How Do I Convince My Fiancé To Make More? (I Make $40,000)

Brought to you by the EveryDollar app. Start budgeting for free today. How can I better encourage my fiance to try to continue to better our income without him feeling like I'm telling him he's not making enough money? Where's this feeling coming from Holly? Do you feel like he's not making enough money? Oh he's making plenty of money. So about a year ago, we started getting really serious about paying off our debt, following the baby steps, trying to get set up to where we can start saving to build a house. Right now we're living on his. You're not married. No, we get married. Our marriage date is exactly a year from now. Well, you don't buy a house or pay off each other's debt until you're about a year and a half. That's really dumb. You're going to have a nightmare on your hands. That's really no, no, no, no, no. Please do not do that with somebody you're not married to. Yeah. If you want to get married this weekend, you can start acting like you're married, but you're not married. This is a disaster. What's the combined debt, Holly? Cars? Yes. So it was two vehicles and then a credit card and then a car hauling trailer. And are these both in both of your names? Yes. Please have a celebration one year from now and get married this weekend. You are so vulnerable that your goose is cooked if something happens here. This is so scary. You have no idea the mess you have potentially made. This is really, really dangerous. How much do you make, Holly? I make about forty thousand a year. Forty five. And then he makes about this is all take home. And then he makes about seventy five thousand dollars a year. And what is it you want him to do better about when he makes twice what you make? Not necessarily doing better. He was told about, I would say, four to six months ago that he is making the best he can make at his shop right now. And, you know, he goes in on the weekends. He works late during the week. And I've kind of tried to encourage him to, you know, possibly speak a different shop or a higher position at his job currently. And he feels like I'm not being appreciative. And I was just wondering how you would go about encouraging kind of like when is the end of the road of trying to increase your income? I'm trying to figure out, is he is he enjoying his job? Did you know your personal info is getting bought and sold to people right now who use A.I. to target you with bizarrely personal scams and spam? Like, hey, George, are you interested in selling your house at 253 Sprague Street? Well, lucky for you, there's Delete Me. Delete Me, as the name implies, goes to hundreds of creepy data broker sites and deletes your personal info over and over all year long. I use and love Delete Me because I can't stop scammers from using A.I., but I can make myself much more difficult to target. So go to joindeleteme.com slash Ramsey and get 20 percent off an annual plan or click the link in the description. That's join J-O-I-N deleteme.com slash Ramsey. He's a body tech, body shop technician. He does enjoy his job. He's had a couple of problems just with my coworkers and stuff, but nothing. He is 25 and I am 22. Yeah, I probably honestly, Holly, I would I would focus in more on. Not only figuring out what to do with your 40,000 and start paying off some of these debts and start working your journey separate than him, because you guys are not married. And it's one thing to tell him, you know, that he you see potential in him and what he's doing, but he may be very content with where he is right now and he's not making a bad living, you know? No, not at all. Yeah. So I'm just curious how those how those conversations go, because he's he's not feeling appreciated, apparently. Yeah, it's kind of back and forth. Sometimes he has a lot of feelings towards him wanting to better himself, wanting to become a shop manager potentially or starting his own business as far as that goes. And then other times he's kind of down in the dumps about it. I do think that when they told him he was making the most he can in his shop, he was not very happy about it and he really wanted to move and then he kind of changed his mind. Yeah, well, I don't think there's much that you're going to be able to do. I think the only thing you can do as a fiance now, as a fiance, you can't do anything as a wife. The only thing you could do would be to you don't have the leverage from the fiance position to lift or to do anything because you're still in the negotiation phase, believe it or not. So you're you're barking up the wrong tree. But once you're a wife, then the thing you could do would just be say, honey, I think what I see, I see that you could run your own business and you'd have to learn some skills that you don't know yet about running a business because being a body shop tech is different than running a body shop, different set of skills. You have to learn the business parts of it, the marketing and the sometimes being twenty five doing what he's doing and really getting good at it. It's not a bad, it's not bad. Like he's. But if we started planning and said, OK, five years from today, we have a goal of you opening something. Let's start saving towards that. And you start reading books about business and learning about business. I think you could be I think you can make three times what you're making and own your own shop and have guys like you working for you. And I think we can get there and I think you can get there. And as your wife, I would love to help you do that. I honestly think you're doing it from the wrong position and you're not listening to me. So that's OK. You do what you want to do. But I'm telling you from having sat in this seat for almost 40 years that you guys are are you are playing with fire. And if you don't get burned in this, I'll be shocked. And so please do not buy a house with someone you're not married to. You are doing what we call in legal terms a general partnership. And if he dies and there is no will, you will own a house with his mother. This is the kind of crap you're playing with that you don't even know about. And you think I'm just being mean and telling you to get married, but you are really walking across the lake of fire and asking to fall in and get your butt burned. You are playing with about four different things there that are going to take off your head. If you guys aren't lucky, you might luck your way through this, but you might not, too. And so please, if you're going to own cars together and buy houses together, get married first and do your celebration a year from now. But you're not listening. So you're not going to do it. No, I can tell that really. I've been doing this a while. You never know. You never know, Holly. So I think you can encourage him from that position to go do something with his life. I don't know. Something wrong in the air. Something wrong. No, they're just 22 and 25. No, there's something wrong in the air. No, I think they're young. Sorry, that sounds demeaning, Holly, but you're young. And what she doesn't see either is that, you know, engagement, there's zero legal protection for either of you and he or you in four months could be like, I think I'm done, you know, and you walk out and that's it. And then for the rest, for the next three years, as you're trying to get out of debt and date and all of this, you got the X and I mean, it just, it is not worth it. It's not worth the risk. Keep your money separate. And that's for other people listening, right? I mean, they're in it, but like when you are dating, keep it separate. Do not combine finances. And then once you are married, once you are married, yes. It is so funny to me on the show. I don't know why it is like this. There's so many couples like that that are dating engaged and everything's combined. And then we talked to married couples and they refuse to combine. How is this? How is this happening? How is this happening? Oh, it's so bad. But yeah, there's just, it's the, it's the protection side. There's just not, there's not any. And oh, and the worst is the co-signing. And then we get the call and they're like, I co-signed with my ex-girlfriend and she's not paying anymore. You know what I mean? And I can't find her or the car. Yeah. And I mean, it's just like, they're just, there's so much life that can happen. And when you're not legally married, you get to just walk out. You get to just leave. At least with a divorce, you're having to go through a court system and you know. The judge will make you pay it then. Yeah. But, um, there's a lot up in the air, Holly. So I'd, I'd lock it down. If I were you, I wouldn't get married. This weekend. Create your free every dollar budget today. The simplest way to budget for your life.