On today's episode, meet Justin and Deepika.
I'm thinking more about the future, and I think Justin is very much thinking about now.
Justin is 40, Deepika is 32, and they're caught in a cycle of credit card debt, even though they have a high income.
It feels like we are living paycheck to paycheck, and it stresses me because we just have the money we have, and then we wait for payday, and we do it all over again.
Justin has a side hustle that he wants to take to the next level, but his business partners are not as invested as he is.
Me, my brother, and my family bought this building, and then finally, when we finally did pay it off, all of us kind of like went our separate ways.
Deepika wants to eventually buy a house, but she can't figure out where they're overspending.
We've looked at our credit card statements time and time again. We cannot figure out what is causing the revolving cycle of debt.
They both struggle with their money psychology.
It's like the second you get a dollar, it's oh my god, it's a dollar. Oh, what can we do with this dollar? And it's that $1 brought us joy, but then it was this fleeting joy.
Money is for rich people, and you have to work super hard to get it.
And they don't have a shared vision for their money, which is preventing them from living their rich life.
You have to understand that for the first few years of our marriage, we weren't allowed to have dreams.
Can they kick their old money habits to the curb and adopt a different strategy for managing their money?
It seems like the folks around us have been able to figure this out, and we just haven't. And maybe the answer is so obvious it's right in front of me, but we have not been able to figure out what the change is that we need to make.
Now, let's meet Justin and Deepika.
All right, I've got Justin and Deepika sitting in front of me, getting ready for our conversation. Let's take a look at what I find. Let's take a look. Assets: $5,000 bucks. Investments: $111,000. They mentioned that Justin's income goes towards savings. Maybe that counts investments, too. Savings at $38,000 and debt at 43K.
Okay, it's all about the income here. What the hell? $21,000 per month. Okay, so they make $260,000 a year. All right, what's the problem? First off, okay, they're taking home 13,000. So they're at least presumably maxing out 401k. How do they have 98% fixed costs at that income? Oh, especially when their mortgage or rent is $1,650 a month. Whoa. All right, where's the money going? Utilities at 700 bucks a month. That's high. But okay. Insurance at $3,800. Why? How can insurance be $4,000 a month? Okay. Well, we'll find out. Car payment $1,800 bucks a month. No. Hell no. Debt payments at 4,000. Groceries at 800. I told you it's always 800 to 1,200 bucks. Clothes 200 bucks a month. You can't spend 200 bucks a month on clothes when you have 98% fixed cost. Investments are at zero. Okay. Savings are at zero. That's a problem. We got a spending problem here. That's it. I mean, it's all in the fixed costs, and we can already narrow it down to a few different areas. All right. I'm going to find out what's going on here. Especially with a salary this high, there's something going on here.
When I saw the different prompts on your Instagram, the one that stuck out to me was the one about having the business idea and not having it pick up off the ground. I saw this and I thought of Justin. And his business really is this incredibly untapped financial resource that we could be benefiting from. It's something that he's been wanting to do for a few years now. He had the LLC created after our son was born. So, he has done a lot of the groundwork. So typically when it comes to all things finances and larger decisions, because I take on the weight of the world on my shoulders at all times for all the people in my life, I'm stressed about the untapped financial stream that could be coming from his business. If we want to do something like buy a home or try to do something for our son's future, we don't have the resources to do things like that. And I think that's what my concern is. So I'm thinking more about the future. And I think Justin is very much thinking about now.
I never focused on future stuff. I've always focused on what happens now. So, she's absolutely correct. There is money to be made in what I'm trying to do. But I always feel like there's always some sort of block. My biggest problem right now is I'm trying to renovate the space, and I either don't have time or I'm trying to do other projects, and so many other things jump on top of it that when I try to focus on the business, it never really goes anywhere.
Is it your full-time business?
No. So, I have a full-time job, and this business is more of like a side hustle.
Okay. How long has it been a side hustle for?
Yeah. So me, my brother, and my family bought this building, and me and my brother were in the mindset of we can turn this place into a recording studio/venue because it has multiple levels. We all pulled our money together, and we never had enough money to actually put into the building. It was just a matter of paying it, paying it, paying it, making the bills or meeting the bills. And then finally, when we finally did pay it off, all of us kind of like went our separate ways. So, it's just me thinking like, hey, this is a great opportunity to do what we originally wanted to do.
What about the family members who put money into it?
My brother is now in Miami. My older brother is here, but he's not very much interested in doing this anymore.
No. When I got the building, he didn't have a place to stay, so I renovated the top into an apartment. The main floor is a venue, and the lower level is the studio. So he still lives up here.
This doesn't sound like a structured business, right? They don't really care about the money, but legally they would be entitled to it. There's like somebody living upstairs, not paying rent. Does it sound unusual to you as I say it?
I went through this in therapy as well.
She was basically like, 'You do realize like this is toxic.'
Oh, okay. She said it, not me.
Thank you, therapist. Don't worry. Okay. And then what did you do?
I tried to talk to him, but he doesn't want to pay, so he just wants to like, you know, stay for free.
Okay. So, you told all the details to your therapist, presumably over multiple sessions. Your therapist was like, 'This is super toxic.' And then you went to your brother. You're like, 'Hey, not sure if you should stay here for free.' And then he was like, 'Oh, I'm not trying to pay rent.' And you were like, 'Okay.'
Yeah. Basically, it's like a family thing. Like you get involved in family, and then you know this kind of stuff happens.
Okay. All right. So, this explains a lot. Okay. You want me to set up the call right now and get all the family members on Zoom? I'm not part of the family. I'll wrap this up in 15 minutes. All right. Maybe not. So, all right. Now that I understand a little bit more about the family business, Deepika, what's your take?
I think it's a fantastic opportunity for Justin because he's actually been doing a majority of the manual labor. He's the only one that has the vision and wants to execute on it. So, I'm in full support of him actually moving forward with his business. I think it's just a matter of prioritizing and finding the resources to actually execute.
All right. So, we have this side business which has a lot of family embroiled in it. And Deepika, you're managing your family finances on a day-to-day basis, things like tracking things, planning where the money's coming from for vacation, those kinds of things, right?
And Justin, do you ever feel stressed about money?
It's not something that I stress over only because I feel like we have a safety net. When we have it, it's great. It makes me happy because you can get what you want in terms of like, you know, gifts, vacations. You don't have the stress of, oh no, I can't do this or I can't afford that. So yeah, when money is there, the levels of stress are down, which to me makes me happy.
It doesn't really surprise me that you are stressed out, Deepika, and Justin is happy because he's like, 'Yeah, whatever. The roof is here and we're eating well and it's good to go.' Right. You've seen this pattern on the show before many times, right? Yeah. We have the worrier. We have the avoider. The avoider is like very happy, and the worrier is like one. Sometimes they try to get them. They get into this chaser-avoider dynamic. But in general, it's just like it is what it is. And in fact, you said, Deepika, that you tend to take on the world in lots of parts of your life. Well, I think we should start with looking at your numbers because I understand the general dynamics, but I don't really understand what's going on with your finances. Let's take a look at the numbers, shall we? Justin, can you read off the words in bold and then the number in full next to it?
Assets 5,328, investments 111,793, savings 38,000, debt $43,251. Total net worth $111,870.
Great. What do you think about those numbers?
It's scary. There's really not much there.
Deepika, you want to add anything on those net worth numbers?
Yeah, now that I'm looking at the numbers, I don't know if we did the assets part right because we have four cars.
And four cars with two people.
So, you have these cars, but your assets read only 5,000 bucks.
We were confused of like, how do you value it?
Just plug it into Kelly Blue Book or whatever. Yeah, let's just approximate it right now. Who cares? It doesn't matter. You know, get it right within 10,000. It's fine. It's probably worth 40,000. Okay, we'll put 40,000. All right, so your net worth is 151,000. Okay, that's cool. Again, you can tidy up the numbers later. This is just at this point, it doesn't really matter. It's just directional. Moving on, let's talk about income. Deepika, can you read off this combined gross monthly income, please?
That's a lot. What do you think about that?
Doesn't feel like a lot. I just feel like we're middle class.
You guys want to say it? Go ahead. Get it out.
It really feels like we are the epitome of middle class. By the end of the month, we just don't know where it all went.
Right. Okay. You got it. All right. All right. All right. Your net income, I found this interesting, is 13,577. Why is the difference so big?
Justin pays, I think it was 1,900 a month for health benefits. It's mindblowing. He's part of a union, and I think maybe the health benefits are included in the union dues, and maybe that's why the number looks so inflated. But that was a very eye-opening moment for us because I don't think either of us realized how much was going towards health benefits and union dues until we completed this.
Is there a pension involved as well, Justin?
And is it a pretty good pension?
Yeah. So once you finish the years, I think we get around $2,800 a month.
$2,800 a month. Okay. Are either of you contributing any pre-tax money to a thing like a 401k?
I think mine was 2% or 4%.
So like about 650 bucks a month towards a 401k total. Okay. So about 7,800 bucks a year. All right. But what really concerns me is the next number. What's this number, Deepika? The fixed cost number.
Okay, Justin, you see that number?
What do you make of this number? What number should it be?
Theoretically, 50% at least. 50 to 60.
Yeah, that's and for a couple with an income like yours, probably towards the low end, if not even lower because your fixed costs don't tend to often scale as much with high incomes. So, we got to figure out what's going on here. I'm going to dive into those fixed cost numbers in just a second, but let's keep going down the list just so we see the rest of the CSP. Your investments are at zero. So you're basically not contributing anything more beyond your 401k, which explains how the investments, which theoretically should be higher with an income like yours, are not higher. Your savings are at zero. You have about 3 months of savings and that's it. And then finally your guilt-free spending. You put child care for 1,200 and then you put everything else 500 bucks a month. Do we all agree that fixed cost is a problem area?
Huge problem area. Yeah. Huge.
Okay. And Justin, do you agree as well?
All right, we're narrowing it down already. Let's try to figure out what's going on. Do you rent or own?
Okay. Your rent is $1,650. That's good. That's 10.83% for housing. Whoa. And that includes your utilities, which are 700 bucks a month. What's up with that?
By the way, we have done a lot of investigating over the last couple of years. For some reason, our gas and electric combination bill is sometimes north of $800, $900, which is unheard of. We've asked the gas company what's going on. We've had them check for gas leaks. We've had them come and look to see what's going on.
How could it take a couple of years to figure this out?
We can't get anyone on the phone. We've just been in this cycle for the last two or three years, and we can't figure it out.
There's something going on there. Maybe it's right, maybe not. But let's keep going because we got a lot more. Insurance, you're paying $3,835 per month for insurance. What is up with that?
It's the union. That's how much they take out of the paycheck. It's almost like half per paycheck.
Well, have you asked your friends at work like, 'Hey, do you pay this much?'
So when I talked to them, they said it's a pretty high amount. I just left it at that because I'm not very good at this stuff.
I don't mind not being good at money. None of us is born being good at money, but it's a skill we learn, right? Like what do you do for your union job?
I work in event services.
If you asked me how to do that, I'd be like, I don't know. I'm not good at this stuff. Which is true. But if I wanted to get good or it was something important to my life, I would get good, right? It's just like it has to happen. So already we're going down this list, and we're three things in, and I've heard, 'I don't know why we're paying that much, but we just can't figure it out.' And I'm a little confused. I don't hear this from almost any other couple. I can understand 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, but like 2, 3, 4 years doesn't make sense to me. I'm going to be honest. Deepika and Justin have me a little bit confused. Their fixed costs are at 98%, which is very high. It means that they are essentially spending every single dollar they make. But that's especially confusing at their income level. They're high earners, and their rent is extremely low. And when I ask them specific questions like, 'Hey, why are you paying so much for insurance?' or 'Why is your electric bill so high?' They give me a very casual, 'I don't know. I don't know.' It's like when I'm 7 years old, I come home, a big old stain on my shirt. My mom goes, 'How did you get that stain?' 'I don't know.' Which by the way does not work. The world has a way of making you tell the truth whether you want to or not, so you might as well do it early on. Now he uses the excuse, 'I'm not good at this stuff,' and then happily continues avoiding money. Meanwhile, Deepika is on a different end of the spectrum, worrying, stressing about their future. This is not a healthy way to approach money. There's two people paying $1,900 a month for insurance totaling 3,800. Deepika, why are you paying $1,900 a month?
So, the two columns are broken down by what's coming out of my paycheck and what's coming out of Justin's. 100% of Justin's paycheck goes into our savings account.
Why does 100% of his paycheck go to savings?
We thought it might be a good way to boost our savings.
You guys didn't read my book, right?
Oh, I have the book. It's actually sitting right there. I read.
Pull it out. Pull it. Show us. Okay. Hold that book up close to the camera. Everybody look at this book. It's so pristine. There's not one mark. It's never been opened. There's never been oxygen between those pages. That thing is still from the factory. Look at that. It's open for the first time. She just flipped through the pages. Wow. Wow. Wow. That thing is perfect. That thing probably came right off my desk. I finished writing it. It shipped directly to you. Wow. All right. So, I have to say, all jokes aside, you know, Deepika, you mentioned you worry, you take a lot of things on yourself. You have a book within arm's reach, but you haven't read it. I'm curious why.
I don't think we realized the scope of our money troubles till we had our son, and we can't seem to find the time.
Okay, that's an honest answer. All right, let's keep moving along the CSP here. Still don't understand why you're paying almost $4,000 a month in insurance.
So, the insurance coming out of my paycheck is my health insurance. We have auto insurance, renter's insurance, life insurance. That's the big one. We have two custom whole life policies and term insurance.
I'm trying to control my rage. I'm not a very good poker player. In my head I'm like, 'Oh, Ramit so calm. Rico Suave over here.' But apparently on camera I'm like, 'God damn it.' There's no reason to buy whole life insurance. I have not found a single reason to. It's not an investment. It's insurance. And in fact, the best way to buy insurance, especially if you have a little one, is term life insurance. It's way cheaper. You're not paying all these stupid fees. And so, like, the amount of money you're paying is like insane for me. Insane. All right, we're going to fix that, too. Let's keep going. Your car payment is $1,863 per month. What is that?
What the hell? For all of you non-car people like me wondering what an AMG is, an AMG is a Mercedes, and Justin bought it for $65,000. And as Deepika just said, their monthly payment is $888.
All other cars have no payments attached to them.
The E-ZPass, the parking the car in Times Square every day.
Who goes to Times Square every day?
Just tell everyone how much it costs to park in Times Square every day.
It costs $30 a day to park there with toll and gas that you can add on $10 on top of that and then I don't know $10 per day on gas.
So 50 bucks a day to drive.
Come on. Am I being punked right now? You drive from Queens to Times Square. Come on. That's a straight train.
I start so early. So my day starts at like 4:30. So the problem is getting a train from there at that time will either make me too early at work or too late. So I decided driving gets me there quicker.
You think it's a good financial decision?
No, but combined it's like $500 or $600 a month towards transportation, and I just felt like hey, on top of everything else, I didn't think that that was the most expensive.
Do you understand the severity of the situation you are in with your finances?
If you were an ER doc looking at somebody who came in the door and this is their, you know, their numbers, what do you see here?
Oh, yeah. This is like a trauma patient. Like you're just bleeding and denying the fact that you're bleeding. Okay. Eventually, you will, you know, die. But at the same time, I think my brain is like, 'Yeah, but life is still fairly good.'
Okay. Deepika, what about you?
The parking situation is a perfect example of Justin living his rich life. I see this, and this is what stresses me. It feels like we are living paycheck to paycheck, and it stresses me because we just have the money we have, and then we wait for payday, and we do it all over again.
The way that you approach money is not commensurate with the income you are making. You're not talking like a couple that makes $260,000 a year, and it's not commensurate with a couple that wants to grow their money for a specific purpose. The way that I hear it is like, oh, the lights are on and we still can eat out every so often, and like that's great. That makes me happy. And Deepika is like, it's occasionally stressful, but we get through it, and I really just want him to get his business off the ground. Can we finish going through the fixed cost, and then I'm going to tell you what I see here?
Your debt payments every month are $4,000. How can that be?
So, we added our student loan payments of 250 and 250 a month to whatever we pay for credit cards, which on average is about 3,500 a month.
Let's clarify something. When we talk about credit card debt, that would be debt that is revolving that you didn't pay off the first month. So maybe that changes things here.
Yeah. So then it would only be 500 because the only debt that we have is the student loan debt.
Okay, great. Okay, that considerably changes things. Oh, guys, this is like a big difference. It went from 98% to 72%. All right, well that's positive. I'm never going to be mad at that. 98 to 72 is good. All right, so you're paying 500 bucks a month in debt, but now we got to talk about some other stuff. So, your groceries are 800 bucks a month. That's fine. Clothes are 200 bucks a month. Whatever. That's fine. So, all the money that you just mentioned, the $4,000 a month on credit cards, where did that go in this CSP?
It's a combination of that last line item with the everything else and 500 bucks for everything else and guilt-free and... Yeah. And then that's what we were trying to figure out is we don't know what the bleed is. We've looked at our credit card statements time and time again. We cannot figure out what is causing the revolving cycle of debt. It's just hard for us once we go line by line to figure out am I doing too much Amazon spending or am I doing too much gas or a toll? And that's what we get lost where exactly are we spending too much.
So what I'm hearing from the two of you is first off I hear no vision for what to do with your money. It's like when we talk about money, we talk about should I park in Times Square. It's like you're already jumping down into the weeds, and then that's where you both stay, right? And I bet you've been talking about that kind of stuff for a long time. It's almost like each person goes to their corner. Look, they're both nodding and smiling.
Sounds about right. For the first couple years of our marriage, his entire paycheck went to his family. So, there was no finances. Justin actually didn't have credit until we got married. So, his entire financial history comes after being married with me. And I'm not the most brilliant person when it comes to finances. I'm a business major. I've taken a few finance classes. I know just enough to make sure that the bills are paid every month. But, we've reached this point in life where we're now thinking about it a lot like what happens now that we have a son. If we want to have another baby, we don't have the space in this home. We want to buy a house. So, I'm trying to look at how do we maximize our income, and I think that's where our divide is happening is I'm thinking about what's next now, and Justin is thinking about what's next but from a very different lens.
You mentioned that he used to give his money to his family, which I understand culturally. And what about you, Deepika?
A lot of my money was also in the possession of his family for a while there. We didn't really have any money to ourselves. It was only after a year and a half that we finally moved out of living with his family, and I had my own income then, but a lot of his income was still going to his family despite being moved out. His father is a pastor, and they don't have many members, so a lot of the foundation expenses and all of those things come from within the family.
Whoa. Holy wow. Okay. All right. So along with that, I'm going to go out on a limb. There's a lot of religious things in the household, control issues, those kinds of things as well. Okay. Yeah. Are you still in touch with your family, Justin?
Not really. I mean, I'm in touch with my brothers. Both my younger brother and my older brother.
And how about you, Deepika?
My parents aren't really around. Distant family also not really an active part of our lives either.
It's got to be tough just for the two of you and your son to be kind of alone trying to make this happen on your own.
That's what we struggle with a lot is trying to create a better future for our son, but not really understanding how to do that. We live in Queens, New York, right on the border of Nassau County and Queens County. And Justin and I have always agreed that if we wanted to take our money and do something with it, we'd really want to buy a home, have space for our son. I want to be able to, you know, have pride in saying that my husband owns his own business and is successful with it, and I can support him with like my own physical contribution of helping him lay the groundwork for that.
What about for you, Justin? What's the vision with money?
Kind of the same. Me and Deepika kind of agree on in terms of future goals and stuff in terms of buying a home, having things saved up for our son, whether it's for college funds or whether it's for him to have the things we didn't have education-wise. And then like she said, being able to have this business grow where we're bringing in a decent amount of income where we're not constantly... I work a lot of hours to make my income. I don't want to have to do that where I'm just a slave to the punch clock.
So you make $260,000 a year. It's a lot of money. Your housing costs are very low. And for a couple that has this income, it doesn't seem like you're really getting ahead. I can see that because you don't have any dedicated savings per month. You don't have any dedicated investments per month, and you have told me that you are constantly in a cycle of getting into credit card debt and then paying it off. But I can also hear it just from the way you talk about money. There's several clues. The clue about how Deepika is the one who manages the money, but even she admits she's not particularly good at it. Justin is happy. He talks about money, but he's not in the day-to-day. And when you do talk about money, from what you've told me, it sounds like you go down into the weeds, both of you, quite frequently, and stay there. When I ask about what the vision is, the vision is quite typical, but there's no plans on how to get there. Okay. And what is I think kind of a big red flag for me is the certain expenses which you haven't been able to find out for like 3 years. The insurance, the car payment, these are red flags that if you can't get the basic blocking and tackling of your money done, then it'll be very difficult, especially in today's time, to buy a house. So, I'm glad that it's not 98% fixed costs, but there's a lot of layers here. Can we just kind of like reset the whole thing? Before we hear their answer, I need a quick favor from you. If you're enjoying this show, please hit the subscribe button because it really helps my team and me. If you had a blank slate, where would your money be going? What is your rich life?
Going on vacation twice a year and not having to worry about credit card debt when we come back.
I would love to have a large home where my son can bring all his friends. I can have another child and not have to worry about where I'm going to put this child and be able to entertain all of our friends and family and not have to worry about space.
I would love for him to continue driving to Times Square every day if that's what makes him happy. But aside from that, I think if he had the resources to be able to invest into his own business and have his vision come true with what he wants to do, nothing would make me happier.
All right, I like it. Justin, what about you? What's your rich life?
Being able to provide for my son without worrying about where that money is going to come from. Owning a nice home, entertaining, and then being able to put money into the business where it brings more money back. For me, you also have to understand that for the first few years of our marriage, we weren't allowed to have dreams. We were brought up in a culture where it was all about the church and the family, and that was it. You weren't allowed to have dreams outside. You weren't allowed to go anywhere. You weren't allowed to travel. You weren't allowed to think of leaving. So, what sounds like basic small dreams, it's everything we've dreamed of for our entire life. And we're content with that. But the fact that we are in a place of our own right now, and you know, our son isn't subject to that kind of life, that's a miracle in itself.
Listen, I love it. And I totally appreciate you giving me the context of where you both came from. So, one of the things that I love is hearing what people's rich life is, and it's a good reminder because sometimes I hear their rich life, and I'll tell them, I'm like, that's too small. In your case, I saw it on your face, both of you nodding and smiling, and like this is what we want. Okay, love it. We can totally work with this. And I think that as we start to take the dream, the vision of a rich life, and then look at how your numbers are or are not serving that vision, it's going to become a lot easier to decide what to do and what not to do. So hearing your rich life vision, do you think that you are currently spending your money to live it?
Absolutely not. What we end up doing is tapping into the savings to pay the credit card bill, which essentially we're just taking Justin's paycheck and using it to pay the expenses that we have. So, we just let it accrue and then use what we could have been using the entire time to pay the credit card.
How many years has that been going on?
It's been about two, two and a half years.
To me, this is what is indicative of one of the challenges here, which is like you tried an approach and it didn't work. Now, that's normal. Like, we're all going to try stuff at life, and it's not going to work. That's totally normal. But it went on for two years. That's a long time to basically have one of the major pillars of your strategy for your rich life not work. One month, fine. Even six months, fine. Two years, too long. Three years to figure out this utility thing, too long. There's no real incentive to change, right?
And in fact, what was the real singular moment in the last five years of your relationship when you actually changed around money?
I think it was once we had our son.
Exactly. This is how most people are with money. They pretty much ignore it. As long as it's running and they can swipe their card, they're fine until two things happen. They have kids and they turn 40. And that's the only time most people wake up until roughly around the age of 60 or so. Imagine that. We work our entire lives, and we pay attention in real urgent terms maybe three to five times in our entire life. If it's me, I go, 'Okay, I accept human nature, but I better make those times count. If I'm paying attention when my son is born, then I better set up my system so that it works for the next 25 years, because odds are I'm not going to pay attention much at all.' You've told me that your money is not being spent towards your rich life vision. What do you think's the solution here?
It seems like the folks around us have been able to figure this out, and we just haven't. And maybe the answer is so obvious it's right in front of me, but we have not been able to figure out what the change is that we need to make.
Take your right hand, hold it up. Now, reach over and grab that book that you put on your desk for a second. Maybe the answer is right in front of me. I couldn't have scripted it better myself. It's not about me. All jokes aside, it's not about me forcing you to read my book or anything like that. It's not about that. What it is about is your very astute observation that everybody around you seems to have figured it out. And candidly, at $260,000, you could actually be doing all of those things. And yet you designed a Byzantine process which doesn't work and hasn't worked for years instead of reading a book that you have literally at your desk. What you told me is achievable, but it would require a lot of changes.
We're willing to make them. Right now, the only solutions that I can see in front of me and the ones that we just keep discussing are, you know, how do we get Justin to stop driving or how do we decrease this particular cost? We know what the bigger picture is. We just don't know how to get there.
I think we need to appreciate that Deepika and Justin are really just starting their journey around money. And when we hear the details about their past, like how they didn't have control of their own money because of their ties to their former church, we can start to develop a little bit of compassion for where they are today. Neither of them had positive role models when it comes to money. So the first step is to help them make some foundational habits and then to build some accountability around their spending. One helpful strategy is to focus on the biggest red flags first. For me, when I look at their CSP, I'm really curious about their housing situation. They live in a high-cost area, but they have low housing costs. So I want to know what's going on here. Is there anything about your house, the rent, that you were concerned about?
My mother, she moved into this house in 1996, and the rent was less than $1,000 and has gone up with inflation over the last 26 years. The rent is so low that we can't justify leaving. But we're in a position where the landlord has also gotten 26, 28 years older. He's no spring chicken. We're in this very worried situation that if, god forbid, anything were to happen to him. Either we don't know if whoever will take it after that is going to up our rent. Are they going to kick us out? Are they going to sell the house? What do we do at that point? And I feel like that's what's also putting us in this hot water to say what are we going to do next.
What would you do if it happened tomorrow?
I would probably start looking on Zillow for other places to rent because we just don't have the down payment to buy a home, especially not in Nassau County, New York. Renting to us makes sense only because the high cost of down payment plus taxes plus the mortgage. It's just way too much. The next step would be like, how can we allocate money towards a new rent payment?
Yeah, but where's the money coming from?
Whatever I was putting into savings now would go directly to pay for...
The money is not really going into savings. It's getting spent anyway.
So where would it come from?
You grew up poor, actually.
It's a common thing for people who grew up poor. Their answer is if something doesn't work with my money, just grind it out. Especially for men. Before we had Jay, that's all I used to do. I used to be the breadwinner in the family, but I would never be home. When we got married, I saw my wife for like four hours per day, and that was because she was sleeping, and I come home, take a shower, and go right back to work. I understand that sometimes we have to. I don't understand keeping that same mindset when you have a household income of $260,000 and housing costs of 10%. It just doesn't make any sense. You don't have to keep grinding when there are so many other ways to put your money to work for you. And one of the reasons I started this podcast and started my entire body of work is that money isn't this mystical thing that only wealthy people have knowledge about. I want people to know this stuff because when you finally understand it, you're like, 'Oh, wait a minute. It's totally achievable, and it's actually not that hard right now.' That's not what I'm hearing from you. Like you could make a million dollars tomorrow, and you would not invest that money. It would get sucked up into your finances, and you still wouldn't be living the rich life until you change this and until you change your numbers. Okay, let me tell you what I would do if it were me. I would first off crystallize the vision of what we both want. I think the house is a nice thing to put down on paper, but it's probably not going to happen today or tomorrow. It's a very long-term aspiration, but you want to have a rich life vision that includes what you're doing to live a rich life today and what you're doing to live a rich life tomorrow. So, it might be we want to have date night twice a month. Great. Fantastic. I would next up talk about how we want to get there, and I would recalibrate the workload. Right now you have a very unhealthy dynamic where Deepika does all the work, and Justin, you're not involved in the day-to-day finances. So that actually puts the two of you at odds. You've got to get together and start going through from your vision to the numbers. That means that you've got to both have skin in the game. How would I do that? I would next decide we're going to get educated about money. Right now the two of you are not educated about money, right? You have the book there. I would say once a week we're going to spend an hour talking about this book and start to change your financial system to be more aligned together. Finally, on the more directive side immediately, I would fix the utilities thing. If you are stuck and at the end of your rope, I would either go into your employer and ask if they have somebody who can help. If necessary, hire a lawyer. That's it. Have them deal with it. Pay him a little bit of money, but get that fixed right away. Okay. Next, insurance. I would cancel the whole life immediately. I would take that money and redirect it.
Where would that money go? It would probably go to where is one of the investments that we should be making.
Correct. I agree. I think that's right on. And I certainly, if I knew that my housing is at the whim of an elderly landlord, I would be putting aside money because I know that I'm going to be either evicted or my rent is going to go up spectacularly. Couple of other things. I would sell every vehicle except maybe one. Furthermore, I don't understand driving to Times Square. That just doesn't make any sense to me at all. How long have you two been debating this Times Square thing?
11 years. The reason you're debating it for so long is it's become part of your identity, and it's become part of your identity because you have no vision to look towards and make the decision. A vision helps you make these decisions so easily. You don't even almost have to think about it after a while. Your vision makes the decision for you. So, if your vision is we want to buy a house one day, then spending 1,500 bucks a month on parking does not contribute to that vision. One last thing, this event space. It just seems like such a mess to me. Like there's no good that can come out of it because even if you win with all the work you've put in, even if you start to generate a ton of money, it's tied in with other people who are not contributing as much. But if I'm looking for a fresh start where we are hyper-focused on the rich life, I would not be doing that. It's a distraction. Sometimes there's no shame in saying, 'Hey, this isn't the right thing for me. I'm going to scrap it and start something else later.' But first things first, I want to get financially stable. I want to start building and living our rich life. Lot to take in there. What's your initial reaction?
You are absolutely correct, but making those steps, I feel like, is going to be the hardest.
What do you think he's going to learn about money as he gets a little bit older?
I don't know. But I would want him to learn that it's not something that he should be stressed about.
Really? His mom, the one who's stressed, wants him to learn that.
Yeah. I want him to not be stressed like I am.
If nothing changes for the two of you when it comes to your money, business, etc., and let's just fast forward three years. What would he learn about money from his parents?
He would just think like money is such a hot topic. Meaning in terms of it creates problems, he would not want to talk about it. He'd try to shy away from it. I think he would grow up the same way we grew up thinking about money, which was money is for rich people, and you have to work super hard to get it.
A lot of the arguments that we had, if it's not money, it's time. It's either Justin's working too much or I'm working too much, and there's very little time it feels that we can spend together as a family just doing family things. When it comes to money, I just feel like it's one less thing on his plate. And I'm realizing maybe it does need to be on his plate. It needs to be on our plate. And all of those things that we've been tabling in terms of the investments and all the high-yield savings accounts that we've talked about, like maybe we should just pull the trigger and do it.
Both of you have created this kind of vortex where you're both totally indecisive about making decisions which to me are so minor in a grand scheme of what you're trying to accomplish, and you've totally missed the big picture. The stuff that's important, like what's your son going to pick up on with money? He's going to pick up that moms are the ones who are supposed to be stressed about money, and dads are carefree, and then it passes down generation to generation. What a tragedy. Especially coming from a family that makes $260,000 a year to be stressed out about money with 10% housing costs all because you have this narrative that you tell about we don't have time. That's not true. I mean, you can make a change. I'm not sure how serious you are about it because you'd have to change a lot.
This is the first time I think we've gotten guidance that is giving us a road map.
Here's what I want to do. I will speak to you again, but not before you finish the book. And I would like to see what specific changes you have made. And if you'd like to speak again, we can actually get into so much more. You have everything you need in front of you with the book, etc. I'd like for you to solve the question of the insurance, the utilities, the car payment, all that stuff needs to go way down. And from looking at your numbers, you actually probably would be able to bring your fixed cost down to, I don't know, 48 to 55%. That's like really good. That's a lot of money. That's thousands of dollars every month that you could be using for investments and savings. And finally, I'd like for you to make a definitive decision about this business. To me, I'd rather have you just literally close the whole thing up. And even if a year or two later you're like, 'Oh my god, I want to buy that place again because now I'm in a better place. I took some business classes, etc. It's going to cost me more.' Fine. At least you started to get decisive. But you can't go through the rest of your life just like waiting for somebody to come and tell you what to do. It's not going to happen. It's the two of you. Would you both like to talk again?
All right. I love it when my guests accept a big challenge. We made some good progress today, but Justin and Deepika have a lot of work ahead of them, and they don't really have a concept of spending money in a meaningful way, which is why I challenge them to work through my entire book one chapter at a time. We only really scratched the surface in today's conversation. And I think we can go a lot deeper once they understand the basics so that they can actually develop a rich life vision. And I have very good news. I'm delighted to share that Justin and Deepika were up to the challenge. They sent several updates along the way, keeping us updated with their progress. And let me tell you, they accomplished a lot. Listen as they share what they learned and the big changes they made.
So, we're on week three, and I actually feel like we've been making some pretty good progress. The financial conversations have been almost daily now. We've made some major decisions that we are acting on right now. The first one is we've decided to cancel our custom whole life policy that is currently accounting for close to 1,400 a month in our budget. We do have other term life and whole life policies that are currently in effect. So, it's not like we're forgoing life insurance completely. We also spoke to a lawyer about our kind of case. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there is anything that we can do unless there's a class action. But we did flag down an actual Con Edison guy yesterday to take a look at our bill, look at our meters. This month's bill wasn't too bad. It was...
Still pretty egregious at 365, but he told us that when the bill gets crazy, have someone come in to do the audit then, and they'll be able to tell us in comparison to our neighbors where we stand and all that. We are chugging along. I've also opened a high-yield savings account based on the book. We went with Marcus by Goldman Sachs. Justin is also transitioning his paycheck back to our checking account, and we have put together a spreadsheet that helps us figure out what the monthly costs are, what account they're coming from, the date that they're coming out, just to help us budget a little bit better. I think we're making some pretty good progress. This is the end of week three.
Hey guys, just an update on this week and what we've done so far. So, we've sold one of two cars. We also put my paycheck into the checking account so that we can manage it, and we created envelopes so that we can put money towards our savings goals. We also created a to-do list. We did it individually. So, on mine, I created some to-do lists. One of which is change car payment to the first of the month so that this way when the paycheck comes, it can slowly start taking it out on the first of the month, as well as some other payments. Also need to inquire about health insurance and why it's so much money coming out of my paycheck. Cancelled one of my credit cards. It's not really doing much in terms of points and benefits, so going to get rid of that one. And that's about it so far for what we've done.
As promised, I agreed to meet up with Deepika and Justin after they finished my book. About six weeks have passed since the time we filmed our initial session and the follow-up interview, which we'll dig into right after this short break from our sponsors. Welcome back. It's so good to see you in person. From what I understand, you read the book, you sent in videos documenting your progress, and I'm told you've made some changes to your finances, which we're going to go through today. What happened right after our conversation?
We set aside weekend time and we said, 'Okay, after our son goes to bed, like we have our assignments for the week.' So I created like a little shared note on our phones and it was here are our financial to-dos for the week. So, I think we came to the conclusion that I still need to lead the charge just because I have a little bit more flexibility, but as long as we know what we need to do and we're keeping on track, we'll be okay.
Amazing. Yeah. How long did it take before you felt like you were making specific concrete progress with your numbers?
Yeah, one week. What happened?
The first thing we did was the life insurance policies.
How much were you spending again?
Combined almost 1,400 a month. So that right there saved us 1,400 a month.
That's a lot of money. And then what did you do when you had that extra 1,400 per month?
We made sure it's not extra money. It's just money that we need to reallocate.
I think I feel something for the first time in my life. It's my heart.
Oh my god. Okay. That's amazing. And you did that together?
What did it feel like to go through this process and decide what to do with this extra money?
We felt like adults once you start being like, 'Hey, no, you need to reallocate money. You need to put stuff away.' You just feel like, 'I'm doing things properly in life.' And it kind of scares you cuz you're like, 'This is what order feels like.'
That's scary. Good. Scary in the sense of like you're getting your life together.
Some people, at least in our circle, their parents have set a very good financial example for them on like this is what your money should do for you. This is how you should be allocating your expenses. This is how you should be wisely spending. And I don't really think either of us had that. So for us, it's like the second you get a dollar, it's oh my god, it's a dollar. Oh, what can we do with this dollar? And it's that dollar brought us joy, but then it was this fleeting joy. So now it's like now the dollar can work for us and we know where to put our dollars.
That's kind of an amazing transformation, just that part alone of going from the minute we make money, we're going to spend it. That's a very childlike approach, but the magical part is that you switched it. Allocation, it sounds like such a boring word, but for me it's going from passively going through life to leaning forward and saying like, we have this pot of money. How do we want to use it in our rich life? Could be vacations, could be eating out, could be cutting back on XYZ, but you get to decide. What surprised you about going through the book?
There's so much bad financial advice out there that I think it's sometimes easy to get swept up in that, but to have everything in an easy-to-understand format just made our life a whole lot easier.
Yeah. Well, thank you. I'm happy to hear that because my hope is that when you start to internalize that, you go, 'Oh my god, it's supposed to be simple. It's supposed to be boring and pretty straightforward.' And then you start to see your savings account build up and all this debt get paid off. You go, 'Wait a second. Yeah, maybe that's how a lot of things in life are supposed to be, right?' Yeah. Awesome. Okay, you go through the book, you reallocate your money. What happened next?
We flagged the Con Edison guy on the street.
The freaking AC thing or whatever. Tell me. I've been waiting.
Unfortunately, he went through, he looked at our bills. He came into the house and he was like, 'What do you have? What's going on here?' He saw that all of our stuff is, you know, up to date. He's like, 'Unfortunately, you're spending the same amount of money that a lot of people are spending. You're paying the normal amount, which happens to be exuberant.' He gave us actual steps about what to do if the bill gets exuberantly high. So, we know what we have to do if we see that bill go beyond like 600, 700.
Now, what's striking to me is that when we talked, this bill had been around for years and nobody got around to talking about it. And I was like, what is going on? Like how can you not find an answer to this? Now you went out and grabbed that Con Ed guy with like a freaking one of those stage things. You're like, get in here. Like that is another amazing change. Where did that come from?
Well, I just saw him on the street and I was just like, hey, can you come here? And he was like, I got nothing better to do.
Yeah. But that never happened like for the last four years. After talking with you, and then we started making actionable steps, something in your brain's like, 'I'm on the verge of saving money. I want to talk to this guy to save more money.' I might have never noticed him.
This is what people mean when they say, you know, you create your own luck. When I hear that phrase, what it says to me is it's almost like I put on a new set of lenses and I'm looking at the same world, but I'm seeing opportunities now that I would have missed before.
Yep. I think that's exactly what's happening.
My next question is about driving. Did you drive here today?
Love this reaction already. Who drove?
Oh god. What the... How much was it today again? Just remind us.
And you were paying like 30 times or whatever when we last talked, right?
