Why Do People Making Good Money Still Feel Broke?

Steve Rhode and Damon Day: The following is the full conversation from this episode of The Get Out of Debt Guy Show.

Oh, we’ll Get Out of Debt Guy. Steve Rhode with me as always is Damon day. The new Get Out of Debt Guy say hello, Damon. How’s everyone doing? Everyone is perplexed about what today’s show topic is about because it is about nothing at all.

It is about the, you know, Damon and I deal with debt issues every day, and I’m always researching and writing and investigating and everything else. Uh, and it gets really tough because being in the, on the debt side of things, you know, where we’re helping people with debt, it’s, it’s like the real life version of groundhog day. Every day is almost the, the same. The situations are a little bit different, but everyone is trying to survive a very bad debt situation. And this past week, Damon, I had, uh, communications with a senior attorney at the state of California consumer protection people.

And he was telling me about how they’re on the lookout for bad debt settlement companies. And I tried to explain to him, you know, there isn’t anybody in the debt relief space that doesn’t have their own agenda and widget to sell. You got the credit counseling people trying to sell people in the credit counseling, and I pointed out, look, just do a web search. How many credit counseling agencies actually speak out about credit card company procedures and policies? None.

That’s where, that’s where their bread is buttered as they say. That’s right. So, you know, I get it. It’s hard for people to know who to trust and dealing with financial problems is almost the perfect storm because, um, all of a sudden you hit a panic wall and you leap at what you think is the most likely way to stop that pain and move on. And for most people, unfortunately, it just digs them a deeper hole.

Yeah. And, and when we look at topics for the show, it’s, you know, it’s like when Steve, when you said Groundhog Day, it’s exactly like Groundhog Day for us. It’s, you know, and we start looking at topics and you go, oh, well, we’ve covered that, oh, we’ve covered that. Oh, we’ve covered that. It’s like everything.

And there’s only so much to this when you’re talking about debt and getting out of debt. And we obviously want to make it, um, informative and entertaining, which is not that easy to do, by the way. It’s hard damn work to make something so pretty look like a chump or a geek. White man can’t jump for those of you in the know. Um, so yeah, I mean, like this morning I was, you know, I had a topic and I brought it up to Steve and, and, you know, the, I want to talk about.

Why do you make $200,000 a year and feel like you’re broke? And I, but in the first thing I said to him was, I know we talk about that a lot. And so we were kind of going over the outline and he goes, why don’t we just make the show about what to make the damn show about, and maybe we get some listener feedback, maybe there’s some specific things you want to know about. Because we, we have, we’ve been doing this show, how many years, Steve? 20?

A lot of years, a lot of years. We’ve covered a lot of stuff and, but here’s the thing. Every show, some people will be listening to it that have listened to us off and on for years. And then there also will be people that have no idea who we are and have, you know, just happened because debt is one of those things, you know, money and debt. It’s not a Joe Rogan type of a podcast where like, I wonder who, you know, he’s talking to today and what subject is me talking about and you know, you’re, it’s new every single time.

It’s one of those things where if you’re knee deep in it and you’re stressed about it, you’re actively searching for information on how do I fix this massive problem I have, and then you’re not right once you got it solved or you don’t have it solved, but you just compartmentalize it and you’re going to do something else, you’re not listening every single day probably, right? And so on one hand, I’m like, well, we already covered that, but it’s like, well, who are we trying to cater the show to the new people that have found us that are in crisis right now, or the people that maybe have been listening for a while and just love my quick wit. So they keep tuning in. I don’t know who to cater to the show. You know, and, and the thing is that I always wanted to talk to people who, after they overcame their debt situation, who wanted to do better, right.

Who wanted to make the future, their financial future even better. And even that gets difficult today because the entire upper middle class down is all getting squeezed by inflation and they don’t have extra money. And so then the conversation comes back to how do we talk about making those difficult choices, you know, about cutting back on things you do for the kids and all those other things that are just painful as well. I mean, I don’t know how many people want to hear about the fact that the consumer price index and inflation rate is 4.2% now, and there’s not going to be any rate cut for interest rates coming up because of that. Uh, if anything, the interest rates will be going up to slow inflation and people don’t want to hear about that stuff.

I mean, I don’t even want to hear about it, but it’s true. Yeah. And, and you know, the, the biggest thing, cause a lot of my clients are, you know, 150, 200,000, 300,000 a year struggling, you know, household struggling and struggling. And a common theme with that is they don’t know why, right. And, and when you really start looking at, you know, if, you know, I’m, I’m a child of the eighties and nineties with the high school in the nineties, and I honestly couldn’t tell you what my parents made, you know, cause it wasn’t, it wasn’t discussed, it wasn’t talked about as far, you know, my dad had his own business, right.

And I remember there were some years there where things were pretty lean. Um, but you know, we always figured out a way and, and things are going fine. Um, now obviously, but I don’t even know, like if I had to put a number on it and someone asked me, I don’t know, but let’s say your, your family, you know, average middle-class family in the, in the, in the nineties and made $50,000 a year, that was middle-class in the nineties, 50, 60 grand a year. And you just start looking it up in chat, GPT and stuff. And to have the same lifestyle, just going by inflation numbers, which we all know are not exactly accurate when, when you’re looking at what things actually cost in certain segments, but $50,000 a year is now the, you’d have to make about $125,000 right now to have the same, you know, if you can grow up in a middle-class lifestyle in the nineties, and your parents had one or two cars and owned a house and you guys had food and did the things about 50 grand a year.

Now it’s 125, just to have those basic things. And also don’t forget that back then, cause I’m a child of the sixties and seventies when you had one parent working, you know, and you still had a really terrific life and could afford things. Yeah. Yeah. And then when you start looking at just go beyond the consumer price index, you start looking at things like housing, you know, three times, you know, what it was.

And, and, and food is way up there. And chat GPT estimates that, you know, you, you, when you, when you really start looking at what you would actually need right now, chat GPT is talking about, about 180,000 a year is the equivalent of a typical 50 to 60,000 a year lifestyle in the, in the nineties. Yeah. Right. That’s why you make $300,000 and you feel like you’re barely middle-class or you make 180 grand and you’re like, I am so broke, I don’t know what to do.

And so, and, and so this is why people that, that would, we would traditionally think of as affluent, like most people, when they think of $200,000 a year, we think that’s affluent, that’s an affluent lifestyle. That’s really good. And that absolutely was in your formative years, you know, when you were like, oh man, if I can make $200,000 a year, I would be living on easy street, but because everything has just gotten so expensive and income has not been able to keep up. That’s why affluent people are, or formerly affluent people are just getting into debt and not realizing how or why, and they wake up going, how in the hell do I have $150,000 in debt? And it’s simply because the lifestyle that you used to have at $200,000 is not anywhere near what it is now.

And I’m not even talking about going back to the nineties. I’m talking about going five, six, seven years ago. So if you were making $200,000 a year when you were 35, you know, seven, eight years ago, and now you’re making $220,000 and you’re 42 or 43, and, and all of a sudden you’ve got all this debt that you didn’t have when you were 35. That’s why, because shit cost 50% more than it did when you were 35. Well, yeah, the cost of maintaining a life today is so much more than it was.

I mean, let’s go way back to when I was a kid, we didn’t have internet. The only TV that you had was free, right? It came over the rabid years. Um, you know, we didn’t have all the channels and streaming and services and subscriptions and everything else, but life was so much cheaper then. I just look at all the pressure that you have now, just, just TV, right?

My, my cable bill each month, because it includes my internet is like 250 or something like that. And I don’t have any premium channel packages. Uh, yeah. And, and everybody listening will have a story when they think back to when I was a kid, there’s no way my dad would have whatever, right? There’s no way my mom would have allowed, like we started looking at travel sports and stuff like that.

Back in the nineties, it was not even a thing. It was a thing, but that was only the things that you heard about. Like, oh my gosh, that guy is just the, the second coming of Jesus on the baseball field. He’s on a travel team. He gets to go to a different city and play baseball.

We have to sit here with these stupid t-shirts at the local field. That’s what we do, but we still had fun. But that was baseball back then. Now it’s like, you play by your house. What are you poor?

You know? And so you have all these extra pressures where you feel like it’s almost like society, it’s like, well, look down. Well, I have to do this for my kids and I have to do that. And I have to do that because everybody’s doing it. So you feel that pressure where 30 years ago, it was like, we don’t have the money for that.

That’s just what your parents told you. Oh, we don’t have the money for that. Now it’s like, well, we have a credit card. I guess, you know, he, he, he made the team. He’s gifted.

He made that team. Shit. Everybody’s on a gifted team now. It’s like, Hey, you got 250 bucks a month. Your kid is an all-star.

Well, I, you know, you gotta find a way to feel comfortable with saying no to live within your income. So back in the, uh, 1970s, my dad was an upper level executive, uh, at a very big company and they downsized and he got laid off and this was before Christmas. And it’s not the, you know, best time to find a job at that time. And he was really struggling, feeling like a failure, not being able to care for the family. And things got so tight at times that they would come in and borrow from my piggy bank, uh, to, you know, get to the end of the week.

And my dad said that he swallowed his pride and he felt like a total loser because it was Christmas time at Sears and they needed somebody to demonstrate the Vegematic, uh, and so here he was working in the same area where people that he worked with were, and yet he’s up there demonstrating this miracle vegetable slicing machine, you know, feeling really terrible and bad, just trying to make some money. And I remember going to the mall and walking up, my mom was holding my hand and I saw him up there demonstrating and I shouted out, that’s my dad. I was so proud of him, you know, being up there and, uh, him doing his pitch. It slices, it dices. I still remember that.

But, uh, you know, that’s the kind of thing that you have to celebrate because life gives you ups and downs. And the more you can go through it together without somebody, I don’t even know if it’s kids today, cause I never had friends or people I knew when I was younger that would be demanding and tell their parents, you know, I can’t stand you because you can’t get me X or whatever, but then again, I mean, look, a, a playground when I was a kid was called a tree. You might get, I don’t know if, if we were just more grateful because you didn’t have all these things, but between, yes, is that it? A hundred percent. Okay.

Yes. That’s what it is. We, we spoil the shit out of our kids. We do. And the funny thing is you made that comment about borrow from your kids.

I’m not saying there was a time in my life where I was guilty of that, but there was a time in my life where it was like, well, you’re not ready to retire yet. And, you know, we’re all pretty hungry. So I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a cheeseburger today. Well, we all go through that. And here’s the tough part is, uh, I don’t know if I have any fantastic, a magical advice for parents right now that need to say, we can’t afford that right now.

Uh, I can tell you what, what my wife and I did when our daughter was a little, when we go to the grocery store and she would say, can we have that? And, uh, Pam was the one that was really good at breaking the news, but she would say, you know what, we can’t afford it today, but the next time that we come back, you can get, you know, whatever that thing is. And so there has to be some ability to say no, and to be honest about living inside your income, because, and this is why I think it’s really important to have that conversation with your kids and the people you love now, because if you don’t do it now, when you retire, you will truly be a burden on them. And that’s, that’s what’s wrong. And, and, and that, you know, that issue right there is what the biggest problem is with debt right now is our, you know, collectively inability to make the hard choices now when we have the ability to not make the choice in the moment because of available credit and things like that, and, um, the whole hyperbolic discounting idea where we’re like, well, pay for it later.

You know, we don’t want to make the hard choice. Now we consciously know we’re smart enough to know that this is a bad choice for our future, but we want it now. And we want to make the easy choice now. And we’ll figure, we figured that we’ll figure it out in the future. Right.

And that’s, that’s where we’re at. I mean, for a lot of us, I get to simply sit here and go, oh, you make $250,000 a year. All right. Let’s get you signed up with Monarch money. Let’s start tracking your expenses and let’s start cutting out things that aren’t absolute necessity.

Because most people, yeah, because most people don’t even have a budget. Like don’t, they have an idea of what they make and they have an idea of what they spend. Especially if you’re making two, $300,000 a year, you’re not used to having a budget. You just kind of like, well, we make good money. We want that.

We’ll get that. You know, if we’re not going to go too crazy because it’s not the yacht that gets you, right? You’re like, yeah, I think I’m part of the yacht. It’s not the yacht. It’s the $3,000 a month on groceries.

Yeah. But in the honest, that’s what the other thing is that you and I both absolutely hate budgets. But here’s how I make my budget work for me and make it super easy. First off, I don’t do it. The second thing is that.

That’s great advice, Steve. That’s why I love this show, man. Cause we’re real. It’s like, that shit sucks, man. But you have, you have to use them as a tool.

Yeah, but the way that I do it is I measure my monthly success by how much I’m able to put into savings. Ah, okay. Yeah. I don’t care how I spent it. You know, it’s because, yeah, because most people, they zero budget, right?

They budget and okay. We’re about okay. But they don’t have savings in the budget and that’s the problem. And you go savings. There’s no way I can afford savings.

Okay. Well, point made, right? You’re living beyond your means. If you don’t have a healthy savings in the budget where it’s growing every month for emergencies, for long-term, that’s why you’re in credit card debt. Because when something happens that you didn’t plan for or budget for, which is, you know, it doesn’t, it’s not that often, it’s only like every other day, something will happen that you didn’t expect.

That’s it. It’s only every other day, probably. Um, sometimes you have an unusual month and every day something will happen that you don’t have a budget for, but it just goes on a credit card. Just goes on a credit card, just goes on a credit card. That’s why we’re in debt because we’re failing to acknowledge that we are living well beyond what we’re making.

If we were using kind of sound money principles and saying, Hey, I gotta be able to set aside 10 or 20% of what I’m making and I know that people are going to, there’s no freaking way. Well, there is a way. We just have to cut out some other things and we don’t have to right now if we still have available credit, but eventually we’ll have to have the pay the piper type of a conversation. But that’s how it happens, especially for people making two to $300,000 a year. And then it’s just, it gets worse and worse and worse.

It doesn’t get better. It gets worse because the more, the more you put it off, the more the debt grows and the more the monthly servicing of that debt eats away at your monthly income, and then the more you have to dip into the credit cards the next month, because every month you’re a little bit shorter, a little bit shorter, a little bit shorter. And then pretty soon you go debt servicing is 25% of my income and you’ll feel like the federal government, but the difference is you can’t just print more money. Oh, but if you could, it would solve all the problems. Make our own money.

Well, you know, so ultimately life is just going to get tighter and tighter thinking that tomorrow is going to be easier, that you’re going to make more. You know, there’s, there’s been a, a sweeping effort. It seems that people nearing the, their peak earning years at companies and corporations are being downsized and laid off because they’re the highest income earners. So if you worked your entire life hoping to get to that level and that’s what you were going to retire at, that’s not necessarily a great goal. And we have talked about that from the 1970s onward, the cost of life has gotten so much more expensive.

It’s going to continue to get that way between the subscriptions and the payments and everything else. Um, so you gotta find a way, I don’t, you know, there’s no magic wand, but find a way where you’re able to save money every month and be part of the financial successful class. You, you know, there’s always been the occasional story about the guy who was the forklift driver who passed away and left $10 million to his favorite college or something like that. It can be done. It’s hard to do.

Well, the, you know, I look at it like this. If you, especially the way things are today, if you want to stay in the middle class or even get into the middle class, there’s a train rolling down the tracks and I call it the asset train. And if you don’t freaking grab a hold of it, you are going to be left in the dust. Right? You’re not going to earn your way into the middle class.

You’re not going to, your earnings are not going to keep you in the middle class. It’s the expenses that are sinking you. And if all of your income is going to lifestyle choices and consumable goods, and none of it is going to investments and savings, you will never get into the middle class if you’re not there or you’ll fall out of the middle class because you can’t, the train’s moving too fast. You have to get on it. You have to get, and it’s like, what are you talking about this damn train?

You have to get money in assets. You have to get money working for you. And when you’re in debt, all your income is just working for somebody else. That’s all it’s doing. You have to get your income working for you.

You have to stop giving other people $2,000 a month to service your credit card debt or $1,000 a month. You have to get out of that debt. And then, and because everybody says, I don’t have any money. I can’t invest in the stock market. I can’t buy real estate.

I can’t do whatever it is that you want to do. I can’t buy assets. Well, you can, you’re just spending all your money on consumables, lifestyle, and debt servicing. Yeah. So you have to start cutting.

So you free up that cash that you’re earning to get it on that asset train. So eventually your assets are making money for you and you can at least keep up and catch up and maybe get further. Well, yeah, I talked about the, you know, I feel comfortable putting money in savings every month. But, uh, I didn’t describe the second part of that, which is it then goes into dollar cost averaging into assets. So, you know, this entire time, since we’ve ever done the show, the stock market is now at the darn near highest point that it’s ever been, even when the economy is sliding and people are doing worse and that money is making money for me, uh, you know, because you can do that.

You don’t have to put in a thousand dollars a month. You can get investing in, uh, we’d love, uh, either betterment or even acorns. And when you talk to Damon, he’s going to talk to you about acorns because it is so easy to get involved and just invest your spare change every month, and it can go into an index fund that will make you the highest average rate of return, and you’ll be amongst the smartest of your friends. They’re, they’re going to retire broke and you’re not. Yeah.

Most people don’t have assets. They don’t have money in the market because they don’t even know where to start. Right. Do I have to, do I have to call a broker? Do I have, you know, do I have to open up a brokerage account?

I don’t know what to do. And then he’s kind of put it off. Well, when you go into like an acorns or something like that, it’s click, click, click, click, click. Oh, now I have a Roth IRA. Oh, now I have an investment account.

Oh, now I have a high yield savings and I don’t really have any extra money. Oh, they’re going to round up my spare change and it’s not going to be much, but you know, they’re going to put $15 a month or 20 bucks a month or whatever you want, and it gets you started. It’s like pushing a snowball and then you kind of start seeing some progress. But when you look at what you spend your money on, right, this is what I recommend to anybody right now. Go to Monarch Money, download, do the free trial.

I think you get seven days or whatever. Link it up, all your accounts and start looking at the reports and see what, where your money actually goes and where we’re going to free up money to get you into the middle class or keep you in the middle class are all these payments that you’re making every single month and figure out what payments we can get rid of or pay off. How many car payments do you have? Are you spending a thousand dollars a month on car payments? And are you the type that’s always likes to have that new car?

So before that payment is, is finished or right after it’s finished, like time for a new car. Well, okay. Maybe we need to change that. Maybe make your car last longer than five years. Maybe drive that car for 12 years, right?

Get rid of that payment for a while. That money can immediately then start going into investments. You’re paying $1,500 a month on credit cards and personal loans. There’s ways we can get out of that stuff. Whether we’re talking about potentially filing a bankruptcy, cue everybody recoiling in horror, but it’s something we can talk about better than eating dog food when you retire, right?

We can maybe settle that debt. You can try to pay it off, but the more and more expensive life gets, the less and less good old fashioned Dave Ramsey debt snowballs are going to work. I’m not saying they can’t work, but every year they’re harder and harder to pull off because everything else is getting more expensive. Especially because the most expensive component to getting out of debt and magnifying your income moving forward is not the dollars and cents. It’s time.

Time is the one thing that you cannot buy more of, but you absolutely need in order to become wealthy in the future. Yeah. So we just have to take a look at where you’re spending your money and make smarter choices that will benefit your future. It doesn’t always have to mean, okay, well, the only way I’m going to get out of debt is I got to tell little Johnny he can’t play baseball anymore, right? Now there are things that you can do to minimize some of those expenses, but you know, you might be looking at, you know, your expenses and you might be shelling out three or $4,000 a month on credit cards, car payments, you know, food that you can, if we really looked at it, okay, we can still all eat and survive and maybe spend, you know, 1,500, $1,800 a month on food rather than 3,000.

You can’t tell me you spend 3,000 and there’s absolutely no way to survive on anything left. Right. So there are things that we can identify. And then all of a sudden, without too big of a fuss, we might have $3,000 a month positive cashflow. That’s something you can throw on the asset train.

Well, you know, here’s the funny thing is that, uh, you and I have been through it. We’ve seen so many other people go through it, but it’s the ones that are the most frustrating for me. And again, I totally understand why, but the ones that are most frustrating for me is when they’re so upside down making payments on things and you know, you know what, all of this debt could be gone in 90 days and instead of being 3 grand upside down, you could be 3 grand positive every month and start living your best financial life. And the funny thing is that everyone has all these objections why they can’t do that, but if they understood, you know, you’re afraid what your kids are going to think about you or whatever, what are they going to think about you when you’re dead broke and they’re having to shell out money to try to keep you alive? Cause that’s what we’re talking about.

Now, how is that better? What are your adult kids going to think of you? Because you didn’t make the adult decisions today, the real ones in order to make the most financial sense that you could to prevent them from having to do that. Yeah. These are conversations I have with my clients, right?

I mean, if, if, if you’re, if you’re struggling, you need some help, you just need to, you know, somebody to bounce some of the stuff off of, and you feel like, well, who can I talk to about this? This is embarrassing stuff. I don’t want to talk to friends or family or whatever. Go to my site, damonday.com, schedule a call with me and we’ll just have a conversation. We’ll just go over, you know, what your situation looks like, and we’ll talk about options and you can tell me you don’t like the options I’m, I’m providing, but that’s all I’m doing.

I’m saying, well, we can look at this and your life will look at this and whether we’re talking about bankruptcy or settlement or whatever it is that we’re, we’re talking about, my job is to give you options and things to think about because usually whatever it is that you’re afraid of, the, the path that you’re on is actually going to be a lot scarier for you than the thing you think you’re afraid of. Oh, and by the way, you can find Damon’s site, d-a-m-o-n-d-a-y.com, damonday.com. And here’s the thing, when you talk to Damon on the phone, cause you’re going to have set up a free call with him, he’s going to sound exactly like this. So you don’t need to, you don’t need to be afraid. This is, you’re going to, you know, get what you hear.

Oh yeah. You’ll get the real stuff. So Damon, someone is listening right now and saying, yeah, that’s all sounds good. I know I need to do that, but I’m afraid to do it. What first step do you, do you have for somebody that they can take right now?

damonday.com. Well, it’s, it’s probably the. Well, that’s the best damn advice I can give you is let’s have a conversation, right? Because it’s, again, I say this a lot, right? A good consultant is someone that borrows your watch to tell you the time.

Right. So a lot of the stuff I might tell you are not, it’s not necessarily going to be something that you went, oh my God, I never considered that. I never thought of that. Now, some of this stuff will, cause I am brilliant if I do say so myself. You are, I agree.

So some things, some things I say, you’re going to be like, holy shit, that that’s, that is quite brilliant. But, uh, some of the things I say, you’re, you’re, it’s not that you’ve never heard it before. It’s that you’ll have an opportunity to kind of talk it through and be like, okay, I’m afraid of this. And then I can find out why. And then we can just talk about the details and I can shine some lights on things and the, and if you’re walking into a cave that is illuminated and not dark, it’s not nearly as scary when someone’s standing right next to you with a flashlight and saying, look, nothing in here and you go, oh, okay.

Versus you’re out there in the woods by yourself and there’s some dark cave. That seems pretty damn scary. I think I’m going to back slowly away and go the other way. Right. And that’s what happens when, when people are faced with anything, any tough choices or what they perceive to be tough choices on it’s going to rock the boat, it’s going to change my family situation and you’re probably right.

It will change your family situation for the better. Absolutely. Yeah. People who do take, make the tough choices, who do make changes, who do address their financial situation. Um, none of them feel worse.

Yeah. And you know, you know, it feels really good when you’re in a spot and oftentimes very quickly where you have more money every month than you need. And a lot of you listening to this are like, what the F is that? Like, I’ve never felt that in my life. I’ve got extra money here.

All of my bills are paid. I’m a month ahead. I have no money stress. Well, I, I guess I can put this in my savings account. Wow.

Yeah. When’s the last time you just had this extra money in the checking account? Oh, that can go into my savings. That makes me feel that that’s, what’s going to make you feel good. Right.

That extra money, that security. How about we get to a point where, cause this is the thing I get all the time. If I don’t have credit cards, what do I do if I have an emergency? Ah, we consult the savings, right? Oh, here’s a novel concept.

We have money. I don’t need to have a credit card for an emergency because I have money for an emergency. And I talk to people all the time and I get it. You get trapped in this way of thinking. I need to have this credit card.

I can’t go bankrupt. I can’t get rid of that. I need to have, there’s $2,000 in available credit left on this credit card. And I need that in case I’m having an emergency. And it’s like, you’re paying $2,000 a month in interest for the privilege of having $2,000 a month available on that card, why don’t we just get rid of all that, we take the $2,000 a month you’re currently throwing away, and in two months, you’ll have twice as much emergency available, and that creditor can’t take it away from you with a dear John or a dear Jane letter that says we’ve reevaluated and we’ve decided to cut the credit card.

Yeah, your limit’s reduced. Once it’s in your savings account, it’s yours. Now it actually is an emergency savings that can’t be taken away from you. So right. We got to get back to that line of thinking of, I don’t need a credit card to bail me out.

I can bail myself out if I just modify a couple. So everybody who’s listening right now, the key is your future finances could be better than what they are right now. And you will have every internal reason why they can’t be. You will explain away every step that you could take to make things better. And you will just continue to spin around the same sort of cycle and things won’t change.

This is why you absolutely need to talk to Damon and he’s not going to judge. I don’t judge. I mean, Damon, I get the same sort of questions that you hear on through the ask Steve chat, you know, the, the things that I see every day through those chats is, I don’t think there’s anything that can shock me anymore. Oh, I’m, I’m a master of responding to the yeah, but the yeah, but, but yeah, but I get to, yeah, but I, I am a trained professional. Yeah.

But, and, and, you know, again, I don’t judge cause I’ve been there, but when when you’re outside of it, you know, if you can strip the emotion out of it, most people know that, you know, what they’re saying doesn’t make sense, but the emotions that, right, when you, when you get things like, uh, you know, I can’t even consider filing for bankruptcy to get rid of this hundred thousand dollars of debt, even though you’ve told me that my house is protected, my cars are protected my life, um, from anybody looking at it, wouldn’t change. It would look like the, I’d have all the same stuff. I would just get rid of this a hundred grand in debt. Um, but that would hurt my credit for a few years and my insurance rates may go up. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. That’s not really, that’s an excuse. I know that that feels like it’s really bad, but the numbers don’t line up. Like, for example, here’s another example is I said in the beginning, uh, inflation is now 4.2%.

And the funny thing is a year ago or two years ago, when people were worried about getting a house, we’re going to wait till the interest rates come down. Now let’s say that mortgage rates went down a quarter to half a point in that time, and you waited all that time because you wanted them to come down. Yeah. But you know what? Prices of homes went up 17% in the same amount of time.

So it’s all about understanding the numbers to make the best decisions possible. When I was a kid, my parents bought a house, um, and rates were, I think, 13, 14. Mine was, well, I’ve always bought my house. I remember when rates went to 7% when my brother and I went in together and we bought our first house on a golf course in Southern California, a brand new house in a golf course community for $165,000. And this was in, uh, late, I think it was 1999.

Right. And that, and that was, that was us going in together. We’re both in college. We both put down $5,000. That was our down payment, $5,000 each.

And our, and our monthly payment was 1300 bucks. Right. And that’s like, you, I don’t even know if you can do that in Mississippi. I mean, it’s, it, you know, much less, you know, Southern California. Yeah.

My first, right. So it’s just, my first mortgage was 14% and that was, we were locking in the rate before it went up even more. Yeah. But I, but so when, but when my point was when I got that, and I forgot my point, which was, I was like, where was I going with this? I’m glad you saved me for a second.

The rate. So I remember our rate was about 7% and I was like, oh, right. It’s this is great. It’s only 7% interest. And it’s, it’s all about perspective, right?

And then we sold that house for 450,000 a couple of years later. Now, if I was going in there going, oh, well, you know, 10 years ago, the rate was 3% and now the 7% sucks, we’re going to hold on this house. We should just keep, yeah, we should wait. We would have missed out on over $200,000 that we made on the house. But, but you know, here it is funny enough.

We not that we wouldn’t have bought it or whatever, but it’s all about perspective because you know, in the past rates were higher. So it’s like, oh, this is a good deal. But now that same deal, people think, oh, that sucks. 7%. That sucks.

Right. Because in the past, in the past, the rates were 3%. They might not ever get there again. You know, those rates came out of a massive crisis, right. And they stayed low longer than anybody expected them to be.

Well, and you got to have cash on hand in order to act on things like that. And the way that you get the cash on hand is you got to just got to, it’s the rule of holes, right? You find yourself in a hole. You just got to stop digging. Yeah.

You stand there watching that train go by, you know, waiting for the ticket price to go low enough for you to buy it. And then pretty soon the train is gone. Well, Damon, I think, right. You’ve got to, got to get on the train. If that’s the takeaway from the show that we didn’t have a show for, you got to get on the train.

You got to get on that asset train. We will figure out how to get you on that train. Don’t sit there and go, I can’t, I can’t afford it. If you have an income, as Steve said with the forklift operator, you can get on the train. You just have to get creative.

If you have an income, you need to buy a ticket. I feel compelled to go. Trains are coming, coming around the bend. All right. On that note, Damon, I will see.

Peace.