285. “We bought the perfect house. Now we feel trapped”

0:00I feel a little bit paralyzed. I don't feel like I know what's right anymore.

0:03Ramit Sethi: You said, we know we want something different, but seem unable to decide how to make that happen. We wanted to Airbnb our house, took out a$80 ,000 home equity loan. We bought an RV, made a new truck to pull the RV. What? Come on, is this a joke? You have a candid camera right now? None of it has worked out and it just makes us tired. I don't really look at them as like schemes, but more of like an out. An out from? from corporate America. He wants to sell the house. I mean, it was stupid. We did not make enough money. I wanted to throw up like half a million dollars in a loan. I'm just like, this does not feel good.

0:38Everybody that we talk to is like, you know, home ownership is the dream, but we do have this debt hanging over our heads.

0:43Ramit Sethi: If you don't develop a philosophy, if you don't develop what your rich life is and really start to practice it, then inevitably you wake up one day, you go, wait a second, I did everything they told me to. And then you're like, this actually sucks. It's this Groundhog Day. Let's see if we can figure this out. I do enjoy snooping through people's money. That's my job. And now I actually get to do it even deeper because every couple on this podcast connects their accounts to Monarch before they meet me, which means I get to see all of their accounts, all of their income, all of their transactions in one single view.

1:18Ramit Sethi: Now I'm about to speak to Chloe and Jake. So let's take a look at their Monarch account and see what their money tells me before I get the chance to meet them. All right, let's take a look. Whoa. Net income at$19 ,248. That's a lot of money. Okay, we have a high earning couple here. Debt payments at$5 ,000 a month. What the hell? Who's paying$3 ,480 to Camping World? What even costs that much? I've seen it on TV. Don't they sell RVs? Those gigantic campers. $3 ,500 a month for an RV. That's more than triple a normal car payment. We're going to find out if I'm right. Let's take a look at their accounts.

1:58Ramit Sethi: We have investments,$311 ,000,$537 ,000 in debt. They have a home equity loan. Why? All right, let's take a look at the recent transactions they have. Here we go. Homeowners going to Lowe's for$866 as recently as yesterday. Wow. And then Lowe's the day before for$47. I'm actually offended. Not that they're spending money at Lowe's, but that they went to Lowe's twice in two days. It's the house stuff that I'm looking at that's quite interesting. And I want to find out why they are here. So let's meet Jake and Chloe. Chloe, in your application, you said something. It caught my eye. You said, we are wary to make the wrong financial decisions because of our chronic schemes that inevitably cost us money.

2:47Ramit Sethi: This is putting us in analysis paralysis where we know we want something different but seem unable to decide how to make that happen. We're pretty grumpy and tired most days. Is that still accurate today? I'm tired of spending money on things that don't matter to me, which I feel like this house is. The house that I'm looking at right now? Mm-hmm. Just from the small window I can see, I see what appears to be a somewhat new suburban house. Looks like a very nice room. Jake appears to be sitting in, I don't know, maybe part of the living room or family room. He's got a nicely painted wall. I always appreciate a nicely painted wall.

3:30Ramit Sethi: Both of them are nodding. How close did I get to reality? So it's not a new house. It's a 70s house that's been renovated multiple times. Oh, did you renovate it as well? We have tried. Wow, that's not a good answer. We have tried is like, oh, f*** it. Okay. Wow. All right. So we have tried. So you're grumpy about spending money on the house. Is that right? Okay. Wow. Yeah. You're in the right place. Let's talk. Those four questions. Okay. And Jake, do you feel the same way? I do. Yeah. I think that we could do a lot more with that money than spend it on trying to keep our house from returning to dust.

4:11Ramit Sethi: Okay. Now you use the word, Chloe, schemes, which I thought was quite interesting. Wow, Chloe, what was that look on your face just now? Done. So when I say schemes, we want to be entrepreneurs. We both work nine to five corporate jobs right now. And we are constantly thinking of different business ideas, wanting to pursue them, and then getting burned out by the maintenance of our house and not being able to. But we like to invest a lot of money in these schemes. And that's become a problem. Like we decided we wanted to Airbnb our house two years ago. We did very little research into the Airbnb market in our area, which isn't great.

4:51And we took out a$80 ,000 home equity loan to do renovations on the house. We bought an RV. We bought, made a new truck to pull the RV. Come on. Is this a joke? Am I on a candid camera right now? No. Our neighbors thought we won the lottery. Yeah. We had a neighbor ask us if we won the lottery. And we were like, no. And we gave her no other explanation. I think she was just like, okay, either they're rich or they're bad with money. So we always, we want to start businesses. We want to create apps. We're always scheming.

5:21Ramit Sethi: The word scheme is quite interesting. Let me read you off some other uses of the word scheme from your application. Quote, we are realizing that our rich life involves more flexibility to follow our schemes. And then we are wary to make the wrong decision because of our chronic schemes. Maybe I misused that word. No, it's an interesting use of word. Or tell me about that word. I think they feel like schemes because none of it has worked out so far. And it just makes us tired. It just feels like everything is kind of this side thing that we decide to do. And then we just, we get overwhelmed. What's the difference between a scheme and a business?

6:01A business makes money.

6:03Ramit Sethi: And a scheme? I don't know. I guess a scheme is an idea that you have. Like a, oh, let's do this thing. this is a great idea. Let's invest all this money in this. Let's invest all this time. And then just dropping it or deciding you don't want to do it anymore. And it's less serious than a business. Got it. Okay. And when you think about the schemes that you have participated in, how do you feel? Some of them, I feel good. The RV one, I don't feel very good about that. I think that was a terrible financial decision. At the time, it seemed like a great idea. What's the feeling? I guess embarrassed.

6:35Okay.

6:36Ramit Sethi: Jake, what about you? What's your take on the schemes, as Chloe puts it, that you've been participating in? I look at them more as opportunities to break out of the traditional 9 to 5s. Because it's not like we don't want to work. We just don't necessarily want to have to do it within the confines of like a corporate structure. We'd like a little bit more flexibility. So I don't really look at them as like schemes, but more of like an out, if you will. And out from? From corporate America. Okay, got it. Tell me a little bit about your relationship. How long you've been together? Are you married?

7:12Ramit Sethi: Any children? We are married. We've been together for 10 years. No kids. Great. Okay. Can you think of a time in the past 6 to 12 months where the two of you did not agree about something relating to money? Chloe, I can see it on your face. You've got one. It's about the house again. We do agree that we don't want to live here anymore. It's just too much maintenance for us. It's crazy. But he wants to sell the house. And I am hesitant to sell the house. Again, because I think that sometimes we make decisions financially that aren't the best. Everybody keeps saying we should rent it out. And real estate's a good investment and all this stuff.

7:50And we have a 2.7 interest rate. So I think we might want to rent it.

7:55Ramit Sethi: Got it. Can we just go back to when you bought this house? What year was it? How old were the two of you? and then walk me through that thinking process. So we were 25 and 27 when we bought this. It was right at the end of 2020 and 2021. So right when all the values started inflating, but they weren't crazy high yet, the interest rates were really low. Again, that's how we got a 2.7. And we bought because it was purely financial. Neither of us had a dream of owning a house. It was just that traditional knowledge of renting is throwing away money. You need to buy a house and it's just the next thing you do.

8:31So we bought a house.

8:32Ramit Sethi: Where does that traditional knowledge, where did you get that from? Oh, that's Jake. Tell me, Jake. I mean, with the interest rates being so low, we were never going to see that again. My thought process on buying a house was if we buy the house and we live there for 20, 30 years, then in some cases, it can be a decent investment, if not anything other than a savings account. Because we weren't saving really much at the time. But then again, we were also making a lot less than what we make now. Were you renting at the time? We were renting at the time. What was your rent? $2 ,400 a month. $2 ,400.

9:05Ramit Sethi: And then once all was said and done, you bought the house, how much total cost every month? When we first bought it, it was$2 ,990. Now it's$3 ,072. That includes maintenance? No. That's not maintenance. That's the minimum. That's the mortgage plus the escrow. What about if you include everything? Any idea? Like$4 ,500 a month. All right. So from$2 ,400 to$4 ,400 a month, What do you think of that? I mean, it was stupid. We did not make enough money. I'm surprised that a bank lended me the money. Well, banks love to give money to Americans. They f***ing love it. And Americans love to take it. What?

9:44Ramit Sethi: I know. I can qualify for this credit card, this mortgage? I must be successful. Honestly, signing that, though, I wanted to throw up half a million dollars in a loan. I'm just like, this does not feel good. Is that for real? You really want to throw up? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, in the moment. Why'd you do it? I was 25, right? Like, I was very young. I think I was making like$126 ,000. The house was$595 ,000 is what it appraised for. So, well over our budget. Did you have a budget? Did you have a number in mind? So, we did. We had a number of$500 ,000 in mind. And that was kind of like our upper.

10:20That was as high as we wanted to go.

10:22Ramit Sethi: Okay. But there's a story behind this house. So, we bought this house because this is his parents' house. Oh! Yes. This house has been in the family since like the 90s, I think. It was like one of his uncles and then they sold it to his parents and then they sold it to us. So we bought no inspection. We bought as is. It was over our budget, but everybody in this area was paying a hundred thousand over asking with no inspection. And we were like, we'll probably get a townhouse, but as much. And like this house has 1.5 acres. It has a pool. It's a four bedroom house with It's like an office. It has…

10:55Ramit Sethi: 3 ,000 square feet. Yeah. 3 ,000 square feet for two 25-year-olds. Yep. What do you guys do? Play hide and seek all day? With the dog sometimes. We did with our dog at the time. Yeah. But most of our time is spent dealing with the house. And again, it has 1.5 acres in the pool. So we have eight hours of yard work pretty much every weekend. What? If not more than that. Just lay it out for me. Eight hours. Like, what do you do? Really, the main problem is that there's like… There's a bunch of different, I guess, landscaped areas of the house. So this house, when it originally entered the family, it had been bought by a family member of his that was a multimillionaire.

11:35And this guy had gardeners, landscapers. There were two koi ponds on the property.

11:41Ramit Sethi: This house is like a mansion owned by a multimillionaire. And now it's sold to two 25-year-olds. Successful, it sounds like. But still, hello? Does this seem a little weird? Yeah. Yes. Y 'all are like sitting there at escrow like, all right, here we go. We're like, money's on sale. Money's on sale. Yeah. To put it in perspective, this house was nice in the 90s. It was landscaped, everything. And then it was sold to Jake's parents. And then they weren't multimillionaires. So they didn't have gardeners. So everything kind of got overgrown. So we had spent five years basically trying to take out all of these overgrown landscape features.

12:23And that's just been our life for the last five summers.

12:27Ramit Sethi: So you buy the thing. And then like, Jake, you mentioned something quite interesting. You said, I felt like throwing up when we were signing. Did you talk about that with Chloe at the signing? At the signing? No, I don't think so. Afterwards, for sure. What did you say? But it was because I was solely responsible, right? Like when we purchased the house, her credit would have dropped mine below that 760 threshold. Just the average of our two credits. So they had her off of it altogether. So for me, it was just like a very like heavy weight of I'm responsible for half a million dollars to this bank.

13:00And what did you say afterwards when you started talking to Chloe about it? You know, it gave me a lot of anxiety to sign that paperwork. And it was just they're handing me a stack of 100 pieces of paper where I'm signing here and there. And there's no way that I'm reading through all of that. I don't have a lawyer.

13:13Ramit Sethi: Chloe, what was your take on this as you're signing and you're about to own this house? At the time, I had zero financial literacy. So I was just in la la land. Like just, no, this is fun. Did it feel good to know that you're going to be a homeowner? I had no desire to own a home. It was kind of just something like I was 27. It was something that like 40-year-olds did, you know? None of my friends owned a home. I was just kind of like, okay, like this is a good financial decision because we're throwing away money on rent. Yeah. Did your parents tell you that? No, actually. They didn't do a lot of financial educating.

13:46I'm sure they tried. but I was not the most responsible person when I was young.

13:51Ramit Sethi: Got it. When Nate met me, my credit was at a 430. He told me he would never marry me because he would never be able to buy a house with my credit. Whoa. Okay. And what was your reaction, Chloe? At the time, my feelings were hurt, but now as a person with a little bit of financial literacy, I understand where he's coming from. She goes, technically, he was correct. I was a liability in this financial partnership. I don't know if I would marry someone with a 430 credit. either. Wow. That's actually quite interesting because I think that first time hearing that you said that, it kind of come off a little bad.

14:26Ramit Sethi: But once you become knowledgeable about money, you realize if we're talking about marriage, then money is a very important part of it. And a 430 credit score, while yes, of course, it'll be difficult for a mortgage, it actually speaks more to your behavior with money. Are you aware? Are you intentional? If you see something that went wrong, can you make changes? So the word liability is a little direct, but as Chloe points out, once you become knowledgeable, I don't know if I would marry somebody with a 430. Jake, so she had the 430. What happened then? You put her on a performance improvement plan or something?

15:04I did. It was a very strict regimen. To be honest, we just talked about how you can improve your credit, right? She didn't even have a credit card at the time. So I helped her with that.

15:14Ramit Sethi: So here you are now years later with the house. And Jake, what do you feel about the house? Don't get me wrong. Like I feel great that we're in a position that we can own a home. And for some people that might be their rich place. For us, it's not. You can just see it in the way that we interact with day-to-day chores. All of these different projects that we've worked on and all this information that's just in our heads now that we don't care to know that kind of stuff. Like what a constant pressure well pump is. Yeah. I don't ever want to know that. I don't even want to hear those words again.

15:47I just heard it.

15:49Ramit Sethi: I'm good. Just look at how much we've spent at Lowe's and that'll tell you exactly how I feel. I do have questions about Lowe's. In fact, in the last two days, you've gone to Lowe's twice. Yep. Let me tell you something. Like in my hell, I wake up one day, I go out of my bedroom and I have a 6 ,500 square foot house. Okay. I go outside, there's shrubbery or whatever you call it. And just dead animals everywhere. And then I go out to my car. It's a humongous SUV. Okay. It's out of gas, by the way. But I somehow get it turned on. And then the only place it drives me, the only place it goes is Home Depot.

16:27I go, what did I do?

16:30Ramit Sethi: in my life to end up here. And then it's just every day, it's the same old thing. It's just Groundhog Day. Yeah. Okay. I deeply understand where you are coming from. Let's see if we can figure this out. When I think about two young people owning a house, first of all, I go, for a lot of people, why would you do it? When you're young, you're building your career, you want geographical flexibility, all that stuff. But that big of a house, that's like a country estate. and they said, hey, it's not really what we want. We didn't even realize it was gonna be like this. It's okay to be like, we made a huge mistake.

17:07Ramit Sethi: It happens a lot. In fact, the more money you make and the more money you spend, the more mistakes with money you are going to make. That's okay. The goal is not to try to avoid all mistakes. It's actually to become honest and strong enough that you can acknowledge them and then fix it. They admit it and they're like, what do we do next? I can work with that. I have a lot of calls every day, and on those calls, we will make a lot of decisions. We will assign tasks, follow-ups. I don't want to have to remember all that stuff. If my team and I did not have high-quality notes, the whole call would just be pointless.

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20:26Ramit Sethi: Use my link and get a free seven-day trial with no credit card and$10 off your first month if you join. That's ladder.fit slash Ramit. I want to take a look at your numbers. All right. Chloe, can you read off the words in bold and then the numbers in full for this entire box, please? Sure. So assets is$860 ,000. Investments is$304 ,000. Savings,$68 ,000. Debt,$540 ,000. And total net worth,$692 ,000. All right. What do you think about those numbers? I like them. I mean, the debt's kind of high. Okay. Jake? I feel good about them. I agree with Chloe here. And that's a little bit high, but most of it's the mortgage.

21:12Ramit Sethi: All right. Let's keep going. I would like to ask Jake to read off the combined gross monthly income, please. That is$30 ,166. Okay. That is a household income of$361 ,992. Who here, by a show of hands, knew that number? Ow. Both. Very impressive. Also, that's a lot of money. How old are you again? I'm 30. 32. How are you all making so much money? A 10. I sacrificed my 20s. What do you do for a living? I am a senior manager of an engineering department. Great. Great. And Chloe? I'm a software engineer. Great. So what I'm looking at here for the breakdown here is Jake is making 20k a month, right?

22:04Ramit Sethi: Or roughly 240k a year. It's great, especially at that age. Very impressive. Chloe making$10 ,000 a month. Also very impressive, especially at that age. All right, I love it. I see that you are contributing a lot to your 401ks. That's great. And I see your net is roughly 18K or 19K a month. Cool, a lot of money. So I thought that once I make an extra 5 ,000 or 10 ,000 or 50, I'll never have money problems again. Isn't that how it works? I thought so. Apparently not. I actually really appreciate you being here because one of the things that I want to show people in my community is just making more money does not automatically solve your money problems.

22:52Ramit Sethi: And in fact, if you don't develop a philosophy, if you don't develop what your rich life is and really start to practice it, then inevitably you wake up one day, you go, wait a second, I did everything they told me to. And how come I still feel scarce about money? How come we feel like, is this it? We work so hard. This is all we have to show for it. Or like, what do I even do with my money? So I would rather people get that now than wait until they're in their 50s, 60s, or 70s. All right, let's continue working on. We see fixed costs. Chloe, what's that number? 43%. 43 % on your fixed costs. One of the lowest numbers I've seen.

23:31Ramit Sethi: Then again, that is what I would expect with a salary that high. So if your salary were more modest, yeah, we're talking about 50, 60%, but as your salary goes up, you expect that number to come down quite a bit. Again, why? Because bread is the price of bread. Even if you double or triple the price of bread, it's still basically the same. And of course, people who make a lot of money spend a lot of money often, that's fine. But your mortgage is$3 ,072, which is quite modest for what you make. looking at the rest of it here, if there's nothing that really stands out to me, I mean, it's 43%. I have no comments.

24:08Ramit Sethi: Investments, 10%. But that is on top of your 401k's, correct? All right, so that's a lot. That's tens of thousands of dollars that you're investing per year. That's nice, especially at this age. Great. Savings at, whoa, 38%, 7 ,000 a month. Although, explain this to me, Jake. That is just saving to pay off the home equity loan. How much? $45 ,000 is what we have remaining. Got it. Okay, so you're setting it aside to pay that off. Got it. Okay. And you have$68 ,000 already in savings. Is that like your emergency fund? High yield savings. Yeah. Great. That's solid. Okay, that's nice. And then your guilt-free spending is 9 % or$1 ,680.

24:54Ramit Sethi: How do you feel about that? It's low for right now. I would like to spend more, But right now, I mean, we've gotten ourselves into a little bit of a pickle. I mean, I know our numbers look fine, but we do have this debt hanging over our heads. Like we can't sell our house or do anything with it really until we pay off this equity loan. So like right now, my entire salary pretty much is just going towards that. Why'd you take out the home equity loan? The RV trip. To rent the house. Yeah. To do some improvements on the house. That way we could Airbnb it. Why don't you just pay cash? You all make a lot of money.

25:25We didn't have any.

25:26Ramit Sethi: So why don't you just wait? It was an option. Yeah, that was an option. I actually find it crazy that in America, we take out debt to do renovations. Renovations are mostly a total luxury. They are not an investment. There's like a few that actually pay out a little bit more than you make, but in general, they're total luxuries. This is crazy. First of all, people are like, what? Rami said what? Yes, it's true. Look it up. Payback rate, home renovations. You will find that the vast majority of them, you're just paying for a luxury. I think now, maybe, would your approach be different if you were to do this again?

26:01Ramit Sethi: Oh, 100%. Yeah, yeah. I mean, at the time, it just felt like any money that you put into your house is good money, right? Like it's an investment. And that's, you know, that's what they tell you. So it could have gone into the stock market. Wow. That would have been great. This is the greatest transformation I've ever heard in my life. You sort of tick all the boxes of what they told you, and then you do it, which I love. You're like, okay, cool. We're going to do everything they told us. And then you're like, wait a second. this actually sucks the more i hear about this the more i think like this actually reflects american culture the more we do what they told us to it's this kind of ephemeral nebulous day and then we're like wait a second i'm supposed to like buy a house in the suburbs work at a company and then one day when i retire i can finally do what i'm supposed to do like wait i did that i actually hate this.

26:52Ramit Sethi: And again, some people love it if they do it intentionally. I have no problem buying a big old house in the suburbs. That's great if that's your rich life. But I love that you are sharing your experience so we can be like, wait a second, is that actually my vision? Shall we take a look at some of the expenses? All right, let's take a look. Let's go to last month. Let's take a look here at the fixed costs which were higher than expected housing what's swim gem that's a pool that is a pool service okay fine transportation y 'all have two cars yes all right yes what do i care you're all at 40 something percent again i'm just like do what you're doing it's great but let's keep looking.

27:37Ramit Sethi: Debt payments at$5 ,089 per month. What is this? Camping World for$3 ,480. Explain, please. That was paying off our loan so we could sell our RV that we bought. I have so many questions because I literally did not know what somebody could buy at Camping World. I thought the most expensive thing at Camping World is a tent. Like, that's what I know. Then I saw the payments. So how much did your RV cost? $50 ,000. Okay. Why'd you get an RV? Because we were going rent the house out. Airbnb it and travel the country. We both have remote jobs. Okay. Okay. How much did you get for it? 30. What was it?

28:15Ramit Sethi: 30… 32 maybe? How long did you have it for? 2 years. So it went from 50 to 32. That's actually better than I thought. What do you think about that? It's better than I thought too but we also bought it at 8 years old. So it was not a new RV. Oh so it had already depreciated. It was 44 feet long. It was a big one. Is that good or what is that? That's huge. It's like the size of a semi-truck. All right. Did you take any trips in the RV before you sold it? Not one. No. Yeah. F***.

28:50Ramit Sethi: That's the sad part about it. It was too hard to get it out of our driveway. Like once we got it in there, we were like, it's never going to leave. That was brutal getting it in there. This is so crazy. But I like that you have a good sense of humor about it. How is it that you both have a good sense of humor about this? Probably because we make enough money where it hasn't destroyed us, honestly. Yeah. Chloe, I think that's very insightful. If, let's say, Jake had lost his job and you had all these debts and the ongoing expenses, it's actually not funny. But I do appreciate that when you have enough, you can laugh it off.

29:27Ramit Sethi: I remember one time, this is embarrassing, I bought a table. So I hired somebody off of TaskRabbit or something. The guy comes over and this is in New York. And I was on the phone. So I was like, like, here's the box. Can you just like put it together? And then let me know. I'll just come take a look. So he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I go back. I'm on my call. The guy comes up to me like 90 seconds later. And he goes, and he points me over to the table. The table came fully assembled. Okay. Fully assembled. I just didn't even open it. I said, oh my God, this is going to be the easiest money you ever make.

30:01Ramit Sethi: And I handed him a big old tip. and I'm just like, what can you do? And like, you can laugh at that now, but if my parents had had that happen, even though they never would have even hired somebody to do it, but let's just say they had wasted, you know, 200 bucks for five minutes, it would have actually been really costly, really hard. But when you make enough, you can kind of laugh these things off. One reason why I want people to focus on improving their income, because I want you to be able to laugh off some of these things. All right, let's keep going. I want to look at some other expenses here.

30:31Ramit Sethi: You're done paying off the RV. The RV is sold. It's gone. Never having been used. I mean, you could have put in the ad, like new. Pets,$163. Sounds very reasonable to me. Shopping, there's just a bunch of Amazon purchases. Fine. Dining out, we have Chick-fil-A, DoorDash, and Donuts. When you look at these transactions, what do you see? It's mostly just like living stuff. A lot of those Amazon purchases are like toilet paper that we have on subscription or paper towels or dog food or something like that. My take from having looked at many, many people's spending is your spending is very normal, very modest.

31:19Ramit Sethi: There are virtually no numbers that stand out to me as like, wow, we should dig in there. None of it. It's all just totally normal. The only expenses that really stood out to me was housing-related expenses. Lowe's, swim stuff. Obviously, there's the mortgage, and then the camping world's a little unrelated, but it's that. So if we look at some of the key numbers that you have, you have$304 ,000 in investments. Where did that come from? A lot of it's individual, and then I have a 401k. Chloe has a 401k. And then we have about$60 ,000 in our own personal investments. And then I have roughly 90, what is it?

32:0496 ,000 in restricted share units for my company. Okay. Got it. And when do those vest? Over the next two years. Cool. How do you treat your RSUs? We could either treat it as it's going to be for a vacation or we use it for like a project that we've been unable, I guess, to individually save for around the house. And I've been getting them for the last. six years or so. How much do you get on average per year? $40 ,000,$50 ,000. Okay. Got it. On top of my salary. On top of your salary.

32:36Ramit Sethi: Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot of money. Okay. And it sounds like you discuss it before. So do you end up with a plan? Like, hey, we got roughly 50K. That's going to invest. This is what we're going to do with it? Yeah. Great. That's the way to do it. We talk about money all the time, like every day. But we love it. Okay, good. I could tell. This is the way to do it. I want everybody to listen here. Yes, you may not make as much as Chloe and Jake, but I want you to listen to just some of the things you hear. You know, the idea that, hey, we have this expected slash unexpected money that's going to come in.

33:08Ramit Sethi: We talk about it ahead of time. That's what you should do. And even if you don't have a date where you're going to get an extra 50K, hey, if we made an extra$100 or if we got a tax refund or something, what would we do with that money? You should be talking about it ahead of time, just like you guys are. Great job. Okay. So I don't see any debt payoffs in your fixed costs. Can you just walk me through that? Sure. So we don't have any recurring debt other than Jake's car that we pay for. We don't have any scheduled payments. So Jake's car is not paid off. My car is. And then we have this home equity loan where there's no actual payments.

33:46We just have to pay it off when we have the money. so it looks like we have very low debt got it it's and you categorize it separately under your savings okay all right yeah we didn't really know what to do with it that's okay it's okay

34:00Ramit Sethi: i like that you did it though i like that you picked something and you know why you did it hey maybe it's right maybe it's wrong but i like that you were like this is our best guess this is what we're gonna do that's how you should do it okay looking at your numbers they look very healthy to me you all make a lot of money you don't spend a lot you have your savings already dialed in yeah, you have some debt, you're paying it off. Okay, great. Y 'all are going to end up doing pretty well regardless. So why are we here? We're here because you said we're not living our rich lives. In looking at the numbers, tell me about the part that you are not living your rich life.

34:36Jake? Well, the numbers only tell part of the story. It's really time spent, effort spent, mental energy just spent, right, on the house. These things are going wrong. We have to schedule contractors to come for XYZ. We have two HVACs at this house, so we could lose one of them because we've already replaced the other. And that's going to be$13 ,000,$14 ,000. I'm already thinking about that. So in my opinion, if we're not going to live here, I would rather not have the mental load of still owning the property because we're still responsible for those things that go wrong. You feel the same way?

35:13I feel the same way as him where I don't really want to deal with it. But I'm having a hard time with the idea of just selling the house because we have such a good interest rate. And we're in a good area where it's an up-and-coming area. There's development happening. If I were a real estate investor, I would look at our area. I wouldn't look at our house, but we already have it. So this is kind of a sticking point for us where I know that when I was young, I was very just flippant with money. I didn't know anything. at this point, I'm the more frugal one. With this house, we made, I think what was probably a good financial decision based on our income, right?

35:53Like as it is now, a poor lifestyle decision, but I want to make the best of it. I don't want to make any more financial mistakes. And the decision to rent this house out or sell it is another one. And I feel a little bit paralyzed that I don't feel like I know what's right anymore, even though our numbers look good.

36:13Ramit Sethi: Do you trust yourself with money, Chloe? Kind of. I think that now I'm good with money, but I think that both of us have a tendency to throw money at things. RV being an example, house. Even like two years ago, three years ago, I bought a new car. The car that I had was like$600 or$800 from being paid off. And it developed an electrical issue that would have been a couple thousand dollars to fix. And they're gaslighting us at the dealership saying it was like that I was leading the overhead light on. And there was all these problems and we just didn't want to deal with it. So I traded the car in instead and it took out$17 ,000 for a car.

36:49And now it's paid off. Like we did pay it off, but I think it was stupid. It was a good car. It just had a problem and it would have been a couple thousand dollars to fix it. And then if you, like we would have saved$14 ,000 on car costs over the last two years. Instead, we had this extra loan that we had to pay off and that money could have gone into the house or it could have gone into the stock market, or it could have gone towards a vacation. Instead, it's gone towards another car that we didn't necessarily need, but we just kind of didn't want to deal with it. And that's what I worry with this house is that we just don't want to deal with it.

37:22And it actually could be a good rental property and we're just mentally exhausted and don't want to deal with it.

37:28Ramit Sethi: Got it. So you are worried, hey, maybe we're making the same decision again, impulsively, just on a much bigger scale. And I want to just slow down and check with somebody, am I doing the right thing? Yeah, and I specifically wanted your perspective. That's why I reached out about this because everybody in our lives is like, what are you doing? This is a great house. They don't see the work that we're putting in and how our lifestyle has depleted since we've been here. But at the same time, it's like, everybody that we talk to is like, home ownership is the dream. And I'm like, are we just done?

38:06Ramit Sethi: I love that you both did. I'm really glad I love when anyone has a philosophy around their rich life. Often, their rich life is different than mine. That's totally fine. And I just love to be able to pull. Tell me, what do you love? Why do this way? Because so much of our money decisions are just based around really a lack of critical thinking and examination and just, and honestly, what other people do. I'm glad you're asking. And I think we can probably dig a little deeper. It is fascinating how much we will stay with a bad decision, not even knowing why. Here we have a couple who could take their unhappy situation and change it like that, and they don't.

38:52Ramit Sethi: Why? Well, since most of us were young, we were told buying a house, the American dream. Then you get this humongous house and, in their case, a low interest rate. Well, how are you supposed to escape this thing that's almost been tied around you, but you also let it be tied and say, no, actually, we don't want to live on a 1.5-acre property. We don't want to keep our 2.7 % interest rate. We don't like this at all. So many of us reach the thing that we were told would make us happy. and when we are not happy, we don't deconstruct it and ask, hmm, what were the messages we absorbed? Why did we listen to them?

39:37We just go, oh, we should probably just stay here.

39:41Ramit Sethi: And then we end up feeling bad about feeling bad. It's kind of easy to understand how they've gotten here because they actually have made bad decisions about money. And what if selling the house is yet another bad decision? I want to help Jake and Chloe unpack all of the different messages that are coming in from family, friends, society, but also from the two of them and help them see a simple way to look at this question. Should we keep the house or not? Think about all the things you have to type out on a daily basis. Email, Slack, text messages, notes. Well, one of the tools that we love in my company lets us use voice to text to save tons of time on all of those things.

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43:15Ramit Sethi: All opinions are my own and not a guarantee of a similar outcome. Chloe, I'm curious, what do you remember your parents saying about money when you were young? I remember my dad clearly telling me that I should never have a credit card because I wasn't responsible enough, which was probably true. My parents, so they, we were very middle-class, but they had eight kids. So it didn't go as far. So, you know, we had everything that we needed. Like we weren't, we weren't like poor, but we did all of our clothes shopping at the thrift store. You know, there wasn't like a crazy amount of scarcity, but like they didn't pay for my college or anything like that.

43:52Right. It was just at 18, I was out on my own. They didn't really talk about it with us much. To me, I think my parents kind of like, they tried a little bit and then they kind of just wrote me off as like, Okay, this one needs a husband.

44:02Ramit Sethi: Hold on. I have a lot of questions already. What part of the country did you grow up in? I grew up here, Virginia. Okay. And what did your parents do for a living? My dad was a software engineer. So it paid well. Like he made probably six figures. But again, it didn't go as far because they had eight children. Like we had four bedrooms between all of us, 10 people and one bathroom and all that kind of stuff. Got it. Yeah, we did go to private school. So that's where all the money went. All of you? Mm-hmm. Wow. What do you think it cost back then? I don't know. I know that they gave you a discount.

44:35It was like the first kid was the most expensive and every kid that you had was a discount. So like, I'm sure by like the fourth or fifth kid, it wasn't that bad. But again, it was like there were sacrifices made in other ways. Like it was the private schooling was very important to them. It was like a religious private school. We didn't go out to eat. We didn't do any vacations unless my grandparents paid for it. That kind of thing.

44:54Ramit Sethi: That's interesting. Did you feel mixed messages about money? I think when I was younger, I didn't really think critically about it. It was just kind of my reality. As I've gotten older, it's become clear to me that that's really what mattered to my parents. Like the private schooling was the thing that they were not willing to compromise on. And that made sacrifices in every other area, even though I complained about it as a kid, right? Like I was like, I just want to go to the trendy stores and buy fashionable clothes and I'm stuck at the thrift store. And I think that it taught me how to be more frugal, even if I didn't realize it at the time, but now I've drawn from a lot of that.

45:29Ramit Sethi: Got it. Okay. That's very interesting. Chloe, do you think that your religious upbringing had any effects on your relationship or view of money? Yes, absolutely. I grew up in an environment where it was very much so like God will provide. You don't take agency for your own decisions. You don't take control of your life. It kind of happens to you and it's all part of a plan, right? So when I was younger, I didn't see the point in developing any type of financial literacy. I barely graduated high school. I didn't go to college at first. I did eventually. I put myself through college when I was working full time, but I had to make up for a lot of that as an adult.

46:07And I see it in my siblings. Some of them are great and they're doing fantastic. And some of them are really struggling financially. And I think it's that same like things just happen to them and they're reactive instead of proactive.

46:20Ramit Sethi: Yeah. Yeah. Are you still religious? Nope. No. Okay. Okay. When did that change for you? So maybe like eight years ago. It kind of was a gradual transition. Jake, did you grow up religious too? I did. Yeah. And are you religious now? No. Okay, got it. You raise a very interesting point, Chloe. Sometimes in certain religious upbringings, the idea of this external locus of control being God and the idea that like, hey, I didn't really see the point of developing my financial literacy skills because in some way, in some form, God will provide. Talking to you now, it is like a stark 180 degree difference.

47:02Ramit Sethi: When I asked, are you still religious? I was 95 % certain you would say no because from the way that you grew up versus today, from a locus of control perspective, you're like, we could save more. We could use this money for a vacation. We could invest more. It's very, I can control what happens to me. And I hear that in the way you talk about money. So just want to reflect on the journey that you have gone through because a journey growing up with many, many siblings and a religious upbringing, which was obviously very important to your parents. And then now to go to an internal locus of control with money is really powerful.

47:37Ramit Sethi: Took a while to work. I can only guess. Anyway, thank you for sharing. It helps me understand much more about your view on money. Jake, let me ask you about your upbringing. What do you remember your family saying about money when you were young? As far back as I can remember, my parents always had, you know, one of those money guys who works off of a percentage. Right. So I always had that kind of mindset that you invest your money, that you save your money, even if they weren't doing it. But then my grandmother, she actually had a huge impact, I think, on my, what I wanted out of money. My grandfather was a CPA.

48:14He died the year I was born. So I don't really remember or know anything about him. but she made some pretty lucky investments in Apple, IBM. So she always had that mindset about invest your money and save your money. And she was very open. Pretty much in every chance that she could get, she was going to give you her opinion or her advice, even if you didn't ask for it. So she was always talking about, you know, starting your own business, make sure that you're investing in the stock market, save your money, don't overspend, buy quality furniture and keep it forever.

48:49Ramit Sethi: I think I've been doing a disservice to my nieces and nephews. I don't really talk about money that much. I kind of love what your grandmother was teaching you. You know, that's valuable stuff. It is very valuable. And then my dad had a lot of friends too that were more well-to-do than he was. And they were very open. They would talk to me about that kind of stuff. And my parents were the same way about saving, right? Save 10 % of your salary. What I did through all the early low-level jobs that I worked. My dad was, he was a cop. He was a state trooper. So very low middle class. I don't know that he ever broke six figures.

49:24We never hurt for money that I knew us, right? Like we had everything that we needed. The lights were always on, that kind of thing. But I wanted something different than what my parents had because I could see that they like couldn't have the things that they wanted, like, or even the things that they needed, right? So like my dad wanted to buy a motorcycle for a long time, but was very limited on you know what he could purchase and you know you shift up or down five thousand dollars and you lose a lot of critical safety features on motorcycles and for me i didn't really i didn't want to do that i wanted to have my cake and eat it too and i also realized that money was kind of like a a tool to buy your freedom when did you realize that you wanted your cake and wanted to be able to eat it too probably 14 or 15 like right when i was getting into high

50:15Ramit Sethi: school. Same for me. I was like, I don't want to compromise. I'll work harder than anybody, but I want what I want. Exactly. Yeah. Quick question. Your dad was a state trooper. What about your mom? She was a stay-at-home mom for the majority of my childhood. She was also a police officer when her and my dad met. Got it. Okay. But then, yeah, she was stay-at-home. Homeschooled us and everything. We didn't go to public school, private school, any of that. How many kids? There's two of us. And then my dad had another marriage before my mom. So there are four of us total. What part of the country did you grow up in?

50:50I grew up in Virginia as well. Wow.

50:52Ramit Sethi: Okay. All right. So did you go to college? Not initially. I put myself through a year and a half of community college after graduating high school. But I actually quit community college because I started working in my field. So I started working at a hospital at 19 doing IT. Chloe and I met around that time as well, actually. And then a couple of years later, she started working at a school and got 90 % off tuition for her. And it was like five friends or something. They were doing a scholarship thing at the time. But you also got it because we were like domestic partners. So you got that either way.

51:28And get my bachelor's degree. And that was, was that 2018? Is when I graduated. How much did you make after you graduated? $100 ,000. And then I've been with them ever since. Do you ever think you'd make$60 ,000 plus a year? No. No. That number was absurd. In my mind, I don't know what it was with like the 90s. You know, you thought six figures, right? 100K. That's all you're ever going to need. Yeah. You get to six figures and you're like, where's my mansion? Right? Yeah. It's really not that much when you tip over from like 80 to 100 or something like that. And I'll think, okay, you know, 140 ,000, that's all.

52:03But Chloe will even tell you. I mean, like we would have conversations. I'd be like, I can't believe I make, you know,$50 an hour. I was like, next goal,$100 an hour. What does it mean to you to have that goal increasing? It will advise me my freedom. The more that I front load the beginning of my life, the easier the latter half of my life. And freedom means what? I would like to start my own business and have enough runway to get me there. And I would also like to make sure that, you know, Chloe and I are set up for retirement as early as possible. And that's a big reason why I want to sell the house, right?

52:37Like we have$250 ,000 of equity in this house. If we take that out and put it in the S &P 500 and you don't put a dime in for the next 30 years, right? You'll be at$10 million. To me, it makes way more sense for us to just front load that now.

52:54Ramit Sethi: Yeah. And then we don't have to invest anything if we don't want to for retirement at that point. And we can scheme, as Chloe likes to call it, as much as we like. And it's not going to set us back because we already set ourselves up there. And it's just you forget about it. Got it. I felt a connection with Jake when he told me that he did not want to compromise at the age of 14. I don't know if it's something about men at 14 who are just like, nope, not gonna do that. I'm going to work my ass off so I can have a lot of money. If you were ever a 14-year-old young man who decided that, leave a comment below because I want to know if it's just the two of us or more.

53:31Ramit Sethi: His example was quite amazing. My dad couldn't get the motorcycle he wanted, Therefore, he had to compromise on the safety. So I decided I'm never going to do that. And to his credit, he followed through. Very determined. Went to college on his own later. Built up this high income career. Works a lot of hours. It's all very impressive. I think that probably the way he talks to Chloe about money almost certainly is focused on numbers and ROI and calculations. but I don't get the sense that there's a lot of rich life joy in when he talks about money. And she doesn't also talk about money that way.

54:15Ramit Sethi: It's what could go wrong and, you know, we're here, we're supposed to be here. So neither of them are bringing that vision. And so of course money is not this fun, joyful, bountiful, alive thing. It's just a series of numbers and things that could go wrong and calculations to happen decades from now. You have to build the skill of talking about the joy of money. You already know how to do it. When you sit there and talk about the spaghetti you're going to eat tonight, you're not sitting there, hello everybody, I'm having 52 carbohydrates tonight. You go, this is going to taste great. I don't care if the sauce gets all over our daughter's face.

54:53Ramit Sethi: It's going to taste great. We have so much fun eating. Oh my God, it's like that one time we went to that one Italian restaurant and on and on and on. There's a joy in it. There's a meaning in it more than the component parts of it. Your rich life is not just made up of your calculations, although they are a part of it. It is your vision. It is your memories. It's how you talk about it. So you've got to build that skill as well. I want to thank our new partners at Monarch for setting up our couples on their platform to see their exact conscious spending plan categories. Monarch is a private personal finance app that brings all of a household's accounts, checking credit cards, loans, and investments into one clean dashboard on your phone or computer.

55:35Ramit Sethi: If you're trying to pay off debt, Monarch makes it easy to see your progress. You can see your whole payoff timeline for credit cards and car loans in a way that you can clearly visualize. No more juggling apps or manually updating spreadsheets. I've always said that a rich life is lived outside of the spreadsheet and Monarch lets you save time so you can do exactly that. Try Monarch for free today and get 50 % off your first year of Monarch's core tier with code Ramit at monarch.com slash Ramit. And when you sign up with my link only, you'll get your Monarch account customized with my exact CSP categories so you can see how you are stacking up to your plan each month.

56:17Ramit Sethi: That's monarch.com slash Ramit with code Ramit. Chloe, when you hear Jake proposing that plan, sell the house, take the equity, 250K, invest it, let it just sit and grow. What's your take? We've been having this conversation for like, I don't know, eight months now. And whenever he shows me the numbers, I'm like, okay, yeah, good. Let's do it. And then 30 minutes later, I'm like, I don't know, actually, because like this house will also appreciate, right? And like, we're already paying less on interest than we are in principle. Like, I don't want to be kicking ourselves down the road because we didn't hold on to a good asset.

56:54Ramit Sethi: Okay. Let me push on this. First of all, is the dynamic that Jake is proposing, we should sell this and like start business or businesses. And Chloe, you're like, that kind of sounds good, but also I don't know. And like, I'm not sure. Is that the dynamic here? Yeah. Well, it's mainly let's sell the house. Don't necessarily have to start a business. Take that money, throw it in the stock market. Don't think about it. And then we can do whatever we need to do with the rest of our money. Cool. And if you sold the house, could you move and keep your current jobs? Yes. Okay. At least it's a viable option.

57:31Ramit Sethi: So it really isolates the variable over this house because your jobs are not tied to this location. Okay, cool. Chloe, you have a great point. I mean, hey, we don't want to make a bad decision. Jake, you also have a good point. That money compounding over a long period of time turns into a huge amount. Yes, it's true. So what is the way that you two have decided you're going to make this decision? We have pretty much just not made the decision. The problem isn't that we're not talking about it. It's just that we keep talking about it and we can't seem to come to an agreement. Okay. Is there one decision that's probably going to make you more money?

58:10Ramit Sethi: Yeah. but we don't only make decisions because of money. What I'm more interested in is what is your individual and joint vision of a rich life? Because that makes things very, very clear. Just as an example, I do a lot of things that seem irrational from a numbers perspective, okay? We have two apartments. Why? Well, we know what our rich life is. On the other hand, we don't have a variety of other things that other people pay for. So I kind of love that you have seen examples of your parents, for example. We're gonna spend a lot on this and very little on that. You have that heritage. Let's talk about it.

58:53Ramit Sethi: What is your rich life? Chloe? It's not landscaping. I want a fancy gym membership. I want a gym membership where they have like a pool and like massages and tanning beds. I'm not supposed to use them, but I still want to. Once we have the home equity loan, we have the money for me to have$400 a month in your membership cost. That's fine. I want freedom though. Like I want to travel. I've never been outside the United States and I want to so badly. I want to live in different cities. I've lived here my entire life. I want to move to the West Coast for a while. I want to live in California. I'd love to try living in Hawaii.

59:30I want to have a little bit more freedom. Like I don't necessarily know that I want to be tied down to a house or a location or

59:38Ramit Sethi: You want to have a nice gym membership. I love the specificity of that. I also love how modest it is. It's like, okay, you can do that right now. But it tells me about you, which I think is great. Chloe, is there anything else in your rich life that would get you like, like, you really want that? A private chef. What would they make for you? How often? Every day. I would love to, they would meal prep for me because I'm a big gym person and I do meal prep. It gets so boring to just like put chicken in the oven all the time. It's so repetitive. So I would love to have a private chef. I mean, that's kind of like a, that's a someday thing, right?

1:00:14If we make it big or whatever, but.

1:00:17Ramit Sethi: I like it. So let me ask Jake. Jake, what is your vision of a rich life? My vision of a rich life. It does, it includes travel. A lot of it. But in order to do that, I have to be able to leave my current position. Not that I could not travel today. It just is increasingly difficult. And I do have to make sure that I am available. Because it's like, I'm on call 24-7, 365. And I know that Chloe was saying that we work 9-to-5s, but I don't work a 9-to-5. I work well over that. How many hours would you say per week you work? On average, these days, which has gotten better, 50-to-55s. But frequently, it will be 70 hours, 75 hours.

1:01:00This last week, I had to work 25 hours straight. Like, wow.

1:01:04Ramit Sethi: It's important for people to know this because here we have somebody, you know, your early 30s making$260,$280. It's a lot of money. But also often, not always, but often those jobs are quite demanding from a time perspective, certainly mentally. I think people need to appreciate that if you're making a lot of money, you are probably working. Companies are not stupid. They're not just handing out$300 ,000 jobs. there's a lot of work to be done. Okay. A lot of work to be done. All right. Tell me more about your rich life. I mean, my rich life, again, does not include landscaping at all. It includes, you know, going out to dinner just on a random Tuesday or a Wednesday.

1:01:52Like, we don't do that today. Some of that, again, is my job. And some of that is just like the compounding chores. So it's like, we constantly feel like we're fighting the house. And that's, I don't like that. So I really enjoy technology. It's why I do what I do. So I would like to have the disposable cash to purchase some of these things. Like what? Like, for example, you know, generative AI is a big thing right now. But it's very hard to actually run any local labs unless you have the capital to do so. So like, I would need to invest$14 ,000,$15 ,000 probably in equipment in order to do what I would want to do.

1:02:32I would love to front load our retirement. So that way it's just a complete weight off of my mind where if I want to take a low stress job, I can.

1:02:41Ramit Sethi: Okay, that's interesting. They seem quite compatible. The one thing that seems to be a bit of a consideration is, Jake, your job, which, you know, maybe makes travel a little harder, things like that. But okay, we can work around that. I can see why you would propose taking the equity and investing it because then that reduces the focus on your high income. All right. So I got it. And everybody started off by saying it's not cleaning lawns and pools. Okay, fine. So that's like one strike against a house. Fine. So Chloe, the concern is like, hey, are we making the right financial decision or are we doing another impulsive scheme.

1:03:25Ramit Sethi: Am I hearing that correctly? Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. Is it just stupid across the board to sell a house with a 2.7 interest rate? Yeah, maybe, maybe not. I'll tell you what, let's do this. Chloe, why don't you argue against yourself? So pretend that you are making the case that you should sell the house and X, Y, Z. Make the best argument you can. I want to see my husband happy and relaxed and I'd love to see him retired at 55 and we can either invest heavily. Like once we finished getting out of debt, we invest my entire salary and we keep our expenses low and that's how we'll get there. Or we can take the equity out of the house that we don't like anyways and we can invest it.

1:04:10And then he doesn't have to think about it. We can just keep investing modestly, which seems like easier.

1:04:18Ramit Sethi: Okay, great job, first of all. That was, I know I put you in an interesting position there. You did a great job. I noticed that your argument centers almost entirely around investment returns. I mean, y 'all are wealthy. Do you know that? When you get comfortable with the idea that one way or another, you both are going to have a lot of money, that is a given. Do you both accept that? Jake says yes. Chloe? I mean, kind of like something could change tomorrow. Like he could fall off a ladder and not be able to work anymore. And then that all goes out the window because like I can barely support us.

1:04:53Like our goal was to try to get our spending down to where we could live off my income. It hasn't been possible for us. So it's like if something happens to him tomorrow, yes, we have some money in the stock market, but everything would change.

1:05:06Ramit Sethi: Did this happen to somebody you know? I worry that it's going to happen to my parents because because my dad's health is starting to decline and my mom has never had a real job. And they still have two kids at home. And if that happened, what would they do? We would have to support them. Ah. We're like the only ones in my family that have the capital to do that. Okay. Have you talked to them about this? Kind of. My dad, so my dad had, he had like a health episode last year. And that's when I kind of started talking to my mom about it. And my dad will not talk about it because it gives him too much anxiety.

1:05:41Ramit Sethi: Ah, that's difficult. Yeah. So my mom, like she's aware and I know they have, like they own a rental property. I don't think their house is paid off. I don't really know all the specifics of their finances. My mom seems to be kind of like, you know, we'll be okay. Your dad has life insurance. And I'm like, okay, but what if he doesn't die though? What if he needs 24 seven care? Like he has a stroke, like a bunch of his family members have. So can I ask you a question? In the worst case that this happens, would your house help or hurt you? It could help because we have an HOA, but it's extremely lenient.

1:06:12We could put a second structure on this property. We have plenty of room. I can't live with my parents. I love them so much, but the religious political differences are just like, it's a little much. I mean, we could build them a little in-law suite very easily here. And our interest rate's low. Our mortgage is incredibly affordable for us. What happens if we want to move away and then something happens to my family and we decide to move back and now we have to spend six grand a month on a mortgage because we're trying to have them live with us. So like it could help. It also could hurt because at the same time, right, we could technically just rent something for them and have them live separately.

1:06:47Ramit Sethi: What's the circular paralysis that I see? Because in other parts that I've talked to you, you're quite decisive. Am I reading that correctly? Are you decisive in other parts of life? That really depends. Oh, wow. Sometimes I'm extremely indecisive and sometimes I can be very decisive. Okay. What parts of life are you indecisive about? We already know money. What else? What to eat for dinner sometimes. That's why you get a private chef. Yeah, that would be nice. Okay. All right. But what else? What to wear. What to wear. Is there any commonality among all three of these? Because the two of them seem low stakes.

1:07:24Ramit Sethi: What to wear, what to eat. It's like, all right, whatever. But money, much higher stakes. What's the commonality, if any? I have this thing that jake and I have talked about where I won't wear my nice clothes Um, so like I bought these lululemon leggings in like 2016. I only wear them for like special workouts What what's a special workout if i'm going to like a fancy gym or something or like i'm working out with my friends And doing like a yoga or something with you know, i'm doing puppy yoga or something i'll wear my My special leggings but otherwise I wear like like really cheap stuff most of the time Cheap like what like stuff?

1:07:57I got from like a hand-me-down from my cousin when I was 15.

1:08:01Ramit Sethi: Interesting. Even though the two of you make near$400 ,000 a year in your early 30s. I do buy stuff. I just, I don't want, I like, it just kind of sits in my closet and I don't wear it unless it's like a special occasion. Okay. Got it. I'm working on it. You know, I have found that it is much easier to increase income than to substantially change your money psychology. Money psychology usually follows. And because we don't really take it seriously, we will like over-focus on investment and allocation. All that stuff is good. But we're just like, yeah, whatever. Psychology is just for like dumb college kids.

1:08:39Ramit Sethi: They don't, you know, it's not that important. I'm cool. No, it actually can cause a lot of the things that I see on this podcast, which is people make a lot of money and they are kind of still living the way that they were in their early 20s or even childhood. I love the specificity of a Lululemon set of leggings only pulled out. Okay, today I'm going with my friends. Better put this on, you know. Whereas in my experience, what I have come to love is I might have a nice sweater or whatever. And I was inspired by seeing people who have money and they're like, yeah, I just wear this like every day.

1:09:14Ramit Sethi: Or like, you know, the old Jane Birkin bag. She literally like threw stuff in it. She had like fruit sitting in there. She really used these bags. And wealthy people often are just like, this stuff is meant to be used. It's not a museum piece. So anyway, psychology changes often after the income changes. Okay, back to your argument. You were making the best argument against yourself. Oh yeah. Go back. Make the argument again in like two sentences. I want to see Jake retired early and I want to see him less stressed. And this is the fastest way to get there. Great. Remember, we focused a lot on the numbers.

1:09:49Ramit Sethi: But what I noticed is that there was no vision of a rich life. Can you make the argument again? But this time, I don't really care about the investment numbers. I care about the vision of our rich life. Go ahead. It's living somewhere where it's sunny most of the time. And I get to try new places and try new coffee shops and travel. And next week, I'm going to go to Spain with some girlfriends. Maybe Jake has to work. That's not part of my rich life, that you have to work. Put this guy to work. It's your, you could make it up. Put him to work. You go, listen, it's the girl's trip. This guy's going to be working.

1:10:27Ramit Sethi: And by the way, Jake, you're also meal prepping from now on. This is my rich life. I'm the personal chef. Wow. I'm the main character. Quite a different energy level on that one, Chloe. What do you notice? It feels happier. It feels like very like optimistic and dreamy. Yeah. In a way, you two have earned the right to be able to dream. I actually think everybody should be dreaming more, but you have really earned the right to be able to put those dreams into motion today versus having to wait many decades as many people do. Being good with money does not only mean you are good at calculating investment returns.

1:11:04Ramit Sethi: That's trivial. Everybody should be able to do that. And if you can't do it in your head, which nobody can, do it online. It's easy. Being really good with money knows when to balance the numbers with the feelings. So Chloe, what are you picking up right now? There's more to spending money than just the numbers? Yes. Yeah. What is there? Happiness? I don't know. Yeah. You have a big smile on your face right now. That's kind of what I love to see. Money should make you happy. It should make us feel awesome. It should make us feel like, oh my God, I wake up in the morning like, I love this. I love it.

1:11:41Ramit Sethi: I love having food prepped. I love having Lululemon leggings that I can wear every workout. And I love the gym that I go to. The irony is you could do it today. You could. So what do you think is stopping you from doing it today? I'm just too tired. Too tired. But okay, let's say that you took a trip, rejuvenated, et cetera. What's stopping you from getting the nice pair of pants and the nice gym and all that stuff? Some of it I think is anxiety about the house. Like we're on a well and a septic, right? That's 50 grand if the septic goes out on the high end. But that's what we have to think about.

1:12:16Ramit Sethi: Why do you have to think about that stuff? I don't think about that stuff. Well, we have to plan for it. Because when we first bought the house, we didn't have any savings. And a lot of these things crept up on us. It's because we have a house. You have to think about the well pump because we have a house. You have to think about the septic because we have a house. If we didn't have the house, you wouldn't be thinking about that at all. I don't even know what septic is I don't know what it is and don't explain it to me don't care what a luxury just be like not interested but one thing that I have learned in my life is to not let the tail wag the dog meaning you make a decision and then you find yourself doing all kinds of stuff you never wanted to or would choose to do all because of that initial decision Do you find that maybe that's happening here, Chloe?

1:13:11Yeah, actually, because now that you say that, I definitely said it to Jake. Like, if I would look in this area, if I were a real estate investor, I would look in this area, I would never buy this house to rent it out because there's too much that can go wrong. There's too much that can ruin. There's too much maintenance that we'd have to pay to have somebody else come do. This is a lot of people's dream, right? Like having a house like this.

1:13:34Ramit Sethi: Is it yours? No, but like, what if it is one day? Tell me, play that out. What if it is? What if we sell the house, we move, I start living my rich life and it's not what I thought it was, right? I'm like, oh, I'm not actually happier with the gym membership. I actually want to have a garden. What would you do? Well, like if we wanted to come back here, we'd have to pay a lot more money because prices have inflated a lot. That's one option. What else would you do? We'd probably rent at first. Okay, so you would pay more in this neighborhood to be back in this neighborhood or what would your options be?

1:14:09Not to come back to those neighborhoods?

1:14:11Ramit Sethi: Yeah. Are there potentially any other neighborhoods in a country of over 330 million people? Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, probably. Why keep yourself playing so small when you don't even like your day-to-day? Better the devil you know than the devil you don't. Yeah, yeah. As you said, it feels comfortable. It's all I have known. And yet I hear this yearning to travel to try different things. I'd like to live on the West Coast. I'd like to try this. Maybe it'll work. Maybe not. Would you be comfortable if you tried something and it didn't work out? Yeah, because then you just try something else. Yeah.

1:14:49Ramit Sethi: Would you be embarrassed? Probably a little bit. The RV thing embarrassed me, but I'm still here. Yeah, that's a good answer. Like, yeah, actually, it is kind of embarrassing a little bit, but it's also what it takes to learn what I like to do, especially because we've both lived in the same area for our entire lives. I like hearing the two of you talk about this because it's actually not just a money question. One way or another, both of these decisions will be fine. It reminds me when I was deciding whether to take a job offer at Google. It was like existential to me. Should I take this offer or should I go do my own startup?

1:15:25Ramit Sethi: And I was going around asking people for advice, very similar to what you're doing right now. And then I had a professor of mine who was like, look, both of these decisions are going to be great. You are going to be great no matter what decision you choose. So now the question is, what do you really want? When you think about your day-to-day, what do you really want? And for me, I feel resentful that I would ever have to wear a badge and badge in at work. It's just like not my thing. I'm like, nah. That made it so obvious and so easy for me to decide what to do. Now, of course, I missed the high salary I would have gotten at Google early on in my career.

1:16:02Ramit Sethi: but eventually I made more but more importantly than the money the money is not how I think about the decision I was free free to make my own decisions free to accept the consequences of when I did it right or didn't I lived a very modest lifestyle I had multiple roommates after I graduated it was not that glamorous but it was cool it was cool for me that's what I wanted Chloe, as I say this, what's coming up for you? I guess the point that you're making is that we'll be fine either way. Yes, and if you accept that you're going to be fine, not only fine, you're going to thrive either way, you're both going to become very wealthy.

1:16:44Ramit Sethi: Either decision. So if you accept both of those things, then how would you think about the decision? What would you optimize for? Probably free time and travel and being able to like do what I want. Not asset value of a 1.5 acre house? No. Jake, what about you? I would optimize for happiness. Now, I do want to point one thing out. I'm not trying to weigh the scale here and be like, sell this thing. You all could actually pay a lot of your problems away. You can have somebody come in and do the meal prep. You could certainly have a more serious type of firm that would come in and handle all the stuff outside.

1:17:25Ramit Sethi: Yeah, it would cost a lot of money, but you have the money. You could do it. What do you think? It's a very valid option. We don't. It is, yeah. Chloe says no. Both say no. We talked about that before too. We were like, technically, we could just pay somebody to come in and do all these things. But to us, it feels like it would be a waste of money because we don't necessarily want to be here. To me, that makes it a very obvious decision. If you definitely don't want to do it yourself because you told me we feel grumpy and we don't like it and all that stuff. And you both resolutely do not want to pay someone else to do it, then what is the only available option?

1:17:57Ramit Sethi: to sell it? Well, technically, if the renters were doing it. You want to rent it out and they're maintaining it. I mean, that's the thing. They won't, right? But like this house was a rental for a while and that's how it got so overgrown. Oh, okay. So that doesn't work either. Well, look, you could theoretically find the magical person, but history suggests maybe it'll be more difficult than you think. So you could do it, but realistically, do you want to? Not really. it just felt like, it just felt like, you know, everybody's like, oh, real estate investing is the best. And like, I mean, you know, there's like so many people online that are just like, you got to buy your house and then you got to like take out, cash out refinance and buy five more houses.

1:18:37And then you got to like do all this stuff and like rental properties are the way to freedom. And it's like, who the does that? I don't know. I feel like there's so many influencers saying that.

1:18:47Ramit Sethi: I look at their advice and then I look at my lifestyle and I'm like, why would I ever take advice from you? Why? Please tell me. It's insane to take advice from people whose lifestyle and whose morals and ethics you don't agree with. Here's a potential compromise suggestion. You could rent the place out for a year, make a very clear measure of what would be success or what would not, and go travel or rent somewhere else and see how you like it, and you would have one year to make a decision. But if you did that, you would need to really discuss the options such as if things break down, how are we paying for it?

1:19:29Ramit Sethi: Who's going to go back and fix it? Are we going to hire somebody? Like you need to really think it through. And you should also ask yourself, is this worth it? Because if this works, how's it going to change our financial and lifestyle picture? Let's say we actually find a great renter. First of all, who's finding the renter? Who's interviewing them? Who's maintaining? All this stuff needs to be dialed in. Chloe, how does that strike you? It's probably going to be me doing most of that stuff. Okay. Just because he's got such an unpredictable work schedule. So like I tend to take on more of that kind of stuff.

1:19:58Ramit Sethi: You want to do it? Not really. I just kind of felt like maybe I had to. I'll tell you the craziest thing about living a rich life is you realize so many things you thought you had to do are only in your head. I have to own a TV. No, I don't. I have to own a car. No, I don't. We have to do this. we have to do that. Maybe. And sometimes, yeah, I actually like doing that. That's cool. I love that. But a lot of times, no. What do you think? What is something you thought you had to do and now you realize you don't have to? Have kids. Great. That's probably the biggest example of all. It was one of those things that everybody tells you, like, it's just the next thing.

1:20:38And most people don't think about it.

1:20:40Ramit Sethi: So you must have had a lot of critical conversations talking about this topic. Wow. And you both affirmatively decided, although other people do it, love it, we've decided it's not for us. Even despite knowing probably there's a lot of pushback and societal things and stuff like that, but you decided that's not part of our rich life. How did it feel to decide that? Really good. Feels empowering to make an affirmative decision for the two of you. your decision again a lot of other people could disagree with it but like it certainly feels good to create your own internal culture what if you did that here that's what we want that's what we want to do yeah jake what do you think hearing this conversation how is it um reaching you you're bringing up a lot of good points to think about um and i feel like i've mentioned some of these things to clay before too like we don't have to mow the lawn if we don't want to we can sell the house and rent somewhere right down the street from here if we really wanted to.

1:21:45Ramit Sethi: And I think that the two of you have been very successful financially speaking. It's very impressive, especially considering how you grew up. It's like, wow, this is incredible. I also am impressed that the two of you have taken this journey together and talked a lot about money. it's clear that you've talked a lot. I love seeing that. I love that. I'm actually really glad to be able to talk to you because not all money conversations have to involve scarcity or deprivation. I speak to a lot of people in those situations, but I think there are plenty of other important decisions like, hey, we've made a number of decisions and sometimes they're embarrassing and are we doing this impulsively?

1:22:30Ramit Sethi: Or hey, like property is a good purchase even though we don't like this. Isn't it still a good decision? To me, here's what I see. I see that despite being very successful, I don't see money currently brings you a lot of joy. It just seems like kind of a bummer. Like where does all our money go? It goes to pay off the home equity thing and then it goes for this and like I don't, the shrubs we could do but we don't and whatever. And then the things we do have are so rare and scarce that we don't really even pull them out except in special occasions. I don't believe in special occasions. I wear my best stuff all the time.

1:23:11Ramit Sethi: I freaking wear it to 7-Eleven. I don't believe that if you are in your 30s making almost$400 ,000 a year that you have to wait until what? 60? To like live your life? I reject that So I think yes, you need to be making a certain amount of money You need to be covering your costs and saving you did all that and you're doing all that Can stuff happen in the future that's bad? Yeah, put a little extra aside for it If you're going to need to take care of your parents Okay, let's put a little bit extra aside for that. No problem but gosh, I would love for you Six months from now to wake up and be like my day looks awesome.

1:23:53Ramit Sethi: I'm going to the gym we're going to get an early dinner. It's funny. In a way, you may have over-indexed on the numbers and under-indexed on the feelings about money. I mean, we look at the numbers. If you retire 25 years from now, Chloe, you'll be 57, okay? On your current trajectory, you would have$4.8 million. It's pretty good. Safe withdrawal rate of$192 ,000 a year. We might need to bring that down a little because you're retiring young. So maybe a little bit, but okay. And if you sell the house now, add it to your investments, let's say home equity is$250K, you'd have$6.2 million with a safe withdrawal rate of$250 ,000.

1:24:38Ramit Sethi: Yeah, of course you would need to pay rent now. So your investments would probably decrease relative to owning. But compounding early on is huge. What do you make of those two numbers, Chloe? That's still more than most people have. Yeah. Like, either way. Yes. When I look at those numbers, I go, like, all right, either one is good. And honestly, if I'm the two of you, I'm like, I'm going to beat that number anyway. The f***? We're not going to only stay at our salaries that we have at age 30? If it's me, Jake, the way you were talking, like, at age 14, you were like, yeah, I'm never going to compromise.

1:25:13Ramit Sethi: Exactly me sitting here, if in your shoes, I'd be like, yeah, that's, like, hilarious. I'm only going to have$6 million. What a joke. We're willing to work hard. It's rookie numbers. Yeah, it's rookie numbers in your situation. Not for the median or average person, but the two of you, you're like, we're going to work. We're going to have more than we will ever need. So once we accept that, how do we want to live from now until then? Chloe, what do you want to do? Go get a gym membership. Okay, let's do it. And wear my leggings. I like that. I think you should wear them. Not now. I'm saying like, when you go to the gym, like, why not?

1:25:47Ramit Sethi: You have them. You deserve them. All right, let's just change some of these numbers, okay? I want to start having a little bit more fun. What should we change, Chloe, that would make you actually live a rich life right now? We could hire someone to mow the lawn until we move. Great. Let's just put it under subscriptions. How much are you going to pay this person? At least$500. I guess it would be$450 would be probably. $450 a month? Yeah, because they come once a week. Okay, cool. Watch this number. 43 % fixed costs. Wow, jumped to 46%. All right. Problem solved. What else? Where's the gym? The one to us is like 200, I think, a month.

1:26:27Ramit Sethi: 200 a month? All right. Let's make it 650 for subscriptions. All right. 47%. Done. What else? Vacations. Okay. How much do you want to put aside for your first vacation abroad? Probably like a thousand a month, right? Okay. And how long until you go? That'd be minimally 10 months if it's overseas. Minimum 10 months? 10 grand, yeah. All right, let's say$1 ,200 a month for that. Okay, this is good, except now we're down to negative numbers. But I don't really believe that because you didn't really put your RSUs in here, did you? No. Instead of$20 ,000, can I just say$22 ,000? That's fair. $22 ,000.

1:27:06Ramit Sethi: So what do we want to say here? Like$13 ,000? Yeah. All right. Yeah, that's about right. So you still have$1 ,000 left over, which, I mean, basically you have more than enough money and this freaking huge payment here is done at the at this year correct yeah like pretty soon yeah all right so watch this let me just zero this out oh wow 40 for guilt-free spending what are you going to do with eight thousand dollars a month i don't know she's like i've only been thinking about landscaping for the last three years Think about it though. Chloe, it's a real question. $8 ,000 per month. Most people will never be in this position.

1:27:49Ramit Sethi: You are, and you're in your 30s. What do you want to do on a monthly basis with this money? I'd like to travel. So I guess I would bump up the vacation fund and maybe do like weekend trips. Nice. That's it. That's it. So we have vacations. $1 ,200 is for your big one. I actually think that's a bit low. You got the money. let's take it up to$1 ,500, okay? And then you want to do a little couple of weekend trips throughout the year? How much are each of those? We usually keep it kind of low-key, like$500 to$1 ,000 maybe, like hotel, gas. Okay, let's call it$300 a month. Give you a little bit more on that.

1:28:28Ramit Sethi: You still have$7 ,410. What are you noticing? I have a lot. Yes. What'd you say that you wanted to do in your rich life? And then Jake, I'm coming to you too. Oh, also private chefs. But I don't know if we can afford a private chef with that money. You're thinking a chef that freaking lives in your mansion. You can have somebody come twice a week, cook your food. They leave it in the fridge all ready to go and you're good to go. You can give them your macros and everything. It's like awesome. I was worried about that. I was like, are they going to make, am I going to hit my protein bowl? Yeah, exactly.

1:28:59Ramit Sethi: You're like, listen, I'm cutting right now. So my chicken costs are going down. So it's great. Yeah, I think you can pay, let's just say$3 ,000 a month. Let's say. Okay. Just to show you, because you at one point said like, that's someday down the line. If we did that and we go to groceries, I'm just going to put it here,$3 ,000, your fixed costs are at 59%. Wow, they did go up, but you still have$4 ,400 a month to distribute. What are you noticing, Chloe? That I have enough. More than enough. As an example, just to fast forward on the house thing, let's say you sold the house. Let's say you got 250K.

1:29:38Ramit Sethi: I would put 200K of that and invest it. And I would take the other 50K and just put it in like a fun fund. We'll use it in the next 18 months. That's the goal we're setting for ourselves. Okay. So now your rent's going to go higher because you have an enviable position that you're in, but you're going to be paying, I don't know, 4 ,500 a month. You're up to 67%, which is, that's a little high, but we need to remember something. Why is that okay in your situation? Because in this case that we would have the money invested, that we don't have to think about it. Exactly. So where other people would have to be putting 10, 11, 12, 13, 15 % aside, you're like, we're good.

1:30:17Ramit Sethi: So instead we can take the money that we ordinarily would have invested and we can redirect it to living our rich life today. Should we still invest? Yeah, probably. Certainly get the 401k match. If you want to put a little extra in, go ahead. but gosh that's a lot of money that we would normally be investing that we could instead put somewhere else also no utilities no lawn guy or lawn person just simple and then what about up here what does it feel like to not have to think about is my septic gonna go takes a lot of weight off yeah jake what's your take on the changes that we have financially made so far i like them I like the idea of a chef coming in once every few days.

1:30:59If we still have 3 ,700 left over here. What do you want to do with the money? Didn't you want some gadget? I would probably put like 500 away for saving towards something that I wanted to purchase. A lot of my purchases are higher than I guess the average consumer. Okay.

1:31:14Ramit Sethi: So 500 bucks a month, that's 6 ,000 a year for stuff you want. Great. I like that. I like how you just owned it. Yeah. Hey, I like to buy some expensive stuff. That's cool. Great. $500 a month. You still have$3 ,268. What do you want to do? Personally, I would probably bump the vacations up. Okay. Even more. Tell me. I would do like$2 ,000. Great. $2 ,000. And then, obviously, if we have that extra money, I would probably put some of that into the stock market as well. Sure. Let's just say$500 a month. Make it$1 ,000 just for kicks. Yeah. You still have$1 ,768. left. As you can see, this is not a cash problem.

1:31:56Ramit Sethi: This is a problem of what do we want and are we willing to close certain doors in order to open up an entirely new set of doors? Chloe, what do you think about that? I mean, I was thinking about what doors could open, but I also just wasn't sure if we could close this door and still be fine. It kind of seems a little ridiculous. I'm like, oh, like what if something happens and we regret this? It's like, then we'll deal with it. There you go. Right? We can buy another house if we want to. We have the money. That's the breakthrough. That's the breakthrough, which is we can trust our future selves to deal with what happens.

1:32:36Ramit Sethi: We can trust ourselves today. So of course, our future selves are going to be even more capable. We're going to have more money, more know-how, more maturity. So if things come our way, we are strong enough that we can withstand those things. Do you believe that? Yeah. Okay. The other thing I want to talk to you about is the schemes, as you put it, Chloe. I do think that you have correctly identified that you have both gotten into a variety of kind of like off-the-wall ideas, like the Airbnb, the RV. What is the pattern among all of those things that you got into? We don't properly research. we impulsively jump in and we don't consider all of the work that has to be done the time that needs to be invested all of that and it ends up just burning us out that sounds kind of like the house who it does if you want to run a business at some point you can it's also not clear you need to think about this right now can I just tell you like how I would think about this so if it were me and I'm Jake, I'm like, hey, I love making this money.

1:33:50Ramit Sethi: And I know that my salary is going to go up, but being on call all the time is not for me. So I would like to start bringing it up with my boss or bosses that, hey, I love doing what I do. But over the next 18 months, here's where I would like to be. I would like to be where I am not on call X, Y, Z. And who knows if that's possible or not, but at least I want to bring it up because obviously I'm getting paid a lot of money. They respect me. But like, here's what I need in my lifestyle. And by giving them a lot of lead time, you can actually like often shape companies. A lot of times the companies just don't know.

1:34:21Ramit Sethi: They're like, well, we keep putting them on a call and he keeps doing it. So why would we not? But gently working with them, especially at this level of pay, companies really are want to keep their top performers happy. So that's one. Chloe, really deciding where do we want to go next? if we were to sell this house, let's make a plan ahead of time. Let's look at the places that we might want to live. Let's think about every aspect of it. If we're on the West Coast, what does it mean for us waking up in the morning or we have to wake up on East Coast time? What's cost of living out there? What if we love it?

1:34:51Ramit Sethi: Maybe we stay there. What if we don't love it? Where would we go next? You don't have to know all the answers, but you just want to at least pose the question. And I honestly think that once you are not like spending eight hours a weekend or more on this house, you're going to have so much perspective. Because right now you are literally in the weeds. But to zoom out and be like, whoa, what do we do if we're not spending all our time just keeping this house alive? You will be shocked in a good way at how much else there is out there for your rich life. I agree. I think we'll get bored without the house.

1:35:32Ramit Sethi: which sounds great yeah what surprised you both about today's conversation chloe i guess i was surprised at how this is kind of a silly thing that we're worrying about or that i'm worrying about maybe not silly maybe there are some very valid reasons why and probably there's some further work you could both do to uncover the kind of focus on security and safety is understandable but also maybe slightly incongruent with your financial situation. You're like, hey, we may need to do X, Y, and Z. I'm like, yeah, totally. You could totally do those things and more. So let's check the box. But that's me just seeing numbers.

1:36:14Ramit Sethi: You, Chloe, have a lifetime of upbringing that has shaped your view of money. And though you've done a ton of work in so many different parts of life, money takes work. And you're actually doing it right now by starting to say like, hey, my rich life doesn't actually have to be playing small. I don't have to save my nice things for a special day. What if I just accept that every day is a nice day? I know. It changes a lot. It takes work to get there, but you're there. You're there. It just takes some more tweaking. I'm really impressed, Chloe, in our conversation today. Jake, what surprised you about our conversation?

1:36:51Honestly, it is surprising to see the numbers. And when you shift them around, that's a big thing. We haven't really done that much with the shifting around. Like, what if we were to spend more money on groceries? Or what if we were to spend more money on vacations? Like, we haven't done that math yet. We haven't gotten that far. So just looking at once we're debt-free from the equity loan, like how much money we'll have to play with, it's kind of absurd.

1:37:16Ramit Sethi: Yeah. I always think, you know, my wife and I, there's this phrase that I started using, which is, what do we get? We're both entrepreneurs. we work really hard what do we get and if there's something in our life that we are not loving it's like we we better get freedom from that thing and we should be so lucky that it's something that money can buy our way out of because you know as you know health is something that sometimes money cannot solve but if it's something like we don't want to have to shovel the sidewalk or something like that, then wow, we are so grateful that we have the money to be able to solve that problem.

1:37:58Ramit Sethi: So that might be a question for the two of you to start asking. We literally put our hands out, palm up. We say, what do we get? And boy, that makes us really feel grateful for the work that we do and the jobs that we have. Because what do we get means we can afford to pay people well to solve these problems and give us a rich life every day. I am thankful that we got a chance to talk. I don't think this is a silly conversation at all. I think it's really important. I think that you both have done a great job with your careers. You have really made impressive gains in your knowledge of money. And now I just want to see your life start to match up with it.

1:38:33Ramit Sethi: Not just the life you're living, but also like how you feel about it. Should be awesome because you two have worked really hard. This couple is very capable. I feel extremely confident they're going to make changes in their life. Just the way they talked about their house in the first two minutes of our conversation, I'm like, oh, they're sick of it. Now, what are you willing to do? After talking, I think there were some major unlocks that they had, particularly Chloe. I think that they will make a plan. No doubt about that. I think that the plan will probably involve some months from now them selling it or even renting it out for a year.

1:39:12Ramit Sethi: Either one to me is perfectly fine. I think that they will start spending more money immediately because they realize we have a lot of money. What are we doing? Why are we playing so small? And to me, this is the joy of the journey with money. You can start taking small steps. You build that confidence. You realize, oh my gosh, We bought an extra pair of pants. Nothing happened to us. It actually makes me feel good. Oh my gosh, we had somebody come and do the lawn. No problem, we can afford it. And you start to make bigger and more consequential decisions. So I'm personally really looking forward to hearing more from them.

1:39:50Ramit Sethi: My greatest joy of all would be seeing them on a trip somewhere, having a great time, working out in a gym in Greece, and just enjoying their hard work and what it's gotten them. Hi, Rami. Thank you again for having us on the podcast. We really enjoy it. Yeah, I had a great time. Thank you again. I appreciate it. My biggest surprise, I think, was finding out that I have a lot of anxiety around money. Even though I have enough of it, I have a lot of anxiety. Yeah, my biggest surprise was honestly just hearing that we were doing okay. I find that it's beneficial to have somebody external review your finances because it's very easy to get stuck like in your own mindset, in your own budget, you know, whatever you want to call it, where it's like you can constantly, I could do better, I could, I can do more, I could, you know, cut here, cut there, not pay for ads.

1:40:44Optimize, optimize, optimize. Possibly optimize, but like at our income level, it's like we don't really need to be doing all of those things. So it was like really nice to hear from you, right, that we were doing the right things and we're on the right path. My biggest takeaway was that it doesn't really matter if we sell the house or keep the house. It's really a matter of what we want to do, not what we should do or what might be the most financially optimal decision to make. So what's right for us matters more in that scenario and also at our income level. We can sell the house and put that in the stock market and not worry about retiring.

1:41:27And I think also, too, you know, the world is our oyster. If, like, moving forward, if we're intentional about how we spend our money, we can afford to do, to live whatever lifestyle we want, which is great. We've worked very hard to be where we are, and the time to enjoy it is now, not in 40 years. You're talking about if we'll be alive in 40 years. Exactly. Within reason. I will get my gym membership, and I will wear my leggings. to the gym that's fancy. And some of the changes that we're going to make moving forward, we are selling our house. We talked to a realtor today, we're getting in on the market, and we are going to move to the West Coast.

1:42:06And we are also going to have a waiting period before we make any large financial purchases that might incur some debt, just to make sure that we don't get ourselves into debt again. And I think that should do it. Again, thank you for having us on the podcast. We really appreciate it. We got a lot out of it.

1:42:23Ramit Sethi: We had a great time. Great time chatting with you. Thanks again. I want to thank our partners at Monarch for setting our couples up on their platform to see their exact CSP categories. Monarch is a private personal finance app that brings together all of a household's accounts, checking credit cards, loans, and investments into one clean dashboard on your phone or computer. One thing I love about Monarch is it allows you to save up for your rich life goals. Like for example, if you want to save up for a wedding or an amazing vacation or your emergency fund, a house, having a baby, college or retirement, Monarch makes it easy.

1:43:01Ramit Sethi: You set up your goals, you tell it how much you wanna save towards that goal every month and Monarch lets you see your progress visually along the way.