Pay the Pit Bull, Not the Maltese: Which Bill Comes First

Opening: Frick and Frack

Hey, welcome back to the Get Out of Debt Guy podcast. I'm Steve Rhode, the old Get Out of Debt Guy. With me, as always, is Damon Day, the new fresh Get Out of Debt Guy. Say hello, Damon. Hello, Damon. And you can always reach Damon through his website.

You can have a little chitty chat with him, communicate with him. He'll answer all your questions. You can find him at damonday.com, D-A-M-O-N-D-A-Y dot com. Damon, recently somebody commented on our podcast, said it reminded them of that old NPR show that ran for about three decades. Click, the Tappet Brothers. Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers.

And it was two guys up in Boston that owned an auto repair shop, and they did a weekly call-in show, and people would, you know, phone in questions about their cars, and they were well received. Kind of funny guys. So are we frickin' frack? That was where I was going. Did I take it from you? Yeah, and even though I'm the new Get Out of Debt Guy, apparently I'm getting to the point now where I don't remember where that reference—I know that reference, and I've used it lots of times, but I don't remember where it came from.

I don't know where it came from either. It's frickin' frack. That's where I was headed, so. All right. So this week we've got a bunch of stuff to talk about on our well-researched and well-planned show, I'm sure. Hold on, hold on.

AI told me frickin' frack. Yeah. It's an idiom used to describe two people who are closely associated, identical in behavior, or inseparable. Okay, the phrase originates from a famous pair of Swiss comedic ice skaters. Yeah, that's just like us, Steve. Exactly what I was thinking about, who moved to the U.S.

in 1937. They were frick and frack. Well, there you go. The more you know. The more you know. Can you imagine Steve and I on the ice rink?

Which one of us gets to lead? Oh, man, no. I'd be holding on to the wall. Neither one of us can throw the other one. I used to get to twirl. Yeah, I used to go ice skating all the time, but then— Nope.

Well, I guess that's the difference of East Coast baby and West Coast baby. I grew up on the West Coast. No ice skating. I cannot ice skate. No, I could rollerblade. I used to rollerblade in the cul-de-sac, and we'd shoot hockey shots.

Well, there you go. I mean, rollerblading's— No, I can't ice skate because toe pick. Toe pick. Oh, I've done that many times. Yeah. I think a few of our listeners should be able to catch that reference.

I can't remember the name of that movie. It was an older movie, but there's a couple scenes there where she goes around and they're teaching a former hockey player how to be a figure skater. Yeah, and hockey skates don't have toe picks. I know. This guy's not used to that, and he keeps falling on his face. I can picture the actor's faces, but she'd just go around every time he'd fall on his face, she'd skate by him and go, Toe pick.

One thing ice skating taught me was how to swear. Get that toe pick going, boom, face down on the ice, and no bueno. Toe pick. All right, so let's get to our well-researched finance show. Frick and frack, man. Frick and frack.

Yeah. Well, Click and Clack would be very happy that we've now taken over as frick and frack. I'm happy to be the village idiot. I have no problem doing that. As we've been referred to, self-deprecating around here, guys. Just hacks with laptops.

Yeah. And AI now. Yeah, there's no sense taking yourself too seriously, even when you're in debt, because this too will pass.

Bankruptcy Is a Tool for the Wealthy — and a Moral Failure for Everyone Else

In fact, Damon sent me a video about—it was a little short about Elon Musk was being interviewed, and that fits perfectly with this too shall pass. You want to give us the highlight of his conversation? Yeah, I was going to say, you know, it's a video, just, you know, some random guy, you know, talking about money. You know, only—well, who's arguably the richest man in the world, in fact the world's first trillionaire for a moment. Yeah, but oh, for a brief moment. But yeah, there was an interview he was doing.

I just saw it on Instacrap or, you know, one of those things. Yeah. And I saw it and I immediately thought of Steve and I sent it over to him, but it was just a blurb of this interview, and the interviewer was talking to Elon about SpaceX and Tesla and, you know, the financial struggles that the companies went through. And Elon was just talking about, you know, both companies were, you know, struggling for money on the verge of closing multiple times, and he just, you know, kept at it, kept at it, kept at it. And then at the end of that segment there, his last line was like, Well, if we had to go bankrupt, I don't care. Yeah.

Which was really— I was like, How did you keep it together? And he was like, Well, if we need to go bankrupt, we go bankrupt, kind of thing. It was like, Yeah, that's the end game. If it doesn't work out, we go bankrupt and start over. But that's how wealthy people think of bankruptcy, if it's a tool. It's a tool.

It's a legal tool, which— You know, always makes me laugh is not the right word, but shrug is probably the better word, where people are so ingrained into thinking that it's a moral and personal failure that they will do anything to avoid it, including screwing their own future, which applies to the generational wealth idea that I wanted to talk about. But here you've got Musk and all the businesses, all the Wall Street businesses out there that look at it as a financial tool, and yet people are suffering and can't sleep and actually, you know, leave this world over their fear and frustration and emotion about their financial situation. And I am not saying, you know, don't try to do your best, but at some point you've got to remember Elon Musk's quote, which is, Damon? The actual quote? We can file bankruptcy. I don't care.

That's it. I'm paraphrasing. I'm trying to remember exactly. Yeah, no, it ended with, I don't care. Yeah. Yeah, like, you know, richest man in the world, eh, you got to file bankruptcy, you got to file bankruptcy, whatever.

Yeah. You know, what blows my mind is people are so worried about their financial situation and they make all sorts of bad decisions. And we talked about, you know, a company files bankruptcy, their stock goes up. That's what Elon Musk just shared about his roles and experience. And even our president has multiple bankruptcies under his belt. Yeah.

So why are you worried? Yeah, people try to throw that at him all the time, and if he even responds to it, he's like, Eh, yeah. Yeah, but he's not doing too bad financially. No. So it's like, wait a minute. I thought you'd be ruined for 20 years.

No, you can be president. Yeah. And worth billions or whatever. Yeah, but it's just, you know, because I actually just pulled it up because I'm going to, you know, do a little video on that whole thing, and I had an outline, and I remembered I had the outline. But in the little description I had in here, you know, life is not over after bankruptcy. And how I'm describing this video is, you know, Elon Musk has openly discussed how close Tesla and SpaceX came to financial collapse.

That does not make bankruptcy right for everyone, but it exposes—here's the important part—it exposes a strange double standard. Companies treat bankruptcy as a financial tool, while ordinary people are taught to see it as a personal failure. And that's the disconnect. And that's the reason why people that are rich tend to stay rich, and people that are not tend to stay not, right? That's right. We're taught different things.

We're led to believe different things. We need to start thinking like wealthy people, and we can become wealthy people. Well, absolutely. And here's the thing.

Generational Wealth and the Long Game

I published a post this week all about what the rich hear and you don't, because, you know, we're in this K-shaped economy where half the population is doing worse and half the population is doing better. And, you know, what the rich people hear is the long-term commitment to being rich. Everybody who's listening to us right now, regardless of what's in your bank account, how are you feeling emotionally, the stress that you're under, you have the potential to be enormously wealthy. But here's the key, is you've got to come up with a plan for the long term, and you have to execute it, because you want to be the forklift driver that died and left three million dollars, right, to somebody else, to the school or whatever. People, ordinary people, can accumulate incredible wealth by having a plan, focusing, making regular, routine, boring investments like this investment test that you and I are on right now. And that wealth will accumulate and accelerate.

The value of compound interest and time is something that can never be replaced or repeated. And let me just say this again, because it is so true. If you are suffering with financial problems right now, well, obviously the first thing you should do is contact Damon. The second thing is, and Damon will talk to you about it, is we need to address your financial situation right now. Maybe it's a suggestion of bankruptcy. Maybe it's not.

Maybe there are other things available. Bankruptcy is not the only solution. But if you come up with a plan to deal with your current situation, you set your sights on the long term, you do something that's manageable and sustainable, not only will you have wealth when you retire, if you start early, but your generations ahead of you who might inherit what you leave and exercise the same discipline. If you're rich, you have an investment advisor or somebody that's managing your money for you. And today, like no other time in history, you can actually do that yourself using AI and not pay any fees. But that's how the money magnifies and accumulates to these huge sums.

I'm off my soapbox now. Well, that's the American dream, right? The promise of, hey, you come here, you work hard, and you're smart with your money, you can grow that money to generational wealth. You're telling me, you know, and well, I was reading in the article, and you mentioned it too, one of the big takeaways from this article at getoutofdebt.org, it's on the front page this week. It's what the rich are hearing right now that you're not inside the $124 trillion wealth transfer. Right.

And you were talking about that with a lot of these wealthy families that have generational wealth, that many of them, or most of them, I can't remember the exact stat on there. There was only two generations ago started with nothing. Right, exactly. So just two generations later, we're talking generational wealth, but you go back 60 years and they came, or, you know, had nothing, and it started. But the point is, somebody down the line had to make that decision, like, okay, I'm not going to live like this anymore. I'm going to start doing things differently, and I'm going to start building.

And now their grandchildren, right, and their children, you know, previously, are enjoying the fruits of those decisions. So if that's something that is important to you, or you're, you know, in your 40s, 50s, 60s, and you're thinking about legacy-type thoughts, it is weird, Steve, like, because I'm 48 now, and I have kids, and now my kids are like in, you know, high school, junior high, high school age. It's when they talk about midlife, it's a real thing where you're just, your thoughts and how you think about things just totally changes from when you were like 20 and 30. It's all of a sudden you're like, you start thinking about, I don't know how much longer I have. It could be 30 years. It could be one day.

I don't know. And, you know, if I was going to be gone tomorrow, how would I want to be remembered? And, you know, it just, it's so weird how your brain just like hits that script and like, how can I, how do I give back now, and how do I, you know, just try to build this legacy so, you know, when I am gone, I'm, you know, remembered? Because when you really start thinking about it, it's like, you know, most people are lucky if they're remembered two generations, you know what I mean? Or five minutes from now. Like, yeah, like how many people know the, you know, even the names or— Much less the history or the life story of your great-grandparents.

Yeah. Just your great-grandparents. Right. I bet you there's a lot of people listening that if I asked them, what were the names, first and last name, of your four great-grandparents, they might not be able to come up with it. And so you start thinking about things like that, right? Like, what can I do to give back and carry that, and what's my legacy, and how can I help?

Versus when you're like 20, it's all different. You don't even think about that. Oh, that's way down the line, and I gotta get mine, and I gotta get my career going, and all this kind of stuff. And then you have this shift, and it's a real thing. So I don't know how I got on that tangent, but— So I'm 66 years old, and what I have learned in life is there's a big difference at being my age. You've got two things that you can say to yourself in the middle of the night.

Either one, You know what? I should have done it. I should have saved. I should have planned when I was younger. I wasted all that time. Or you can say, Oh man, I am glad I did it.

You know, nobody's ever gonna die unhappy by saying, You know, I'm glad I did it. I really had a great life. Yeah. It's much better to do than wish. Yeah, and I think a lot of us reach a point, at least I'm at that point now, where I'm kind of beyond going, my retirement, my this, my that. How's that gonna work?

And I'm more for— What can I do today so that my kids can have a good life? My kids have a better life. And, you know, the financial lessons I'm teaching them and money we're able to put away for them now while they're young, and then realizing, you know, coming from the, you know, what we deal with every day, looking at, man, if I can do this for my kids and I can help them with this, that will be something when they retire, they could have a million dollars, two million dollars, three million dollars. And by then I may probably be gone, but that would be something that's like, man, I'm so glad my parents did this for me, right, when I was young, because now I'm fine and my family's fine. And, you know, that's something where it's like I'm at the point where it's like, you know, oh, I've got this hundred bucks, right? And it's like, oh, I could go do something cool, or I could put it away in my kids' account and let it grow, and that would turn into them thinking about me, you know, 40 years from now when I'm probably gone.

But that hundred dollars now I'm at the point where it's like I would rather spend that hundred dollars on being a positive thought in my kids' heads when I'm gone. It's so weird to think like that, but that's how I'm thinking these days. Yeah. When my dad passed away, one of the last things that he said to me is, Will I be forgotten? And thinking about that, I took part of the money that he left and started a scholarship fund for him in his name at Michigan State University so that his name would always live and always help people moving forward. And luckily, I had a chance to share that with him before he died.

It really meant a lot to him. Yeah, that's awesome. Anyway, how do we get the Debbie Downer show? This is supposed to be a frickin' frat show. Frickin' frat turned into Debbie Downer. Jeez, Dad.

Well, we're on a narrative arc. Now we're going to bring it back up. Well, right before we bring it back up, I was, I don't know if I saw it on TikTok or what I saw it on, but this was like a year or two ago, and it kind of hit me, and it was something to the— Most people get to a certain point in their life where they realize that they now exist just to be good memories for their kids. And I was just like, that one hit me pretty hard. I was like, shit, yeah, that's true. You know, and you're living your life like, what kind of memory is this going to leave for my kids?

Because that's essentially what we're doing now when we have kids. It's like your whole life goals change to, what can I do? Like your dad was saying, I don't want to be forgotten. Right. Well, he's not every morning because when I walk into my closet, I still have some of his ashes sitting there. So I always say, Morning, Dad.

Yeah, that's my dad. Some days I walk in there and I go, you know, I should probably really do something with those ashes. No, what I did— Yeah, some of them, yeah. Yeah, what I did with both my mom and dad's ashes after they both passed was I flew, you know, when I was still flying as a pilot, I flew all up and down the East Coast to all of their favorite places, the things that meant the most to them in their lives, and I scattered their ashes together in those places. So, I don't know. At least I know they'll always be there.

Their son had the ability to be able to do that for them. Yeah, thank God, Mom and Dad. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, I'm like, I'm going to jump in my plane and go to all my parents' favorite places. Yeah.

Well, they planned well, and so they were an example. They were Depression-era kids. Oh, hey. It is mostly the wife. Do you need to take that in this high production value show, or? Apparently I do.

Okay. This is live. Pam never likes that message. That ringtone for her. Warning, it's the wife. Yeah, mine is the Miley Cyrus, Come in like a wrecking ball, and that gets a laugh every time I'm out, and that is super loud and it rings through.

And then I'm like, Excuse me, that's my wife, and it's, You come in like a wrecking ball, and everybody just freaking laughs. And they're like, Does she know that's your ringtone? I'm like, Oh yeah, she thinks it's hilarious. Well, bringing this back to money, so the reason I went down that path was because, you know, when you're dealing with money and you're worried about your finances and you're worried about making ends meet, and maybe it's the reason you're listening to this podcast right now, because you are probably going to be making emotional decisions, and you want the pain of the situation you're going through right now to go away quickly, and you want a magic solution. There are solutions available. Let me tell you, there's a solution for every situation, and Damon can explain it to you when you contact him.

Why People React Instead of Plan

But the mistake that I see people made, and I've seen ever since I started helping people more than 30 years ago, is that they react rather than plan. And what I mean is, they wake up in the middle of the night and they say, Oh my God, I got a financial problem. I'm stressed, the same way that you and I felt in our lives, Damon, when we hit the wall. And what do they do? They reach for the first magical thing that they hear or see, like a commercial or something on the radio or something in their email, something on the internet, something on TikTok, and generally that is going to be a debt relief company trying to sell you their product. And so, or even a nonprofit.

And so what do people do? They feel like the pain has gone away because somebody gave them a magical answer, and instead what they're really doing is screwing their financial future, which is counterintuitive for people. Yeah. Yeah, we were going to talk about today, I was going to bring up, you know, Steve and I talk about the high production value. The way the show gets figured out is one of us will call each other about 10 minutes before and be like, So, you got any ideas? And my response was, Oh shit, it's today?

Yeah. Ten minutes before we did this, I called Steve and I was like, Well, I got a couple ideas. You have any ideas? And he goes, For what? I'm like, That's today. I'm like, Ten minutes.

But yeah. But I was just looking at, because, you know, after, I mean, Steve, how long have we been doing the show, man? We've been doing the show for, God, more than—1980s we started this show or something? Just kidding, just kidding. Well, I started the Get Out of Debt Guy show originally back in the early '90s. Yeah.

And so imagine this. Imagine, if you will, a world—no. So how much crap can we talk about when it comes to, like, debt and debt-related stuff? So a lot of the challenge for us is we have covered everything, but we never know who's going to be listening to the episode. Yeah. You know, it could be a lot of people that have just stumbled across the podcast.

So it doesn't matter if we're, Oh, we talked about that two and a half years ago. Yeah, but 99% of the people listening to this podcast probably didn't hear that episode two and a half years ago. So we have that kind of that give and take where we don't want to keep repeating a lot of the same stuff, especially even if it's important. But at the same time, at the end of the day, it's money coming in, money going out, and there's not a lot. Yeah, I mean, there are three ways that you deal with it: increase income, reduce expenses, or eliminate your debt. Yeah.

Well, I was just reading, you know, I was talking about, you know, the Federal Reserve report that came out, you know, light toilet reading, right? And it was talking about non-housing debt, which is the debt we typically talk about, you know, credit cards, personal loans, auto loans, things like that. It's increased $48 billion in the last quarter, and almost half, like $21 billion, is on credit cards. Yeah. So, you know, we've been talking about credit card debt is at an all-time high, seems like for at least a year now. My whole career, it has always been next month.

Yeah, it's like every month it's higher and higher. So people are just putting—they're surviving the K-shaped economy with credit cards. That's essentially what they're doing. If they don't have assets, everything's going on credit cards, right? And so, you know, I was thinking about this topic of, you know, when people get in a situation where they're like, okay, our cards are maxed out, that game is over, of, you know, just putting things on cards, and they just look at everything and they go, We don't have enough money to go around. And this ties back to what you were talking about, where people wake up in the middle of the night in a panic, and instead of coming up with a plan, they're just knee-jerk reaction, Okay, this bill needs to be paid, this bill needs to be paid.

And the funny thing is, a cheat sheet kind of thing is usually the bill that doesn't need to be paid is the one that's yelling at you the loudest. Right, exactly. Right, it's like your mortgage company is not calling you every day. Because they're feeling like, hey, we're going to take this house, right? So that, so, but the ones that are not secured, right, the ones that they don't have much recourse, or as much as, like, the mortgage company, they're the ones that are trying to scare you the most. They're the ones that are pestering you the most because they're the small dog syndrome, right?

I've got two, I call them medium-sized dogs. They're about, like, 50 pounds or so. And then I've got my little Maltese, and she runs around like she rules this house. Like she's the sheep herder for these two, just yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap. But it's because she's got that small dog syndrome that she's got to appear big and scary to protect herself, right? Even though she's just freaking little Maltese.

That's your credit card collector, freaking little Maltese. You know, your mortgage company is the pit bull. The pit bull can just stand there and be like, So you want to try something? Yeah, he doesn't have to be barking at you. But that little Maltese is going to be yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, give me a treat, give me a treat, give me a treat, you know? So anyway, I was just thinking about this.

Pay the Pit Bull, Not the Maltese

When you're in that situation where you just, you can't cover, you're spread too thin, you can't cover everything, don't just start missing payments without having a plan, because there is a pecking order to this stuff. There are, you have to look at this as, okay, what are the consequences of, I've got $100 and I have $200 in obligations. What do I do? Do I give each one $50? Probably not a good idea. You know, do I give one the $100 and the other one zero?

What do I do? And if I am going to do that, which one gets the $100, which one gets zero? You've got to have a plan and a strategy. So you have to start with, what happens if I can't make this payment? What happens if I can't make this payment for five days? What happens if I can't make this payment for a month?

You know, so we got to figure all that stuff out. But you don't just want a knee-jerk reaction. Throw what little money you have left or what little money you have in the bank to the Maltese that's yapping the loudest, because that's usually the wrong thing. And then the pit bull comes for dinner, and you don't have any food because you gave it to the damn Maltese because they were yapping at you. I just came up with that on the spot. I think that's pretty good, right?

Pay the pit bull, not the Maltese. Right. Well, I know. It's certainly accurate. With ten minutes of planning, right? It's certainly accurate.

The mortgage companies, when I talk to them on behalf of clients all those years, would always tell me the same thing: You know what? They got to pay to stay. We don't need to chase them or yell louder or anything else, because if they don't pay, they're not going to stay. Yeah, it makes sense. Well, why do they need to be nervous about it? But the ones that are calling you consistently every day, every day, why are they calling you?

So what are they so nervous about? They're nervous that you might not pay, and you might figure out the matrix. You might figure out, they're like, Well, why do I have to pay? Because we want you to. Right. Okay.

I mean, you know, what if I can't pay? What are you going to do? The collector with the big bark is the one that's also going to try to manipulate you with emotional baggage and make you feel guilty for not paying. Yeah. And what will make you feel a lot better in the crappy situation is at least have an understanding of how the system works and have a plan so you don't get taken advantage of. Because creditors will absolutely use every trick in the book to try to guilt you into a payment, even if you can't afford the payment.

Collectors and Debt Relief Salespeople Use the Same Script

They'll definitely use the feel-felt-found method on you and try to get some sympathy. Oh yeah, I understand, and I've been there. Trust me, I talk to these collectors every day, day in and day out, and the shit that comes out of their mouth sometimes, it's like sometimes you just want to go— Right, but you know what the flip side of this is? Is the credit counselors and the debt relief, debt settlement people are all using the same strategy as well, that feel, felt, found. I mean, we've had so many debt salespeople inside the organizations, you know, tell us about how they were trained with, Find the emotional button and push it, because they're trying to make a sale. Yeah.

And so what, you know, so you have somebody that's out there nervous, stressed, upside down, things aren't working right, they're starting to fall behind on payments. You got, on one hand, you got collectors calling you. Yeah. And on the other hand, you got effing debt relief salespeople calling you. Yeah, and there's one more hand. No wonder people make bad decisions, because they don't have good options that are being presented to them.

Yeah, but you just grew one more hand here, because on the third hand, you got frickin' frack and Elon Musk telling you, Don't worry about it. And we are the ones that people say are out of touch. But it's because everyone else is trying to manipulate you. Yeah. Well, I mean, the whole point to all of that is don't make any decisions until you have a plan and you understand the consequences of that decision. Because I'm not on the podcast saying, You know what?

If you can't pay your bill, just don't pay it. Right. There's consequences to not paying credit cards. You have to be aware of that, but we also have to plan to address that. There's consequences to not paying any type of bill. There's always some kind of consequence.

Yeah. So we have to figure which one is the bigger consequence, right? Let's maybe take care of the one that has a bigger consequence. If we have to sacrifice the one with the smaller consequence. And when you're comparing a credit card and a mortgage, or a credit card payment and an auto loan, and a credit card to feeding my family, you know, okay, do I pay this credit card bill or do I get dinner tonight for my kids? Well, you know, that's a choice, right?

And usually the credit card is not going to win if I'm making the plan, right? Because I give two shits about Chase Bank, but I care about my kids, right? Right? It's like, sorry, I wasn't planning on doing this, but I got to make a tough choice. Yeah, but someone might say, But Damon, that advice, you don't give two shits about Chase Bank, that might hurt my credit score. That might hurt my credit report.

And the reality is that is another myth and fear that you're dealing with. Because the honest truth is that those people that take care of their financial problems now with a plan do better financially moving forward than people who don't. And what does that give you? Looping back around, the opportunity to create generational wealth when you're just pissing away your time and money for nothing, and you've got to change it. You know, the plane is going down or the boat's sinking. You don't just keep, you know, gliding or bailing.

You need to do something to fix the situation. Well, and going back to kind of what I was talking about earlier, when I'm gone, right? Yeah. I don't want the memories, you know, of me, my kids' memories of me to be like, Well, you know, our childhood sucked, but Dad did his best. And you know what's cool about it is he always paid Chase Bank every week, even if… I don't want that to be their memory of me.

Chase is not coming to your funeral, buddy. I don't know why. I don't have any specific or particular beef with Chase, but they tend to be always my example when I'm thinking of a bank. I always use American Express. You know what it might be? You know what I think it's—because I used to bank with Chase for many, many years, but I don't bank with them anymore.

But I never even thought about it until you just brought it up, and I realized I always pick on Chase Bank whenever I'm talking about the big bad banks, and I think it comes from after my bankruptcy. And, you know, I was banking with Chase as my main bank, and, you know, all the business income went through there. I was making, you know, good money after the bankruptcy, rebuilding. And it was a couple years after, it was when I went to—I wanted to buy that Escalade, right? I went to the bank, and this was like, I think it was a 2014, but I bought it used because that's a smart thing to do. It was like two years old.

Anyway, nice truck.

What Actually Happens After Bankruptcy

So this was probably about three and a half years post-bankruptcy, and my credit was in the mid-700s, you know, already, and had been. And I had, you know, all kinds of new credit cards, and anybody looking at my life three years after bankruptcy would have no clue I'd filed bankruptcy three years ago, which, another little tip when people think, Oh, my life's going to be over for 20 years. But anyway, I remember this is back in the days when you did go into the branch and, you know, talk to a banker. So I go in, and I'm talking, Hey, I want to get a loan. I got this car I want to buy, and blah, blah, blah. I want to get pre-qualified for it so when I go to the dealer I'm not messing with their financing, yada, yada, yada.

So I'm talking to the banker, and he pulls my credit report and he goes, Oh, you had a bankruptcy a couple years ago. And I'm like, Yeah, but, you know, my credit score is fine now, and you can see I easily can afford the payment based on, you know, the money and blah, blah, blah. He's like, Well, we have a policy at Chase Bank, and we can't loan you a vehicle, give you an auto loan if you've had a bankruptcy within the last five years. And I'm like, What do you mean? I was like, Well, you can auto deduct it from my account every month. I mean, at that time I was making enough money, I could have bought the car fairly quickly just in cash, but I wanted to finance it.

And they're like, You know, I'm sorry, it's just our policy. It's just like, we will not give you an auto loan. Yeah, it's their rule, right? So not to say, you know, you file bankruptcy and everything's great. Sometimes you have some hurdles. This was a hurdle.

We just have to solve the hurdle. So what did I do? I left Chase pissed off. There was a credit union across the street, like literally across the street. And I went, Fuck you, Chase. So I walked across the street.

I'm not a member there or anything. Never even been in there. I walk in, I'm like, Hey, you guys do auto loans? Yeah. Okay, I'd like to talk to somebody about an auto loan. Sat down with that banker, went over the whole thing.

I said, Look, I bank with Chase, but they got a policy, blah, blah, blah, with the bankruptcy. I said, Do you have a policy like that? And they said, No. And I was like, Well, and I had a copy of my credit report. I don't just, you know. So I was like, Well, here's my credit.

Here's the actual FICO score. Here's my income. They're like, Yeah, we should have no problem approving this. We have to officially put it in, but it should be approved. I'm like, Okay. So I went back across the street, went back to the guy.

I was like, I'd like to close out my accounts. Yeah. Closed out my accounts, went and opened up, became a member at the— Credit union got the loan and went and bought the truck. Yeah. So, F you Chase, that's probably why I always pick on you. And I haven't banked with them since, so there you go.

I always pick on American Express because when I went bankrupt in 1990, you know, I had an opinion that I need to do whatever I can afterwards to repay my creditors. And what I learned from that experience was American Express was one of them that said to me after my bankruptcy, Please do not send us money. Silly rabbit. Yeah. And other creditors would just return my checks, and they wouldn't accept the money. And it's because I was thinking emotionally back then, trying to come to something that made me feel better rather than understand what the reality was and why they could not take the money.

Yep. I think if more people understood what you just said, it would open up their ability to make a good financial decision without the emotion. And to paraphrase what Steve just said there is, after he went bankrupt and legally discharged the debts, he still emotionally felt like he wanted to pay it back, and he tried to pay it back. And the banks were like, Don't send us any money. We can't take it. We don't want it.

I had zero creditors that would accept a payment. Yeah. And you're sitting there losing, you know, people are losing sleep over, Oh my gosh, what if I don't pay them back? They're like, No, don't send the money. It's just a business to them. And again, we're not advocating go run up a bunch of credit cards and then go bankrupt.

No, no, not. But if you're in a situation where you need a fresh start, it can be an option. Like Steve said earlier, it's not the only option. People don't call me and I go, Bankrupt, bankrupt, bankrupt. If I was going to do that, you wouldn't need to call me. You just go to our website and click Find a bankruptcy attorney.

You know, there's lots of options, lots of strategies. There is no one-size-fits-all. But we always, again, I reiterate this all the time, so I don't want people to come away from our podcast thinking all these guys are going to do is tell me to file bankruptcy. They just talk about bankruptcy all the time. No. We talk about bankruptcy a lot because it's one of the options that's the most underserved in terms of PR.

Bankruptcy has bad PR, so we try to help it with that. But our whole thing is look at every option available and then make a smart—I don't want to say emotionless decision, but I don't know the word for minimal emotion. Well, the financial decision that is best for you. Correct. Correct. And it's usually not just one.

There's usually multiples where it's like a degree.

Every Option Costs You Something

What are you willing to sacrifice? So if you're looking at, I want to try to Dave Ramsey-ish—I'm doing air quotes—my way out of this, we're talking about massive lifestyle sacrifice. That's what it comes down to. Not impossible. Hard? Most people, yeah, pretty hard.

But also throwing away your potential for generational wealth by doing that too. Yeah, that. And then you start looking at like a debt settlement or a bankruptcy, you're talking more of a quote-unquote credit score sacrifice. So no matter what you do, there's going to be some kind of sacrifice. It's not going to be a fun decision, but it is a decision that you have to make. Which way do you want to go?

Do you want to really sacrifice lifestyle, or do you want to sacrifice credit, or do you want to sacrifice a combination of both so that you're not, to quote Dave Ramsey, having to eat beans and rice and have 18 roommates live in with your family? Is that actually a Dave Ramsey quote? I don't even want one roommate, much less 18. No, hell no. Hell no. I'm too old for roommates.

You had that person that you talked to who tried that advice and took in the roommate to help cut down his expenses, increase his income, and the roommate didn't pay. Yeah. Yeah, he's like, I was doing the Dave Ramsey thing, so I wanted to be smart about it. I got a roommate, and then the roommate just ended up costing him money. The guy moved in and stopped paying. And to just add insult to injury, that's one thing to, like, not get the money you're supposed to get, but you got the guy living in your house, and he's not paying you.

So, like, you know, it's one thing you got a rental house or something, investment property, and a tenant's squatting in there not paying, and it's becoming an issue and you're having to try to evict them. But at least they're somewhere else. Imagine having that tension and that scenario of somebody just literally in your face like, I ain't paying you. Right. And they're living down the hall in your house. Like, you want to go, you know, make pancakes, and they're sitting at the table.

Yeah. Well, not your payment. Hey, at least you didn't have to file bankruptcy, right? Yeah. This is so much better having George here. Yeah.

I mean, if I could go back in time to when I was going through all that crap, and instead of being so stressed and depressed and unable to sleep and not able to function and all that other stuff, if I had had you to talk to, somebody that could give me a plan and help me to understand, you know what? I would have been more emotionally present for my three-year-old daughter. And that's something that money just can't buy you. Damon, there's one thing I do want to close on the podcast. I'm not sure, I might have texted it to you.

College, AI, and Debt for Jobs That May Not Exist

I don't think I wrote about it, but it was a great article about how this is how much college degrees are just more and more bullshit. It was the story I sent you about how people are now using AI to complete their online degrees. Oh, yeah. Take the tests and everything. Yeah. I mean, it's, well, and I don't know when, I mean, I think we're in the breaking point, right?

It hasn't become official yet, but we are quickly approaching a point where it'll be adopted more by the masses. A few of us in the know already see it, but college is, at least college as we know it, and college as it has been for the last however many years, is obsolete for the most part. It is completely broken, you know, at minimum. And this whole graduate high school and just go to college, college is, AI is coming so fast and changing the way we do everything so fast that the colleges are way behind the curve. Even, you know, these colleges are just struggling to kind of come up with, we need to start putting in some AI courses into our curriculum. But this whole idea of paying 50 grand, 100 grand, 150 grand, right now there are kids signing up for school—it's August, school's just getting—there are kids going to college for the first time that are planning on getting degrees in something that won't even exist when they graduate.

Well, look at finance. Borrowing money to do this, it's crazy. Look at business finance degrees, right? When you went to school, that was a smart move because it was going to be needed. You were going to work your way up the career ladder and all that other stuff. And yet we had the pregnant snake, Steve.

Well, and yet today, today the finance field is the most impacted by AI. Yeah. And, yeah, because, well, like I think there was another Elon thing I was watching where he was talking about computers, where he was talking about where the word computer came from, right? Yeah. And it came from there used to be rooms of people that they called computers that would do math. Like if there was a bank transfer or something like that, the information would go to a human who would do the math to get it right and then write it down and put it in a file or whatever.

That was a computer. So in the personal computer case, his whole point was, because they were talking about what was going to happen when AI replaces all these jobs, and he was saying, well, this has been happening throughout human history. Technology advances, and then people that have certain jobs in that field get replaced and they have to go do something else. This is not a new concept. And he was using that argument of, where do you think that word computer came from? It used to be actual people, and now there's nobody that has a job sitting in a room that their only job is, we're going to give you some information and you're going to add up numbers for us and tell us what the answer is.

They don't have that job anymore, right? Yeah, and times are changing fast. They are changing extremely fast. So, yeah, I mean, because I've got kids right now that are at that age, and it's just like, parents, like take a step back before you're just like, well, you're 19 now and you just graduated, so let's get you enrolled in that $30,000-a-year school and see what you want to do. And, you know, I mean, you really have to take a step back and look at what is the world going to look like in five years? Because we're in a period where, you know, the change is so fast.

It's like it's happening in real time, and it's always happening in real time. But it's like the good old days were like last year now, versus I remember 20 years ago when it was like— It was last year. Like every year you look back and you go, oh my God, that's like so far in the past based on where things are at right now. Like we were talking about last week about, got ChatGPT editing all my videos, and if you go to the Penny Stupid channel—oh, by the way, yeah, we hit 2,020 subscribers. Congratulations. Last week we just hit 2,000, so we gained 20 more subscribers in the last seven days.

But a lot of that is because I've got ChatGPT editing all my videos. It's like a daily long-form video every single day, and we made that point last week that I'm paying like five dollars a video, essentially, because I got the hundred-dollar ChatGPT monthly package. And it's doing what would cost me probably ten thousand dollars or more if I had to hire somebody to edit the kind of volume of videos I'm doing. It's crazy town, and we're on the beginning of this, right? What ChatGPT is going to be able to do for me five years from now, I can't even wrap my head around that. This is the dumbest that it's ever going to be.

Yeah. So just if you've got kids that are about ready to go to college or freshman year or whatever, really, really sit down with them and really think through: what are you studying? What do you want to do? How is that going to be impacted by AI? Is this a good investment? And it's easier to pivot as a freshman than as a senior, I'm telling you.

Yeah. I mean, the idea that you're going to go to school, get a degree, graduate, go to work for a company, work there your entire life, get a pension, that's gone. That's gone. What I heard a CEO say recently was, I don't hire people by degrees anymore. I hire them by if they can demonstrate creativity, ingenuity, and show me what they've done, because AI will fill in all the rest of the gaps. If you can find somebody that can exercise critical thinking, you know, like, for example, in their financial situation, instead of reacting emotionally, come up with a plan.

What can they do to use the tools at hand to create the outcome that they want is more valuable to a company next year. Then, your stupid psych degree. If you got a psych degree, I apologize. Yeah. And I know it sucks because college was the easy button, where it's like, Oh, that's the next thing. Go to college, and they'll take care of it, and they'll make my kid smart, and they'll give them all this information, and they'll allow them to make these connections, and then he's going to go get a job and he's going to be good.

That was nice because it was easy, and it was like, Oh, that's the next thing. And now it's like, it's gone. What the hell do we do? Everything is changing, and nobody seems to know exactly. Everybody's got theories, including frickin' Frack here. Everybody's got theories, but nobody knows exactly.

And so it's like, that's what I'm talking about. Like, last year was the good old days, right? It's just moving so fast that there's so much change and turmoil that there's no, like, Oh, here's the obvious path anymore. Like, you're almost like having to gamble on your kid's future. And I'm having these conversations with my kid right now, so I know what it's like. It's like, I don't know exactly what you should do, but let's really think about it.

And, you know, you want to be in, like, video editing, and so I'm showing him, I'm like, Evan, I don't need you to edit videos. Yeah. You know, I don't need that. I was like, that's not going to be something that's really a thing. I mean, I'm sure there are going to be some people, but if you've got an industry that has whatever, you know, 200,000 jobs in it, well, even if that industry doesn't go away, but it shrinks to 25,000 jobs in a couple of years because AI can fill in the gaps, that's not a field that you're going to want to go into because now you're competing for a much smaller pie, right? Yeah.

It would be much better. It'd be much better for people to learn skills or to even start their own business, to become an entrepreneur. Then it would be to go and get a degree. Oh, I think that's where everything is going to eventually go. You're going to have these, you know, I saw an article the other day where it's like the first one-man billion-dollar company or something like that. Yeah, it was a 23-year-old kid I just saw has a $300 million company that just started.

Yeah, and they're like, you know, no employees, just doing it with the technology. Yeah. And so I think that's where things are going. It was like, it's going to be like, you know, you start, you identify a need, you develop a product or a service, and you have the technology help you bring it to the market, and there's your business. Yeah. Or the business is you're really good at, you know, being able to use AI, and then you're going to these existing businesses and say, Hey, look, I can show you how to be a lot more efficient.

And then you can get hired by that business to be the AI implementation guy or whatever. I don't, you know, not really a thing just quite yet, but it will be tomorrow. It's changing that damn fast. You know, there's businesses right now going, We need an AI guy. You know, I heard about this AI. Hey, how do we get AI to work for us?

And they have no idea how it works or anything or how it can be implemented to make them more efficient or make them more money. But if you can show them how you can make them more money, they'll be interested, and they'll go, I can get… This is like the internet craze back in, what, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. You can make a whole bunch of money if you knew how to build a website. Yeah. And you go to a business, you'd be like, Hey, I've been looking at, you know, I was on Google and I noticed you don't appear in the search results and you don't have a website.

Here's what I can do for you. And you would, you know, pitch them that, and they would be like, Oh, that sounds awesome. I'm going to get more customers, and they would pay you $2,000. Oh, I paid five grand for my first custom website. Yeah, and that was a big thing. Early 2000s, yeah.

Yeah. Now you can't do that because I needed a redesign on my website, Steve, and you're like, Oh, I can do that for you. And then like five minutes later, you send me a link. You're like, How's this? And I'm like, That looks really good. You're like, Yeah.

And you had Claude do it or whatever. Yeah, I did. So you can't just go and be like, Oh yeah, $5,000 for a website. They'd be like, No thanks, click, click, click, click. Oh, this looks really good, and then, Oh, publish. You know, by the time you hang up the phone, you got a new website already.

I heard about a guy who, his new business strategy was he would just take a list of, like, landscapers, and he would just set his AI to build a website for every one of them. And then he would contact them and say, Hey, I built you a website. You want to look at it? And if you like it, you can buy it. Yeah. But that's what I'm talking about, learning how to use those tools.

That's where the— and then be able to go to an existing business and say, because they don't care how you did it. They just care, like, Oh my gosh, I've got this thing. This thing's going to make me more money, right? I want to hire this guy, or I want to pay this guy, whatever, so I have access to this. It's— that's not what that guy is doing is not new. That's kind of the business model for a lot of those guys, you know, contacting small businesses.

But in the past, they would have to spend a considerable amount of time putting those websites together. So they're just taking the same tried-and-true model and then putting it on steroids, because now AI can throw those websites together in a day for 50 potential leads and then send out the emails with the preview and, Hey, I can do this awesome thing for you. You just got to pay me a little bit of money, and your website can look like this instantly. All right, on that note, Damon. What's, uh, I wish you a good day. The big takeaway on that last segment is don't be getting your kids into a ton of debt, going to a four-year school without really giving some thought to, is the degree going to give them something that they can use to turn into a living when they graduate?

Because it's not a good investment if the answer is no. And if the answer is yes, it's still probably not a good investment because you can get those skills way cheaper and way faster than taking four years and, you know, partying your way to a degree. Right. But, you know, I digress. I'm just Frack. All right, I'm Frick, and we're going to get the Frick out of here.

Until next time, I'll see ya. Peace!