{"id":2279,"date":"2025-10-19T08:40:20","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T08:40:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sekmesreceptas.lt\/index.php\/2025\/10\/19\/episode-230-we-spend-168-of-what-we-make-what-are-we-missing\/"},"modified":"2025-10-19T08:40:20","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T08:40:20","slug":"episode-230-we-spend-168-of-what-we-make-what-are-we-missing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sekmesreceptas.lt\/index.php\/2025\/10\/19\/episode-230-we-spend-168-of-what-we-make-what-are-we-missing\/","title":{"rendered":"Episode 230. \u201cWe spend 168% of what we make. What are we missing?\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"\u201cWe\u2019re drowning in debt\u2014but I drive a Tesla\u201d\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/pWe6Uh4B-Gc?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe data-testid=\"embed-iframe\" style=\"border-radius:12px\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/episode\/22aCnmSEft2yrOBPw3TIPL\/video?utm_source=generator\" width=\"100%\" height=\"400\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\" allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Amy (32) and John (40) are raising two young kids in Canada, earning a solid $155,000 a year. But with $768,181 in debt and fixed costs at 168% of their income, every month feels like a losing battle. Two years ago, John hid hundreds of thousands in business tax debt from Amy\u2014what she calls \u201cfinancial infidelity.\u201d Since then, trust has been fragile, money is tight, and they often feel like they\u2019re fighting on \u201ctwo separate life rafts.\u201d Amy\u2019s trying to rebuild their future, but when more than HALF of their monthly income goes immediately towards debt, they\u2019re struggling to find a path forward. Can Ramit help them bridge the gap between good intentions and hard numbers\u2014and finally get on the same team?<\/span><\/p>\n<div id=\"ez-toc-container\" class=\"ez-toc-v2_0_83 counter-hierarchy ez-toc-counter ez-toc-grey ez-toc-container-direction\">\n<div class=\"ez-toc-title-container\">\n<p class=\"ez-toc-title\" style=\"cursor:inherit\">Turinys:<\/p>\n<span class=\"ez-toc-title-toggle\"><a href=\"#\" class=\"ez-toc-pull-right ez-toc-btn ez-toc-btn-xs ez-toc-btn-default ez-toc-toggle\" aria-label=\"Toggle Table of Content\"><span class=\"ez-toc-js-icon-con\"><span class=\"\"><span class=\"eztoc-hide\" style=\"display:none;\">Toggle<\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-icon-toggle-span\"><svg style=\"fill: #999;color:#999\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" class=\"list-377408\" width=\"20px\" height=\"20px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" fill=\"none\"><path d=\"M6 6H4v2h2V6zm14 0H8v2h12V6zM4 11h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2zM4 16h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2z\" fill=\"currentColor\"><\/path><\/svg><svg style=\"fill: #999;color:#999\" class=\"arrow-unsorted-368013\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" width=\"10px\" height=\"10px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" version=\"1.2\" baseProfile=\"tiny\"><path d=\"M18.2 9.3l-6.2-6.3-6.2 6.3c-.2.2-.3.4-.3.7s.1.5.3.7c.2.2.4.3.7.3h11c.3 0 .5-.1.7-.3.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7zM5.8 14.7l6.2 6.3 6.2-6.3c.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7c-.2-.2-.4-.3-.7-.3h-11c-.3 0-.5.1-.7.3-.2.2-.3.5-.3.7s.1.5.3.7z\"\/><\/svg><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<nav><ul class='ez-toc-list ez-toc-list-level-1 ' ><ul class='ez-toc-list-level-4' ><li class='ez-toc-heading-level-4'><ul class='ez-toc-list-level-4' ><li class='ez-toc-heading-level-4'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-1\" href=\"https:\/\/sekmesreceptas.lt\/index.php\/2025\/10\/19\/episode-230-we-spend-168-of-what-we-make-what-are-we-missing\/#In_this_episode_we_uncover\" >In this episode we uncover:<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-4'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-2\" href=\"https:\/\/sekmesreceptas.lt\/index.php\/2025\/10\/19\/episode-230-we-spend-168-of-what-we-make-what-are-we-missing\/#Chapters\" >Chapters:<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-4'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-3\" href=\"https:\/\/sekmesreceptas.lt\/index.php\/2025\/10\/19\/episode-230-we-spend-168-of-what-we-make-what-are-we-missing\/#Links_Mentioned_In_This_Episode\" >Links Mentioned In This Episode:<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-4'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-4\" href=\"https:\/\/sekmesreceptas.lt\/index.php\/2025\/10\/19\/episode-230-we-spend-168-of-what-we-make-what-are-we-missing\/#This_episode_is_brought_to_you_by\" >This episode is brought to you by:<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-5\" href=\"https:\/\/sekmesreceptas.lt\/index.php\/2025\/10\/19\/episode-230-we-spend-168-of-what-we-make-what-are-we-missing\/#Transcript\" >Transcript\u00a0<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/nav><\/div>\n<h4><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"In_this_episode_we_uncover\"><\/span><b>In this episode we uncover:<\/b><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">How their fixed costs rose to 168% of their income<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Why John hid his business tax debt, which shattered Amy\u2019s trust<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">How years of financial strain forced Amy to shoulder household finances alone<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">How Amy\u2019s volatile income and John\u2019s shrinking business payouts created a $4,000 deficit<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">John\u2019s Dreamer attitude collides with the harsh math of his monthly debt payments<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">The emotional impact of having no safety net<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Amy\u2019s plan to launch a new business vs. John\u2019s struggle to keep his afloat<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Why managing risk isn\u2019t about optimism<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Amy\u2019s frustration with carrying the mental and emotional load of finances while John \u201cfocuses on income\u201d<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 300;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Ramit\u2019s direct call for decisive leadership and clear planning to get out of financial free fall<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h4><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Chapters\"><\/span><b>Chapters:<\/b><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h4>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(00:00:00) <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">\u201cHe spent two years hiding his debt from me\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(00:18:03)<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Ramit breaks down their numbers<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(00:26:27)<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">\u201cI was humiliated driving that Tesla\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(00:39:52)<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">\u201cWe\u2019re flying blind\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(00:54:47)<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">\u201cI feel like I\u2019m carrying this weight alone\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(01:02:13)<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">\u201cHope is not a strategy\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(01:24:56)<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">\u201cThis is what happens when we finally get specific\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">(01:42:25)<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Where are they now? Amy and John\u2019s follow-ups<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Links_Mentioned_In_This_Episode\"><\/span><b>Links Mentioned In This Episode:<\/b><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h4>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Join me Monday, October 20 to learn How To Nail Your Dream Job Interview. Reserve your spot at <\/span><strong>https:\/\/iwt.com\/interview <\/strong><\/p>\n<h4><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"This_episode_is_brought_to_you_by\"><\/span><b>This episode is brought to you by:<\/b><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h4>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">LMNT | Right now, LMNT is offering 8 single serving packets FREE with any LMNT order. Get yours at <\/span><strong>https:\/\/drinklmnt.com\/RAMIT<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Rocket Money | Cancel unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster at <\/span><strong>https:\/\/rocketmoney.com\/ramit<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">ZocDoc | Download the ZocDoc app for FREE at <\/span><strong>https:\/\/zocdoc.com\/ramit<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\"> then find and book a top-rated doctor today #sponsored\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Facet | Facet is waiving their $250 enrollment fee for new annual members, and for my audience, Facet is offering $300 into your brokerage account if you invest and maintain $5,000 within your first 90 days. Head to <\/span><strong>facet.com\/ramit<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\"> to learn more about which membership option is best for you.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 300;\">Fabric by Gerber Life | Join the thousands of parents who trust Fabric to protect their family. Apply today in just minutes at <\/span><strong>https:\/\/meetfabric.com\/ramit<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2 aria-level=\"2\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Transcript\"><\/span><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Transcript<\/span><\/b><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;134233117&quot;:false,&quot;134233118&quot;:false,&quot;134245418&quot;:true,&quot;134245529&quot;:true,&quot;201341983&quot;:0,&quot;335559685&quot;:2010,&quot;335559737&quot;:2010,&quot;335559738&quot;:375,&quot;335559739&quot;:375,&quot;335559740&quot;:768}\">\u00a0<\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"none\">Download the full transcript PDF<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;134233117&quot;:false,&quot;134233118&quot;:false,&quot;335559685&quot;:2010,&quot;335559737&quot;:2010,&quot;335559738&quot;:150,&quot;335559739&quot;:150}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:00:04)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I handle all of our finances, and I can see that there&#8217;s no savings. I can see if John gets hurt tomorrow on a job, we&#8217;re (Bleep).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:00:14)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You have 168% on fixed costs. You&#8217;re broke.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:00:18)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I feel we&#8217;re so strapped for money that I am just trying to bring in as much as I can.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:00:24)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You are spending more than you make every month. That&#8217;s for sure. It&#8217;s not sustainable.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:00:28)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0This is an unbearable amount of stress, and I feel it every day, all hours of the day.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:00:37)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I am carrying this weight over here on my own when it comes to how our household is being run and what our monthly finances look like. That&#8217;s on me. We&#8217;ve got nothing. There is no cushion if we fall. We lose everything overnight.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:00:53)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It feels more and more like I&#8217;m just getting attacked here. So I&#8217;m starting to feel defensive to be quite honest.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(Narration)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:00:59)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0This is directly from Amy&#8217;s application.\u00a0&#8222;We are in a combined $400,000 Canadian of debt, not including our mortgage or car loan. I don&#8217;t know how to create a CSP when there is no money left at the end of the month even after cutting out every single extra cost we could.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:01:20)\u00a0Today,\u00a0I am speaking with Amy, who&#8217;s 32,\u00a0and John,\u00a0who&#8217;s 40, and they are struggling to come together as a team to manage this mountain of debt.\u00a0I&#8217;m looking at their CSP or\u00a0conscious\u00a0spending plan.\u00a0You can download the same thing for free on my website\u00a0if you&#8217;re in the same boat as this couple and you&#8217;re struggling to figure out where to even start,\u00a0I go through that in detail in my money coaching program, which you can get at iwt.com\/moneycoaching.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:01:48)\u00a0Let&#8217;s take a look at their key numbers.\u00a0Assets,\u00a0$900,000.\u00a0Investments,\u00a00. That&#8217;s a big red flag. Savings, $2,160. Very low, especially for a family with kids.\u00a0Debt, $768,181. Total net worth, $133,979. They earn a combined income of 155k, which is very healthy. Their fixed costs are at 168%, which explains everything.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:02:19)\u00a0They are spending 68% more than what they earn every single month, just to keep the lights on. That&#8217;s the whole ball game right there. Investments are at 1%.\u00a0No surprise.\u00a0Savings at 1%. Guilt-free spending is at negative 70%, which of course is impossible.\u00a0I have a lot of questions, so I say we get right to it and meet Amy and John.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(Interview)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:02:42)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Amy, in your application, you wrote something to me that really caught my attention. You wrote, &#8222;He spent two years hiding his debt from me, while I thought we were financially good and we were spending as normal, even going so far as to buy a new car.&#8221; What was your reaction when you finally heard the truth?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:03:07)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So much rage. We luckily didn&#8217;t have our kids at home that night. They were over at my in-laws, and he sat down on the couch and just very nonchalantly mentioned that he had gotten a call from the CRA, Canada Revenue Agency here, and that they had talked to him and given him some numbers, and there was debt. Without giving me specifics, all this debt has accumulated from his business.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:03:38)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Did you know at that point how much the debt was?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:03:42)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No. And it took a few weeks of me to really pull the answer out of him, and it took a few more weeks for even him to know the final numbers because it still hadn&#8217;t been completely tallied up on the CRA end either.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:03:59)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Did you have a sense of $5,000, $50,000? Do you have any sense at all?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:04:05)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0None.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:04:07)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0If you had to guess at that moment, what would you have guessed?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:04:09)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Probably $50,000, maybe 100 tops. But I&#8217;m not in the business. He had started it before we were together, and I&#8217;ve never had a role in it, and I have always just trusted that it was managed. And so I wouldn&#8217;t have had a good idea or even a guess of what numbers that debt was.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:04:31)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0When John told you in that conversation that CRA had contacted him and there was debt, how did you feel hearing it?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:04:45)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I was fed up. I was so defeated because it felt like this business had continued to take so much from us. And he was working so hard, and he had never not been working hard, and we were never once financially doing okay. Just to hear this, it was like that kind of one last blow. I was just so done, and I wanted it to just be gone completely.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:05:20)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0John, how does it feel hearing Amy&#8217;s recollection?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:05:25)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I remembered a little bit differently. I thought that in that night we talked about the numbers. But I could be wrong. I felt ashamed and defeated that it was such a huge number. I had been trying to chip away at this for a long time, and I was finally at the point where my last, option fell out from under me. I had some big jobs I was looking at getting that was going to be a big payment towards this debt, and I thought I had plans to tackle the debt.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:06:03)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0How much was the total amount?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:06:07)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It was 240, 280, something like that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:06:12)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Wait, which one? Those are different numbers.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:06:15)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:06:16)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:06:17)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Well, it continued to grow as the months were going on, and it was finalizing interest and penalties and everything. So it took a bit.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:06:26)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right, so 240 to 280.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:06:28)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Uh-huh.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:06:29)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. Can we walk through the debt? So this is business debt. What type of business, John, and how did you accumulate this debt?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:06:38)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It is a cabinet business. There&#8217;s personal income tax, and then the business is source deductions, which is like, here in Canada we have to pay unemployment insurance. As an employer, I have to match my employee&#8217;s contribution as well as Canadian Pension Plan CPP. So I have to match those for the employees I have at the time, and I fell behind on those payments.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:07:09)\u00a0I&#8217;d pay myself everything we needed to pay for the mortgage here, on our personal side of things. Doing that didn&#8217;t leave anything on the business expenses side. So all those accounts suffered because I had to basically pay ourselves 12,000 a month to pay our bills.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:07:32)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That was true up until a certain point because then money was so tight on the business that he wasn&#8217;t able to bring money home either. So money was getting redirected at a certain point into the business only and not coming home, in which case that&#8217;s when I started to work and it was my income was keeping us afloat. His income was keeping the business afloat.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:07:56)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0How many years did it take to accumulate this amount of debt?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:08:00)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It was three years now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:08:04)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. At what point did you start to say, &#8222;Uh-oh, this is a problem?&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:08:10)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0About a year and a half ago, I guess. That&#8217;s when the CRA reached out and we started talks, and I had to start paying them, which is where my income on the personal account started to drop off, because I had to start committing to payments to the CRA. So it was 3,000 a month at first, then it grew to 5,000. Then they&#8217;re asking for 7,000.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:08:34)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0When you stopped taking home income, I assume the two of you had a series of conversations about that. Did that happen?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:08:43)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Not a lot of detail to my recollection.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:08:47)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Wait. If one partner stops bringing home income, that seems like you&#8217;d talk about it. Where am I missing it?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:08:54)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I would ask, &#8222;Is payday coming this week?&#8221; And sometimes the answer was yes. Sometimes it was late. Sometimes it was half of the payday. And then I started working, and I wasn&#8217;t really planning on it. I was at home with the kids, and I was expecting that money to be able to go into savings, paying off whatever other debts we had.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:09:14)\u00a0And then rapidly it started to shift into, John wasn&#8217;t able to have a payday. So I would bring my money in instead and use that to cover bills and the mortgage. And then that started happening more and more where his payday wasn&#8217;t coming in at all. And mine was taking over everything.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:09:35)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Could you make it on one income, on your income alone, Amy?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:09:37)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes. Yeah, we could. We were doing okay. There was definitely some times where I remember having to help cover the rent for his shop one month, help cover extra wages of one of his employees one month that was coming out of our personal income.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:09:55)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0There&#8217;s a bit of the boiling frog metaphor. Just like the temperature went up just one degree at a time. How accurate would you say that is?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:10:04)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Absolutely. Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:10:05)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. What about the ramifications of this secret debt? What have they been?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:10:14)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Our relationship has probably gone through its roughest year because of it. It&#8217;s called financial infidelity, I believe, and it was 18 months to two years of not knowing that he was accumulating this debt. And he had a plan. He thought he could handle it until he couldn&#8217;t. And then that was when I found out.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:10:37)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0John, what have the ramifications been for you?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:10:42)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0After the conversation last year, the idea was that I was going to close down and work for someone else. So losing the business was pretty depressing. But also, I know that I did a lot of damage in our marriage and the trust. So I lost a lot of that. And so it took a lot to build that back and just show her that I&#8217;m here for us and our family and I&#8217;m not choosing the business over our family.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:11:20)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. Since this came to light, the secret debt, how did you stay together, stay connected? What did it take?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:11:33)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Credit to Amy for being the one to always spark the conversation, the hard-to-have conversations. They&#8217;re uncomfortable, but as we got into them, we got through them. And we went to bed together still at the end of each of those nights. And being willing to put in the work for our marriage and our family, all of those things was what was driving me to get through it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:12:03)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Amy, what about you, from your perspective?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:12:06)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We&#8217;ve been together for 10 years, and I really love him, but also really trying to hammer home to John that we&#8217;re a team. That even though that&#8217;s his business, it still impacts me. It impacts our family. And the choices he makes over there have the potential to risk everything for us.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:12:27)\u00a0And to do that by himself, that&#8217;s a huge weight for him to be carrying on his own, not fair for him. I&#8217;m his partner. I&#8217;m his teammate. That that&#8217;s supposed to be something that we carry and we figure out together. And because he had made a choice to continue carrying that weight by himself for so long, it took such an extra toll on him that it didn&#8217;t need to, and it prevented this huge timeframe where we could have been figuring something out together. So that was really frustrating and something that I really tried to get through to him as well.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:13:06)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Got it. Amy, in your application you wrote, &#8222;I don&#8217;t know how to create a conscious spending plan when there is no money left at the end of the month, even after cutting out every single extra cost we could.&#8221; Both of you are nodding. What was the feeling like? Confusion, helplessness, what?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:13:31)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All the above. Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:13:33)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0If you don&#8217;t mind, I&#8217;ll jump in. There&#8217;s some curve balls. So we were in the process of me switching gears. I had something lined up and realized that that income that I was going to bring in was going to be significantly less than what I could do with the business. And nearly the same time, Amy&#8217;s pay got cut quite a bit as well.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:13:58)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What&#8217;d you guys do? What I want to know is, what&#8217;d you do when you discovered this massive gap?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:14:05)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So I turned down the job, and I stuck with the business, and I laid off some employees. And now bringing him a consistent paycheck. And that&#8217;s where we&#8217;re at right now. And Amy&#8217;s got some schooling that she is in the works with to boost her income.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:14:24)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. Sorry, let me just pause you right there. So I&#8217;m trying to understand if&#8211; when couples see numbers that are staggering and stark and not the direction they need to go, sometimes, in fact, most times they do nothing. They simply bury the piece of paper under the couch cushions and then they go, &#8222;Ah, whatever. It&#8217;ll work itself out. This sucks.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:14:49)\u00a0It&#8217;s like learning to live with a toothache. In a rare, rare number of circumstances, maybe 3% to 5%, they go, &#8222;What the\u00a0(Bleep)? And it&#8217;s a red alert. It&#8217;s like they do a spring cleaning. Which one was it?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:15:04)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We did the spring cleaning. We did. And I&#8217;m the one who manages all of our household finances.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:15:09)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What? You did the spring cleaning?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:15:11)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We did the spring cleaning.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:15:12)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. All right.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:15:13)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We cut out everything. We spent hours sitting down and adding up every single number. And I know you don&#8217;t like the semantics of the spending, but it was like, &#8222;Okay, how much are we spending a month on groceries? If we&#8217;re eating out, how much are we spending on that?&#8221; So getting the lump sums and where the money was going and then being like, &#8222;Okay, we need to cut that down by this much.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:15:32)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Did you do it?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:15:33)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We did. So there&#8217;s no eating out at all.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:15:38)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What matters is you actually were quite responsive. You did cut your spending, which is great. That tells me when circumstances required it, you two both said, &#8222;We got to make a change.&#8221; Great.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(Narration)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:15:49)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Amy used the phrase financial infidelity. She thought that their finances were fine. They were going out to dinner, buying a new car.\u00a0But it turns out that John was hiding hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for years. And we can fix a little overspending.\u00a0It&#8217;s a lot harder to fix broken trust, especially around a topic like money, which is one of the most intimate taboo topics there is.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:16:16)\u00a0What do you think happens when one of you is not honest about your finances with your partner? Right after this break, I&#8217;m\u00a0going to\u00a0walk you through their numbers,\u00a0and you&#8217;re\u00a0going to\u00a0see just how deep this hole really goes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(Interview)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:16:28)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:\u00a0<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Let&#8217;s look at the numbers. Amy, can you read off the word in bold and then the number in full next to it, please?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:16:38)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Assets,\u00a0$900,000. Investments, 0.\u00a0Savings,\u00a02,160.\u00a0Debt, 768,181.\u00a0Total net worth is $133,979.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:16:58)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. What do you think of that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:16:59)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We were happy that we weren&#8217;t in the negative when it came to the total. That was the astounding part.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:17:05)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. That&#8217;s good. John, what do you think of the numbers?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:17:07)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, same. I was expecting that to be a negative, but to be slightly in the positive was a nice surprise.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:17:14)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:17:15)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Wow. All right. So far so good. Net worth is a moment in time. It is a snapshot. We want to get a little bit more information so that we understand monthly what&#8217;s going on. So this time I&#8217;m going to ask you, John, to read off your\u00a0gross combined monthly income, please.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:17:36)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That is 12,940.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:17:39)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, great. And that means that combine, the two of you make $155,000 per year. Did you know that number?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:17:46)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:17:47)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Amy says yes. John just took a deep breath.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:17:50)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Oh, I did not.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:17:52)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0John did not. All right. Wow. Hold on.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:17:54)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I don&#8217;t want to be your statistic. No.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:17:56)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Everyone take a deep breath and recognize statistics matter. 50% of people I talk to do not know their household income. And here, right on the money, 50% on this call do not know. John, how do you feel to be a statistic?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:18:15)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Do I have time to defend myself?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:18:17)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It&#8217;s not defensing. It&#8217;s a fact. You don&#8217;t know your number. Now you know your number. You make $155,208 a year household income. Great. Let&#8217;s get to the number that&#8217;s giving me, I don&#8217;t know what this feeling is in my body, but it&#8217;s giving me some kind of feeling. Hey, Amy, can you read off the fixed cost number please?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:18:36)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Our fixed costs are 168%.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:18:39)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0168% fixed costs. What does that mean?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:18:46)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It means that we&#8217;re basically screwed at the end of every month and rely on some credit card debt in order for us to get by.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:18:55)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You are spending more than you make every month. That&#8217;s for sure. It&#8217;s not sustainable. I agree. John, what does it mean to you?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:19:03)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, so Amy&#8217;s income was basically halved. I set my income at 7,000, and we were projecting her income to be 4,000. It&#8217;s less than 2000<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:19:16)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Well, it&#8217;s 2,500.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:19:18)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We&#8217;ll fix the income. Is it going to matter? 168%, 134%? Does it really matter?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:19:26)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:19:28)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0If her income hadn&#8217;t dropped, those numbers would be in a much better shape. This is a snapshot of where it is, and it&#8217;s a horrible number, and it&#8217;s not sustainable, yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:19:41)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Hold on, hold on, hold on. Let&#8217;s fix it. Let&#8217;s fix her number. So in a hypothetical world where her income did not drop, what is her take home pay? Tell me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:19:49)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It would&#8217;ve been the same as John&#8217;s.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:19:51)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a07,000. Okay. Watch. What happens to your fixed costs?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:19:57)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Still higher than it should be, but it would still be manageable.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:20:00)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It&#8217;s 72%, which is way better. That&#8217;s totally manageable. Okay, so now the question is, how come you are not making $7,000 a month take home, Amy?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:20:12)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Because in the world of doing the kind of content creation stuff that I part-time do, it&#8217;s just volatile and wasn&#8217;t all in my control.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:20:22)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Fine. All right. So that&#8217;s a good exploration. I agree, 7,000 net would change things considerably. But you don&#8217;t make that. It would&#8217;ve been great. It doesn&#8217;t exist. You have 168% on fixed costs.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:20:35)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:20:36)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You&#8217;re broke.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:20:37)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:20:38)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We all agree?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:20:39)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:20:40)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:20:40)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. Why don&#8217;t we go through the rest just to get a good gauge at the high level.\u00a0So investments are at 1%.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:20:47)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:20:48)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0$40 a month to a registered RRSP.\u00a0All right.\u00a0Fine.\u00a01% going to savings, which is $50 for gifts.\u00a0Always funny to me, $50 to gifts and $20 to a registered education. Please tell me this is not for your kids.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:21:04)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It is. You get tax exempt. It&#8217;s a positive thing to do if you&#8217;re making a lot of money. It&#8217;s a good thing to&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:21:11)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s so nice. I wonder what your kids will say when they have $1,800 in their college plan while their parents are homeless. What do you think they&#8217;ll say?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:21:20)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We&#8217;ll be living with them. Isn&#8217;t that supposed to be the joke instead? I know.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:21:25)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s a good point though.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:21:26)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Maybe aside from the jokes, we can look at where the money&#8217;s going.\u00a0And then finally we have guilt-free spending, which is negative 70%. So obviously that doesn&#8217;t work. In fact, there&#8217;s some numbers on here that just point blank do not work mathematically. One of them is that you are missing $4,190 a month.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:21:46)\u00a0That means you&#8217;re overspending, obviously. And if we go back up to your income, it indicates, Amy&#8211; I believe this is you. Your net income is negative $1,000. How can that be?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:21:58)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So she gets the $2,400 a month and then makes a payment to the CRA for 3,600, let&#8217;s say. So that&#8217;s where the&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:22:07)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Once a year?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:22:09)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Once a month.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:22:09)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Every month.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:22:09)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Every month.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:22:11)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0If you look at the negative, that we&#8217;re in the negative over 4,000 every month, it&#8217;s because I have to send the CRA 3,736.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:22:20)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s not because of your income, right, Amy?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:22:22)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes, it is. That&#8217;s my income tax debt.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:22:25)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That was a previous year. So it&#8217;s last year&#8217;s total income tax debt that we weren&#8217;t able to pay. And that&#8217;s the same thing on my end that&#8217;s accumulated. So she&#8217;s also got a number that we&#8217;re paying off as well.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:22:38)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I see. Okay. Got it. Let me tell you how I would recognize that differently here. I think this is a good key, important point. So what you did was you basically skipped a skip.\u00a0You&#8217;re probably making\u00a0$1,000\u00a0a month here on your net ballpark. What you just saw is your fixed cost drop down to 126%.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:22:59)\u00a0Okay, that&#8217;s good. But your debt payments are actually higher.\u00a0They&#8217;re probably $2,000 higher. So instead of this, I&#8217;ll add it. 5,888.\u00a0And now your debt payments are up to 151%, roughly in the same genre but it is more properly represented here. Do you see what I did?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:23:22)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm. Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:23:23)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:23:24)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It doesn&#8217;t substantively change anything, but it&#8217;s important to understand nobody really is taking home less than $0 if they&#8217;re working it. We got to understand the basic stuff correctly.\u00a0So fixed costs are at 151% approximately. Debt payments are more than 50% of take-home pay, way over. They&#8217;re $5,888 versus $8,000 of take-home pay. I would describe that as unsustainable.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(Narration)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:24:01)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Let me\u00a0just be direct.\u00a0When over 50% of your take-home pay goes to debt, it is a massive red alert. I ran the actual percentage of what their debt payments are compared to their take home pay, and it&#8217;s an astonishing 73.6%.\u00a0That&#8217;s it. Game over. You cannot build any kind of financial future, much less a\u00a0Rich Life\u00a0when nearly three quarters of your income is gone the moment it hits your account.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:24:29)\u00a0And within the debt,\u00a0we still have layers and layers of debt. We have business debt, personal tax debt. They mentioned a car loan. I suspect there&#8217;s even more.\u00a0This is a major clue that tells me they&#8217;ve built a financial system that guarantees they&#8217;re\u00a0going to\u00a0stay broke. It doesn&#8217;t matter how hard they work. They have structurally set themselves up to fail, and no amount of hustling will ever change that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:24:53)\u00a0It&#8217;s like building a freaking house out of Popsicle sticks and then putting your house right next to a fire factory where all things do is just light on fire every single night.\u00a0What do you think&#8217;s\u00a0going to\u00a0happen? It doesn&#8217;t matter how many sticks you use for your house, it&#8217;s going to burn down every single night. Now they&#8217;ve already mentioned a few of the debts they&#8217;re carrying. I think it&#8217;s time to get specific. Listen now as I ask them to break it all down.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(Interview)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:25:17)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Amy, can you explain the $768,181 in debt? What is underneath those numbers?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:25:24)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Our mortgage at $514,000. Our credit card debt at 7,000. John&#8217;s income tax debt at 53,500. My income tax debt at 43,680, and our car loan debt at roughly 50,000.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:25:53)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. Fine. $7,000 of credit card debt. What&#8217;s that for?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:25:56)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s what&#8217;s been filling in the gaps.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:25:58)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. And a car loan of $50,000. What&#8217;s that? Wow. Amy looks very scared right now. Go ahead, Amy. You should be.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:26:09)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I know how you feel about this truck.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:26:10)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What did you get?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:26:13)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, this does require a bit of a backstory.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:26:16)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Not really. What kind of car?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:26:17)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Tesla Model Y 2023.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:26:19)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0(Bleep). That&#8217;s even worse than I thought.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:26:21)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;m the one who applied for the approval of even being able to get a car loan. And I was under the assumption we were in good financial standing. This is a part of that financial infidelity. At no point during any of this conversation that we were looking at getting a new vehicle for the first time in our lives did the information come up that we had this debt sitting there.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:26:45)\u00a0I thought we were good. There is also a government initiative program where you get money for buying an electric vehicle. So we actually didn&#8217;t pay anything out of pocket to get it. And yes, in hindsight, once I found out about everything, I was humiliated. I was humiliated that we&#8217;re driving around a\u00a0(Bleep)\u00a0Tesla with this much debt sitting in our back pocket. It was definitely a huge part of my anger because I would not ever have made that call.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:27:15)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. All jokes aside, I understand what you&#8217;re saying. And I have to ask John, as Amy was going through this diligence process of finding the car and&#8211; that&#8217;s an expensive car. Why didn&#8217;t you say anything?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:27:28)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Because at the time, I was paying the CRA, and they were happy. I was making regular payments. And I thought that&#8217;s just how it was going to continue.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:27:39)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. So you thought it would be okay, John. You had the plan, then you were paying, and then things got worse?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:27:49)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So the collections officers, they changed so frequently. So the next one I got was starting to lay the hammer down and he said, &#8222;No, you need to come up with all the money right away.&#8221; Which was not going to happen. So I had to meet halfway and up the payments. And so that&#8217;s where my personal income started to dwindle and the payments increased over there. So that&#8217;s when\u00a0(Bleep)\u00a0hit the fan.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:28:10)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, so you said, &#8222;Okay, I&#8217;m getting a lot of pressure from the government to pay more. I&#8217;m going to cut my own income to the household.&#8221; It&#8217;s okay because Amy, she&#8217;s covering it. That worked for a while and then it got even harder. She had to step in and help with the business rent and a business employee, and that&#8217;s when things started to, it sounds like, spiral. Am I reading that correctly?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:28:35)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. I was in the process of getting larger jobs and more of them. So the outlook looked promising. It was like a carrot being dangled in front of me. It was like, okay, it is going to get better. It&#8217;s going to get better. It&#8217;s going to get better, is what I was seeing on the business side of it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:28:55)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0John, how good are you at managing risk?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:28:59)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;d like to think I&#8217;m pretty good at it, but I can&#8217;t control timelines on projects.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:29:11)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. Amy, what do you think?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:29:16)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I think that he is an internal optimist, and that is a side of that that I really admire and love about him, but that is also why we are where we are.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:29:27)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. If you shut the business down today, what happens to the tax? Is it still owed?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:29:33)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:29:34)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0And what&#8217;s the bankruptcy laws in Canada?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:29:38)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We have to pay off the source deductions before we can file bankruptcy or a consumer proposal.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:29:46)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0How much is that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:29:48)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0The source deductions is 180,000 right now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:29:53)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Let&#8217;s say you paid that off somehow. Would you be able to declare bankruptcy?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:29:58)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It does look like once the source deductions are paid off, that banks and the consumer proposal, other options would become available, like consolidation&#8211; debt options. So we would be able to at least look into those before we had to assess for bankruptcy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:30:16)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So it sounds like maybe, but not for sure.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:30:19)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:30:20)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:30:21)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. What do you guys think the solution is here?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:30:29)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We thought the solution was to sell the house and use the leftover to pay off as much of the debt as we could. I think we calculated there&#8217;s still going to be some left, depending on where we ended up in a house situation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:30:46)\u00a0We looked at buying somewhere across the province. So we actually explored that quite a bit to sell the house. We thought about refinancing the house, so I got to work and put in a rental suite downstairs to increase the value of the house so that we could get it appraised for a higher amount.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:31:05)\u00a0Somewhere around 850 is what we were shooting for, and that difference of about 300,000 would be significant. I think we could only refinance 80% of the difference. So it&#8217;s not an actual 300,000, but 80% of 300,000.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:31:27)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0But we couldn&#8217;t go that route.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:31:31)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Right. No, wait, why couldn&#8217;t we go that route again?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:31:37)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Because our lender with the mortgage had policies in place.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:31:41)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0At the time, yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:31:42)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0At time of that. You are not allowed to use the equity in your home to pay off CRA debt.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:31:48)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s right. Specifically CRA. They would not lend us money. Same with banks, have the same thing. We&#8217;ll not lend you money if it&#8217;s to go towards a government debt.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:31:58)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What if you just sold the house?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:32:00)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We looked to see what we could sell the house for, where else we could move. And ultimately we decided to try to hold onto the house to see if we could Airbnb or rent out the basement suite, have any supplemental income, as well as just an ounce of happiness.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:32:19)\u00a0We really love the community that we&#8217;re in. It&#8217;s a small community. I&#8217;m involved with the school here. There was that piece of it as well. And all of our family is where we live, and the only option for us if we sold, was to move away. We wouldn&#8217;t be able to afford to stay here at all. It wasn&#8217;t going to be an option. And we would lose every single piece of our village. So that was a factor that we had to consider as well.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:32:44)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So you thought about the first option about building something first floor. Didn&#8217;t work. You thought about selling. Based on your decision, that didn&#8217;t work.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:32:53)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:32:54)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Where are you today? What&#8217;s the solution?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:32:57)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0The solution thus far is that I am taking courses to become a nail technician and open a nail studio with the space downstairs. Looked at the projections around income in our area. It&#8217;s not an oversaturated market out here, and I would be able to make between 4,000 or $5,000 a month, which would be significantly more than a rental suite. Airbnb is becoming non-option in our area. They&#8217;re really trying to (Inaudible) that completely.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:33:27)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You&#8217;re going to start a nail technician business. Okay. And John?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:33:33)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I am trying to come up with ways to boost my income as well. I don&#8217;t want to do the same thing I did with the business and pull every dollar out of it and then\u00a0(Bleep)\u00a0the business over again. So I am trying to tread carefully with the projects I have right now and use that money wisely in the business and pay what we need on our household. But I&#8217;m looking at possibly boosting my take home soon.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:34:03)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Do you currently make a gross monthly income of $10,440 a month? Net would be 7,000.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:34:13)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0After tax is 7,000 a month.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:34:19)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, okay. How much does the business make in total?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:34:22)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Like revenues?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:34:26)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:34:27)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It fluctuates so much. What the problem was is I was pulling every dollar. So in the past it&#8217;s been 130. Some years it was 70.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:34:38)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I believe 2023 or 2024 was literally $30,000 that you had made for the entire year, so it&#8217;s very, very inconsistent.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:34:49)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So the business is not making enough to pull out $7,000 a month net. That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m hearing.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:34:58)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So far, since I&#8217;ve made changes and I have laid off staff, there&#8217;s more money left over at the end of the month. So I&#8217;m now able to pay myself that wage now, as of January. So this next calendar year, the profits are going to be much better for the business, and I&#8217;ll be able to sustain 7,000 a month every month.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:35:21)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:35:23)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So long as I hit my sales number. That&#8217;s the caveat there, and that&#8217;s the tricky part with being in the industry of trades. It&#8217;s feast and famine. We&#8217;ve probably heard about the trade war going on. We may or may not see some price increases and people not want to build anymore, in which case I am now vulnerable again.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(Narration)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:35:46)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You know, most people don&#8217;t wake up in the morning like me and say, today is a risk management day.\u00a0But you do manage risk every single day. You manage risk when you wear your seatbelt, when you lock your front door, when you take a vaccine.\u00a0Unless you&#8217;re an anti-vaxxer, in which case, get off my podcast. You manage risk when you set up automatic savings for a rainy day.\u00a0Even though there may not be an emergency now, you know that one could come.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:36:13)\u00a0Managing risk means planning for things that haven&#8217;t happened yet. But John didn&#8217;t do that. He kept on pouring money into a business that was already failing. He took on CRA debt. He cut his income without telling Amy. And when I asked him if he was good at managing risk, did you catch what he said? He said, yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:36:31)\u00a0This is very common with dreamers. They will tell themselves,\u00a0if I just try hard enough, it&#8217;ll work out. They will often point at all the work they&#8217;re doing, all the hustling, all the deals that are just about to close. I\u00a0want to\u00a0know where these patterns of money came from, so stay tuned as I dig deeper.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(Interview)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:36:49)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I want to understand more about how the two of you think about money. So Amy, when you were growing up, what do you remember your family saying about money?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:37:02)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0My situation is a little bit more complicated. I have multiple households I grew up in. My parents divorced when I was a baby, and more often than not, my mom was a single parent. She hated money. She didn&#8217;t like talking about it. She didn&#8217;t like that it existed. she said that. My dad said that about her.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:37:22)\u00a0She was a single parent, working her\u00a0(Bleep)\u00a0off. But in hindsight, I was able to gather that she wasn&#8217;t very good at handling her finances. And there was some months that our power got shut off. And I, as a kid, she very much kept that from me. It wasn&#8217;t my burden to carry, but we lived in an old house.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:37:43)\u00a0I just assumed that maybe the power cut out in the neighborhood. And I never knew. But we had to go to the laundromat. And there was some weeks where I would have to pick through and decide which of my dirty clothes I wanted to wash because we couldn&#8217;t afford to wash all of them.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:38:01)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:38:02)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So that was that side with my mom. The other side at my dad&#8217;s house was him and my stepmom, and he worked a very average government job, consistent paycheck, pension, all of those details. And he lived off credit cards. And generationally, his dad had never said no to him ever and ended up dying without a penny to his name.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:38:31)\u00a0And my dad continued that mentality with himself, that if he ever wanted anything, he bought it, including cars to work on, motorcycles, whatever toy he wanted. Everything new and shiny and pretty. And yeah, last I&#8217;d heard it was over $90,000 in credit card debt with multiple different credit cards.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:38:51)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a090,000, 9-0.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:38:53)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a09-0. Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:38:55)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What lessons do you think you brought from your childhood money messages to this relationship with John?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:39:02)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I feel like it is a very chaotic mess. I moved out at 18, and I didn&#8217;t save a penny ever. If I had 20 bucks in my account, I was stoked because I could still go get Starbucks. I worked hard, and I should have had money, and I never did. I spent it. All my bills were covered. My rent was always covered, but I just spent whatever I had.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:39:26)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What about today?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:39:28)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Today, I am the worrier. I am always stressed and fearful and wondering how to make more money and how to make what we have go further, how to make our groceries last longer.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:39:45)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Is your financial life chaotic?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:39:49)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. I feel like we&#8217;re flying by the seat of our pants every single day. No matter how frequently we sit down and budget and spreadsheet, I feel like no matter what, at the end of the day, we&#8217;re just flying blind.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:40:00)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Hmm. Okay. John, what do you remember your family saying about money when you were young?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:40:08)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0My parents asked us never to talk about our finances with other people because it was private.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:40:14)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You grew up in Canada?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:40:16)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:40:16)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Did you grow up in like the equivalent of the Midwest of Canada?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:40:21)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No, no, I wouldn&#8217;t say that. No.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:40:23)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What the\u00a0(Bleep)? All right. That&#8217;s a very Midwestern thing.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:40:25)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Is it?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:40:26)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. Like money is for adults and that&#8217;s not for the children type of thing. Okay, go on.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:40:32)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So what I mean is they would mention, we don&#8217;t have money for that. We don&#8217;t have money to do that. We&#8217;re saving our money. This month we&#8217;re a little&#8211; cinch the belt was a term they used when they needed to save for a trip or&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:40:48)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Were you poot?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:40:48)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s what they made it seem like when we were growing up, that we were not well off. But I think that now that I am in a position that they were in, I think they did quite well. We went to Disneyland, went on ski trips. They drove\u00a0(Bleep)\u00a0cars, but that&#8217;s because they didn&#8217;t prioritize buying fancy cars.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:41:09)\u00a0They bought a four-acre hobby farm, which nowadays is worth a lot of money because of the location. So they said those things growing up, and they said, keep it between us. So that&#8217;s what I mean.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:41:23)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What happened as you got older?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:41:26)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0When I had a job, I was always living paycheck-to-paycheck, especially in my younger years because I was just out partying too much. But I had an apartment. I was paying rent. Wasn&#8217;t prioritizing buying groceries. I was just blowing my money at a young age.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:41:43)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What did you tell yourself at this time, let&#8217;s say&#8211; what are we talking, early 20s?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:41:47)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:41:48)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What did you tell yourself about money back then?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:41:52)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I wanted to earn more of it. I wanted to be financially stable one day.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:41:59)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I don&#8217;t believe that. I don&#8217;t believe you told yourself in your 20s, I want to be financially stable. I simply don&#8217;t believe that. No 20-year-old guy says that to himself, ever.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:42:09)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I was looking at buying investment properties on the East Coast.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:42:12)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0But that wasn&#8217;t to be financially stable. What was it to be?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:42:17)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, for passive income.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:42:19)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Exactly. What else did you tell yourself in your 20s when you were out partying, spending money? I&#8217;m not judging. I don&#8217;t care. I spent a lot of money in my 20s too. But what did you tell yourself?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:42:32)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I wasn&#8217;t worried about the money I was spending because I was making pretty good money.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:42:37)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm. So if you log into your checking account and it was like, I don&#8217;t know, 50 bucks or 100 bucks or something, what did you tell yourself?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:42:44)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Save that until next payday.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:42:49)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:42:51)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0In my mid-20s, I started saving money and actually taking my paychecks and dividing them into subaccounts to not be blowing my money all the time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:43:03)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Where&#8217;s the savings? It&#8217;s 15 years later.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:43:07)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Well, we bought this house.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:43:10)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. This is very fascinating to me. A lot of people, they save very thoughtfully. They save for decades. And then they buy a house, and then they feel house poor. And I go, like I just said, &#8222;Where&#8217;s your money? Where&#8217;s the savings? It&#8217;s been 15 years of savings. Show me where it is.&#8221; And your answer was a little mopey. Well, I did buy this house.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:43:34)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, I didn&#8217;t finish actually. It wasn&#8217;t 15 years of savings. I didn&#8217;t say that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:43:40)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mid 20s. You&#8217;re 40.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:43:42)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. But I wasn&#8217;t saving this whole time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:43:45)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, carry on.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:43:46)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I spent it on items, like I bought myself a Jeep. Paid it off early,<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:43:51)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:43:53)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Bought myself a bunch of equipment for my business.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:43:55)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:43:59)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That ate up a lot of money. I was having fun with it. I was doing what I wanted with it. Right now, I can&#8217;t do what I want with money because it&#8217;s not there.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:44:07)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It&#8217;s there, but you just owe a lot of debt.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:44:11)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:44:14)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It&#8217;s like when your 5-year-old falls down. It&#8217;s not that big of a deal. When a 40-year-old man falls down, it&#8217;s a much bigger deal.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:44:22)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I handle all of our finances, and I can see that there&#8217;s no savings. I can see that there&#8217;s no retirement plan. I can see if John gets hurt tomorrow on a job, we&#8217;re\u00a0(Bleep). We don&#8217;t have life insurance. We&#8217;ve got nothing. There is no cushion if we fall. We lose everything overnight.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:44:42)\u00a0We lose his business, we lose the house, the car. We lose literally everything because there&#8217;s nothing. I have tried to have these conversations, and not that I get a blank look from John, but I don&#8217;t get this sense of believing that that could happen or believing that there&#8217;s an urgency in these things.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:45:04)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0John, do you agree with Amy that you&#8217;re one injury away from major, major problems, including no life insurance?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:45:11)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I honestly don&#8217;t feel like there&#8217;s any money for that. I feel we&#8217;re so strapped for money that I am just trying to bring in as much as I can. So I&#8217;m focused on trying to earn as much as I can.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:45:24)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0But it&#8217;s been years. It&#8217;s not like it&#8217;s only been in the last six months where things have been excessively tight. And I&#8217;ve had moments where it&#8217;s been terrifying.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:45:35)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It&#8217;s scary to hear when two partners don&#8217;t see money the same way. And we&#8217;re not talking about having five or $10,000 of debt. We&#8217;re talking about having hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt with two kids, with no life insurance, with less than a month&#8217;s worth of expenses in your savings account.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:46:00)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:46:01)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0This is a major problem. What&#8217;s the future?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:46:08)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0At this trajectory, it&#8217;s not looking good.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:46:10)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Be specific.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:46:12)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We cannot hold onto this house. We can&#8217;t have two cars. We could sell and hopefully pay off a large amount of money and rent. I don&#8217;t know if we could afford to buy in a different city. But yeah, at this trajectory, we&#8217;re sinking extremely fast.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:46:36)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s not the worst case to me. That actually sounds perfectly fine to me. Oh, we sell a house and make hundreds of thousands of dollars and then go rent somewhere. Oh, boohoo. What do you mean? That sounds fine. I don&#8217;t really consider that actually&#8211; that&#8217;s good case. John, what&#8217;s bad case?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:46:58)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I don&#8217;t think jail time is in the cards, but what&#8217;s worse? I guess bankruptcy would be worse. Credit takes a huge hit.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:47:10)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I think you just answered my question because that&#8217;s not the worst case. Like I said, that&#8217;s actually ideal. Worst case is your business gets knocked down tomorrow because of tariffs or whatever, or you get injured, or something happens to Amy&#8217;s thing, and you all have one week&#8217;s worth of money. And that&#8217;s it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:47:30)\u00a0And now your house is going to get taken. Your kids can&#8217;t go to school where they go to school. Who knows what&#8217;s going to happen to a relationship under this kind of financial stress? That&#8217;s bad. You guys don&#8217;t talk about this a lot?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:47:48)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;ve tried. I have tried the tactics of scaring into action, I guess.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:47:58)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Does it work?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:47:59)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No. We&#8217;re here, so no.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:48:04)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It feels like you two are stuck.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:48:08)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I actually felt like we talk about our situation or money quite often. Especially recently, we were talking about, like, we can&#8217;t afford to do that. We shouldn&#8217;t be spending money on that. We got to stop doing that. The long-term savings, yeah. Maybe we have a different vision of where we&#8217;re at and what the plan is with that. I feel like we don&#8217;t even have a dollar to put towards savings right now, or retirement.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:48:38)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Hold on. You use the word feelings a lot about money. I don&#8217;t feel we have enough. Do you know?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:48:46)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. So what I mean by that is we don&#8217;t have the money for that. I don&#8217;t see it. I don&#8217;t see it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:48:54)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, okay. Fair. Fine. Amy looks skeptical, but this is beside the point. John, you&#8217;re surprised that you and Amy don&#8217;t see eye to eye on the acute severity of the problem. And you&#8217;re saying like, &#8222;Hey, we have a plan, actually. I think we&#8217;re on top of it day to day.&#8221; Okay, fine. Maybe you are, maybe not.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:49:11)\u00a0I take your word for it. But the day-to-day is not really what concerns me. My question is, what&#8217;s the plan? When is the debt going to be paid off? How are you going to increase your savings so that if something happens to one of you, your children are protected?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:49:25)\u00a0What would be your answers to those questions?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:49:28)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mine is&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:49:29)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Talking to John, please.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:49:31)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No. See, that&#8217;s where I feel like we&#8217;re stuck. I don&#8217;t see how we can come up with more money until we earn more money.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(Narration)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:49:40)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Let me\u00a0say something I think a lot of people feel, but rarely say out loud. John is trying. He is showing up.\u00a0He&#8217;s having conversations. He&#8217;s working hard.\u00a0And in most areas of life, that counts for something. But when it comes to money, effort doesn&#8217;t always matter.\u00a0The world doesn&#8217;t care how many hours you&#8217;ve worked if you&#8217;re not driving actual results.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:50:03)\u00a0Your credit card company&#8217;s not\u00a0going to\u00a0give you a round of applause for updating a spreadsheet. The CRA doesn&#8217;t care if you tried your best. They just want their money.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:50:14)\u00a0It reminds me of the Spelling Bee\u00a0when I was a kid.\u00a0I didn&#8217;t do it just to have fun,\u00a0sitting there, reading two hours a day with my mom, this freaking Scripps Howard yellow book of words.\u00a0I did it to win. It was not just about effort.\u00a0It was about results. And I think John is confusing effort with results.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:50:32)\u00a0The tough part is when you&#8217;re putting the effort in and still not seeing results, it can be very demoralizing.\u00a0And I want to tell you the difference between, in my experience,\u00a0people who stay stuck and people who get unstuck and win. Most common reaction from people who get stuck is they try all this stuff.\u00a0It&#8217;s not working, and then they go,\u00a0&#8222;What&#8217;s the point?&#8221;\u00a0They start making up excuses. They blame the world.\u00a0Or they just keep doing what they&#8217;re doing and hope that somehow, magically,\u00a0things will work out.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:50:53)\u00a0The people I know who are successful do not do that. They are very honest with themselves. They take a hard look in the mirror.\u00a0They go,\u00a0&#8222;Okay, this isn&#8217;t working. What am I doing wrong? Where can I improve? Let me switch it up.&#8221;\u00a0And that&#8217;s where I think John is. He&#8217;s confused, overwhelmed, frustrated, and certainly not adapting,\u00a0even though this clearly is not working.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:51:13)\u00a0And in addition, there&#8217;s another problem here. They&#8217;re not working as a team.\u00a0Amy&#8217;s worried about risk. John&#8217;s focused on income. They stopped trusting each other with money. Remember Amy&#8217;s phrase, financial infidelity,\u00a0is a huge deal. So before we start fixing numbers on their CSP, I\u00a0want to\u00a0talk about trust and what it would take to rebuild it.\u00a0Listen as I ask Amy what that phrase really means to\u00a0her.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(Interview)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:51:40)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So I want to understand more a little bit about the teamwork going on here. Amy, you mentioned the term financial infidelity. What does that mean to you?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:51:55)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It&#8217;s making the conscious choice day in and day out to hide something significant and the little lies that go into the decision to buy a car. That would&#8217;ve been a good time to bring it up. And instead, the little lies that we should do this. That&#8217;s a great idea. Or going on weekend trips that cost money we didn&#8217;t have.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:52:27)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Are you satisfied with John&#8217;s answer that he thought things were fine?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:52:34)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0There was a conversation we had at dinner once and I said, &#8222;Okay, we need to get you back into work.&#8221; And I see now that that was not even close to enough information.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:52:46)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We really need to get you back to work? I agree. That is not direct at all. Amy, when he said that, what&#8217;d you think?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:52:53)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That meant nothing to me. I don&#8217;t know what that was supposed to mean, but that definitely wasn&#8217;t clear that that meant I&#8217;m carrying a whole bunch of debt over here and that&#8217;s how we&#8217;re going to fix it, is by you going back to work.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:53:09)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0John, what stopped you, out of curiosity, from being that direct?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:53:14)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I guess I was scared. That was a lot of money.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:53:19)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:53:20)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. I was trying desperately to get rid of it, to pay that debt, and just move on from it. But I couldn&#8217;t get a handle on it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:53:32)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I feel like we&#8217;re treading water. I feel like the want is there, but that&#8217;s where it seems to stop.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:53:43)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0But are we working together, or?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:53:46)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Let me ask a different way. Are you working together effectively?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:53:49)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No. Because we&#8217;re still in the negative by thousands every month. And I don&#8217;t think that it&#8217;s effective.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:53:59)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0John?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:54:01)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Can, actually, we follow up? I&#8217;d like to know why.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:54:04)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Even a week or two ago, I had to pay the CRA payment. I had to pay our property taxes, and we had $500 left in the bank account. I was stressed. And so my solution was, I am going to sell some things on marketplace. Have a hundred dollars to go grocery shopping.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:54:24)\u00a0Haven&#8217;t had to do that since I was in my early 20s, to make sure that no money was being touched out of that account. And I remember messaging you and just saying, &#8222;Hey, please don&#8217;t make any extra stops this week. No beer pickups, no extra snacks.&#8221; And your response was simply, &#8222;Okay,&#8221; with a heart.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:54:42)\u00a0And in my mind, that would&#8217;ve been a bit of a red flag to come home and be like, &#8222;Hey, what&#8217;s going on with our finances? What&#8217;s going on this month?&#8221; And so it&#8217;s just one of those moments that highlighted like, okay, I am carrying this weight over here on my own when it comes to how our household is being run and what our monthly finances look like. That&#8217;s on me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:55:06)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0John?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:55:09)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It feels more and more like I&#8217;m just getting attacked here, so I&#8217;m starting to feel defensive, to be quite honest. I am absolutely stressed out about our finances and the business finances. It&#8217;s not like, oh, that&#8217;s your problem. You deal with it. No, this is our problem that I got us into. This has weighed on me for years. It&#8217;s changed me as a person. This is an unbearable amount of stress, and I feel it every day, all hours of the day. How can I improve that? How can I make more money? That&#8217;s my focus right now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:55:51)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I find that to be an extremely interesting reaction that you just had, John. First of all, I welcome it. I love when somebody can describe how they are feeling in the moment. I never want to attack anyone arbitrarily. That&#8217;s not my job. My job is to figure out how to get you where you want to go.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:56:12)\u00a0The reason I called that response interesting was it almost felt like it was one of the first times that you have literally and figuratively leaned forward. Like, this is how I&#8217;m feeling. I&#8217;m (Bleep). I&#8217;m stressed. I&#8217;m feeling attacked. Now we&#8217;re in this. That is the level of anger that I want you to have, because hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt is actually not acceptable. It&#8217;s not.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:56:42)\u00a0And this concept of like, well, we talk about it a lot and it&#8217;s fine, but your partner says it&#8217;s not fine. And so if one partner says it&#8217;s not fine, it&#8217;s not fine. And then, what&#8217;s the plan? What&#8217;s the debt payoff date? Don&#8217;t know. How are we going to build savings? Don&#8217;t know. We got to make more money. How? Don&#8217;t know. That&#8217;s not acceptable.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:57:01)\u00a0And I like the anger because it&#8217;s going to take decisiveness to get out of this situation. So I welcome your response, and I appreciate that you are able to articulate how you&#8217;re feeling. That&#8217;s hard for me. I&#8217;m like, &#8222;Wow, that was masterful.&#8221; How do you feel about continuing our conversation?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:57:21)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0First of all, I agree with what&#8217;s being said but I feel like I&#8217;m being painted as a bit of an idiot and a bit of the enemy here.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:57:32)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Because? Why?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:57:34)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;m not totally sure I agree with some of the answers.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:57:40)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Whose answers.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:57:41)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0There&#8217;s just a lot of information that hasn&#8217;t been accurately&#8211; there&#8217;s so many details to all of this that&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:57:53)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, tell me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:57:54)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;ve clearly made a big mistake not having a grasp on the business financials. But I feel that since then, involved with the household budget, I feel like we&#8217;ve been doing a pretty good job. And I thought we were communicating that together as a team.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(Narration)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:58:13)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. I need to cut in here because emotions are starting to get high,\u00a0and honestly,\u00a0I love it. John is frustrated, which makes me so happy. It tells me that he cares. This is the kind of energy I\u00a0want to\u00a0see&#8211; present, engaged. Even if it means frustrated.\u00a0The worst reaction would be somebody just going,\u00a0&#8222;All right.\u00a0(Bleep)\u00a0this guy.&#8221;\u00a0That&#8217;s checked out.\u00a0I can&#8217;t help that because once you&#8217;re gone, you&#8217;re gone.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:58:38)\u00a0But to be in it, to disagree with me, I welcome it. To be able to articulate how you&#8217;re feeling in a moment like he just did,\u00a0that is incredibly impressive. When we get flooded or overwhelmed, or we feel misunderstood, when we&#8217;re fighting with somebody, our body literally changes.\u00a0We shut down. We can&#8217;t hear the same way that we normally do.\u00a0And so we react in these peculiar ways. We project.\u00a0We deflect.\u00a0We deny.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:59:02)\u00a0So for John to pause and say,\u00a0&#8222;I feel attacked,&#8221;\u00a0I am actually in awe. That is a master level reaction. It is something that I have tried to learn in therapy,\u00a0and it is really hard.\u00a0I also love when someone pushes back on me.\u00a0It&#8217;s a good sign. The last thing I want is for somebody to come on this show and nod through the whole thing.\u00a0All right.\u00a0And then leaves saying,\u00a0&#8222;(Bleep)\u00a0that guy.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:59:25)\u00a0If you disagree, say it. That&#8217;s how we actually get somewhere. So I appreciate what just happened, but now I have to push.\u00a0Because despite everything we&#8217;ve heard, John still thinks they&#8217;re doing pretty good. They&#8217;re not.\u00a0You cannot be doing pretty good when you&#8217;re hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and one emergency away from disaster. So listen as I push John to really understand the severity of their situation and hopefully start playing offense instead of defense.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(Interview)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(00:59:56)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You have $2,000 in your savings account with two kids. You have no money left. So you could talk together, but it doesn&#8217;t change the fact that you are not making effective decisions. And because, John, you are the one who put this level of financial risk on the family, in my opinion, it would be your responsibility to take the lead on getting your family out of it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:00:26)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So can I ask you something?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:00:27)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:00:28)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0The $320,000 debt is getting a $10,000 payment each month going forward. That is on the side. I then transfer $7,000 a month to our personal side, and we&#8217;re still struggling on the personal side. I don&#8217;t feel comfortable increasing the $7,000 because that&#8217;ll just put us back into this problem.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:01:00)\u00a0I can&#8217;t pay for this source deductions, the business operating expenses. So how do we take the 7,000 plus what Amy can bring in, and how can we best use that money to keep the house and hopefully keep the car? That&#8217;s what we&#8217;re struggling with.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:01:23)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I love that you&#8217;re asking these questions, and I am down to play ball. Let&#8217;s simulate some stuff.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:01:29)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I think we should be a bit realistic with the income. Honey, what do you think? We were saying 4,000 a month?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:01:36)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I think it was closer to 5. I was to move towards doing the nails.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:01:42)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0But is that before tax? So we have to take 30% off.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:01:45)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, that was before tax.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:01:47)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a030% off of that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:01:50)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a01,500 off. So 3,500. So\u00a0should I change this to 3,500 take home?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:01:56)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:01:57)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. Take a look at the fixed cost number. That&#8217;s the number that matters. What is the number now?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:02:02)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It&#8217;s 115,000. So that&#8217;s the trajectory we&#8217;re trying to get to. And this is maybe our new norm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:02:15)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0115% is not acceptable.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:02:18)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Right.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:02:19)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That number needs to ideally be below 60%. We could fiddle around with it a little bit above 60, but 115% we&#8217;re not even in the same universe.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:02:28)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Right. So we&#8217;re still really\u00a0(Bleep). So what do we do?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:02:34)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Good question. Okay. Before we jump into the numbers and start messing around with the numbers, I&#8217;d like the two of you to just ask yourselves. Have a conversation. The last several times we&#8217;ve talked about money, how have we showed up, and now in this conversation, how do we want to show up differently? Go ahead.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:02:58)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I think I always show up optimistic. I think that&#8217;s pretty clear with all of the conversations so far. I am still optimistic. But I need a dose of reality, and I need to know if we have to go to the extremes of selling our house.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:03:18)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0The two pieces I am thinking of is that my CRA repayment plan is short-lived. So I know that that puts us in the negative. That just screws us every month right now, but I haven&#8217;t defaulted on a single payment, and there is a timeframe. And if we can buckle down, make more money in the meantime, and get those payments done instead of defaulting or screwing up and letting it snowball into a higher number, that feels like a light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to that one there.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:03:59)\u00a0At the same time, there&#8217;s the schooling that I&#8217;m doing to be able to make that income right downstairs. And so yes, obviously if we have to sell, we have to sell, but I lose that option of having the rent-free space downstairs to run a potentially successful business.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:04:24)\u00a0Like I said, that is not an oversaturated market in our area. I do believe that that will financially be lucrative and will help. So that&#8217;s where my brain goes, are those two pieces. It&#8217;s just, how do we navigate the current financial situation until these pieces are dealt with, really?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:04:46)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Can I cut in real quick? First of all, I like this back and forth, is great. The question was, how have we shown up in past conversations, and how do we want to show up differently?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:05:00)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I just feel like no matter how good or productive conversations are, no matter how many calculations we make, at the end of every time, it&#8217;s going to like, okay. We just keep going back to hoping for the best. And that&#8217;s it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:05:15)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So how do you want to show up?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:05:20)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0With a plan. I&#8217;d like to stop feeling like we&#8217;re just grappling around in the dark.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:05:25)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s generic.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:05:28)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I know.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:05:29)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s like me saying I want to go to the gym and just magically get a six pack. That&#8217;s an outcome. How do you want to show up in this conversation?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:05:43)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I would like to show up as being more optimistic, I guess. That would be nice where I get to show up feeling like there&#8217;s hope and&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:05:54)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Look at John&#8217;s face. There&#8217;s a smile. John&#8217;s nodding. He was caught off guard. Right, John?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:06:00)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. I like that response from her. I want that for her too.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:06:03)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. If it were me, from knowing you, the way I would show up is, I would say, &#8222;I think in the past we have danced around the truth. And the way I want to show up is I am ready to make hard decisions now.&#8221; And I would almost reframe it to bad news in the short term is good news in the long term. But bad news in the long term is death.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:06:38)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:06:39)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0And that&#8217;s what you&#8217;ve been doing. Hope is not a strategy. Fiddling around with numbers is not a strategy. We need to make some tough decisions. Are you all ready?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:06:51)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:06:52)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, great. Let&#8217;s take a look. The goal is to get your debt paid off, your fixed costs down to roughly 60%. I understand that might be difficult. Maybe we stretch it a little bit, but in the ballpark.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:07:10)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:07:12)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Now I&#8217;d like to just give folks a quick little understanding of where the money&#8217;s going in fixed costs.\u00a0Your housing costs at $2,975 a month, plus your utilities,\u00a0are 26%. Not bad for what I assume is high cost of living area.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:07:28)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:07:29)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay.\u00a0Insurance, 455.\u00a0Car payments at\u00a0$1,077.\u00a0Debt payments, $5,888 per month. It&#8217;s killing you. It&#8217;s over half your take home pay.\u00a0Groceries at 900.\u00a0Clothes\u00a0at 50.\u00a0Phone at\u00a0245,\u00a0and subscriptions at 55. Nothing else is particularly egregious. It&#8217;s the debt. That&#8217;s your primary thing here. All right. So your fixed costs, and this is if we assume Amy is making more money, which I&#8217;m not comfortable putting that assumption in here yet,\u00a0I&#8217;m putting it back to\u00a01,000.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:08:08)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That&#8217;s fair.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:08:09)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Your fixed costs are at 151%. What do you want to do?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:08:13)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You want to talk about making hard decisions? It would be that we have to sell the house, and the money would have to go towards the debt. It would have to knock off my debt right off the bat. I know that it&#8217;s not as significant as John&#8217;s debt, but knocking it out 100% would alleviate that monthly repayment plan.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:08:35)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0How much would you take home if you sold the house?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:08:40)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We owe the bank 514. So if we got 800 for it, then that goes back, whatever fees and extras and stuff. It would be, what, roughly 200,000?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:08:53)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That sounds pretty reasonable to me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:08:55)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:08:56)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0200,000. And just overall, y&#8217;all owe 53 plus 46. That&#8217;s 100 plus 150. You owe about 157,000 ballpark. Do you want to see what happens to your monthly money if you&#8217;re able to make that change?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:09:21)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:09:21)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. So in this case, you&#8217;ve sold your house. I need to know how much you are now paying for debt on a monthly basis.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:09:38)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mine would be down to zero. We&#8217;d have to still put 30% aside of every paycheck. But debt, if we sell the house, mine would be wiped.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:09:49)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, so that&#8217;s right here. $5,888 a month?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:09:55)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:09:55)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. Just out of curiosity, when is this going to be paid off anyway? How many months?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:09:59)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0In 2023, it was supposed to be 12 months, and I&#8217;ve been paying it. So it would be January that it would be done.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:10:06)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0This coming January?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:10:08)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:10:09)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Oh. All right. That opens up another possibility. Let&#8217;s take a look.\u00a0So first off, if we just zero this out, watch what happens to your fixed costs. Whoa. 77%. Is anyone seeing what I&#8217;m seeing here? What do you all take away from what just happened?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:10:31)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So that&#8217;s the scenario of selling the house. Right?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:10:34)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Let me reframe it. That is the scenario of Amy&#8217;s debt payments of $5,888 a month being zeroed out, being completed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:10:44)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Right.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:10:45)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0How you get there, I&#8217;m now seeing multiple possibilities. You could sell the house. That&#8217;s one. And y&#8217;all would have a 77% fixed cost. Not great, but doable, better. What do you think about that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:11:10)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It&#8217;s definitely a contender for options, I would say.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:11:14)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, I agree. I think that&#8217;s pretty good. It would give us a lot of breathing room, a lot of options.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:11:21)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Now, I guess it wouldn&#8217;t be wise to try to take a bank loan to pay that, would it?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:11:27)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You all need to stop dealing with debt is what you need to do.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:11:29)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:11:30)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0People in debt love to use more debt, and you are the last people who should be using debt. None of it. Home equity, refinancing, business loans, personal loans, none of it. It&#8217;s kryptonite. Stay away. That&#8217;s what got you into this problem.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:11:47)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:11:48)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;m seeing nods from both of you. I think you guys get it. If you sold the house, how much would your rent be?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:11:55)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We&#8217;ve looked at the rental market and how much we would spend. Cost-wise, we&#8217;d probably look at having to do a two-bedroom, have the kids share.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:12:05)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I agree. Okay. Smaller, fine. And would that still cost $2,975 a month plus 500 bucks in expense? So 3,500 bucks?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:12:14)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So that would be the high end of what we would find out here, but not totally unreasonable.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:12:19)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0John, you agree?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:12:21)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, I think the about $3,000 mark.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:12:24)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Here&#8217;s what I&#8217;m going to say. The fact that you have a four bedroom, and if you decide to sell and rent, it is likely that you will go to a smaller location.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:12:34)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. Significantly, yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:12:36)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I, third party, outside observer, don&#8217;t mind it. Easy for me to say. I don&#8217;t have two kids, and I&#8217;m not going to be the one living there. But sometimes I think it&#8217;s really helpful to have somebody from the outside just giving their perspective.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:12:49)\u00a0So if you were able to rent a smaller place, even for $500 less, $500 a month is really meaningful to you right now, extraordinarily meaningful. That means every month you&#8217;re adding 25% to your emergency fund. Guys, it&#8217;s really important. This is the way you start thinking long term. Not just what&#8217;s happening for four months, but 12 months, 24 months, 48 months.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:13:19)\u00a0These systemic changes like in your housing costs can really add up. You take that 500 bucks, put it in your savings account, by the end of the year, just that savings alone is 6,000 more dollars. Do you see how I&#8217;m thinking about little differently? That&#8217;s how I want you to think about it. All right. Back to the CSP, which is interesting, we did not factor in any income changes. I think it&#8217;s time to talk about the income.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:13:50)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:13:51)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What do you want to do?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:13:53)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I am trying so hard. I pick up cleaning jobs when I can. That&#8217;s something I&#8217;ve done since I was a teenager.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:14:03)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What&#8217;s our theme for this conversation right now?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:14:05)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Hard change.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:14:07)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. I&#8217;m not interested in replaying the old stories.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:14:11)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:14:11)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0If they would&#8217;ve worked, they would&#8217;ve worked.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:14:13)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:14:14)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Here&#8217;s what I have to say. You mentioned this nail tech business that you are potentially launching and you said there&#8217;s not a lot of saturation. What evidence do you have that you will make $3,000 per month net?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:14:31)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Conversations with other friends who do this as their current job and looking at the standard cost of services and even lowering it a bit, as someone who would be new to it. You tend to do it a little bit cheaper. If I had five clients a day, three days a week, which it would likely be more five days a week, three clients a day type of a situation&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:14:54)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0How are you going to pay for equipment? You got to certainly set up something. That&#8217;s got to come from somewhere. It&#8217;s going to cost money. There&#8217;s a lot of stuff involved here.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:15:02)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;ve already been doing that due to the content creation work, I do get products for free. And after the certain amount of time, I&#8217;ve actually been selling those items, those furniture items, and then using that money to thrift and buy the furniture I would need from marketplace downstairs. So the setup is pretty well done. It&#8217;s just going. And so that was less than $150 to furnish.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:15:29)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Great. When can you start?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:15:31)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0The program is 10 to 12 weeks. I&#8217;ve been doing it for a month, so it&#8217;s completely self-paced. It&#8217;s at home, so kids are in school in two weeks. I can do much more then and not at midnight.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:15:42)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. How long will both of you give Amy, John and Amy alike, to prove that this works before making a change?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:15:55)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I think it would take a few months to build up a clientele.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:16:02)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0My comfortable timeline would be six months. If I&#8217;m not seeing progress and significant clientele coming in and that income coming in, then changes need to be made.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:16:14)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, great. I like that. And what I would say is this: it could be six months. It could be four months. In that realm sounds reasonable to me. But I&#8217;ll also say this: it doesn&#8217;t happen that you wait until five months and 30 days and then you make a decision. You actually set milestones. This is exactly what we teach in our Earnable program, to help start and grow businesses. It&#8217;s like you set a goal.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:16:38)\u00a0Let&#8217;s say you plan to have $3,000 a month in net income. Let&#8217;s say $5,000 a month gross. That means that by month 1, you probably should be making 1,000 and then 2, and then 3. And look, if your milestone 3 is to hit 3,000 and you hit 2,600, that&#8217;s pretty close. Stay on track. But if your milestone was at 2,600 and you hit 300, that&#8217;s a major problem.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:17:04)\u00a0In other words, you should not wait to find out the answer until month 6. You already pretty much know by month 3, in which case you&#8217;re already making plans. This is the level of speed that we are operating at. Seeing nods from both of you. Are we good on this?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:17:19)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That makes sense.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:17:20)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Absolutely.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:17:21)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0All right. Now, John, talk to us about the business. What do we want to do here?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:17:27)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0To increase what I take home?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:17:30)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:17:32)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I have someone who&#8217;s interested in renting out some space at the shop for a short term for 700 a month. I am in the process of figuring out if I can give up that space because I might need it for this big job we just got.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:17:48)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:17:49)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So that&#8217;s a possibility. Looking and tracking the numbers closely to see if I can afford to give myself a raise is an option. I can always take on more work and start working extra hours. We&#8217;ve gone through that, and if it can be a mutual agreement and a short term so that Amy isn&#8217;t stuck with all the burden of the household, which was hard on her last time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:18:17)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes, but also, this is a dire situation. This is different than it has been. You worked crazy long hours sometimes in the past because you were growing the business, or that was what you wanted to do. This feels different and, yeah, I think that that definitely requires a plan and a conversation. If more work is an option, even if it&#8217;s short term, then we&#8217;ll figure that out.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:18:43)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Could we have this conversation right now?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:18:47)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:18:48)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. I could probably sit another job and before Christmas, and it could be an $80,000 job.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:18:55)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. If they&#8217;re asking you to bid on it or it&#8217;s an option, then go for it. Yeah, we will figure it out. We&#8217;ll plan.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:19:05)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Let&#8217;s plan it right now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:19:07)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I can go back to 12-hour days and not do my flex day. I&#8217;ll just work flex days and be home for the weekend.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:19:16)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It takes a really hard toll on you though. Not even just me and the kids. That takes a lot on your body and your everything.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:19:28)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, but if it&#8217;s for a few months, that&#8217;s fine. But when it&#8217;s a couple of&#8211; that&#8217;s 18 months or whatever that was.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:19:36)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:19:36)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I don&#8217;t want to do that level of over time, but&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:19:40)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. The kids still need to know that their dad lives at home.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:19:44)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Can I intercede for just a second? I love this conversation. It&#8217;s like the energy is totally unlocked. That quicksand that you were in before, that is nowhere to be seen. In fact, what I&#8217;m noticing is both of you actually building on each other, which is amazing. It&#8217;s like an upward spiral. Have you guys noticed it?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:20:04)\u00a0It&#8217;s cool. I can feel it, and I can see it on your faces, both of you. I love it. One question that I might ask, because I can hear, Amy, you&#8217;re alluding to it, &#8222;Hey, that took a toll on your body.&#8221; And then what happening is, John is going, &#8222;It&#8217;s fine as long as it&#8217;s for this short time.&#8221; I could feel a bit of tension and what I might flip that to is, okay, John. I really appreciate that you are willing to work longer hours to pick up this extra job.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:20:33)\u00a0It concerns me that you might be putting your body under a lot of stress. But I also understand that this is what we need to do for the short term to get us out of the situation. What would you need in order for this to feel good and for us to be successful together? Try to ask that question, Amy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:20:57)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We&#8217;ve done this before, and I feel like the difference here is that this is a joint decision versus this just being something you want to do.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:21:05)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No need to explain. Just him how you can support him.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:21:07)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0How can I support you in making this work better than it has in the past?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:21:14)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I thought it worked well in the past. You were extremely supportive. You made my lunches. I think he even started presetting the coffee machine. I think the most hopeful is eliminating the guilt that I feel when I&#8217;m not there to help. Yeah, I think we&#8217;ve done that in the past.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:21:44)\u00a0I think we worked well. That was extreme hours, and that was an extreme amount of months. But if we had to do 12 hours, a day for four months to unlock that extra cash to put towards your income tax to unlock your income at another level&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:22:14)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0John, what do you need to feel supported by Amy? That&#8217;s the question.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:22:18)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. Sorry, I didn&#8217;t quite finish. I was starting to choke up. The feeling that she doesn&#8217;t need me there for dinner. Like, she&#8217;s okay to put the kids to bed. And I can just focus on finishing the shift and get home when I get home. The lunches and the coffee were an awesome touch.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:22:45)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You want that? Will that help you feel supported right now?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:22:49)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:22:50)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:22:51)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Amy?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:22:52)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, that makes sense. Because we have done this before, then it&#8217;s the shifts of it where there&#8217;s times where you&#8217;ve worked the late nights, but it&#8217;s not communicated to me that this is what&#8217;s happening. So the frustration on my end rose that I am left here doing all of this.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:23:09)\u00a0I&#8217;ll see you when I see you. And so if this is the plan, we can do that. And we&#8217;ve had this inkling of this conversation of, if we have to work what longer, we&#8217;ll figure it out. We&#8217;ll do it. But we haven&#8217;t actually planned. So that feels like a really feasible option.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:23:30)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So if I were to take on more hours, what would you need from me as far as helping with you, with the kids, and being a husband and being available?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:23:43)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I think the weekends would be huge. If it was a Monday to Friday grind and that&#8217;s what we have to do, I can absolutely get on board with that. But having the weekends, especially for the kids. Because I just can&#8217;t ever forget the fact that preschool teachers thought that you were in the military because the way that our daughter spoke about you is as if you were never there. And that was heartbreaking.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:24:05)\u00a0So having you there on the weekends where we actually&#8211; spend that time together with the family. If I have that to look forward to, know that that&#8217;s what&#8217;s coming at the end of every week, no matter how hard it is, then I&#8217;m good with it. I know it&#8217;s not forever. There&#8217;s a reason behind all of this. Hard decisions. I can get on board with it. Yeah, that would be huge.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:24:24)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I feel like losing the house would be a harder scenario.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:24:29)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:24:29)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Would you say?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:24:31)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. If that&#8217;s where this goes, that&#8217;s where this goes. And we just need to be able to get on board with that as a whatever plan, C, D down the road. But if we have these other plans in place and we work our\u00a0(Bleep)\u00a0off to execute these plans to their finality and go, &#8222;Well, that\u00a0(Bleep)\u00a0still isn&#8217;t working,&#8221; and we&#8217;re still not where we need to be, then we move on to the next. And if losing the house, selling it, is in the cards, then at least we know that we&#8217;ve done these other plans first, so that we&#8217;re not kicking ourselves later.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:25:10)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:25:11)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Nice work. First of all. Round of applause. That was a phenomenal example of working together. Really, that was fantastic.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:25:18)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Thank you.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:25:19)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0The thing I liked most was that people are capable of pushing themselves way more than they think possible, especially if there&#8217;s a powerful reason and you know that it&#8217;s going to last for a limited time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:25:38)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:25:39)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Now looking at the CSP, what can I change the income to for John so that we can start to get a sense of what happens to the fixed costs?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:25:53)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0If I were to be able to afford to give myself a raise?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:25:57)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. Is it 1,000 a month extra? Is it 3,000, 5,000?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:26:02)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I don&#8217;t know if I would go as much as five. Maybe three.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:26:07)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0An extra 3.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:26:09)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. I think if I were to work towards that, yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:26:12)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Understanding this is just until Christmas, so you would adjust it later, but just to get a sense for what would happen, let&#8217;s take a look.\u00a0Instead of 7,000 take home, I&#8217;m\u00a0going to\u00a0make it 10,000.\u00a0Right there, that number drops at 56%, which is staggering. Oh, and by the way, we should probably increase Amy&#8217;s take home pay.\u00a0Let&#8217;s assume that things go well.\u00a0And what did we say the number&#8217;s\u00a0going to\u00a0be? 3,500?\u00a0Watch this. Well, your fixed costs are at 46%.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:26:41)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Wow.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:26:42)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Candidly, that&#8217;s amazing. I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s going to happen. But that&#8217;s if every single thing goes right. That&#8217;s not how life works. But you know what? I build a life where everything does not have to go perfectly right, and I can still live a Rich Life?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:26:58)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:27:00)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0So maybe Amy is making 3,200. Maybe John gets a contract, but it&#8217;s not 80k. It&#8217;s 50k, and it lasts X number of months. But you can still take that money and you can utilize it effectively. Right?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:27:16)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:27:17)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Absolutely.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:27:17)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;ve given that some thought. I think the obvious one would be Amy&#8217;s income tax debt. And for me on the business, I&#8217;m focusing on that source deductions. So that opens up more options for if, hopefully not, but if we had to do the consumer proposal, or even worse, if we had to do bankruptcy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:27:37)\u00a0But it also opens up bank loan. I know we don&#8217;t want to talk about loans and more debt, but it could be a difference of interest rates. Maybe we save a bit. I don&#8217;t actually know what the CRA&#8217;s charging interest. I should. I should. That&#8217;s a number I&#8217;m embarrassed not to know.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:27:58)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0In your conversations with the government agencies that you&#8217;re in touch with, what amount of negotiations have you done with over your monthly payments?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:28:09)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I tried. Like at the beginning I said, &#8222;Will you be okay with 3,000?&#8221; Or I think it was 2,000. And they said, &#8222;No, that&#8217;s not enough.&#8221; So I said, &#8222;I can do 3,000.&#8221; I can&#8217;t just give you this magical $20,000 a month. So I tried to just give them the full picture and just say, &#8222;Listen, I&#8217;ll give you what I can.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:28:32)\u00a0And it grew because the jobs were becoming bigger contracts. So I opted as I could, and they&#8217;re okay with that. And the first lady I had was great. She totally understood. And then, I got another officer who was harder on me. He was saying I have to go borrow money from my friends and family, Money Mart and all this.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:28:53)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What the\u00a0(Bleep)? Who knew the government is a goddamn loan shark? What is this?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:28:59)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0It was brutal.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:29:01)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, John, let me ask you a question. You mentioned something about paying $10,000 a month towards this debt. Is that correct?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:29:09)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:29:10)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Are you doing that now?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:29:12)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0As of my last payment, yes. And so I&#8217;ll be doing that for the next five months, but four months for sure.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:29:20)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay. And out of curiosity, are you just doing that because you have extra money so you&#8217;re just putting it towards the debt?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:29:25)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, pretty much.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:29:27)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What&#8217;s the interest rate on the debt?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:29:30)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I don&#8217;t know the interest rate, unfortunately.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:29:33)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, this is what I suspected. We need to be much more disciplined. For example, if I&#8217;m in your situation and I have extra money coming in because of a job that I got, I&#8217;m not going to immediately just start paying off extra debt because I&#8217;m going to end up in the same position I&#8217;m in five months from now. What I&#8217;m going to do is sit back, carefully consider what&#8217;s the interest rate?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:29:57)\u00a0Hey, I&#8217;m not going to have this job after five months. What am I going to do? This is where dreamers never look at the negative. They just go, &#8222;Oh, the next deal will come and save me. We got to stop that thinking.&#8221; We got to say, &#8222;Okay, if they agreed that I can send them $3,000, that is the amount I&#8217;m sending them. Next, let me factor in the interest rate. Is it to my advantage to pay a little bit extra?&#8221; Could be.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:30:18)\u00a0But then finally, you want to start building up this cash reserve in your business. In short, maybe it&#8217;s a good idea to pay extra. Maybe not. You need to factor in a lot more than just, I have the money. Would you be able to do that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:30:33)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, absolutely. You&#8217;re totally right.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:30:34)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Okay, great. Amy, what do you need from John in order to trust him financially speaking?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:30:48)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Full transparency and communication. I don&#8217;t want to have to ask how money is going, how the jobs are going. Is payday coming? I want it to be upfront that when he comes home, I got this job. This is what&#8217;s happening. This is how much the job is. This is how much I got the initial invoice for. And he has done, I&#8217;d say, at least half of that, half of the time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:31:18)\u00a0And I want to be excited for him when he says I got a job. I want to be able to celebrate that with him for a minute. And I think that he tends to get wrapped up in the business so much that those moments just pass him by too. And so to be able to, &#8222;Hey, you got that job. That&#8217;s amazing. That&#8217;s really exciting.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:31:38)\u00a0And financially, yes, that&#8217;s great. But also it&#8217;s a really great confidence booster of what he is capable of. So I think that communication and that transparency among those pieces would just continue to help gain the trust back.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:31:57)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0That makes absolute sense. I am totally willing to continue to be as transparent and keep you informed. Like we talked about, you don&#8217;t need to know when I&#8217;m buying material and I just bought some plywood today.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:32:10)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0When will you update her?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:32:12)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We had talked about every other month or something. We haven&#8217;t really a (Bleep).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:32:21)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Wait, what?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:32:22)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0No, it was supposed to be every week. We were going to sit down once every week, and we haven&#8217;t. It&#8217;s happened more just conversationally while we&#8217;re making dinner or whatnot.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:32:34)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0You&#8217;re talking around each other, and you&#8217;re going right back into the stories. And if I were not here, that would&#8217;ve just happened. The second thing I notice is that there&#8217;s a lot of murkiness, a lot of gray area.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:32:45)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I was nodding along because I was expecting that I knew what she was going to say.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:32:49)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0But you didn&#8217;t. You thought it was every other month. She said every week. That&#8217;s not in the same planet.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:32:59)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0We had talks only, I guess would&#8217;ve been May, June, about the transparency specifically around, I didn&#8217;t want any big transactions be taking place. No big equipment, no nothing to be purchased, no big car repairs on his work vehicle without discussion with us first.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:33:18)\u00a0We had sat down and, okay, if he&#8217;s making this much money a month on the work log, where&#8217;s the money going? And he&#8217;d show me the percentages. And I remember saying, the business savings percentage, that needs to be way higher.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:33:31)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Great. Now I want you to get specific. What does a transparency report look like specifically? Can you tell me? And I think it should be John who leads this one? John?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:33:47)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0To explain when I get a check, a big check comes in, and I tell her how much it is and I tell her how that money is going to be divided. And I can say if I need to buy something other than your odd 100-dollar tool here and there, which doesn&#8217;t really come up anymore. But an expensive purchase is a conversation between the two of us. We&#8217;ve agreed to that as well.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:34:22)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0What if you don&#8217;t get a big check for six months?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:34:26)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Then I would be transparent about that, let her know.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:34:29)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0When? Because if I were you, I&#8217;d wait until month 5.999. And Amy, how do you think that makes her feel?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:34:37)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I think if that were to happen again, that we we&#8217;re not going to make it. We can&#8217;t be here again. We can&#8217;t be in a position where he is just crossing his fingers, hoping that a job is coming up. But nothing has actually been shown anyways till the very last possible second to tell me. That&#8217;s why we&#8217;re here. We&#8217;re not.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:34:58)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;m going to show you a different way that I might communicate. I might say, &#8222;On a weekly basis, on Saturday at 11:30 to 12:00 AM, I, Amy, am going to look over the document, and I&#8217;m going to talk to you about it.&#8221; John says, &#8222;I, John, am going to have that document completed by Friday night at 9:00 PM.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:35:29)\u00a0So that Amy has an hour in the morning on Saturday, whatever, to look it over, write her questions down. Then you all talk about it together for a half an hour. In this document, it&#8217;s going to be a template. It&#8217;s filled out, and you just plug it in like Mad Libs. Here&#8217;s the amount.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:35:45)\u00a0Here&#8217;s how much is in the bank. Here&#8217;s the current deals in discussion. Here&#8217;s the deals we lost. All the relevant information. Here are the things planned to be purchased in the next whatever. Guys, transparency is not like pulling freaking teeth out, or I will tell you if something happens. Transparency is proactive.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:36:06)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Right.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:36:07)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0When I get my reports on Monday from my team leaders, you think I&#8217;m going to them like, &#8222;Hey, what about this?&#8221; No. If I have to ask, they have failed. So I&#8217;m getting a full report, numbers I can drill down into what&#8217;s going on, how many deals, what&#8217;s our BPN, all this stuff. They have done the work to manage.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:36:25)\u00a0And John, you got to do that to manage the communication to Amy. Amy, your responsibility is to look at it, make sure that it makes sense for the household, and then for the two of you to talk about it together.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:36:36)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:36:37)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0How does that strike you, John?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:36:39)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, I like that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:36:40)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Cool. Little different. Way more effective, I think, in communication. And I think Amy, for you, you mentioned something that resonates with me. You go, &#8222;I don&#8217;t want to have to ask.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:36:49)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:36:50)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Same thing I tell my team. If I have to ask you, we have a serious problem. So I need you to be proactively&#8211; and the best way to do that, just give them a template. Both of you developed the template together. I think John should take the first crack. Here&#8217;s a template I&#8217;m planning to report on by Friday night, every night, at whatever time. What do you think? Is this going to give you what you want? And then if after a couple of weeks, you want to change a couple of things? Go for it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:37:14)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:37:15)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I like that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:37:16)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Love that. So Amy then said, for trust, I want transparency. Was there anything else?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:37:22)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Communication. Just goes along with it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:37:25)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0There&#8217;s one thing I don&#8217;t think we addressed, which is the people around you that you need to enlist on this sprint you are about to go on.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:37:34)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:37:34)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Wow. Nods from both. Tell me. This is about to become very difficult for several months. What people around you do you need to enlist?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:37:44)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0My go-to is going to be his parents. They&#8217;re fully retired. They&#8217;re incredible help. And I did it in January when we were looking at our numbers, and I went, &#8222;We got to make all these cuts. We can&#8217;t do anything in the summer with these kids.&#8221; And I remember messaging my mother-in-law saying, &#8222;Hey, I know it&#8217;s a long way. Can you help with the kids? Can we make a plan for that now?&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:38:04)\u00a0And had a concrete, these are the exact overnights that they&#8217;re going to have the kids for the entire summer so that I could structure the work and the time that I needed. And so I will do that exact same thing and get the help that we need from them, the best that we can.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:38:19)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Amazing. Also amazing what happens when you&#8217;re super specific about what you need.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:38:24)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:38:25)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Wonder what would happen if you did that here.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:38:28)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:38:30)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I think especially when a family is about to make a major sprint like the two of you are&#8211; and we don&#8217;t know how long the sprint will last. If everything works out great, it could be December. But it could be that you end up moving to a different place or moving in with in-laws if you really need to save money, which is an option we haven&#8217;t even entertained.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:38:51)\u00a0But there&#8217;s so many different things that you might do. And at a certain point, you need to bring kids in to let them know, &#8222;Hey, we are going to be closer together as a family. Dad&#8217;s going to be working more. Mom&#8217;s going to be working. We want to show you what it takes to pay off debt. We have not been paying close attention, and now we are making a change.&#8221; Trust me, that lesson will stick with them.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:39:14)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. And we&#8217;ve learned more about our parenting with them around the money than we expected to with this debt for sure. That we are saving our money, and we are working harder to make different choices with our money, and this is&#8211; yeah. So we&#8217;re doing more beach days and more activities that we are doing together that are free.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:39:36)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yes. Beautiful, beautiful. I also love that you&#8217;re painting the picture. You told them why a little bit. But you are avoiding&#8211; what so many parents do is just to bottle it up and say, &#8222;We can&#8217;t afford that.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:39:48)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah, yeah. I work really hard not to do that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:39:50)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah. Great work. Great work. Okay. What surprised you most from today&#8217;s conversation?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:39:57)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I think my biggest worry at the beginning, honestly, was like, what if it&#8217;s hopeless? What if you leave the call, Ramit, and you&#8217;re like, &#8222;Oh, they&#8217;re so screwed. I can&#8217;t do anything here.&#8221; I think that was my biggest worry. So the fact that there&#8217;s this feeling of forward momentum and there&#8217;s some relief in that, that there&#8217;s visual plans in place, and that feels really good.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:40:24)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0John?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:40:27)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I felt surprised that we weren&#8217;t as on the same page with our financial planning as I thought we were. I thought we were doing a good job and a thorough job. I still feel that way. But I need to maybe check in more to understand her stresses. Because she&#8217;s got the stress of the household debt on her shoulders because she&#8217;s worrying about where the money is, where it&#8217;s coming from, and she&#8217;s looking at that a lot more than I am. So I need to start being there beside her, seeing those numbers at the same time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:41:06)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Great. Okay, I have a couple things I want to mention to you. First off, there are several things we did not get to, but I know that you will get to them in time. When something is burning, we need to put the fire out. And that&#8217;s why we talked about that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:41:22)\u00a0Some things that I would like for you to think about and to discuss in future conversations with each other would be understanding interest rates for your debt, understanding where your next dollar should go. Should it go to Amy&#8217;s debt first? Maybe. But y&#8217;all really need an emergency fund, so you may need to pay that debt off a little slower and put money in an emergency fund.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:41:50)\u00a0Very important to think about. Guilt-free spending, we didn&#8217;t even tackle. I suspect there&#8217;s probably some guilt-free spending, although I think you two seem pretty dialed in on your spending. So I don&#8217;t really think that&#8217;s a major pro&#8211; dialed in, meaning I don&#8217;t think anyone&#8217;s like eating out 25 times a month or something like that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:42:08)\u00a0I do think that an emergency fund is critical. You don&#8217;t know how important it is until it happens. Don&#8217;t let yourself get in that position. I think your communication with each other is something I would&#8211; I think it&#8217;s a foundational level that I would really think about. And I would strongly encourage you to get whatever outside help you want just so you can communicate.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:42:36)\u00a0I say that because I saw tremendous changes just from the beginning of our conversation to now. Tremendous. And I think sometimes, including my wife and me, all of us, we have blind spots that unless you have somebody there, it&#8217;s very hard to discover them on your own, very hard. So something for you to consider.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:42:58)\u00a0A couple of other things that come to mind. Negotiating with the Canadian government. It sounds like you&#8217;ve done it to some extent. You may want to think about what are the other options. I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;ve googled around and talked to other folks. Maybe there&#8217;s lawyers to consult. I&#8217;m not as familiar with it, but it&#8217;s a crushing amount of debt.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:43:16)\u00a0Even the business debt is a crushing amount. In the US, often you can negotiate settlements with things like medical debt, etc. I don&#8217;t know what the equivalent is in your situation, but I would like for you to consider it. It&#8217;s certainly worth trying because the debt is so huge. If you could even get a 25% reduction, that is massive.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:43:37)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:43:37)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:43:37)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Bankruptcy, still not off the table. Again, I don&#8217;t know the local implications in Canada, but those are all things to think about long term, calmly, methodically. But first step thing is get that income up, pay that debt off quickly, and most importantly, talk about it effectively every single week. But make the plan, get specific.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:44:04)\u00a0That plan should ultimately be as simple as being able to hang it up on the fridge and it tells you everything you need. One page. That&#8217;s when you know you are fighting for simplicity. You are running a very clean, non-chaotic financial household. All right?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:44:20)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:44:21)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Love it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:44:21)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I love that. Yeah, love that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:44:23)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0John and Amy, thank you so much. I appreciate you both.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:44:25)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Thank you.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:44:26)\u00a0<\/span><b>John:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Thank you so much.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(Narration)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:44:30)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0Before we get to their follow up, I just\u00a0want to\u00a0share a few thoughts because this conversation really stuck with me long after we finished.\u00a0A lot of people would hear that their partner hid over\u00a0$100,000\u00a0in debt and think that&#8217;s it. There&#8217;s no coming back from this. And honestly, for a lot of people,\u00a0there would be no coming back.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:44:48)\u00a0But I noticed with Amy and John that they had this commitment. John, what he did was a massive breach of trust, but they are still here,\u00a0still showing up, still trying to figure it out together.\u00a0And you can notice the love in little things,\u00a0like Amy making his lunch and John promising weekends with the family. There was a real tenderness in these quiet little gestures.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:45:11)\u00a0When this conversation started,\u00a0it was like they were in opposite corners.\u00a0They were polite, but there was a lot of tension. You could feel it. Something shifted. They started actually hearing each other. And I don&#8217;t think this will be easy. It won&#8217;t. It will probably be one of the hardest things they ever have to do. They have a huge hole to climb out of.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:45:29)\u00a0But if they make a full on sprint and they do it together, I think they have a shot at it.\u00a0Because when you&#8217;ve been stuck for so long, really stuck, and you finally get a glimpse of what&#8217;s possible, that might be enough to get something to change. And I think maybe today they saw a path forward. Let&#8217;s take a look at what happened next.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:45:53)\u00a0<\/span><b>Amy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I was surprised at a few points in the conversation and really found value\u00a0having an unbiased third opinion, being able to have a different perspective that we clearly really needed and haven&#8217;t had before.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:46:14)\u00a0We have been setting up all the steps needed to head into this sprint. Hopefully it&#8217;ll only be for a couple of months, just planning longer hours and what days of the week that works best so that we are both feeling supported in this and not feeling like one of us is carrying all the stress and the weight.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:46:38)\u00a0And I have a goal of having my courses done and planning a soft opening with the nail studio between December 15th and January 15th. So that gives me a really good timeframe and a good push to get all my course work done and really just stay motivated and stay focused on getting this going, getting this opened, and being able to really ramp up my income.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:47:10)\u00a0I\u00a0want to\u00a0say a huge thank you to Ramit and the team for allowing us the opportunity to work with them, and it was a really life changing experience.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:47:23)\u00a0Hey, Ramit and team.\u00a0It&#8217;s been about a month since we had our conversation with Ramit, and I just wanted to give you a follow up on how it&#8217;s been going. John has been working extremely long, extra hours, and I am taking over the home front and just chipping away at life over here, working on the course and just doing the best that we can to\u00a0dig ourselves out of this debt and to stop living outside of our means every month. So it&#8217;s been hard.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:47:58)\u00a0During our conversation with Ramit, we committed to making some hard choices. And I think the piece that gets forgotten often is\u00a0it&#8217;s not just in that moment, that decision, that plan, but it&#8217;s having to make sure that we follow it up every single day with actionable steps.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:48:19)\u00a0So that has been what we&#8217;re doing,\u00a0and it&#8217;s a hard season of life.\u00a0We understand that.\u00a0We were prepared for it.\u00a0Doesn&#8217;t make it easier, but we are pushing through.\u00a0So that&#8217;s where we are at, and thank you so, so much for talking with us and giving us the opportunity to share our story.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:48:45)\u00a0<\/span><b>Ramit:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I&#8217;m a little disappointed not to hear from John. Amy&#8217;s made a lot of changes. I appreciate that.\u00a0John,\u00a0I know working hard.\u00a0I&#8217;m sure John&#8217;s busy.\u00a0But this is a team effort. And part of why I want follow-ups, of course, is for me to know what&#8217;s going on, but it&#8217;s also for you to hold yourselves accountable and to see that you are both doing this as a team.\u00a0So Amy and John, I wish you both the best, and I\u00a0want to\u00a0remind you the only way out of this is together as a team.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(01:49:17)\u00a0And now I want you to listen to this episode next.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><script>\n!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)\n{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?\nn.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};\nif(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';\nn.queue=();t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;\nt.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)(0);\ns.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,'script',\n'https:\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/fbevents.js');\nfbq('init', '259290718675278');\nfbq('track', 'PageView');\n<\/script><a href=\"https:\/\/www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com\/230-amy-john\/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=230-amy-john\"> Nuoroda \u012f informacijos \u0161altin\u012f <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Amy (32) and John (40) are raising two young kids in Canada, earning a solid $155,000 a year. But with $768,181 in debt and fixed costs at 168% of their income, every month feels like a losing battle. Two years ago, John hid hundreds of thousands in business tax debt from Amy\u2014what she calls \u201cfinancial [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[4190,4451,4450],"class_list":["post-2279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sekmes-istorijos","tag-episode","tag-missing","tag-spend"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sekmesreceptas.lt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sekmesreceptas.lt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sekmesreceptas.lt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sekmesreceptas.lt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sekmesreceptas.lt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sekmesreceptas.lt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sekmesreceptas.lt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sekmesreceptas.lt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sekmesreceptas.lt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sekmesreceptas.lt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}