Making $230,000 and Still Paycheck to Paycheck

Brought to you by the Everydollar app. Start budgeting for free today. Should I, you know, just put off contributing to retirement? My wife and I both, we're both 42 years old, and just concentrate on our debt or, you know, continue contributing to retirement and find a way to, you know, pay off our debt. We're currently living paycheck to paycheck right now. Between the two of us, we make $235,000 a year. It's kind of embarrassing. And really, I think, got stuck in these buy now, pay later type deals. How much debt have you got? Credit cards. In consumer debt, let's do loans and everything, $187,000, not counting our mortgage rate. How much do you owe on your cars? One car is $31,000 left on it, the loan, and the other is $17,000. Okay. So what's the other $130,000? Credit cards and some personal loans and $30,000 in student loans. So you just, you guys just, you borrow, you spend money like you're in Congress. How long have you been making $235,000 and spending this kind of money? I will say the last six months, um, my, my, I had gotten a new job where I got the $50,000. How long have you been making $235,000? Um, probably at least a year and a half. Okay. What were you making before that? Uh, right around probably like 180 between both of us. Okay. So it's fair to say there's absolutely no bridal on your spending until just recently. Yeah. Yeah. And when I just have an epiphany, actually I'm watching your, your tech talks that I show up on tech talks, your videos. So I was, I was abusing you on tech talk and you're like, Oh, Dave's going to get me. Oh my God. Exactly. And I was like, I need to, I need to figure this out. I appreciate that. But the bottom line is the emotion is you looked in the mirror and said, I'm a 42 year old man. I make $235,000 a year and we can't control our spending. This is disgusting. And it had nothing to do with my tech talk. You just really just came to an epiphany. Didn't you? Yeah. I mean, I'd be able to die, you know, and then just thinking about them like that. I feel like I can't even enjoy like foods of my labor, like getting where I am, you know, making decent money. Oh, you've already enjoyed the fruits of your labor. And then some, you've spent every fruit of your labor and then fruits of other people's labor. And that's $187,000 worth. Yeah. Well, a lot of it's on our kids, I would say. Well, then your kids, they need to learn a new word. You want me to teach it to you? I don't think the kids to know those car loans. No, the kids don't have car loans, but they go, you guys do anything you want to do whenever you want to do it without any thought of it. And that stops. You got to, you're going to have to grow up. All of you, all of the kids and you know, is the answer we're freaking broke. We're broke. Exactly. Yeah. We're broke. Broke people can't do that. 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If you don't do that, you're going to continue to be normal. And as you and I have both established in this call, Mike normal sucks. Oh yeah. It's not fun. Your life is not fun. Yeah. It's stressful. And I'm always worried if I lost my job or what happened. Yeah. You'd be, you'd be screwed and you're going to retire broke. So stop all your retirement. If you don't do this stuff, it's going to catch you because you guys, you're pretty extreme mess here. You're going to have to take some extreme measures to reset your all's brains on how money works. So think about this, Mike, if you paused investing, could you then take home 10, 12, 15 grand a month with your income making two 35? Yeah. Yeah. I think I do about 600 into my retirement a month. Okay. So we'll get that back on top of anything else that we can muster up, sell the $31,000 car that brings us to about one 56 and consumer debt. Now you throw seven grand at that thing a month you're done in less than two years. By 45, you have a fully funded emergency fund. You're completely debt-free and you're investing in retirement 15%, which is way more than 600 bucks a month. And if you invest 15% and of your income into retirement, which you can easily do with no payments, right? 45 to 65. So you're going to have millions and millions of dollars at retirement, but the next two years are going to suck. Yeah. It's going to be off. Your kids are going to hate Dave Ramsey. They're going to have to join the Dave Ramsey support group on Facebook. Yeah. Why? I keep telling them they need to learn how to save now and not, uh, yeah. Cause I mean, yeah. Yeah. Cause you know what, you know what they're going to do when they grow up, what you do more is caught than taught. How old are they? Uh, nine and 11. Oh, that's perfect. You got time to save them. If they're teenagers, I don't know if you could turn it around or not, but you know, but right now they got, they get to watch their parents sacrifice to win and they're going to remember it the rest of their lives. And when they inherit $10 million at your death, they're going to say back in all 26, daddy and mama said they wasn't going to do this anymore. And the whole life changed, right? Someday that's what they're going to be sitting on, but you're going to be the old man that changed the whole thing someday, but not if you're not the young man that changes the whole thing. Yeah. You ready to do it? We'll help you. Okay. I think you can do it. Yeah. And I actually, the reason I've kept you on here so long as I think you're disgusted enough to actually do it. It requires a certain level of being pissed off to do it. Oh yeah. I'm a superman. I can, I can, I can sense it every day. And it's not mad at somebody. It's mad at this situation and mad at the mess I made, and I'm not going to do this anymore. I've had it when you have that moment and I can tell from talking to you, that's why I keep, keep you on the line. You've had that moment. If you were just blowing me off on all this stuff, I would have already blown you off. So, but you dude, I'm proud of you. I think you can do this. And I I'm telling you, if you do what, so stop the 401k, sell the $31,000 car, get on the every dollar budget. We're going to give you the upgraded version for free. Get signed up on it. I'm going to send you a copy of the total money makeover book. You and your wife read through it and go, we want a life making 235,000 with no payments, but a house payment. And we're going to retire 20 years from today with tens of millions of dollars. And I I'm the retirement though. Um, should I go all the way down to zero? You've got to focus on the enemy right now. And the enemy is your overspending that has created debt. And you've got to focus on that with such intensity that people think you've joined a cult. Like your broke friends are making fun of you. Look at Mikey, he makes 200 grand and he can't you know, well kiss my butt. I'm not going to be broke anymore. I'm changing. You do whatever you want to do, broke person. And you just move on. You may need some different friends. So this is the thing you've got to reset your brain on how this stuff works to where you get above this problem and step on it instead of it stepping on you. Cause this money subjects been kicking your butt your whole life. You've never been able to tell it what to do. It's always told you what to do. That changes this week, Mike, it has to. Cause if you just make more, you're just going to spend more until you say I've had enough. We just found that out when he got to 35. Yeah. A third of people making six figures or paycheck to paycheck. And a lot of people think, well, if I just made more, I'd get out of this. I tried to out earn my stupidity. I couldn't do it because I had a lot of stupidity. And the more you make the bigger, the zeros on the end with the stupidity. It's exactly bigger mess. You get to clean up. So hang on, Mike, we're going to send you a total money makeover book. 10 million people have used that to get out of debt and become wealthy. I want you and your family to become wealthy and be able to do anything you want to do, but it's going to cost you two years to clean up your last 10 years of stupidity. Create your free every dollar budget today. The simplest way to budget for your life.