in this clip, she's like, I'm genuinely confused. I don't think she's genuinely confused, but I think that she is in the right spot getting help from a professional that's actually looking at the numbers rather than just swiping her credit card and not thinking about it. So she's genuinely confused maybe just because she's not paying attention to her finances and how she's spending her money. Then Caleb Hammer and the guests here, they talk about eating out. So when we say, oh, I eat out way too much, this just means that you're spending money going out to restaurants or getting takeout food a lot. So here in the United States, it's expensive. It adds up a lot to either order food and have it delivered to your house or even go pick it up. It's obviously way more financially responsible to grab groceries and cook them at your house. You'll save money and you'll eat healthier. We use eating out all the time to either mean going to a restaurant or just picking up takeout food. Like maybe we'll say, I don't want to cook tonight. I just feel like eating out or we've been eating out way too much. We need to cook tonight and eat at home. So this is a really common phrase that's used in American English. And then a really good slang phrase that the host Caleb uses here is he says, it's not mathing. The math's not mathing. This is kind of a newer thing that people say. It's kind of funny, but honestly, it's just become a really casual, normal thing that younger people say. And I don't mean like teenagers. I mean like, you know, people in their 20s, 30s, maybe even their 40s now. It's kind of catching on as a phrase. It just means like the numbers don't make sense. Like you're saying, you know, I have enough money to spend here. But if you actually look at the math and you look at the finances responsibly, the math is not mathing. It's not working. Maybe you buy something and your partner at home says, oh, how much did that cost? And you say, oh, it wasn't very much. It was only like 40 bucks. And they're like, really? I got a $75 charge on my credit card. So the math is not mathing here. That means like, are you lying? Are you not understanding how much you bought that for? Like, it's just a kind of a funny, like humorous expression to mean like your numbers don't make sense. And obviously here, mathing is not correct grammar. That's what kind of makes the phrase humorous. Let's go on to the next clip now. I would say one of those was because I think I went to dinner with a friend. Oh my goodness. Cause something unique happened. Almost like something unique happens every month. Just like going to Orlando last month. Just like there'll be something unique next month. There's always something. This phrase, there's always something. It's one of those phrases that a native English speaker would use so naturally and you would never learn it in a classroom or a textbook. So when I say, oh, there's always something. I might mean there's always a problem. Like, oh, there's always something in my life right now. Like my car broke down or, you know, I need to get this fixed or my tooth needs work on it. This means there's always like a problem, especially when it comes to money. Like for me, I feel like, you know, everything will be going well for quite a while. And all of a sudden, a lot of different things in my house or my car start breaking and these costs are adding up really quickly. And it just feels like there's always something. And by something we mean there's always a problem. Here in this clip, I feel like the host, there's always something. He means like there's always a problem or there's always an excuse to why you need to spend so much money. And this is true in life. There's always going to be excuses to spend money irresponsibly. There's always something like, oh, it's my friend's birthday. Oh, it's Christmas, whatever it might be. But you need to be responsible and not always make these excuses. This is what the host is trying to say. Let's go onward in this episode. You take the hard things. Hard things always come up in life. Choices come up in life. And the adult decides what's more important. Me being able to make a literal minimum monthly bill or getting dinner with a friend. And why does dinner with a friend have to equal hundreds of dollars? So what do you. I mean, that dinner wasn't that dinner was less than a hundred dollars. OK, then not then your math isn't math anymore, because you said the reason why we got that dollar amount is because you went to dinner with a friend. That was the only thing you're excusing. And then you said it was $20 a week. If it was less than $100, then you're doing $20 a week eating out. We don't add to that much money being spent. I just what I just I don't know. I just what you can't handle being called out. No, I can't be. I just that's just how I spent my money. And I don't know what to like say. The phrase here, you can't handle being called out. This is a really great native phrase. It means, you know, can you handle someone confronting you or someone, you know, facing you with the actual reality or the truth? And here he's kind of asking her to take accountability instead of just saying excuses like, oh, my friend's birthday. I had to spend money. He wants her to say something like, yeah, this was a really bad decision. I'm making bad decisions. I'm making irresponsible decisions. He's saying you need to be the adult here. This is just implying responsibility and responsibility for her actions. So we use the phrase calling someone out, meaning like we're telling them the truth about their actions. We're giving them some criticism here. And we say like, you can't handle being called out. It means they made this decision. They should own up to it. They should take responsibility rather than just keep making excuses and saying that nothing is their fault. All right. Now we're going to move on to the next episode of the show. We're just going to look at a few clips from it from another guest that is having a hard time actually taking responsibility again for their spending. Let's take a look here. I'm a big planner. Tell me the plan. The Liz plan. The plan of Liz. It's kind of a Liz and Pussy Husband. A very multi-step plan. Okay. Most are. We'll potentially go downhill if anything bad happens. So it only works if nothing bad happens to begin with. Why do we set that plan up then? Because that's not a realistic plan. Bad things happen all the time. What are we talking about? Well, that's very clear. So what, but why would you make that? No, that doesn't make any sense. Why would you make that plan? That's not a plan. Well, you have to have something if you're taking. Yeah, but you're the one who constructed the plan. You're the one who made the plan. Yes. So why would you set up a plan that can't have any flaws happen along the way? It's better than not having a plan at all. Sure. But it sounds like it's almost basically like that in the end. Well, because it's an unsustainable plan because there is no life, no life that anyone lives, even the best lives among us where something unpredictable does not pop up along the way. This is not possible. This is not a thing. Could be five years. Could be five minutes. I don't know. I get that. But you got it. You got to do what you got to do in the moment. So what's your grand plan? What's this grand plan? Well, the first phrase I want to talk about from this clip is I'm a planner. Are you a planner? Are you someone who is more spontaneous? In English, when we say that someone is a planner, it means they like things to be planned out and organized. They like to know what they're doing next rather than just doing things spontaneously. And it's kind of humorous in this episode that this girl is saying, you know, she's such a planner when her finances are going so awry and she has a lot of credit card debt, because clearly if you were a planner and you were being really responsible, you would plan for spending, not just keep swiping your credit card over and over again. When we talk about things going downhill, we just mean that a situation that started out good starts to gradually go badly. It's starting to, you know, turn out negative. So here her finances are really going downhill. This means they're getting worse and worse and worse gradually. And then a lot of times in finance or business, when we're spending too much money, we're spending more than we can make, we say that it's unsustainable. So it's unsustainable for a business to just keep losing money. They eventually need to make money or they're going to have to close their doors. Or if this woman, she keeps swiping her credit card without looking at her finances and actually making a budget, it's not sustainable. It cannot keep going on. We even use this phrase unsustainable when we're talking about something just as a person we can't keep doing because it's either going to ruin our health or just mentally it's just too difficult. Like if you're working 80 hours a week, after a while it might become unsustainable, especially if you're at a job where you're doing really hard labor. It might be unsustainable for your body to keep doing that if you're not getting enough sleep. And then a really casual phrase that this woman uses, and she says, you This phrase, it really is like you have to do something that's difficult, you know, just when you're in a difficult situation or difficult circumstance. She's saying it's not ideal, but I gotta do what I gotta do because I've gotten myself into this bad situation. One situation I can think about for this phrase is like when something isn't ideal, but you have to do it to make something work. Like if you've ever had a baby and they just will not take a nap, you might take them for a ride in their stroller or in their car, and obviously it'd be nice if they nap in their crib or in their bed, but you gotta do what you gotta do sometimes so that they don't get overtired and you get a nap time. Let's go onward with this podcast clip. Make that make that make sense to me. When you look at it as an outsider, I'm looking at how much debt do you have besides our mortgage? You know, that's actually a debt. I don't know if you believe that or not. Yeah, probably about $360,000. Just about $350,000. Okay, very good. How much did you spend last month, banking lady? Income was probably... No, that doesn't matter. How much did you spend last month, banking lady? Between $75,000 and $8,000. Okay, $15,970.33. So you're not... Does that include interest? It potentially includes interest. Okay. A really natural phrase that Caleb uses in this clip is he says, make that make sense to me. Obviously, this is a very awkward grammatical phrase, but it is really natural for me. I would use this phrase in my speaking. I think that's what's interesting about this podcast is that he has all of the financial information. He has it really well organized, but he's speaking more like a friend or like really casually rather than a financial professional person. And he's saying banker lady, because I think this lady, she said she worked in banking, even though her finances are just awful. So he kept calling her banker lady, you know, kind of sarcastically and kind of make fun of her. Like, you're the banker, you're so professional, but your finances are a mess. So he says, make that make sense. It just means like, explain that to me because it sounds crazy or it sounds like utter nonsense. And then if you say you are an outsider to a situation, especially if you're giving an opinion, it just means you have the perspective of someone who's not in it. And a lot of times if you're not directly involved in a situation, you can give a really good opinion as an outsider as he does here. Let's look at the last part of this clip now. Anyway, so where was I going with this? I don't know. You were talking about him and what he knows. He knows about it. I hid all the finances. He knows about it. He officially knows how much debt we're in and where the debt is. Well, you were even off on your debt, so. Well, I know the debt. I know all the debt. You were off by 10,000. 10,000 in the grand scheme of all of it. Substantial amount of money. You're right. You're in an insane amount of debt. Where was I going with this? Because that phrase that she in this clip here, it kind of indicates, you know, how confused and like just helpless in the situation she is because she lost her train of thought. When we say that someone has lost their train of thought, it's like they don't actually have a point that they're talking about or they can't really remember what they were speaking about. So here, you know, she's trying to say, like, what was I going to say? Like she had a point to make, but she didn't really have a clear way to say it. So here, this phrase is really used naturally in conversation. And then Caleb tells her when they're talking about her total amount of debt, which I think was $360,000. He says, you were off by 10,000. We use this phrase, you were off by, when we're talking about someone counting something incorrectly. Like maybe I ask someone, oh, how many pages are in your report over there? And they say, um, I think like 30. And I look and it's 32. I said, oh, you were just off by two. So off by the amount of number that they missed. Or if they say, I think there's 30. And I count and I say, oh, there was only 20. Oh, you're off by two. There was actually two more. So a lot of times we, you know, clarify, you're off by two, meaning two less or two more. And then a lot of times when we are talking about a good amount of money, we say a substantial amount of money. It just means large or significant. So here he's saying like 10 grand is a significant amount of money. It's a substantial amount of money, even though she's kind of brushing it off saying, oh, it's only 10 grand. It's only $10,000. He's saying, no, like you need to be worried because that is like a substantial or large amount of money that you should care about. Okay. If you're enjoying this podcast, let's move on to the next clip. And we'll break down the English again, because I find this a entertaining way to learn English. So he's actually my ex. And I texted him and said, hey, want to go to Texas next weekend and go on this podcast with me? Why? Why am I talking to you guys then? I don't know. We're kind of, we've been talking, maybe we want to get back together. Finances were hard when we were together. Oh, it's a determination of getting back together. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. We'll see. Maybe. So what's the question? How long have you guys been broken up? A little over six months, like eight months. We're having talks. Maybe. Well, we haven't had a talk yet, actually. Yeah. She's difficult to talk to. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Giving you some context to this podcast clip, the two people in this episode are exes. This means they are former boyfriend and girlfriend. They are no longer together. And the host, Caleb, did not know that at the beginning. He was asking them like, why do you guys live in two separate places? Why are you paying two separate rents? Because it's pretty common for couples to go on this show and discuss their joint finances. But here they kind of have separate finances. And he was confused about that at the beginning. And then they reveal to him that they are exes or, you know, they broke up. So if you didn't know in English, we can say my ex-boyfriend, my ex-girlfriend, my ex-friend, my ex-partner, my ex-husband, my ex-wife. Usually when we have these romantic relationships that we broke off or got divorced or sometimes just friendships, we use ex in front of that person. And typically, it's not used in such a friendly way. If we say they're my ex. In English, it's interesting, we'll say, oh, we've been talking. And most English speakers know by saying this, we are starting to flirt or get into a relationship. It's used romantically. It's not like literally we're just having casual conversations or saying, hey, what's up? It means you're talking about getting together or getting back together in their case or just getting to know each other on a deeper level. Like, oh, we've been in the talking phase is sometimes what people in beginning relationships will say. And then they also say we've been having talks. When we say we've been having talks, it means we've been having discussions or deep conversations either about a problem or just, you know, you can say we've been having talks about our future, meaning we've been having serious conversations about our future. And then this episode is pretty funny because it's kind of like friends, like we were on a break here. They're talking about getting back together. So they broke up, but they're getting back together. So let's learn a little bit more about this interesting couple and their finances in the next clip. Because we were talking about moving in together and that was kind of the big thing. Yeah, because I was the breadwinner and he wasn't. Yeah, but now we'd be making almost equal. Yeah. Yeah. So what's the big concern then if we're deciding whether or not we should? There was like I mean, there was other relationship. It wasn't just the apartment, but that was like the current like struggle we were fighting at the time. Yeah. Yeah. But if we're going to determine whether or not, especially when it comes to your guys finances, because that's what I'm more interested in. Yeah. If we're if I give my like seal of approval on if you guys should get back together like. OK, the term breadwinner, I was the breadwinner. This is a really old fashioned phrase, but we still use it today just to indicate who in a relationship is making more money. Typically, we're talking about the boyfriend or the girlfriend or the husband or wife. Traditionally, men, they were always the breadwinner of the family and women staying at home with the children. But nowadays, you know, a lot of times women have jobs and if they're high up in corporate life, they become the breadwinner or the person who supports their family financially the most. And then we use this phrase seal of approval, usually kind of in a sarcastic way. He's saying like, you know, I don't really want to make a decision about your relationship except for the finances here because he can't make a judgment on, you know, who they are personally, but he has looked at their finances. So he's talking about approving their relationship financially if they can become more responsible, giving his seal of approval. Sometimes you might say, my mom gave me the seal of approval to get married or my parents gave us the seal of approval for our wedding. Whatever it might be, this is a really common way that this phrase is used. We can also say like our boss gave us the seal of approval. There's no real seal or mark of approval. It's just kind of joking, saying like their official approval, even though it's unofficial. Let's go onward with the last part of this clip. You guys are visiting here. We stayed in a hotel. Yeah. Guys staying together. Yeah. So we're on the path. Why are we considering getting back together? What's the conversation? What's the thought? What's the vibe? I think it's definitely like a possibility, but we're like, since we broke up, there's been some things going on, some stuff that she did that I didn't like. And then I don't honestly, my friend, like I said, these two really remind me of the friends episode. We were on a break because obviously he's pretty hurt that she saw someone else romantically while they were broken up or he thought they were just on a break, not seeing other people. But whatever the situation might be, Caleb is like confused because he's like, you guys are staying together in a hotel here, but you're telling me you're not actually together. And then the man says we're on the path. This means, you know, we're working towards being together. If you say, oh, we're on the path or sometimes we say we're on the right path or the right track, it means you're moving in the right direction towards a goal or a certain outcome. So here they're moving towards getting together, but they want to get their finances corrected first. And then, like I said, you know, the show's very casual. Caleb said, what's the vibe? So he's trying to figure out what's the mood? What are their feelings? You know, what's happening in the situation? What's the vibe? If you say, what's the vibe on the party tonight? Again, it's acting or it's asking, what's the mood? What's it going to be like? What are the feelings or is it really formal or is it really casual? This is a pretty common expression or question to ask nowadays to figure out what something is going to be like or what you should be prepared for. What's the vibe of the event or what's the vibe we're going for here? Is it casual or is it professional? Thank you guys for watching this lesson with me. I hope you learned some really natural phrases. And if you want to go deeper into these phrases, make sure to check out my membership on englishwithkayla.com. I'll link it below where you can learn more with me as your teacher and a community. I'll give you quizzes and resources to learn new phrases like the ones in this episode every week. And if you guys are listening or watching, make sure you subscribe for more English lessons. I'll see you guys in the next video. Goodbye.