244. "I'm in $244k debt but give $500/mo to my church"

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Lisa.com, promo code Ramit. Previously on Money for Couples. You've mentioned a windfall. It was $170,000. How much of the money is left? None of it. What'd you spend it on? I spent $30,000 to furnish our house. I got a air transpire. We've already spent more than our budget on groceries, so every bit of money we're spending right now is borrowed. Right now, you spend $6,000 a year on charity, and you're in $244,000 of debt. Taking away that is like telling God, I don't trust him. It feels wrong. This was not easy. There was a lot of fights with money. That was my moping for the first couple weeks. I was just not living in reality. Kids will go wild if they don't have certain constraints. Well, guess what? As adults, we're no different. The way that I was looking at money before was so childish. It didn't mean anything to me. We can't set up a financial system that requires us to be perfect because we would always fail. If we have kids, are we cool with our kids potentially feeling like, oh, we're going to be fully abandoned and being just raised by nannies just so that I can have nice things? Welcome back to part two of my conversation with Mike and Noelle. Last week, we started to untangle this financial situation. One income, high debt, zero savings, which Noelle only learned the severity of when they sat down to go over their numbers to prep for our conversation. Now they're both in panic mode about how to climb out from under a mountain of debt with a single, If you haven't had a chance to check it out, I suggest you go back and listen to the full episode from last week. In our last conversation, we went line by line to cut their fixed costs. But despite acknowledging how dire their situation was, they weren't actually able to make any significant cuts. They had already gone over their budget for guilt-free spending. Noelle was reluctant to give up daily indulgences like face cream and a subscription to Glade plugins. And now when we last left off, I encouraged Noelle to consider cutting back on her church tithing, something that is deeply personal to her as part of her sobriety. Now, as you know, I would never force anyone to cut back on something that is deeply meaningful to them. But the fact remains that they need to make some major changes and they need to do it now. Let's get back into it and see what she's decided to do about tithing. If you choose to keep this, I won't fight you on it. It's your money. And anytime somebody comes on here and they go, I tithe or I give money, I go, are you sure you want to keep it? They go, yeah. I go, cool, we'll work around it. We can work around it. I think I've already, I literally went from 10% to 5%. So I've already cut that in half. Right now you spend $6,000 a year on charity and your income is $156,000. You're in $244,000 of debt. So if you tell me, Ramit, I want to keep it at this amount, I will keep it. But if you tell me, Ramit, I want to give of myself, I want to give some money, and I know that right now we're in a crisis, I can give $50, and as we make more money, I want that built in the plan that we are going to increase it to $100, to $500, to $1,000, and eventually we will donate more than we ever would have donated. We can build that too. You tell me. I want to have that as an option. I want to talk to someone I respect in a spiritual way. I respect that. All right, so you're going to keep that as an option. So we're going to keep $500. You may change it later. I would love your update. We're at 82%. How do you want to get down to 60? The subscriptions is not down yet. Let me show you something just so you understand the scale of what we're talking about. I'm going to drop all of your subscriptions, $123 off, and I want you to look at this number. It goes down 1%. Why are we talking about this? Got it. Okay. What do you want to do? I feel like that's why I want to do the Uber thing because then I can hopefully, you know, what I saw online was $300 to $700 a month just by driving on Saturday nights. Should we? Should we model that in? I think that would be pretty helpful. Yeah. $300, is that gross or net? That is $300 a week if you do it every week. Let's imagine you don't do it one week, so you've got three weeks. That's $900 a month take home on the low end. Okay, $900. Let's put it in. Watch what happens to the numbers. 76%. That's meaningful. I think you're starting to get pretty realistic. Would you like me to give you another framework to look at this through? Yeah. I think that'd be helpful. Yeah. This is often what happens couples are just like, we don't know what to cut. Like we cut to the bone. I get the sense there's not a lot of appreciation for the things you spend because it's just, it's like, oh, we'll just buy this. We'll buy that. All of the discretionary items, I would be in, if I were, if it were up to me right now, this says you spend 17%, but we know that's not true. It's more like 30%. So I would take that number down to something like five to seven. It's actually like re-calibrating the entire family structure and saying, hey, we're in a crisis. And for the next year, we're going to buckle down. We are not eating out. We'll eat out once every, whatever, six weeks when there's a discount, whatever. But every time we do, we're going to appreciate it. It's going to be special for us. The money from guilt-free spending would instead flow to savings and possibly paying off your debt faster. Your savings has a, a problem. It needs to be built. If you could put 2000 bucks a month towards savings, that's really, that's really good. Okay. You wouldn't realize how important it is until you absolutely need it. It's kind of like you don't realize how important airbags are in a car until you really need it. Right. Let me just pause and get a quick check-in from, from each of you. How are you feeling so far, Mike? Uh, overwhelmed, but it's nice to hear your opinion on, on our situation. Um, cause I knew we were in dire, but hearing it from you makes it a little bit easier. A little more real for me. Yeah. If we want what we want later on, we, we need to make some serious sacrifices now. Great. That's what I want you to hear. Excellent. Noelle, let me check in with you. I think I also, I just feel overwhelmed. Maybe sad. Sad because? Because I thought I already cut it down to the bare minimum and cutting it down further feels like cutting off fingers. I think that's really honest. But if I can be equally honest, Noelle, those roses behind you, are those real? That, yeah, those are budget, those were $8. I budgeted that in asking my husband, I want him to buy me flowers every week. Okay. Cause I think it's just like a romantic gesture that I would appreciate. Okay. And so I budgeted it in. I don't mind that you plan for something small. Even when you are in a crisis, we need small moments of joy. Always. You never, ever, ever in your life saw me telling somebody cut every single thing. Never get it. You tell me, okay, this is the one thing that I really enjoy. Fantastic. But it probably has to be one. Like one thing. It can't be all the other stuff. Not right now. Oh, good. This is the crux right here. If your mindset is that you've got to give up everything you love, even temporarily, it means you're going to suffer. And that means you've lost the game. Just to be very blunt, you will never succeed at something if you hate it. Let me give you a couple of reframes that you can use when you need to make big, uncomfortable changes with your money. First, sacrifice is not the same as suffering. Second, serious change is supposed to be hard. What's really going on here, in my opinion, is that both of them compare themselves to how they used to be. They're anchoring themselves around their old spending, the very spending that got them into this problem in the first place. Like they're basically saying, I used to spend $500 a month on glasses, laid plugins. Now it's only 150. Or Mike saying, my credit card debt was worse in college than it is today. Why are we comparing ourselves to the very situation that got us in this problem? The real solution here is to anchor yourself to zero. You got to change those internal messages to, I'm spending $150 on Glade plugins. I could be spending zero. I have credit card debt. I should have none. A couple with $244,000 in debt living on one income quite simply needs to anchor to zero. Listen as I encourage them to look at this as a temporary sacrifice with a purpose, not as meaningless, endless suffering. I'm not surprised also to hear you saying sad because I think that's a really good comment because I think that the more you do this, the more it feels like going back to where you came from and not having enough. And that's scary. And I think in some ways there are like, you've been trying to escape that and spend more, but I want you to recalibrate the way you look at it. I want you to conceptualize it differently. If you think I'm going back, then you will always subconsciously fight against it and you will sabotage it. That's it. Simple as that. On the other hand, if you find a way to make it your mission, hey, I lived on less before I can do it now. I know that we're biding our time until. My income goes up and we're going to do this in a healthy way. And we're actually going, we're not going to wait two more years. We're actually going to make huge progress on these debts now so that when I start earning an income, we are well positioned. You got to find a way for these changes to be pleasurable to you. Otherwise you will forever resist and sabotage them. What's going through your head right now? I just know that you're right. I know that. I think the thing that I keep going back to is the tithing and then just like the guilt and the, I need to talk to somebody about it and like what kind of volunteering could I do? I'm like literally just, I think my brain is, I'm just afraid and I want to figure out how to do it. And like, I don't want God to be the thing I could, you know, the part of me feels guilty. I'm like, I should literally be willing to cut everything else before that. Let me say a couple of things. Number one, you don't, you don't have to set aside God. Nobody's asking you to do that. Yeah, I know. Your relationship with God, that's not for me to talk about or intercede, but I'm sure you will find the right solution for you. I know that for the two of you, especially based on the kind of life you have described you want, Costa Rica, kids in private schools, that will simply never happen ever if you don't make dramatic changes. Okay. You'll just be another high earning. American couple that is constantly in debt and two months away from losing it all. Just a statistic. What a tragedy. Or you can make tough choices now, have a mission, have a real vision that the two of you work towards together and say, look, in two years, things are actually going to be way different. And then we can loosen the reins a bit. Instead of eating out once every six weeks, let's do it once a month. Let's celebrate. A couple more things. I would sell a lot of stuff in the house. I would sell it and I would put that money immediately towards savings, which I think just my guess is there's probably like $5,000 worth of stuff that could be sold. I might be making that up. You never talked about this with me, but just a guess. There's some amount of money, which also sends a signal. We don't need fancy stuff right now. This is not the life we live because it's very hard to be sitting here, scrimping and pinching when you have like amazing, beautiful stuff. It just doesn't, it doesn't send the right signal to both of you. But if you're like, we are in a rebuilding. We got rid of everything fancy. We got used stuff. And like, while it sucks, I can actually deal with it. Trust me in 18 to 24 months when you have like more, much more money, you're going to be so methodical about what you buy guys. Two years in your early thirties goes by like this, but it can set you up for the rest of your life. Here's what I want to do. I want to talk to you again, if you would be interested, and I would like to talk to you after you make changes, because first, I think you have some work to do together. Maybe independently as well, in terms of tithing, in terms of where the money is going to go. Here's what I propose. We talk again, at least a month from now, I want you to redo your CSP. I want you to change the way that you talk about money. The two of you should be talking together. You can read money for couples together. That would actually be a great. Way to start. And you will be able to decide together. What changes do we want to make? I think that there's a big opportunity with earning some more money right now. Noel, if you can do it with your schoolwork, then the 900 bucks already made a huge dent. Turn that into 1100, 12. I mean, that's like a lot of money right now. A lot. That can flow directly down to both savings and to debt payoff. It's up to you how fast you want to pay it off. Paying off that much in two years is quite aggressive. That's part of the reason that you are feeling the stress. You have no money left over. But if you decide, oh, I want to actually like instead of paying it off in two years, let's pay it off in four. And that will allow us to fill up our savings account. You choose. Nobody's telling you have to pay it off in two years. It's not all or nothing. I'd like to talk to you after you do this so that we can come back together and we can talk about. What changes did you make? What disagreements do you still have? What confusions arose? Because things will arise as you make these changes. It's going to have some wrinkles. We'll figure it out. And then we can work through it together. How does that sound to both of you? Sounds great. Yeah, it sounds good. Cool. I would love that. I actually think you taking this, what we've talked about today, realizing, wow, we're in a crisis, but we also have control. We can make big changes in ways that we never thought possible. And we got to do it together. I think that will. Empower you both to move faster and bigger than you ever thought. What was your take on what I just said? I didn't even think about like this is a crisis. And I did. I didn't. I've been so nonchalant about all this. We need to take it serious. That's a great realization. Honestly, just the fact that you're like, whoa, I realize this now is a crisis will spur you into action. I think there is a mixture of feelings. I think one feeling is like hope and relief. And just trying to recognize that this is temporary and like it's OK because it is a crisis. Like I didn't I maybe I just I'm so new to this, like learning that this is a crisis to the point where I need to like cut things in that way. So, I mean, it's sad because I thought I could still, you know, just bear minimum and still have some of the pleasantries and just realizing that like I could cut all of the pleasantries and there is. Like some security in that, I think, in the long run by doing that. That you could cut those things and still be OK. Yeah. Yeah, it's free. It's like I actually don't need all this stuff. And trust me, these lessons that you learn together are the same lessons that if one day you have children, you'll pass it on to them. All right. Let's plan on talking again. I can't wait to speak to you and hear what changes you've made. Now, I don't do this very often, but I thought it was important to give Mike and Noel some space before I speak. This is for a couple of reasons. First, they are both just starting to understand the language of money and how it works. They don't have any savings. They have very high fixed costs and a lot of debt. They need time to absorb this information and putting it into practice. You can't learn a new skill in one sitting. You can't learn to play piano or how to kiteboard after taking one lesson. It needs time to breathe. Second, their emotions are very, very elevated right now. Noel is feeling guilty and overwhelmed and sad. Mike literally did not understand they were in a crisis. Despite his obsession with checking his bank accounts, this is going to take a lot of time to process. It's very difficult for us psychologically to accept that our future is not going to be the future that we envisioned. And so what I need for them to do is to go from hot to cool. And that takes time. We're going to get right back into it and see what changes they've made right after this. I'm going to take a wild guess. Maybe you've. You've been putting off seeing a doctor for a while for some unexplained condition. Hey, why is my left eye blurry? Do I have toe fungus or is it just gross toenails? Whatever it is, stop wondering if you should get it checked out. Go see someone right now. You can use our sponsors Zocdoc. They make it really easy. You don't even have to get on the phone to schedule an appointment. Zocdoc lets you search and compare local in network doctors, whether you're looking for primary care, dentistry, eye care, or anything else. You can easily search by specialty or symptoms, and you can book in network appointments with more than 150,000 providers across all 50 states. Getting an actual appointment is easy. You just look through the real appointment openings, click what works for your schedule, and book it instantly. And what's great is their appointments happen fast, usually within 24 to 72 hours. No more waiting months and months to get the care that you need. Your health matters, and taking care of yourself should not be complicated. Find and book the right doctor with Zocdoc. Head to Zocdoc.com slash Ramit to get started and check that appointment off your to-do list. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com slash Ramit. I'm talking about Slack, Gmail, Notion, iMessage, even ChatGPT and Claude on Mac, Windows and Android. With WhisperFlow, you just hit a hotkey, speak, and the text appears way faster than typing it. Plus, it's smart, it's adaptive, so you don't send a block of huge incoherent text. And unlike other dictation apps, it corrects mistakes, it gets names right the first time, and it can format bullet points and lists on the fly. I find that particularly useful. So if you send tons of emails and messages every day, if you want to be able to capture your own ideas just by talking, WhisperFlow is a no-brainer. Get one month of WhisperFlow Pro for free at WhisperFlow.ai slash Ramit. That's WhisperFlow.ai slash Ramit, W-I-S-P-R-Flow.ai slash Ramit, or click the link in the description. Welcome back. Nice to see you again. How's everybody doing? Good. Really good, yeah. Cool. I am very excited to catch up. I have so many follow-up questions since we last talked. First off, just overall, if you had to describe how you felt after we talked last time, what word would you use? I think I was disappointed. Like, just disappointed by reality. Do you know what I mean? Like what? I just felt like, aww. I just realized like how childish I've been in my relationship with money and how like I haven't really had to think about these things and now like just coming to the realization of like it's not some endless thing and I have to accept that I'm in a rebuilding phase right now and that means I really am restricted to the things that I need at the moment and be happy about the things I still have because if it were, you know, your world, you would sell all my furniture. So I should just be happy that I have that. And stop. Yeah. And then. That feels very realistic. That's like you took it as an eye-opener, an awakening. Yeah. That's cool. Okay, Mike, how about you? I think Noelle came around with this, but I got really peaceful about it because, you know, we talked last time about my almost crippling anxiety with money and obsessing and I can't even point that out. But, I mean, I can. I just. The fact that I was like. Getting a rush out of paying off my credit cards and then getting back in it like just I would have never saw that. Great. All right. I'm happy to hear both of your perspectives. Since we last talked, what else has changed for you? Noelle? Well, I think overall I'm feeling more comfortable with money. I think we are having money conversations more regularly where they're not like stressful or like high energy. They're just kind of like, hey, how do we want to like a conversation we've had recently? Like. Like there has been a couple of times where we've like picked up a soda for the day and we're like, oh, let's put this in the grocery budget. And then feeling like, should that be in the grocery budget or is this like. And then just having conversations about how we want to treat it and if that's something we want to allow ourselves to do or is this like a slippery slope and we're going to end up in trouble and not staying in our budget. And like having honest conversations about like what works for us. Great. How about for you, Mike? What's changed? I've just had to be really conscious because I mean, I'm on the road all the time. So I've had to pack in my lunches. I've had to be taking, you know, taking two water bottles with me instead of one because I could be on the road for eight hours. Just stuff like that. And knowing that like I had made a commitment for Noelle and ours finances. And so it's like I've just not spending money today. So that's been an adjustment. But that's how I racked up $350 in 15 days in the month of August. On gas station stuff. So it's definitely been an adjustment, but I've enjoyed it a lot. So but I mean, I've really just had to be conscious. Like really. That's powerful. Before we dive into some questions I have, I do want to go over some of the homework that I asked you both to do. During our last conversation, I talked about cutting your fixed costs from 85% towards 60%. Building a six-month rollover fund. And Noelle finding $1,000 to $1.5K per month of income while in school. And then potentially pausing tithing temporarily. Okay, so we talked about all of those things as homework. Let's go through each item and see where you stand. Okay, let's start off with fixed costs. What did you cut and did you approach the 60% target? So fixed costs included the credit cards. So we did get it down to that number. And then we were like, okay, we have this big chunk of change afterwards. So let's reinsert it. So we kind of like started to reinsert it into there. We are had a conversation with his mom and asked if it was okay if we paid $200 for the time being. And then once we get his car and the credit cards paid off, then we can start, you know, upping that and just get her paid off really quickly. So we had gotten that number quite a bit down and then the savings grew pretty more significantly. So okay, first of all, great job. Great job. I love it. The fact that you brought that fixed cost number down that you decided to put more towards debt. That's awesome. The fact you had the conversation about paying off the debt. Amazing guilt-free spending. How much did you each spend last month though? It's hard because it's not I wouldn't call any of it guilt-free spending. It's like stuff that came up that was unexpected. I don't know what to do about when stuff comes up. Like I had school fees show up that were like several hundred dollars that like had to be an extra and I'm like, I don't I don't know what to do with that. What else showed up? A vet bill which we got out of we that some of that stuff was okay because we actually have a doctor's savings account. We like made a savings account for $700 a month put aside just for doctors great and we went through like almost all of it, which is nuts. Okay, it just have it was a bad month with it comes to that kind of stuff. But like we never I mean we never like went out to eat like we didn't buy things like for fun. Did we like I will interject one thing Noel had my birthday. She yeah, she had her birthday this month and her parent and my mom and her mom gave us some money and we use that for a video game. And we're in flowers and but we only spent what they gave us. Okay. Yeah, are they the flowers that I see behind the sunflowers? No, those are those are like $6 sunflowers that they're nice came out of groceries officially. Okay. All right. We're still we're still within the grocery budget. I love it. It doesn't matter whatever your number is if you're hitting your number and you choose to get freaking fruit roll-ups or granola snacks or organic eggs or flowers. It's totally up to you. That's awesome. Okay, and you took the birthday money and you spent it on a video game and flowers fine. All right, I totally I totally understand the rollover fund. How much is in it now? 3300 Wow. Yeah, my my I had a good month this month. And so, you know, our budget is 10,800 a month. We brought in 13,300 I think. After a conversation with you. We both just understood what we have to do and in order for me to not feel anxious about money. I have to have money in the bank. It's just it's worth noting that that account you're referring to is separate from the savings account that we have for like doctors and annual bills. So like that other savings account also has like almost a thousand in it too. So like we did really good in savings. Very good. It is amazing how quickly you can build up savings when you truly attack it. Like we are. We are going on pure offense. It's shocking. You can often put hundreds sometimes thousands of dollars in a single month and and then you go wait a second. If we just do this for six months like we're golden that is incredible. What an incredible feeling. Okay, love it. Let's keep going. Noelle your income. Did you bring in any extra money? And if so from where so I did bring in $200 driving Uber on a Saturday night, but I didn't get home. Until like 3:00 in the morning. Okay, and I was passed out for the next day. And since then my work school schedule has gotten like nuts nuts. Like I'm working 10 hour days seven days a week. It's like absurd. So that has I haven't done it again since I'm waiting until my mock trial tournament. This upcoming weekend is over before I kind of great try and return to that. But also Mike has signed up for. is signing up for doing uber too and his free time so have you have you done it yet mike not yet i'm gonna tackle that actually probably after we get off the phone now now that i'm thinking about it um because in my career it just i don't know i saw my wife being so willing to like do law school and then this so like okay what can i do and i was and uber just is i mean i can turn it on and turn it off no matter what like wherever sometimes i'm in a different city for eight hours at a time and waiting for appointments for four hours what what can i do i could spit it starbucks spending coffee and watching tv or give drives so it just it made a lot of sense for me to do that as well so that's such a powerful example where one partner says like i'm gonna push it i'm gonna help contribute towards our goals and then the other partner says wait a minute if they're doing that then maybe i can do this and it's this upward spiral which is the best kind of spiral and it is so rare you so that's incredible the two of you are motivating each other and you're going to be achieving your goals faster i also love that as a team you know that hey sometimes i can't drive uber i got mock trial coming up okay fine that's totally fine not everything has to be 100 all the time but the concept of like we're a team sometimes i might get injured then you might pick up some of the slack and vice versa incredible teamwork this is pretty amazing do you notice how differently they are talking about money now they actually sound like a team take the uber example noelle set a goal to earn 300 a week in additional income driving for uber okay she didn't achieve that goal that's okay because mike saw an opportunity to step in and join her in that goal for so many parts of life when you truly get honest about what you want and what it will take a lot of times it's actually pretty achievable there are rarely cases where there is simply no solution are things going to go perfectly no they never do they had some unexpected medical bills they didn't earn as much side income as they expected but at least they got started i don't mind a couple of mistakes i do mind people just sitting there paralyzed they're doing a good job that's what we're seeing play out with noelle and mike if listening to mike and noelle has you thinking we need a reset like this then you don't actually have to figure out how to do it alone i can help in money coaching i will help you get honest about your money and i will help you get honest about your money and i will help you get honest about your numbers looking at them in black and white and then i will help you build a plan that works for your real life you don't have to do this alone my personal philosophy when i'm hiring a coach is that i'm worth it i'm worth paying to get help i'm worth paying for to get better results i'm worth paying for to know that somebody cares if you're ready to make a change with your money and you want to do it fast sign up at iwt.com money coaching i'm going to take a wild guess maybe you've been putting off seeing a doctor for a while for some unexplained condition hey why is my left eye blurry do i have toe fungus or is it just gross toenails whatever it is stop wondering if you should get it checked out go see someone right now you can use our sponsor zocdoc they make it really easy you don't even have to get on the phone to schedule an appointment zocdoc lets you search and compare local in-network doctors whether you're looking for primary care dentistry or dental care or you're looking for a doctor who's going to take care of you you can easily search by specialty or symptoms and you can book in-network appointments with more than 150,000 providers across all 50 states getting an actual appointment is easy you just look through the real appointment openings click what works for your schedule and book it instantly and what's great is their appointments happen fast usually within 24 to 72 hours no more waiting months and months to get the care that you need your health matters and taking care of yourself and your health matters should not be complicated find and book the right doctor with zocdoc head to zocdoc.com slash ramit to get started and check that appointment off your to-do list that's z-o-c-d-o-c.com slash ramit my team at iwt is fully remote and i love that because of that we're constantly sending messages through slack through google drive through all kinds of different technologies and that's why my team at iwt is fully remote and i love that because of that we're constantly sending messages through slack through all kinds of different technologies and that's why my team is such a big fan of whisper flow whisper flow turns the way you naturally talk into clean ready to send text in any app on any device i'm talking about slack gmail notion imessage even chat gpt and claude on mac windows and android with whisper flow you just hit a hotkey speak and the text appears way faster than typing it plus it's smart it's adaptive so you don't send a block of huge incoherent text and unlike other devices it's very easy to send a text to your phone and it's very easy to send a text to your phone and it's very easy to send a text to your phone and it's very easy to send a text to your phone dictation apps it corrects mistakes it gets names right the first time and it can format bullet points and lists on the fly i find that particularly useful so if you send tons of emails and messages every day if you want to be able to capture your own ideas just by talking whisper flow is a no brainer get one month of whisper flow pro for free at whisper flow.ai slash ramit that's whisper flow.ai slash ramit w-i-s-p-r flow.ai slash ramit or click the link in the description tithing we talked about this at length tell me what decisions if any that you made yeah so we were originally at a thousand then right before we met you we brought it down to 500 since then we brought it down to 200 how did you make that decision that's a very difficult decision to make candidly it's a very sticky topic how did you decide to cut it from a thousand to 500 200 so the way i see it is like the way that i was looking at money before was so childish that i like wasn't there was it didn't mean anything to me so like giving up money if it doesn't if money doesn't mean anything to me it doesn't mean anything to give it up so i felt like there was like no value in my tithing anyways because i was just spending it on whatever so i think now i think there's a little more value that we're really conscious with our budget and i'm making a point to give them still 200 that could be like really valuable and other things like i'd love to go to the movies occasionally or go out to eat and i don't do those things instead i i give that and so i feel like in the end it's like i'm actually spiritually doing more than i was before even though i'm giving less wow mike where are you on this noelle has put a real emphasis on the tithing and i i've just been so selfish with money that i just thought it was a good idea for us to give it away in some capacity i've just been so you know i'm gonna hold on to it and hold it and it's and that that's a whole nother psychology thing but i always wanted to give something and i just kind of wanted to leave it up to her to to be what and and that was i don't know that answer was incredible yeah so one thing that i noticed from your response is it sounds like you are respecting money a lot more yeah i think that's definitely the biggest that's the lesson the like overall lesson that i've gotten and like i've grown up you know i'd mentioned that i was sober i've been sober 10 years i've grown up in a lot of ways and this is just one way that i haven't because i've never been pushed to um and i think this is like what i needed to kind of push me and realize like oh like i really have actually not grown up in this area i really appreciate the honesty like the candor is so refreshing and it often when i'm talking to a couple or an individual about money they might start a transformation with money and often what i find is that they take those skills of transformation and they use it for other parts of life it's very common that people who go through i will teach you then go on to transform their relationship with health with fitness it's very common in your case it's like you've built those skills in other parts of life to transform your life and now you're doing it with money doesn't matter to me one way or another doesn't matter all i want is the transformation for you and to hear the way that you are respecting money that is like that's amazing money should be respected it should be honored it should be treated carefully it allows us to have the beautiful flowers that you have and the books and the it's those things that allow us to do what we do so i am loving hearing this increasing respect for money so cool okay question which of the changes that you made felt the most painful well i'll go it's uh for me it's been we made a real commitment because you know we went we went really hard with you last time on the on cutting the budget what you would do helped us out way more than you probably even know about what you would do in this situation so we get we got like really serious we gave ourselves a budget of six hundred dollars of groceries a month and we've we did this month will be we spent 614 so um and the reason it's 14 is because i've spent money on soda so okay hold on remind me what was it before before 600 what was it prior like 1200 or something crazy like literally attention americans who tell me you can't cut your spending yes you can wait you got to tell us mike and noel what did you do to get it down to 600 well um you eat a lot of ramen yeah i eat ramen like every day that wasn't what i expected uh never mind that's his choice that's his choice yeah but but i'm also adding chicken breast and onions in it so it's healthy for me like i said when i'm on the road i just won't spend money on food and i'll have to tough it out or noelle made me um get uh granola bars for my car so like which is a great idea um and then like a two gallon jug of water in my car so that's how i've been because he because you kept buying things and you'd be like well i don't have food i didn't think to pack it and i was like we need to keep that in your car so that i'll never be an excuse again nice um yeah that's true isn't it amazing like so much like we're talking hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month and in part a lot of that happens from a little bit of pre-production and then you're like oh my god i'm gonna have to do this again and then you're like oh my god i'm gonna have to do this again and then you're like oh my god i'm gonna have to do this again and then you're like oh my god i'm gonna have to do this again and then you're gonna have to do this again and then you're like oh my god i'm gonna have to do this again planning and you could spend a little bit for some convenience you want the granola bars are already packed up okay fine we'll keep it in the little container fine but just that alone means i'm not going to a restaurant i'm not going to stop and get this which ends up inevitably being 10 15 bucks each time it is incredible what you can do when you have constraints that's what's amazing constraints we always think of him as like ah don't rule me get away from me but sometimes we actually need constraints and rules and limits as we all know with kids kids will go wild if they don't have certain constraints well guess what as adults we're no different so it's really cool to see the creativity where you go okay we're gonna cut our number down to 600 bucks how are we gonna do it oh well we're creative we're smart we can figure it out and here we are noelle what did you do on the grocery front to be able to cut that spending yeah honestly i'm just really price conscious when i'm at the grocery store i look at the prices of the things i'm buying and if it feels high i put it away i usually if i'm at the grocery store won't spend more than about 30 to 35 dollars per trip and that should cover me for two to three days like what do you get um i got like little like cheese snacks before i got like a big thing of like pesto and tortellini and that would feed me for a couple of days because i could like reheat it and eat it for a couple days okay loving that we talked about what changes felt the hardest what changes actually felt easy for you so for me i actually thought the groceries was the easy part for me and the subscriptions weren't as bad as i expected we have a yeah we have access to watch still a lot of the things we wanted to watch before without paying for it so that's actually really nice yeah we don't pay for one streaming service now except for amazon prime i guess oh you pay for amazon prime what do you borrow um i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know someone else's uh don't worry i'm not gonna tell the ftc actually maybe you shouldn't say whatever don't say it it's fine somehow they got access i don't mind okay and um i think honestly for me that like just sorry just just circling back and coming back the groceries was the easy part the the thing that was hardest mentally the thing that was very hardest i think was his mom and the tithing i should say and then the thing that was after that just realizing like i was moping around to to in all reality for the first couple weeks like about the fact that i can't i really like like expensive face wash and expensive shampoo and conditioner wait like which brand like i really like olaplex and drunk elephant and those are just like well what is the more expensive drunk elephant is a brand of face wash it's like fifty dollars or how much it's like it's like expensive for a bottle of face wash and then for the shampoo and conditioner for olaplex it's like fifty dollars for like this big of a bottle you were putting on like suave or something some and then you're just like oh this disgusting shampoo it doesn't even smell good is that what was going no i was just moping around for when it's run out and like what am i gonna do and and i just felt like i'm i just got really sad about that i think it was easier than i thought like i in reality i think everything so far has been a lot easier than i expected it to be i think i just had to be more grateful for the things i already have because i have a lot you know so gratitude respect for money incredibly powerful commonalities i find by the way with a lot of people who are quite successful with money not all i know some rich cheap a lot of them hey if you're rich hold on i need to just blanket announcement for america there's a certain money you have where you are not allowed to complain about prices anymore okay i'm just i'm you heard it here first you never heard anyone else say it if you make a certain amount of money we can debate over how much you're just not allowed to complain oh my god disneyland is so expensive oh my god mozzarella is so you're not allowed to complain about it anymore you could run it in your head but you are not allowed to talk about it anymore because you made a certain amount of money it's over all right enough off my soapbox noel i love the gratitude i love the respect that's amazing i actually think these values are going to go so far so far as the two of you increase your earnings your savings your investments it's like a whole new way to look at money wow okay beautiful um mike what did you notice about how noel responded to these changes you know things like face wash and shampoo and cheese what did you notice this was not easy there was a lot of fights with money the last probably maybe before we met you the first time we had there was there's like weeks of like stress and us like arguing about this but after we did it with you she was just really disappointed and i was just like i and it was interesting because i just had a different response as you heard like i was just peaceful and i was ready to do this and i i like doing this kind of stuff but then all of a sudden one day she just woke up and she just like man we have we have a great life and like this is totally doable and um where did that come from i don't know i think it just i needed i needed a minute to process reality and i think eventually i kind of just woke up to feeling yeah like everything's okay like i'm safe everything's fine we have a great life yeah my whole life wasn't taken away from me yeah like we're not on like welfare like it's okay there's a lot to appreciate that's for sure and yeah look we all if if we feel like something is being taken away from us it's natural ever since we were little kids to to resist it to pull back give me my snack back don't take it away from me but there's a time for that there's a time for grieving naturally we all feel that way a small amount of people come out the other end and go wait wait a second like i'm actually pretty good we're good and we should take the time to appreciate what we have also i will say there's always a better tomorrow i believe that and that means you know build a rich life today and a rich life tomorrow which means there is a hundred percent a day where you will get that shampoo back the one that you love and trust me when you get that shampoo if you decide in the future to spend the money on that you're going to appreciate it 10 times more like i know what it takes to pay for this shampoo i know what we went through i could do it again if i have to and we did it together and here we are and this shampoo smells great i love it okay mike i want to ask you a question about paying bills we talked about you feeling a rush paying them at the last minute juggling them around do you still feel that way absolutely i just don't do it wow i just don't do it how do you stop no well uh she's just able to structure it really well and then with the literature that i read with you with uh because i think i read i certainly read your first book and i listened to your money with couples and just the way you you know you hammer automated automated automated and so noelle and she's like you need to stop like the only way you're going to stop doing like getting this rush is if you just stop it so no it irritates me every day but i just don't do it i wait for the credit cards to come out when they're supposed to and the savings to transfer when it's supposed to and no it still bugs the hell out of me but i just i know i know what we built is what we need to do and so i just i just kind of put in the back of my head like this is just what it is that's pretty impressive that's really impressive it reminds me of so many people have made major changes you know they were spending money a ton of money and i go you miss it they go yeah i miss it every day i go how do you not do it they go they basically say in so many words the same words you said there is something bigger than me loving to spend money there is something bigger as you put it than you needing to manually pay credit cards and get that rush yep that rush is not going away it's there it's probably latent it will decrease like a sugar addiction decreases but it's not going away it's just sitting there you know dormant like one of those fish that sits in the desert you know you pour water on it comes to life somehow you're like how is this possible i don't know it just happens more importantly though what you've done is you've elevated you're playing a bigger game because we and getting this temporary rush it is meaningless does nothing thing for us. In fact, it keeps us small. And Mike, I'm so happy that after our conversation, you said like, yeah, I love it, but this isn't my destiny. I'm destined for something bigger than that. And together with Noel, we got to elevate. So well done. Well done. One of the most hilarious findings in the entire personal finance industry is that most people just don't plan basically more than a month ahead of time. And yet the personal finance industry refuses to acknowledge it. That's why they will show you yet another compound interest chart. Hey, everybody, look, if you start at age 22 and you compound for 85 years, you can buy a sandwich. Most people literally are not thinking beyond the next month with their money. This is also especially hilarious to me because of my own cultural upbringing. I've been literally planning for retirement since I was 14 years old. So imagine me looking around the world going, what the hell is going on here? But that's not how most people think. And that's quite evident when we look at Mike and Noel. Until just a month ago, they were only thinking about the days and weeks in front of them. Mike obsessively logging into his bank account to manually pay this month's bills. Ooh, I did it. I paid this month's bills. No regard to where they were actually doing financially, where they are going. Noel buying the most expensive mozzarella, thinking only as far as dinner that night. It's like trying to drive across the country, but only looking at the road 10 feet ahead. That's not how you drive. But now Mike and Noel are starting to zoom out. The fact that Mike automated his money is a huge step. It's getting them out of the weeds and building the infrastructure to be able to think long-term. I'm curious how zooming out and seeing money through this new lens has affected their CSP. Remember, Mike has a variable commission-based income, which means his earnings look different month to month. And since they had zero in savings, they were extremely vulnerable to risk. If anything happened to Mike's job, they would have run out of money within days. That's why I encouraged them to create a rollover account, which is essentially a buffer savings account where you set aside extra money during good months to cover expenses during leaner months. If you have variable income, I recommend that you build your way towards having six months of fixed costs in a rollover fund in addition to an emergency fund. That's going to allow you to stabilize your income and similarly, you're going to be able to save money. So if you have variable income, you're going to be able to save money. a normal, stable W-2 income. We're going to take a look at their numbers right after this. Maybe you've been putting off seeing a doctor for a while for some unexplained condition. You can use our sponsor ZocDoc. ZocDoc lets you search and compare local in-network doctors. Whether you're looking for primary care, dentistry, eye care, or anything else, you can easily search by specialty or symptoms and you can book in-network appointments with more than 150,000 providers across all 50 states. You just look through the real appointment openings. Click what works for your schedule and book it instantly. Your health matters and taking care of yourself should not be complicated. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com slash Ramit. Can we take a look at the CSP? Yeah. All right. So you updated the CSP. I want to put it on screen and I would love it if you can walk me through it. Did your investments up here change at all? They went up a little bit because it took a couple of weeks to turn off my 401k. Okay. And your savings are at zero? Is that right? Not right now. When we wrote this, they were at zero because we had not transferred anything into savings. Mike, what is it at now? Do you have? Well, our rollover is $3,300. Plus that, what's the other account? I think it's $211. All right. $3,511. I'll take that. Hey, that's pretty good. $3,500. We're heading in the right direction. Okay. Well done. The round of applause on that. Okay. But do you also, because we have $10,000 and we're checking well, do you want that too? Yeah, I count that. By the way, I'm going to get in big trouble right now because everyone's going to start attacking me. Ramit Sethi, it's supposed to be a true net worth. You need to count that. I'm going to get in big trouble right now because everyone's going to start attacking me. You need to count your checking. Yes, you do. Okay. Yes, you should count your checking. And if you make a lot of money, one reason people feel scarce about money is they still keep their checking account really small. Like they try to maximize yield. It's dumb. If your monthly expenses are $15,000, put $20,000 or $25,000 in there. It's okay. You don't need to optimize every single thing. You will feel so much better. So considering that your fixed costs are $8,043 a month, makes perfect sense to me that you would put $12,000 in there. Of course, it may take a while to get there, but you'll get there. All right. So should you put $10,000 in your net worth? Yes. We can even just increase it up here and call it $39,800. Okay, cool. Total net worth negative $188,031. Okay. I don't mind. Still so bad. It's still negative, but it's certainly trending in the right direction. All right. You dropped your 401k contribution. Okay. Let's see. Okay. So pets, I think before it was something crazy. So we got him up. We got him on his original food that was reasonable. You put that dog on a freaking diet. You're like mom and dad are on a diet. You're on a diet too. No more mozzarella cheese either. We're taking you straight to the dog kibbles and bits. All right. How much did you save per month on the dog? So he's on a Purina dog food. I feel like he eats less of it though, too, than he did of the other food. So it's like shit. Hold that dog up. Let's see the dog. Let's just evaluate the dog. How healthy is he or she? He. He's really healthy. Our vet always rants and raves. Oh, what's his name? Dulce. Dulce. Okay. Dulce has a beautiful sheen to his coat. I think that cheaper food is doing him well. So you're saving quite a bit. $256 a month on average without exceptional circumstances. Per month on your dog. Is that right? Yeah. And we actually spent the vet. We actually, that actually went for its medical bills. So I was still in our budget. Great. Amazing. Another benefit of being forward looking is the vast majority of people, when something happens like an unexpected expense, it cripples them. It's like taking a punch when you're out just walking and you're just like, what the hell? But when you are thoughtful, mindful, when you're following, I will teach you to be rich, you already put plan for the unexpected. You can't know what it's going to be, but you know something is going to happen. So you plan a little bit extra. You always add in a little buffer. And then when you get punched or when something happens, I don't know why I'm using this punching example. When something happens, you're well prepared for it and it does not knock you off track. Well done. All right, let's keep going. We see that tithing is down to $200. That's a big change. Subscription is down to $58. Very nice. Yeah, that's my gym membership. That's Amazon Prime. I got rid of my gym membership, but he felt like he really wanted to hold on to his, so we agreed that he would keep his. Your fixed costs are 74%. That's in the right direction as well. The debt payments are at 2024. Is this higher or lower than it was last time? I guess same. It's about the same. It's because the savings went up. Okay, let's take a look. So going down to investments, investments are still at zero right now. In fact, you are currently investing $0. I don't love that. I don't like that. I don't like that. I don't love it because I like the factory to stay on even for a hundred bucks a month, but I understand there are certain things you're prioritizing. We can talk about that. Let's look at savings. Savings are at 24% of take-home pay. Okay, that's a lot. So you have annual bills and doctor bills at $362 a month. Okay. And your rollover fund is at $2,233. So you're being quite aggressive with that. That's a lot. So you have annual bills and doctor bills at $2,233. That's have questions. First of all, is 2% realistic? No. No. It was originally, it would have been if it was actually guilt-free spending. But the problem is there's a buffer needed that we didn't really realize at the time. And since then, every time we have things come up where you have to spend money, what I've done is just taken it out of the overflow savings budget and moved it into the extra budget, the miscellaneous budget. Hopefully it's not going to stay here, but right now it's at 850. I'd like to keep, that's a lot high. That's a little high. Okay. 850 is not that big. It's 8%. And then the overflow savings account went from like, I think it was initially, it's down to 1,165. Because he had such a good month, we still were able to put away three, over three grand. Good. But yeah, the average month, that's what it's at though. I think your rollover fund is pretty aggressive. And when you have a great month, yeah, pump that thing up. fill it up but you got to leave yourself a little bit of room for the unexpected the only reason we thought of that was just because of how variable his job is and like and you're like he's performing better at work and i'm like convinced that it's because he's not stressed he's not going into the job thinking like i need money i need money i need money which is obviously going to come across to people you're selling to they're going to feel your energy you're going to feel their energy right and so when you're just like not thinking about money because money's okay i feel like it makes you better able to be present so like you've had a great month and i think having a rollover account that's comfortable having money in our checking account so we never have to worry about making sure that there's enough in the checking account to cover all the bills like i feel like we're just going to feel more relaxed so that's just basically kind of like my mentality as far as being so aggressive with the overflow front because of the nature of his job and just how variable it can be gotcha what do you think mike i 100 agree let's yeah i like i said the fact that i'm still checking my bank account today is my problem and more psychology probably more like you said probably therapy thing um but yes knowing that yeah it's it's been life-changing actually so for me that's what i love to hear that's amazing okay i have a question about your debt if you stick to your current plan how long until your debt is paid off no i would know this i want to point out before noel answers i just want to point out noel just grabbed her phone she she has the information handy it's not like oh i don't know she's pulling something up go ahead noel the last time i think i did the math i feel like we were at like a year and a half we could have done it quicker but with trying to do the savings as aggressively as we are i think we just are like it's because i remember you saying specifically like you don't have to do it that quickly like it's okay if it's just like a little bit chill so i think we made it a little bit chill so the credit card payments are specifically it's a weird number but it's one thousand six hundred and sixty one dollars a month is just automatically going towards credit card bills yeah and and so that i think that's a it's around a year and a half that sounds pretty good to me how's that sound to you i feel good about it i stress about it as you know but yeah it's and realistically it's really good okay we're all about realism here always like it took you a while to get into debt it's going to take you a while to get out but a year and a half or so does not seem extreme to me to be debt-free credit card debt-free that's quite impressive well and to have a savings and a roll over fund i mean that i just don't that that term changed my life like our life i've been trying to for some reason in my head the way you said it i was able to respond because i've had coaches you know like one of my best friends and one of my best friends and one of my best friends and one of my best friends is a top sales guy and he's got me in the career and he told me to do the same thing you did but i don't know i guess i was ready to listen this time i think that's probably true we we make changes when we are ready to hear them i see it all the time i've done it myself people told me advice 10 years ago i didn't listen now i'm ready good um let's talk about investing so right now you have zero dollars going towards investing now i understand why you're being very conscious of every dollar it's being apportioned into places you want let me simply tell you my philosophy on investing which is obviously you've heard you know start early invest consistently i'm not even talking about that imagine you ran a factory and you were like creating a thousand widgets a day and then you realize there's a shortage of some parts due to somebody imposing unnecessary tariffs let's say and you were like we're shutting the entire factory down just shut it down well now what happens when you shut it down you got to lay everybody off and that old guy george who's the only guy who knows how to repair the cobalt programming thing he's he died now when you decide oh we're ready to finally restart the factory it's incredibly difficult you don't have the talent you don't have the parts you don't have any of it if instead you had simply gone from a thousand widgets a day down to 50 widgets a day you could have cut your costs a bit you could have maybe laid some people off but you still keep the factory running that is exactly how i think about investing sometimes people can't invest five thousand dollars a month or a thousand dollars a month but my question to them is can you invest 50 a month because then you keep the factory running and when you are able to like when you pay off your credit card debt in 16 18 months or so then it is really easy to simply transfer that money over and turn up the factory that is why i love to keep it running what do you think of that i think that's good i it sounds like maybe we could do a hundred dollars a month obviously we can do that and maybe is the best place to do it is in your matching program right like because if you get a 401k match yeah i do but i gotta i gotta contribute six percent oh it has to be six percent to give four percent that's why i turned it off i understand and there's no in between you can't do like two percent i could do two percent i just wouldn't get a mat oh yeah well i don't mind it i don't mind it there there may be better options the other investments i have is vanguard i oh another question well another question i just kind of asked is i also have a roth that i've haven't contributed to in years uh that's just sitting in my vanguard as well that's just it's grown i don't know seven percent or something but so you would you would have to look because there is a contribution limit based on your income to see if you're eligible for a roth ira it also depends on if you're eligible for a roth ira it also depends on if you're filing single or or married there's a little bit to look into it's not hard but a roth ira is an awesome awesome account and you can contribute 50 bucks a month you can contribute 583 a month etc etc but if not put in a 401k that's fine the point is just to get the 50 a month keep the factory running that's really the point of it 50 a month in the grand scheme yeah it will add up but your real growth is going to come from 500 bucks a month a thousand bucks a month so where you put it at this stage is almost not as important as simply having it go somewhere if it were me i would if i had the opportunity to do a roth ira which you can just search roth ira contribution limits i would put the money in there 50 bucks a month you can do it through vanguard super easy you just open up a roth ira do it that way i already know what you're thinking right now a bunch of commenters sitting there with cheez-its on their face going ramit you don't know what you're talking about fifty dollars a month won't get anywhere as you start to gear up and write your angry comments let me just run the numbers for you start with fifty dollars double it every year cap it at two thousand dollars a month stay consistent for 25 years assume average stock market returns of seven percent you end up with over one million dollars that's right i love cheez-its too but don't write me comments like that anymore unless you run a calculation yourself this is the power of starting small and building the habit and for mike and noel that future is actually within reach within two years they're going to be a two income household but the discipline has to start now investing is not just about how much you earn although that certainly helps it's about building the habits building the skills to respect money to stay consistent and to know that wealth is created over time that's how they start living their rich life as you made these changes since the last time we talked did you notice any childhood lessons coming up as you were engaging with money in a different way yeah that was my moping that was my moping for the first couple weeks it was because there was yeah it was definitely like this fear of like suddenly everything around me is going to change but my environment didn't change like i'm not in you know a tiny one-bedroom apartment with cockroaches like that's just not where we are right now and so even if we're spending like we're restricting how we're spending like we still have a beautiful apartment and we're not going to be able to we still have you know a lot of what we want and everything we need so it's just not the same and so i kind of had to realize like maybe i was afraid that it would be the same and after a couple weeks realizing this is not the same thing i think i was able to be like wow that was i was just not living in reality and also that's when i kind of realized like okay i've just been really childish and this is a childish way to like think about things and that's okay like forgive myself too right like you know yeah what does childish mean to you the codependent maybe like dependent on other people to be okay i think that's how i have been with money like i needed other people around to take care of me um and that just puts me in a really bad spot and it puts a weird strain on a marriage that right like and then i get mad because you're not my girlfriend and i'm like oh my dad and it's like well i kind of made you that way like that's a very powerful insight like you would hand control over and delegate authority and in many in some ways co-create this parent-child dynamic it's not quite that but slightly that and and then inevitably people who do that resent it and they're like i don't want to have to ask permission why do i feel this way why are you controlling the finances And while true, there's often a co-creative element. in that very cool that you recognize that very cool I love that Mike what about for you any childhood lessons come up as you were making these changes yeah I couldn't think of some on the spot but as Noel was talking I I find myself getting back into uh I wouldn't say so much child but like young adulthood bad bad patterns that I kind of lived my whole life with that I'm I'm working to to break anyways but it is you know we did so well on this budget and we would have we would have hit the $600 grocery budget but uh I let off the gas and and that's very very like me and 18 year old Mike's kind of sense of these bad like just lazy bad habits that that I don't like but I just really gravitate towards so that's interesting I heard Noel you've been doing a lot of work on the podcast and I've been doing a lot of work on the podcast and I've been doing a lot of work on the podcast and I've been doing a lot of work on the podcast and I've been doing a lot of work on the podcast We've just been having a lot more open dialogue about our future. But now we both feel comfortable, at least for me, I feel more comfortable talking about it now that she knows where we are with finances. Before it was almost like la la land. And now it's like, this is what it is. This is what we're doing. We have a plan together. You said, when you rent, the most you'll ever pay is your rent. When you buy, when you have a mortgage, the least amount you'll ever pay is your mortgage. And that really hit me. And it totally makes sense how you talk about, you know, and invest the rest rather than bring your home. Like that's how you build wealth. We're like, it just really connected with us. So like, homeownership doesn't seem too big of a deal for us anymore. That's cool. And if you decide down the road, you're like, we want to buy, you always can. You always can. Yeah. Especially if you've been investing for five, 10 years, aggressively 15 years. Those people are in an enviable position to be able to buy if they want to. They're just sitting on tons and tons of money. But I think it's important. There's this beautiful, like a bamboo, you know, it's like, it's flexible, but it's firm. And we want to make a plan, a rough plan of our rich life. And we want to have some core values. Great. We always know that we can change down the road. Maybe we don't want to buy a house today. Maybe tomorrow we do. Cool. What will put us in a position to, if we change our mind, to be able to be in a good spot? Maybe we do want kids or don't want kids. Okay, well, maybe that will change. But what's our timeline, etc, etc. There's so many things where we are focused on this season of life. We don't know what's going to happen in the next season. Let's think about it a bit and just make sure we set ourselves up for what may transpire. Let me jump in here because what Mike and Noel just shared is very powerful. They both realized that they were aiming for these arbitrary goals that didn't actually align with what they actually value. This is the power of a rich life vision. And this is why I get so excited when you create your own specific, unapologetic, rich life vision. That's why I wrote my journal, because it has a series of no numbers questions that will help you actually understand what you truly want. Not your friends, not your mom. Just what you want in your rich life, and it will help you build the confidence to get it. Because so many people just arbitrarily aim for the things they think they want, usually based on what other people around them want. That's what Mike and Noel did. It's like the blind leading the blind. It's like someone whose favorite food is Chick-fil-A trying to give me advice on the best Indian food. Why would I listen to you? We need to go deeper than just mindlessly absorbing what other people want. We get an amazing opportunity once. To create our rich life vision and then use our money to live it. And I got to say, fortunately, Mike and Noel have started to do this. You notice their vision is about alignment. They want to be present for their future kids. They want to do work they care about. They want to stay grounded even when money gets tight. It's pretty powerful. When you really start to interrogate your own beliefs and you start to create your own unique way of living, you might be surprised. It can actually be a surprisingly. Hard realization. For example, it's hard to realize you've been living your life for something you don't actually care about. It can be deeply confusing, deeply unsettling. I love the honesty that they both shared about that, but that's just part of the process. Now they get to focus on what they really want. And the principle here, your future is bigger than your past. Now I want to talk about the future and how they can stick to the plan they've created now that you have made a plan talked about. have something bigger to work towards. So we got to find a way to enjoy it. That is incredibly empowering. Honestly, I want to see you to continue doing what you're doing. I want to see you rack up the wins, rack them up, just like take them, appreciate them because the wins are going to come more and more and more. You have 3000 bucks in savings. It's going to grow your investments. You're going to turn them on 50 or a hundred bucks. That's going to grow. Debt's going to start getting paid off. And then you're going to have lots of cash. Win, win, win. In short, I want you to continue feeling good about money and actually feel better and better and better. And then when you go to buy the Diet Coke or the self-care products, like you may decide like, I actually don't want that anymore. Now that I can afford a million of them, it's not interesting. Or yeah, I'm going to do it within reason. And man, this really feels good to be able to do it. That is my vision for you. I actually think you're totally on track. To nail it. Mike and Noel, thank you so much. And big, big, big congratulations. You are doing awesome. This is one of the most impressive transformations I've seen, not just because of what changed, but how quickly it happened. Five weeks ago, Mike and Noel came in with anxiety, no plan. They were overwhelmed, but they stuck with the process. They got honest and things began to shift. They cut spending. They built a system. They made a plan to pay every dollar of their debt and they did it fast. They redefined what matters, not just stuff, but shared values. They sacrificed, stayed accountable. They started respecting money together. All in all, very impressive. But the work is not over. They still need to keep pushing down fixed costs, including having hard conversations about things like tithing. Mike's anxiety is improving, but it needs ongoing support. And both of them have to keep showing up, especially when one of them starts playing a little. loose with the plan because buying a soda should not derail anybody's future. I want to give a huge thanks to Mike and Noel for speaking with me, not once, but twice. And more importantly, for doing the work. Now, let's check out their follow-ups to see what's changed since this conversation. Hi, Ramit and company. This is our updated video from a few months ago. A couple of positive things. What Ramit taught us with the rollover fund and paying off debt aggressively. We have done both. We've been able to contribute a lot on the rollover funds. And as a result, I finally, I have a first month of not bringing in as much as we wanted or needed in our conscious spending plan. And there was no stress for either of us because we had enough money in our checking and we were even still able to save money based on what we've been doing with our money. So that's what I'll say. Yeah. And then I think as far as our spending goes, we have been generally within budget, but I do feel like we've, we've gone higher with our food budgets. Like that's gone up a little bit. We don't like go shopping or, you know, order things on Amazon or do anything like that anymore. But there are like little things that we can improve. And so we're still kind of working on like, just like the little things of making sure that we're, when we're in the grocery store, we're not, we're like looking at what we're spending. And then I think there's been a couple of gas station trips that we're doing to also kind of like step back. But other than that, I think we're doing really well. Thank you.