Episode #181: “We argue about money daily b/c he can’t stop talking about Ramit”

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[00:00:00] Linda: Nathan is more of a like, I want to get this done really quickly. He’s a list doer, so he wants to check things off of his list.

[00:00:06] Nathan: I’m very analytical, want to make sure that the money that I calculated in our retirement is going to meet the goals that I have for our family.

[00:00:14] Ramit: Nathan is a 35-year-old dentist, and he’s the ultimate worrier.

[00:00:18] Nathan: I get nervous. I have insecurities, and I think that that’s why I’m always looking for validation.

[00:00:25] Ramit: Linda is 37 years old, and she spends a lot of energy helping Nathan feel okay about their finances.

[00:00:32] Linda: We’re very stressed about money just because we can’t spend the way that we used to. It’s been a big change. So I think we do carry anxiety and stress.

[00:00:41] Ramit: But Nathan’s constant optimizing is causing arguments between him and his wife. His anxiety has gone through the roof, and he’s desperate to get my take on their finances.

[00:00:51] Nathan: I moved the goalposts. We make a decision, and then I learned some new bit of information, and then I go back.

[00:00:57] Ramit: And Linda, she just wants Nathan to chill out.

[00:01:00] Linda: I think we both prioritize different things. I want Nathan to feel more secure in the decisions that we’ve made as a family.

[00:01:07] Ramit: Can Nathan and Linda get on the same page and see the actual amazing reality of their finances?

[00:01:13] What you call research is really just worry disguised as homework. It just adds more and more stress because, again, stress is life.

[00:01:21] Nathan: I thought like, “Man, I’m just really well prepared.” And then when you come in, you’re like, “You’re [Bleep] nuts.” And I go, “Okay. I could see how that–“

[Narration]

[00:01:30] Ramit: All right. We have Nathan and Linda. Let’s see. “We bought a new house, and now our mortgage has doubled. Expense is the same, and he won’t stop spending. We’d like Ramit to help us with our conscious spending plan to see where we can cut. We are unable to stop talking about money every day.” Huh? Why? “Oh, we have talked about Ramit for the last three weeks nonstop.” Fantastic. What’s the problem? I don’t see any problem here.

[00:01:58] Ramit: I want to take a look at the CSP. What? Assets, $2.3 million. Why they sound so alarmed already? What the hell? Why has this happened to me every time? In their 30s. All right. Investments $694,000. By the way, their CSP has a lot of writing on it– a lot. You find this with people who really feel the need to get every detail out. I’m like, it’s supposed to be a spreadsheet with a few numbers, not a freaking essay on the right side.

[00:02:29] All right. Savings, $79,000. Debt, 1.5 million. Okay. It says their business and their home. Interesting. And then total net worth, 1.5 million. Very good in their 30s. Okay, let’s take a look at the income. $30,000 a month. Okay. So $365,000 a year. What? Fixed costs are at 76%? No way.

[00:02:57] It’s one thing if your fixed costs are 62 or 63% when you have a household income of $55,000. Things are expensive. Bread would be proportionately expensive if one of you is making $20,000 a year. But making $365,000 a year and having 76% fixed costs, that’s typically overspending.

[00:03:17] This CSP has people’s fingerprints all over it. And what I can already tell is that because they have so many categories, explanations for every single line, they are way deep in the weeds, and they are missing the big picture. Their CSP is basically double the length of every other CSP because they just added a bunch of stuff. Maybe I need to lock the CSP so you can’t add any more rows. I never had this situation before, but I think we may need to make a change.

[00:03:45] Something’s weird here. I have a note from my producer. “Ask them how many times they applied to the podcast.”All right. We’ll find out. This is a very interesting CSP, but I feel like I’m going to have to be pretty direct on today’s call. Let’s see what happens.

[Interview]

[00:04:02] Nathan: I was sitting in my basement, just alone, and I had heard about you, and so I applied. And then I applied in her name, then I applied in my name again, and I applied in her name. I don’t know. I just thought the more times I applied then your team would be like, “You know what? This guy’s serious. We would love to have him on our show.”

[00:04:25] Ramit: How many times did you apply?

[00:04:27] Nathan: I think eight.

[00:04:28] Ramit: That’s weird, right?

[00:04:30] Nathan: I am quirky like that sometimes. If I have a goal in mind, I have always pushed really hard to get it. I was trying to create my own luck.

[00:04:42] Ramit: Are you impulsive?

[00:04:45] Nathan: No.

[00:04:46] Ramit: Oh, wow. Look at the body language. He says no. She’s nodding furiously. Okay. All right. So you filled out the application and spoke to my colleague. And Linda, what did you think of this?

[00:04:59] Linda: I want Nathan to feel more secure in the decisions that we’ve made as a family. I think he is lost a little bit of faith in us, especially since we moved, and so I’m here to support him. I hope that this helps him get some faith back because history has shown us that we do have faith in each other, but the last six months has been a big change for us. So I think we’ve lost some of that.

[00:05:26] Ramit: Okay. Let’s talk about what happened six months ago.

[00:05:30] Linda: We bought our dream house.

[00:05:31] Ramit: Okay.

[00:05:32] Linda: At a 7% interest, and we had a 3% interest in our old house. So it’s a different monthly payment. Going into buying the house, we came up with a strategy because we knew that interest rates would eventually come down. And we talked with lenders and came up with a plan of refinancing.

[00:05:53] So we took out a loan that you could refinance. So we’re just waiting for the interest to come down. And once we get to our goal, we’ll save about $1,500 a month on our mortgage, and that will get us to a place where we feel more comfortable. We’re savers, and I’m used to saving more. And so I think when we look at what we’re saving now versus what we used to save, it’s different.

[00:06:15] Ramit: When you say you’re a saver, finish the sentence for me. I’m a saver, and if I’m not saving, then I am, what?

[00:06:24] Linda: If I’m not saving, I don’t have money for my kids to college and have retirement money and savings for house projects. If we’re not saving as much as we used to, then we just can’t do the things that I have in my mind, and it’s just an adjustment.

[00:06:41] Ramit: Nathan, do you agree?

[00:06:43] Nathan: We came together. We go, “Look, we’d like to move out of our neighborhood. This is going to be a bigger house, and it’s going to be a bigger mortgage.” And I think that in the time I’m like, “Yeah, I think that’s what we want to do.”

[00:06:58] And so we make the move and we buy it. Then I’m doing research, and I see one of your podcasts that says, “Hey, this is how you can figure out if you can afford a house.” And then I go, “Oh, shoot. Linda, we didn’t even look at that. We didn’t calculate that.”

[00:07:17] And then I get nervous. I go, “Hey, did we even look at this? Did we do this?” And then I freak out a little bit and she was like, “Look, we embarked on this together, and now you’re moving the goalposts on us.”

[00:07:28] And that’s where we argue. And that’s where I think that she goes, “Hey, you’ve lost faith in us. Look, I know our finances too. We don’t do it the same. You’re reading Ramit’s book. You’re doing all these things, and how I get there is different than how Ramit or you are getting there.”

[00:07:51] Ramit: Is your fight about me? Because that’s what it sounds like.

[00:07:54] Linda: Well, every night after the kids go to bed, he is like, “Okay, let’s talk about our Rich Life as it pertains to vacation in the next five years.” And while I like that, he wants to talk about our Rich Life often. But Nathan, one thing you said is– we did have a financial advisor that we talked to prior to buying this house that gave us a max mortgage, and we’re actually lower than that. So I think he sometimes forgets that we talked to experts about smart financial decisions. We haven’t made our decisions in a vacuum.

[00:08:26] Ramit: And a good decision involves lots of different inputs, not just one person, not just one book. Lots of different perspectives. And then ultimately you decide what’s right for your individual situation.

[Narration]

[00:08:37] Ramit: I have a comment to make, and it’s not going to be the one you think. Lots of people make an impulsive decision to buy a house and then they dive in headfirst to much larger costs as they freak out because suddenly they don’t have anything left over at the end of the month, which happened because, you know. They didn’t run the numbers before they made the biggest financial decision of their lives.

[00:08:57] But that’s not what’s happening here. Nathan and Linda did run the numbers. They even spoke with a financial advisor who gave them the go ahead. And so everything was seemingly fine until Nathan found new information– my book, my podcast, and that has him second guessing himself. My first thought is that Nathan is impulsive. My clues are that he applied almost 10 times to my podcast because he’s questioning everything based on reading some new book, and because he’s treating the idea of a Rich Life as a task that should be talked about every single night.

[00:09:36] Nathan even sent this email to my team after applying several times in less than a week, basically asking how he should tailor his application so they’ll get picked. Now, this is the beginning of a real problem because there will always be new information that contradicts a decision you make. I constantly get messages in Instagram and other DM platforms with people saying, what do you think about this thing? What do you think about Apple credit card?

[00:10:05] They’re going to constantly be second guessing themselves for the rest of their lives. What you really need to do is to develop a deeply rooted confidence in your decision making, and you get that confidence through competence. Now, I have to say I’m also curious about Linda’s reaction to Nathan.

[Interview]

[00:10:24] Ramit: Linda, the way you talk about this situation feels very casual. Like, “Ah, we got a bigger house, and we knew it going in. Yeah, it’s just an adjustment for us.” There’s that. And then Nathan sounds a little bit more like, “Hmm, I’m freaking out a bit. I didn’t run the numbers properly. Now, I’m not sure.” Okay. There’s that. And then there’s the application. On the application, one out of 10, how serious is this? Eight. We have talked about Ramit for the last three weeks nonstop. We keep fighting because of it. What’s going on here?

[00:11:07] Linda: For me, we need to reign back our spending. We were able to buy whatever we wanted when we were in the last house. Until we can go through our financial plan, which is going to take about a year until interest rates come down from the time we bought the house, we have to be more conscious of it. And I think sometimes Nathan is more of a like, I want to get this done really quickly. He’s a list doer, so he wants to check things off of his list. And I don’t know that we can do that as much. So we do conflict sometimes about that.

[00:11:40] Ramit: Hmm. What do you think, Nathan?

[00:11:43] Nathan: I’m very analytical. Want to make sure that the money that I calculated in our retirement is going to meet the goals that I have for our family. Part of the reason that I get nervous, I don’t know if this is just me or not, but as somebody who is a minority in US culture, especially an Asian American, I have insecurities, and I think that that’s why I’m always looking for validation.

[00:12:14] Ramit: That’s pretty insightful. Okay. I appreciate the self-awareness. Linda, does that strike you as true?

[00:12:22] Linda: I think we’re very stressed about money just because we can’t spend the way that we used to recently. I will say that I was not as conscious about our spending when we were in the last house because we could afford to not be.

[00:12:40] Ramit: This sounds like every American. Literally, this is the American story. Oh, it was the two of us. Maybe a little baby. And then we were living large. We rented, or we had a small little house. We would eat out and we would travel, and it was fantastic. And then we got a big house because we’re Americans. And then, uh-oh, we can’t spend all the money we used to because we have to repair our basement. Is this not the classic Americana story?

[00:13:13] Linda: Yes, but we’re in the suburbs now. We are on a train with a bunch of kids. We plan on staying here forever. So we’re cultivating a childhood for our kids.

[00:13:24] Ramit: There’s nothing wrong with it. I’m just saying it’s not that surprising. Of course, you can’t spend as much. You bought a much bigger house at a much higher interest rate. It’s like, “Yeah.” What’s the surprise here?

[00:13:36] Linda: How stressful it would be to step back.

[00:13:40] Ramit: So it’s been harder than you thought to cut back on spending. Okay. Nathan is saying, I need validation. I’m not sure if we have made the right decision. What else?

[00:13:54] Linda: I think we both prioritize different things. Like my focus is getting the kids that they need, and his focus is getting the house, what it needs. And so between the two things, we’re trying to take care of things on our different paths, but then it’s small ticket items that add up and are harder to cut.

[00:14:14] Ramit: Like what?

[00:14:15] Linda: I just bought a backpack for my son because he needed a backpack to go to school.

[00:14:19] Ramit: How much was the backpack for your little one who’s, what, four years old?

[00:14:23] Linda: Two.

[00:14:24] Ramit: Two. How much was it?

[00:14:26] Linda: $40.

[00:14:27] Ramit: And What about you, Nathan? What are you spending money on?

[00:14:30] Nathan: Most of the stuff is for our house, or every once in a while I like to play some golf. For our lawn, I was getting fertilizer. I was getting mulch and the mole traps.

[00:14:47] Ramit: How much are these mold traps? I have to know.

[00:14:49] Nathan: For a two pack it was 50 bucks.

[00:14:51] Ramit: Two packs, 50 bucks. Okay. And how many of those do you need to get?

[00:14:56] Nathan: Two or three.

[00:14:57] Ramit: That’s a lot. You have to talk to someone who doesn’t know any of the words we’re using right now. How often do you have to get these?

[00:15:03] Nathan: If you notice you have mole activity, you get them once, and you can reuse it.

[00:15:07] Ramit: All right. [Bleep], I’m going to get roasted so hard online. Ramit Sethi doesn’t know about moles. What a–

[00:15:15] Linda: It wasn’t the cost of the mole trap. To me, it’s the mindset around spending. We already paid the mole people to get rid of the moles.

[00:15:27] Ramit: Wait. Okay, hold on. Are we talking about M-O-L-D, dog, or M-O-L-E, like the little–

[00:15:35] Linda: Moles in backyard?

[00:15:35] Ramit: Oh my God.

[00:15:36] Nathan: A little rodent.

[00:15:37] Ramit: Okay. Wow. This is hilarious. Moles. Who knew? All right. Okay. So you don’t like that he’s being wasteful by buying duplicate mole traps. Nathan, do you feel any particular way about her purchases?

[00:16:00] Nathan: She really likes to do rid well, which is sustainable recycling. And she likes to buy organic for our groceries. And for the longest time, with our grocery bills being higher, those things, I don’t love it.

[00:16:20] I always say like, “Do we have to get these things?” I feel like we can get a broccoli that’s not organic, and we’re just going to be just fine. And so she gets upset that she’s like, “This is really important to me,” eating what she says is healthy, which I agree to a certain degree, but when it hurts bottom line, sometimes I go, “Look, that’s something that we can cut out.”

[00:16:48] Ramit: Hmm. Do you all have an agreement on how much you should be spending? Basically, do you use a CSP?

[00:16:55] Linda: We know what our budget is, and we have lowered our monthly grocery bill by $200 a month doing that.

[00:17:00] Ramit: Oh wow. 200 bucks. The magic number. I appreciate that. That’s a great example. I’m not making fun of you. I appreciate it because pretty much everyone who comes on here can lower their grocery bill, and everybody plays the, “Oh, there’s no way. Ramit Sethi is so out of touch. When was the last time you shopped for–” I go, look, nobody even knows their numbers when they go to the grocery store.

[00:17:20] If you literally just say, “I want to save 50 bucks.” You can save 50 bucks, almost everybody at the grocery store. That’s pretty cool. You set a goal. You saved 200 bucks. That’s awesome. I appreciate it. All right. I think we need to just look at the numbers, honestly. So first of all, what was it like filling out the CSP together?

[00:17:41] Linda: I mean, we talk about money a lot, so I think it was just getting it down on paper.

[00:17:45] Ramit: Who wrote all the words on the CSP?

[00:17:50] Linda: Nathan.

[00:17:51] Nathan: I did.

[00:17:51] Ramit: Nathan, what the [Bleep], man? You wrote these 400 paragraphs. I’m like, no wonder they don’t feel good about money.

[Narration]

[00:18:01] Ramit: Okay, I just need to explain what I’m seeing here. Without even reading a single number on their CSP, I can see clear as day that Nathan and Linda are overcomplicating their finances. There are a hundred notes in the margins. A CSP is supposed to be simple. Nathan’s explanation helps me understand that he’s actually not just being impulsive. He’s anxious, and he’s insecure about things beyond money, and his CSP is just a symptom.

[00:18:30] In fact, his entire financial setup is just a symptom. In the meantime, Linda seems okay with this, but I got to tell you, I would not be. At what point do you actually start to feel good about money? Right now, my suspicion is that Nathan will never feel good about it. Let me take a look at their numbers after a quick break.

[00:18:50] Welcome back. Let’s keep going.

[Interview]

[00:18:52] Nathan: Basically, part of the reason of wanting to jump on here too is so that I can get all this out and then I can go live my life.

[00:18:59] Ramit: Hold on. You guys talk about money every single day. You come home at night. You go,” I’m tired. Let’s talk about our Rich Life.” Seems like maybe the issue isn’t the CSP, but something deeper.

[00:19:12] Nathan: I went over the CSP four times before this call, just making sure that everything was tied, I understood everything. But it’s funny. To me, I’m like, “Man, I’m just really well prepared.” And then when you come in, you’re like, you’re [Bleep] nuts. And I go, “Okay. I could see how that–“

[00:19:27] Ramit: Think about it. Do you start to see some links? So applying 10 times, writing extremely exhaustive details. First of all, why is there a line item for a diaper when it’s $100 per month? And then two, there’s a description next to it like I don’t know what diapers are. Environmentally conscious brand. Nathan–

[00:19:53] Linda: Nathan, I love you.

[00:19:54] Ramit: What’s the need to explain it all? Tell me about that.

[00:19:57] Nathan: Yeah. So I put on the diapers there because I noticed that we spend it regularly. Go, “Oh, okay, so this is a fixed cost because we regularly do that.” And then as I was going down, I was like, “Well, should this all go under the 15% miscellaneous?” So I think I wrote the sustainability part because I would go to Costco and buy diapers, but she wants to get sustainable diapers.

[00:20:23] Ramit: I think that the CSP leaves fingerprints of every person and couple that fills it out. Every couple fills it out differently. When I look at this CSP, what do you think I see?

[00:20:40] Linda: Anxiety.

[00:20:41] Ramit: Yes. Anxiety.

[00:20:43] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:20:43] Ramit: What else?

[00:20:46] Nathan: That’s the big one.

[00:20:47] Ramit: Clinging onto every detail. Why?

[00:20:53] Linda: I think we feel stressed right now. We’re not used to having to think about our spending. And so now that we do, it’s been a big change. So I think we do carry anxiety and stress.

[00:21:08] Nathan: When we first met, I was thinking about spending all the time. I still think about spending all the time. And it’s funny because my parents are like, why are you so stressed all the time? Because you made me stress. They came from Vietnam during a war time. All they had was the degrees on their back.

[00:21:26] And they go, “Look, you get ahead in your life because of your degrees. They can never take that away from you. But now they’re like, “Why are you so stressed?” Or they go, “Hey, we didn’t teach you to be cheap. We taught you to be frugal.” And I think it’s funny just because I’m a product of you guys.

[00:21:48] Ramit: Yeah. It’s true you are a product of them, of course. But you also get the chance to turn the page to the next chapter of your life.

[00:21:58] Nathan: I know I’m thinking small. I want to think big, and I want to get better at it. I think where I appreciate myself is I’ve done therapy. I’m always looking to continue to improve. But partly, with my insecurity of doing the right thing, I might take it too far sometimes.

[00:22:20] Ramit: I appreciate that. I think you’re pretty self-aware. I think you have both hit upon what the CSP reveals to me. It reveals anxiety above and beyond everything else, and that is manifested through– the CSP is easily double, two to three times longer than anyone else’s CSP. Okay. Way too many categories.

[00:22:44] It’s overly precise when that’s not the point. Anxiety causes you to go deeper and deeper and deeper into the weeds to look for precision as if the meaning of life is to get more precise on your CSP. That’s not the meaning of a Rich Life. The meaning of a Rich Life is to design it and then to use your money to live it.

[00:23:08] It’ll be very difficult to live a Rich Life if you are constantly down in the 3-dollar weeds. So that’s the first thing it reveals. Second, it reveals micromanagement, like, if we control everything, then nothing will get by us. Almost like trying to stop the ocean from flooding by holding your arms out. Can never happen.

[00:23:28] And three, it just reveals chaos to me. When I think of calm, cool, and collected with money, I think of someone who’s fluid. They know their numbers, what’s our income? What’s our net? Are we saving enough? What’s our savings rate, investment rate, asset allocation? When are we going to be a million? Those key numbers. And the rest of it, we can be fluid. We can have it live somewhere, but not have to control it all the time. How does that strike you, Nathan?

[00:23:55] Nathan: When I don’t have that control over those numbers, I don’t want to wake up and be like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t put enough into VTSAX, and I missed out on this opportunity.” The last three years, we had a financial advisor who was doing 1%, and then lo and behold, I read this book. Don’t do 1%.

[00:24:15] I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I need to take back control of my money.” Because that’s what happens if I let it coast. Things like that slip by me. It could be Asian culture too. They go, “Look, if you’re in control of everything, you’re not going to miss anything.”

[00:24:27] Ramit: Do you notice what just happened there? What did I say first, and then what was your response?

[00:24:35] Nathan: How do you feel about this? And then I went into a whole story.

[00:24:38] Ramit: I want to try to recalibrate the dynamic right now. What might be another answer you give me?

[Narration]

[00:24:46] Ramit: Before we hear his answer, I need a quick favor from you. If you’re enjoying this show, please hit the Subscribe button. It really helps me and my team.

[Interview]

[00:24:53] Nathan: Wow. I didn’t think about that. That’s something I can try.

[00:24:57] Ramit: Nice. Here’s another alternative answer you might give. ” Oh my gosh, I never thought about it like that. And now that you pointed out, I noticed that the reason I have 50 lines in the fixed cost area is that I feel I have to control everything. Maybe the first thing I can do is to focus on five key numbers and not worry about those things that I used to worry about.” You see the difference in that answer?

[00:25:26] Nathan: Yeah. It’s looking ahead and not looking back, like you said.

[00:25:28] Ramit: Yeah.

[00:25:29] Nathan: What’s so tough is it is just not natural for me to do that.

[00:25:32] Ramit: Just because something isn’t natural– it’s not natural to ride a bike the first time. It’s not natural to eat ceviche, whatever. And what might be a different way to say it is, “Wow, here’s what I could try going forward.” Doesn’t mean you have to get it perfect. It’s just, “Here’s what I could try.” And it just totally recharacterizes the way that you’re talking about yourself. You’re not stuck in the past. You define your future. All right. Let’s look at the numbers in the CSP. So here we go. We pull up the CSP. Linda, why don’t you read the word in bold and then the full number next to it?

[00:26:10] Linda: The assets are 2.3 million. Investments are 694,000. Savings is 79,000, and debt is 1.5 million.

[00:26:23] Ramit: Okay. Total net worth.

[00:26:24] Linda: 1.5 million.

[00:26:26] Ramit: Okay. 1.5 million in your 30s. How do y’all feel about that?

[00:26:31] Linda: This is why I say I feel like we’ve lost a little bit of faith, because we’ve gotten here. We’ve done the work, and I think sometimes I have more faith and more emotional about some of our decisions, and Nathan is more analytical, so he can sometimes struggle if I don’t do all the big long calculations.

[00:26:55] Ramit: What was my question to you, Linda?

[00:26:57] Nathan: How do you feel about that?

[00:26:58] Linda: I feel good about it.

[00:27:00] Ramit: Why do I talk to every depressed millionaire in the country on this show? What the [Bleep] is wrong with everybody? Linda, did you notice what you just did?

[00:27:10] Linda: Downplayed that we have that much money.

[00:27:15] Ramit: Yeah. And what else? What did you do instead?

[00:27:19] Linda: Look at a problem.

[00:27:20] Ramit: You’re the typical American living in the suburb who has a lot of money and somebody goes, “Oh my God, what a beautiful kitchen.” “Oh, well, the problem was the Calacatta marble from Italy. It’s so crazy how long it takes.” to try and give you a compliment. $1.5 million in your 30s, and the question is, how do you feel about that? Let’s try it again, Linda.

[00:27:41] Linda: Okay. I feel good. We worked our [Bleep] off for that.

[00:27:44] Ramit: Oh [Bleep]. That’s a good answer. Okay. Nathan, how do you feel about that?

[00:27:50] Nathan: I’m unsure.

[00:27:51] Ramit: Okay, that’s honest. Go on.

[00:27:53] Nathan: It’s partly because of the world we live in, and it’s always getting more and more. So 1.5, I know that that’s more than a lot of people, but is that a good start for where we want to take my Rich Life, basically?

[Narration]

[00:28:13] Ramit: All right. Listen, I’m well aware how absurd it sounds for millionaires in their 30s to talk about how unsure they are if they have enough, and yet this is real. A lot of people don’t have that kind of money, but they believe that some magical day when they have more, they’ll suddenly feel good about it.

[00:28:33] As you’ve heard on this show, just having more money does not change how you feel about it. There are also a lot of people with money or a house or a beautiful family who still worry. That’s not stupid, and that’s not absurd. That’s human. I think it’s a beautiful thing to listen to people’s worries, to meet them where they are, and in some cases, tell them, “Hey, your feelings might be real, but they are out of sync with reality.”

[00:29:01] And that’s the last tactic I want to point out to you. You’ll notice that both of them answer in terms of problems, often in terms of the past. “How do you feel?” “Well, it’s okay, but I’m not sure it’ll be enough. And when I was younger, I always thought–” Sometimes the best thing you can do is to notice your thought patterns and your speech patterns and change them because our language often becomes our destiny. Like this. They might say, “I’m really proud of how far we’ve come. I still feel anxious about my future. But my top goal right now is to appreciate where we are as a family.”

[Interview]

[00:29:38] Ramit: You struggled to connect to your feelings, right?

[00:29:40] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:29:41] Ramit: Yeah, I get it, as an Indian guy. I totally get it. Somewhat similar upbringing, I’m sure. Not really taught about how to connect with our feelings. I noticed because when I ask you how you feel, you give me a thinking answer. In fact, you pivoted to, “Are we going to have enough?” Which is a mathematical question. Talk about this with your therapist?

[00:30:04] Nathan: Yeah. What just came up to my head was you come home one day and you get an A minus and your dad’s like, “Why didn’t you get an A?”

[00:30:13] Ramit: Yeah. Happened all the time. I’m sure we both know a lot of people who grew up with similar upbringing. Parent like, A plus, that’s expected, all that. It’s interesting that some people take well to that, and they’re like, “Yeah, I like to work,” or, “I have high expectations,” whatever. And I think one of the things that I hear from you, you told me, is I constantly need reassurance that I’m doing right, which I’m 100% sure traces back to childhood.

[00:30:44] Nathan: Talking to therapists, it’s definitely always the central part of me that we talk about, and a lot of times they go, “Hey, look, you’re enough.”

[00:30:55] Ramit: You are enough already, without even looking at all the millions of dollars you have. You don’t believe it though.

[00:31:04] Linda: He also doesn’t believe it if I am the one that tells him. He needs to hear from somebody other than me.

[00:31:09] Nathan: Hearing stuff from your loved ones, you’re like, “Yeah, you’re my loved one. You have to tell me that. When you hear it from other people, it’s different.

[00:31:18] Ramit: What Linda said is really interesting. She may have the exact math that I have, but you’re not going to listen unless you hear it from, what, a financial advisor, a guy who wrote a bestselling book, etc.?

[00:31:31] And while it’s cool, we get the chance to talk, in life, ultimately, what makes you successful is to be able to parse what’s going on and then make most of the time the right decision for yourselves. It’s like, “Hey, if we compound $1.5 million for 40 years or 30 years, how much will we have?” You can run that. What does the calculation tell you? Will you have enough?

[00:31:59] Nathan: It says around, anywhere from the sites have gone, seven to 9 million.

[00:32:05] Ramit: Is that enough?

[00:32:06] Nathan: Right now, I’d say no,

[00:32:08] Ramit: Okay. All right. What is the number that’s enough. Is there a number?

[00:32:13] Nathan: Probably 10, 11.

[00:32:15] Ramit: Okay. What’s the difference between seven and 10?

[00:32:20] Nathan: So what I’ve tried to do is calculate, “Okay, what is college going to be for my kids?” So I got two kids. I want to have the option to pay for my kids’ college if they need it. Guessing they’re going to have two kids each, so that’s four kids. Want to give them a little nest egg if they need it. I want to give my kids some down payment for a house if they need it. Honestly, there’s things that my parents were able to do as refugees. I am sad or nervous that I won’t be able to necessarily do the same things that they’re able to do for their three kids.

[00:33:04] Ramit: Linda, what do you think hearing this?

[00:33:06] Linda: I have faith that we will be able to sort it out. Yeah, you try to make the best decision with the information you have at the time, but if you make the wrong decision, I think we’ve proven over the past eight years that we’ve been together that we can fix those decisions.

[00:33:23] And so I struggle that he doesn’t have that same faith and that he carries so much anxiety about all of these things because I don’t necessarily agree that we won’t be able to provide all of these things for our kids and grandkids.

[00:33:41] Ramit: All right. I’m just writing down a few words I just heard from you. I just want to point something out. We’re sitting here talking about your CSP. We haven’t even gotten to the income yet. The words that you both use to describe the current situation is sad, struggle, lost faith, and don’t have confidence. We’re all looking at the exact same numbers. And this is the beautiful and confusing part of money psychology. We are all looking at the same numbers, and all three of us see something completely different. How can that be?

[00:34:14] Linda: So part of it is that we’ve been maxing out everything that we can for the past couple of years, and we are not currently maxing those things out.

[00:34:21] Ramit: And if you’re not maxing things out, it makes you, according to your own definition as a saver, a what?

[00:34:30] Linda: I don’t know.

[00:34:31] Ramit: A failure. Think about it.

[00:34:33] Linda: When we were maxing everything out and we were doing everything we should, Nathan was not as riddled with anxiety about it as he currently is. But since we’ve stopped doing what we’re used to and we’re focused more on more short-term gains than long-term gains, I think it’s been a struggle.

[00:34:53] Ramit: Give me an example. What happened?

[00:34:54] Linda: Nathan spends a lot of time in the conscious spending plan, but then I don’t necessarily think when he like hits a button on Amazon he’s consciously spending.

[00:35:02] Ramit: He loves the conscious spending plan, but he also loves spending unconsciously. Okay, go on.

[00:35:08] Linda: In this coming year, we’ve made the decisions we made in order to get our forever home and build this life for our children. So we have to be more conscious of what we’re buying and be more aware of where we’re putting our money and focus on the things that are really important.

[00:35:25] Ramit: You guys are not getting the point. You’re stuck in the weeds. You’re stuck in the tactics. We are three of us looking at the same exact numbers. One of us, Nathan, is going, “This is a [Bleep] disaster. I’m worried. I’m stressed. How am I going to have enough to pay for my great grandchildren’s college graduate school? There’s no way. I’m sad that I can’t do it. Sad. That’s the word you use, Nathan. Sad. Talking about $1.5 million net worth in your 30s.

[00:35:55] I’m sad that I can’t do something for people who are not even born yet. Your kids’ kids. I’m not kidding. This is what you said. Then we have Linda who’s going, well, he worries a lot. We are spending a lot, and it’s stressful, and he’s spending unconsciously. So there’s that. It’s a lot of, like, he, he, he. It’s good, but it’s also bad. And then there’s me going, “What the [Bleep] is going on right now? When I calculated this, I easily calculated $11 million at retirement.

[00:36:35] I didn’t even do anything. I just plugged in the exact numbers you have, and it’s 11 million. I didn’t even talk about your assets, selling your assets. That’s way more money too. 11 million bucks. And I go, “Yeah, your spending is a little high, but there’s some obvious reasons why. We can fix that in 10 minutes.”

[00:36:49] But here’s the point. You are looking at the world through a set of lenses, Nathan, where you are always through exclusively going to see the downside. You could have $20 million right now, and you would not be happy. You would be worried. What would you be saying at 20 million? I don’t know. There’s a lot of risk. We’re paying out too much in investment fees. What about our kids? Trust costs a lot of money. And the question I have for you is, do you want to go the rest of your life feeling bad about your money?

[00:37:17] Nathan: No.

[00:37:18] Ramit: Are you sure?

[00:37:20] Nathan: Positive.

[00:37:20] Ramit: Okay. Who are you if you’re not worrying about money?

[00:37:24] Nathan: I’m lazy. I am somebody who’s not striving to be better.

[00:37:30] Ramit: Yeah. Because in your mind, the opposite of worrying is lazy. Linda, what is it for you?

[00:37:37] Linda: Relaxing.

[00:37:38] Ramit: Yeah. That’s how it is for most people, Nathan. The opposite of worrying is relaxed, calm. But for you, because you not only were raised worrying probably, you have now come to actually thrive on it. Think about it. You come home from work, and you go, “CSP time. I’m worried.” And it gives you that feeling, doesn’t it? Like I have a purpose. I’m worrying.

[00:38:06] And now you’re not just worrying for yourself, you’re worrying for your family and your great grandchildren. I am worrying because that’s what I do as a man. That’s my job, is to worry and provide for five generations forward. But if I took away the worry from you, then what would it leave?

[00:38:26] Nathan: Vulnerability. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I’m totally exposed now. This is who I am. Is this good enough?”

[Narration]

[00:38:35] Ramit: I’m going to cut in here because this is such a powerful statement. If I take away the worry, is this good enough? Am I good enough? I think most of us feel this in some way. I know I do. If I wasn’t a CEO, who would I be? What if I wasn’t a husband? What if I wasn’t in shape? What if I wasn’t known online? Who would I be?

[00:38:58] And if you really twist a knife on that, starts to feel very uncomfortable. Nathan takes his anxiety, and he redirects it to working harder. And in a way, that’s constructive, which is why optimizers like Nathan can often get lost in their optimization. They justify it. They say, “Hey, me being in control has gotten me good results, so I’m going to get more in control, and therefore I’ll get more good results.”

[00:39:27] But there’s a problem. You can’t control everything. In fact, the more you do, the more you start to lose a sense of what’s truly important. When I started my business, I was a control freak. A lot of entrepreneurs are. In fact, I told myself that a lot of entrepreneurs are control freaks. Ha ha ha. It became a half joke to me. I obsessed over every tiny detail. I wrote every email, every Instagram caption.

[00:39:51] And as my business grew, I couldn’t keep up worrying about the small details. There just weren’t enough hours in the day for me to obsess over every single social media caption and email, everything. And I had to systematically strip control away from myself. And my team certainly helped.

[00:40:10] They told me over and over for years, “You shouldn’t be doing this anymore.” It took a long time, and that is what allowed my business to grow. It also allowed me to focus on the bigger picture, and frankly, it allowed me to have more fun. My challenge here is to help Nathan see that there’s a better future ahead, one in which he can willingly give up control because he’s earned the right to.

[00:40:36] Let’s take a quick pause to support our sponsors.

[00:40:40] Now back to the show.

[00:00:00] Linda: Nathan is more of a like, I want to get this done really quickly. He’s a list doer, so he wants to check things off of his list.

[00:00:06] Nathan: I’m very analytical, want to make sure that the money that I calculated in our retirement is going to meet the goals that I have for our family.

[00:00:14] Ramit: Nathan is a 35-year-old dentist, and he’s the ultimate worrier.

[00:00:18] Nathan: I get nervous. I have insecurities, and I think that that’s why I’m always looking for validation.

[00:00:25] Ramit: Linda is 37 years old, and she spends a lot of energy helping Nathan feel okay about their finances.

[00:00:32] Linda: We’re very stressed about money just because we can’t spend the way that we used to. It’s been a big change. So I think we do carry anxiety and stress.

[00:00:41] Ramit: But Nathan’s constant optimizing is causing arguments between him and his wife. His anxiety has gone through the roof, and he’s desperate to get my take on their finances.

[00:00:51] Nathan: I moved the goalposts. We make a decision, and then I learned some new bit of information, and then I go back.

[00:00:57] Ramit: And Linda, she just wants Nathan to chill out.

[00:01:00] Linda: I think we both prioritize different things. I want Nathan to feel more secure in the decisions that we’ve made as a family.

[00:01:07] Ramit: Can Nathan and Linda get on the same page and see the actual amazing reality of their finances?

[00:01:13] What you call research is really just worry disguised as homework. It just adds more and more stress because, again, stress is life.

[00:01:21] Nathan: I thought like, “Man, I’m just really well prepared.” And then when you come in, you’re like, “You’re [Bleep] nuts.” And I go, “Okay. I could see how that–“

[Narration]

[00:01:30] Ramit: All right. We have Nathan and Linda. Let’s see. “We bought a new house, and now our mortgage has doubled. Expense is the same, and he won’t stop spending. We’d like Ramit to help us with our conscious spending plan to see where we can cut. We are unable to stop talking about money every day.” Huh? Why? “Oh, we have talked about Ramit for the last three weeks nonstop.” Fantastic. What’s the problem? I don’t see any problem here.

[00:01:58] Ramit: I want to take a look at the CSP. What? Assets, $2.3 million. Why they sound so alarmed already? What the hell? Why has this happened to me every time? In their 30s. All right. Investments $694,000. By the way, their CSP has a lot of writing on it– a lot. You find this with people who really feel the need to get every detail out. I’m like, it’s supposed to be a spreadsheet with a few numbers, not a freaking essay on the right side.

[00:02:29] All right. Savings, $79,000. Debt, 1.5 million. Okay. It says their business and their home. Interesting. And then total net worth, 1.5 million. Very good in their 30s. Okay, let’s take a look at the income. $30,000 a month. Okay. So $365,000 a year. What? Fixed costs are at 76%? No way.

[00:02:57] It’s one thing if your fixed costs are 62 or 63% when you have a household income of $55,000. Things are expensive. Bread would be proportionately expensive if one of you is making $20,000 a year. But making $365,000 a year and having 76% fixed costs, that’s typically overspending.

[00:03:17] This CSP has people’s fingerprints all over it. And what I can already tell is that because they have so many categories, explanations for every single line, they are way deep in the weeds, and they are missing the big picture. Their CSP is basically double the length of every other CSP because they just added a bunch of stuff. Maybe I need to lock the CSP so you can’t add any more rows. I never had this situation before, but I think we may need to make a change.

[00:03:45] Something’s weird here. I have a note from my producer. “Ask them how many times they applied to the podcast.”All right. We’ll find out. This is a very interesting CSP, but I feel like I’m going to have to be pretty direct on today’s call. Let’s see what happens.

[Interview]

[00:04:02] Nathan: I was sitting in my basement, just alone, and I had heard about you, and so I applied. And then I applied in her name, then I applied in my name again, and I applied in her name. I don’t know. I just thought the more times I applied then your team would be like, “You know what? This guy’s serious. We would love to have him on our show.”

[00:04:25] Ramit: How many times did you apply?

[00:04:27] Nathan: I think eight.

[00:04:28] Ramit: That’s weird, right?

[00:04:30] Nathan: I am quirky like that sometimes. If I have a goal in mind, I have always pushed really hard to get it. I was trying to create my own luck.

[00:04:42] Ramit: Are you impulsive?

[00:04:45] Nathan: No.

[00:04:46] Ramit: Oh, wow. Look at the body language. He says no. She’s nodding furiously. Okay. All right. So you filled out the application and spoke to my colleague. And Linda, what did you think of this?

[00:04:59] Linda: I want Nathan to feel more secure in the decisions that we’ve made as a family. I think he is lost a little bit of faith in us, especially since we moved, and so I’m here to support him. I hope that this helps him get some faith back because history has shown us that we do have faith in each other, but the last six months has been a big change for us. So I think we’ve lost some of that.

[00:05:26] Ramit: Okay. Let’s talk about what happened six months ago.

[00:05:30] Linda: We bought our dream house.

[00:05:31] Ramit: Okay.

[00:05:32] Linda: At a 7% interest, and we had a 3% interest in our old house. So it’s a different monthly payment. Going into buying the house, we came up with a strategy because we knew that interest rates would eventually come down. And we talked with lenders and came up with a plan of refinancing.

[00:05:53] So we took out a loan that you could refinance. So we’re just waiting for the interest to come down. And once we get to our goal, we’ll save about $1,500 a month on our mortgage, and that will get us to a place where we feel more comfortable. We’re savers, and I’m used to saving more. And so I think when we look at what we’re saving now versus what we used to save, it’s different.

[00:06:15] Ramit: When you say you’re a saver, finish the sentence for me. I’m a saver, and if I’m not saving, then I am, what?

[00:06:24] Linda: If I’m not saving, I don’t have money for my kids to college and have retirement money and savings for house projects. If we’re not saving as much as we used to, then we just can’t do the things that I have in my mind, and it’s just an adjustment.

[00:06:41] Ramit: Nathan, do you agree?

[00:06:43] Nathan: We came together. We go, “Look, we’d like to move out of our neighborhood. This is going to be a bigger house, and it’s going to be a bigger mortgage.” And I think that in the time I’m like, “Yeah, I think that’s what we want to do.”

[00:06:58] And so we make the move and we buy it. Then I’m doing research, and I see one of your podcasts that says, “Hey, this is how you can figure out if you can afford a house.” And then I go, “Oh, shoot. Linda, we didn’t even look at that. We didn’t calculate that.”

[00:07:17] And then I get nervous. I go, “Hey, did we even look at this? Did we do this?” And then I freak out a little bit and she was like, “Look, we embarked on this together, and now you’re moving the goalposts on us.”

[00:07:28] And that’s where we argue. And that’s where I think that she goes, “Hey, you’ve lost faith in us. Look, I know our finances too. We don’t do it the same. You’re reading Ramit’s book. You’re doing all these things, and how I get there is different than how Ramit or you are getting there.”

[00:07:51] Ramit: Is your fight about me? Because that’s what it sounds like.

[00:07:54] Linda: Well, every night after the kids go to bed, he is like, “Okay, let’s talk about our Rich Life as it pertains to vacation in the next five years.” And while I like that, he wants to talk about our Rich Life often. But Nathan, one thing you said is– we did have a financial advisor that we talked to prior to buying this house that gave us a max mortgage, and we’re actually lower than that. So I think he sometimes forgets that we talked to experts about smart financial decisions. We haven’t made our decisions in a vacuum.

[00:08:26] Ramit: And a good decision involves lots of different inputs, not just one person, not just one book. Lots of different perspectives. And then ultimately you decide what’s right for your individual situation.

[Narration]

[00:08:37] Ramit: I have a comment to make, and it’s not going to be the one you think. Lots of people make an impulsive decision to buy a house and then they dive in headfirst to much larger costs as they freak out because suddenly they don’t have anything left over at the end of the month, which happened because, you know. They didn’t run the numbers before they made the biggest financial decision of their lives.

[00:08:57] But that’s not what’s happening here. Nathan and Linda did run the numbers. They even spoke with a financial advisor who gave them the go ahead. And so everything was seemingly fine until Nathan found new information– my book, my podcast, and that has him second guessing himself. My first thought is that Nathan is impulsive. My clues are that he applied almost 10 times to my podcast because he’s questioning everything based on reading some new book, and because he’s treating the idea of a Rich Life as a task that should be talked about every single night.

[00:09:36] Nathan even sent this email to my team after applying several times in less than a week, basically asking how he should tailor his application so they’ll get picked. Now, this is the beginning of a real problem because there will always be new information that contradicts a decision you make. I constantly get messages in Instagram and other DM platforms with people saying, what do you think about this thing? What do you think about Apple credit card?

[00:10:05] They’re going to constantly be second guessing themselves for the rest of their lives. What you really need to do is to develop a deeply rooted confidence in your decision making, and you get that confidence through competence. Now, I have to say I’m also curious about Linda’s reaction to Nathan.

[Interview]

[00:10:24] Ramit: Linda, the way you talk about this situation feels very casual. Like, “Ah, we got a bigger house, and we knew it going in. Yeah, it’s just an adjustment for us.” There’s that. And then Nathan sounds a little bit more like, “Hmm, I’m freaking out a bit. I didn’t run the numbers properly. Now, I’m not sure.” Okay. There’s that. And then there’s the application. On the application, one out of 10, how serious is this? Eight. We have talked about Ramit for the last three weeks nonstop. We keep fighting because of it. What’s going on here?

[00:11:07] Linda: For me, we need to reign back our spending. We were able to buy whatever we wanted when we were in the last house. Until we can go through our financial plan, which is going to take about a year until interest rates come down from the time we bought the house, we have to be more conscious of it. And I think sometimes Nathan is more of a like, I want to get this done really quickly. He’s a list doer, so he wants to check things off of his list. And I don’t know that we can do that as much. So we do conflict sometimes about that.

[00:11:40] Ramit: Hmm. What do you think, Nathan?

[00:11:43] Nathan: I’m very analytical. Want to make sure that the money that I calculated in our retirement is going to meet the goals that I have for our family. Part of the reason that I get nervous, I don’t know if this is just me or not, but as somebody who is a minority in US culture, especially an Asian American, I have insecurities, and I think that that’s why I’m always looking for validation.

[00:12:14] Ramit: That’s pretty insightful. Okay. I appreciate the self-awareness. Linda, does that strike you as true?

[00:12:22] Linda: I think we’re very stressed about money just because we can’t spend the way that we used to recently. I will say that I was not as conscious about our spending when we were in the last house because we could afford to not be.

[00:12:40] Ramit: This sounds like every American. Literally, this is the American story. Oh, it was the two of us. Maybe a little baby. And then we were living large. We rented, or we had a small little house. We would eat out and we would travel, and it was fantastic. And then we got a big house because we’re Americans. And then, uh-oh, we can’t spend all the money we used to because we have to repair our basement. Is this not the classic Americana story?

[00:13:13] Linda: Yes, but we’re in the suburbs now. We are on a train with a bunch of kids. We plan on staying here forever. So we’re cultivating a childhood for our kids.

[00:13:24] Ramit: There’s nothing wrong with it. I’m just saying it’s not that surprising. Of course, you can’t spend as much. You bought a much bigger house at a much higher interest rate. It’s like, “Yeah.” What’s the surprise here?

[00:13:36] Linda: How stressful it would be to step back.

[00:13:40] Ramit: So it’s been harder than you thought to cut back on spending. Okay. Nathan is saying, I need validation. I’m not sure if we have made the right decision. What else?

[00:13:54] Linda: I think we both prioritize different things. Like my focus is getting the kids that they need, and his focus is getting the house, what it needs. And so between the two things, we’re trying to take care of things on our different paths, but then it’s small ticket items that add up and are harder to cut.

[00:14:14] Ramit: Like what?

[00:14:15] Linda: I just bought a backpack for my son because he needed a backpack to go to school.

[00:14:19] Ramit: How much was the backpack for your little one who’s, what, four years old?

[00:14:23] Linda: Two.

[00:14:24] Ramit: Two. How much was it?

[00:14:26] Linda: $40.

[00:14:27] Ramit: And What about you, Nathan? What are you spending money on?

[00:14:30] Nathan: Most of the stuff is for our house, or every once in a while I like to play some golf. For our lawn, I was getting fertilizer. I was getting mulch and the mole traps.

[00:14:47] Ramit: How much are these mold traps? I have to know.

[00:14:49] Nathan: For a two pack it was 50 bucks.

[00:14:51] Ramit: Two packs, 50 bucks. Okay. And how many of those do you need to get?

[00:14:56] Nathan: Two or three.

[00:14:57] Ramit: That’s a lot. You have to talk to someone who doesn’t know any of the words we’re using right now. How often do you have to get these?

[00:15:03] Nathan: If you notice you have mole activity, you get them once, and you can reuse it.

[00:15:07] Ramit: All right. [Bleep], I’m going to get roasted so hard online. Ramit Sethi doesn’t know about moles. What a–

[00:15:15] Linda: It wasn’t the cost of the mole trap. To me, it’s the mindset around spending. We already paid the mole people to get rid of the moles.

[00:15:27] Ramit: Wait. Okay, hold on. Are we talking about M-O-L-D, dog, or M-O-L-E, like the little–

[00:15:35] Linda: Moles in backyard?

[00:15:35] Ramit: Oh my God.

[00:15:36] Nathan: A little rodent.

[00:15:37] Ramit: Okay. Wow. This is hilarious. Moles. Who knew? All right. Okay. So you don’t like that he’s being wasteful by buying duplicate mole traps. Nathan, do you feel any particular way about her purchases?

[00:16:00] Nathan: She really likes to do rid well, which is sustainable recycling. And she likes to buy organic for our groceries. And for the longest time, with our grocery bills being higher, those things, I don’t love it.

[00:16:20] I always say like, “Do we have to get these things?” I feel like we can get a broccoli that’s not organic, and we’re just going to be just fine. And so she gets upset that she’s like, “This is really important to me,” eating what she says is healthy, which I agree to a certain degree, but when it hurts bottom line, sometimes I go, “Look, that’s something that we can cut out.”

[00:16:48] Ramit: Hmm. Do you all have an agreement on how much you should be spending? Basically, do you use a CSP?

[00:16:55] Linda: We know what our budget is, and we have lowered our monthly grocery bill by $200 a month doing that.

[00:17:00] Ramit: Oh wow. 200 bucks. The magic number. I appreciate that. That’s a great example. I’m not making fun of you. I appreciate it because pretty much everyone who comes on here can lower their grocery bill, and everybody plays the, “Oh, there’s no way. Ramit Sethi is so out of touch. When was the last time you shopped for–” I go, look, nobody even knows their numbers when they go to the grocery store.

[00:17:20] If you literally just say, “I want to save 50 bucks.” You can save 50 bucks, almost everybody at the grocery store. That’s pretty cool. You set a goal. You saved 200 bucks. That’s awesome. I appreciate it. All right. I think we need to just look at the numbers, honestly. So first of all, what was it like filling out the CSP together?

[00:17:41] Linda: I mean, we talk about money a lot, so I think it was just getting it down on paper.

[00:17:45] Ramit: Who wrote all the words on the CSP?

[00:17:50] Linda: Nathan.

[00:17:51] Nathan: I did.

[00:17:51] Ramit: Nathan, what the [Bleep], man? You wrote these 400 paragraphs. I’m like, no wonder they don’t feel good about money.

[Narration]

[00:18:01] Ramit: Okay, I just need to explain what I’m seeing here. Without even reading a single number on their CSP, I can see clear as day that Nathan and Linda are overcomplicating their finances. There are a hundred notes in the margins. A CSP is supposed to be simple. Nathan’s explanation helps me understand that he’s actually not just being impulsive. He’s anxious, and he’s insecure about things beyond money, and his CSP is just a symptom.

[00:18:30] In fact, his entire financial setup is just a symptom. In the meantime, Linda seems okay with this, but I got to tell you, I would not be. At what point do you actually start to feel good about money? Right now, my suspicion is that Nathan will never feel good about it. Let me take a look at their numbers after a quick break.

[00:18:50] Welcome back. Let’s keep going.

[Interview]

[00:18:52] Nathan: Basically, part of the reason of wanting to jump on here too is so that I can get all this out and then I can go live my life.

[00:18:59] Ramit: Hold on. You guys talk about money every single day. You come home at night. You go,” I’m tired. Let’s talk about our Rich Life.” Seems like maybe the issue isn’t the CSP, but something deeper.

[00:19:12] Nathan: I went over the CSP four times before this call, just making sure that everything was tied, I understood everything. But it’s funny. To me, I’m like, “Man, I’m just really well prepared.” And then when you come in, you’re like, you’re [Bleep] nuts. And I go, “Okay. I could see how that–“

[00:19:27] Ramit: Think about it. Do you start to see some links? So applying 10 times, writing extremely exhaustive details. First of all, why is there a line item for a diaper when it’s $100 per month? And then two, there’s a description next to it like I don’t know what diapers are. Environmentally conscious brand. Nathan–

[00:19:53] Linda: Nathan, I love you.

[00:19:54] Ramit: What’s the need to explain it all? Tell me about that.

[00:19:57] Nathan: Yeah. So I put on the diapers there because I noticed that we spend it regularly. Go, “Oh, okay, so this is a fixed cost because we regularly do that.” And then as I was going down, I was like, “Well, should this all go under the 15% miscellaneous?” So I think I wrote the sustainability part because I would go to Costco and buy diapers, but she wants to get sustainable diapers.

[00:20:23] Ramit: I think that the CSP leaves fingerprints of every person and couple that fills it out. Every couple fills it out differently. When I look at this CSP, what do you think I see?

[00:20:40] Linda: Anxiety.

[00:20:41] Ramit: Yes. Anxiety.

[00:20:43] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:20:43] Ramit: What else?

[00:20:46] Nathan: That’s the big one.

[00:20:47] Ramit: Clinging onto every detail. Why?

[00:20:53] Linda: I think we feel stressed right now. We’re not used to having to think about our spending. And so now that we do, it’s been a big change. So I think we do carry anxiety and stress.

[00:21:08] Nathan: When we first met, I was thinking about spending all the time. I still think about spending all the time. And it’s funny because my parents are like, why are you so stressed all the time? Because you made me stress. They came from Vietnam during a war time. All they had was the degrees on their back.

[00:21:26] And they go, “Look, you get ahead in your life because of your degrees. They can never take that away from you. But now they’re like, “Why are you so stressed?” Or they go, “Hey, we didn’t teach you to be cheap. We taught you to be frugal.” And I think it’s funny just because I’m a product of you guys.

[00:21:48] Ramit: Yeah. It’s true you are a product of them, of course. But you also get the chance to turn the page to the next chapter of your life.

[00:21:58] Nathan: I know I’m thinking small. I want to think big, and I want to get better at it. I think where I appreciate myself is I’ve done therapy. I’m always looking to continue to improve. But partly, with my insecurity of doing the right thing, I might take it too far sometimes.

[00:22:20] Ramit: I appreciate that. I think you’re pretty self-aware. I think you have both hit upon what the CSP reveals to me. It reveals anxiety above and beyond everything else, and that is manifested through– the CSP is easily double, two to three times longer than anyone else’s CSP. Okay. Way too many categories.

[00:22:44] It’s overly precise when that’s not the point. Anxiety causes you to go deeper and deeper and deeper into the weeds to look for precision as if the meaning of life is to get more precise on your CSP. That’s not the meaning of a Rich Life. The meaning of a Rich Life is to design it and then to use your money to live it.

[00:23:08] It’ll be very difficult to live a Rich Life if you are constantly down in the 3-dollar weeds. So that’s the first thing it reveals. Second, it reveals micromanagement, like, if we control everything, then nothing will get by us. Almost like trying to stop the ocean from flooding by holding your arms out. Can never happen.

[00:23:28] And three, it just reveals chaos to me. When I think of calm, cool, and collected with money, I think of someone who’s fluid. They know their numbers, what’s our income? What’s our net? Are we saving enough? What’s our savings rate, investment rate, asset allocation? When are we going to be a million? Those key numbers. And the rest of it, we can be fluid. We can have it live somewhere, but not have to control it all the time. How does that strike you, Nathan?

[00:23:55] Nathan: When I don’t have that control over those numbers, I don’t want to wake up and be like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t put enough into VTSAX, and I missed out on this opportunity.” The last three years, we had a financial advisor who was doing 1%, and then lo and behold, I read this book. Don’t do 1%.

[00:24:15] I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I need to take back control of my money.” Because that’s what happens if I let it coast. Things like that slip by me. It could be Asian culture too. They go, “Look, if you’re in control of everything, you’re not going to miss anything.”

[00:24:27] Ramit: Do you notice what just happened there? What did I say first, and then what was your response?

[00:24:35] Nathan: How do you feel about this? And then I went into a whole story.

[00:24:38] Ramit: I want to try to recalibrate the dynamic right now. What might be another answer you give me?

[Narration]

[00:24:46] Ramit: Before we hear his answer, I need a quick favor from you. If you’re enjoying this show, please hit the Subscribe button. It really helps me and my team.

[Interview]

[00:24:53] Nathan: Wow. I didn’t think about that. That’s something I can try.

[00:24:57] Ramit: Nice. Here’s another alternative answer you might give. ” Oh my gosh, I never thought about it like that. And now that you pointed out, I noticed that the reason I have 50 lines in the fixed cost area is that I feel I have to control everything. Maybe the first thing I can do is to focus on five key numbers and not worry about those things that I used to worry about.” You see the difference in that answer?

[00:25:26] Nathan: Yeah. It’s looking ahead and not looking back, like you said.

[00:25:28] Ramit: Yeah.

[00:25:29] Nathan: What’s so tough is it is just not natural for me to do that.

[00:25:32] Ramit: Just because something isn’t natural– it’s not natural to ride a bike the first time. It’s not natural to eat ceviche, whatever. And what might be a different way to say it is, “Wow, here’s what I could try going forward.” Doesn’t mean you have to get it perfect. It’s just, “Here’s what I could try.” And it just totally recharacterizes the way that you’re talking about yourself. You’re not stuck in the past. You define your future. All right. Let’s look at the numbers in the CSP. So here we go. We pull up the CSP. Linda, why don’t you read the word in bold and then the full number next to it?

[00:26:10] Linda: The assets are 2.3 million. Investments are 694,000. Savings is 79,000, and debt is 1.5 million.

[00:26:23] Ramit: Okay. Total net worth.

[00:26:24] Linda: 1.5 million.

[00:26:26] Ramit: Okay. 1.5 million in your 30s. How do y’all feel about that?

[00:26:31] Linda: This is why I say I feel like we’ve lost a little bit of faith, because we’ve gotten here. We’ve done the work, and I think sometimes I have more faith and more emotional about some of our decisions, and Nathan is more analytical, so he can sometimes struggle if I don’t do all the big long calculations.

[00:26:55] Ramit: What was my question to you, Linda?

[00:26:57] Nathan: How do you feel about that?

[00:26:58] Linda: I feel good about it.

[00:27:00] Ramit: Why do I talk to every depressed millionaire in the country on this show? What the [Bleep] is wrong with everybody? Linda, did you notice what you just did?

[00:27:10] Linda: Downplayed that we have that much money.

[00:27:15] Ramit: Yeah. And what else? What did you do instead?

[00:27:19] Linda: Look at a problem.

[00:27:20] Ramit: You’re the typical American living in the suburb who has a lot of money and somebody goes, “Oh my God, what a beautiful kitchen.” “Oh, well, the problem was the Calacatta marble from Italy. It’s so crazy how long it takes.” to try and give you a compliment. $1.5 million in your 30s, and the question is, how do you feel about that? Let’s try it again, Linda.

[00:27:41] Linda: Okay. I feel good. We worked our [Bleep] off for that.

[00:27:44] Ramit: Oh [Bleep]. That’s a good answer. Okay. Nathan, how do you feel about that?

[00:27:50] Nathan: I’m unsure.

[00:27:51] Ramit: Okay, that’s honest. Go on.

[00:27:53] Nathan: It’s partly because of the world we live in, and it’s always getting more and more. So 1.5, I know that that’s more than a lot of people, but is that a good start for where we want to take my Rich Life, basically?

[Narration]

[00:28:13] Ramit: All right. Listen, I’m well aware how absurd it sounds for millionaires in their 30s to talk about how unsure they are if they have enough, and yet this is real. A lot of people don’t have that kind of money, but they believe that some magical day when they have more, they’ll suddenly feel good about it.

[00:28:33] As you’ve heard on this show, just having more money does not change how you feel about it. There are also a lot of people with money or a house or a beautiful family who still worry. That’s not stupid, and that’s not absurd. That’s human. I think it’s a beautiful thing to listen to people’s worries, to meet them where they are, and in some cases, tell them, “Hey, your feelings might be real, but they are out of sync with reality.”

[00:29:01] And that’s the last tactic I want to point out to you. You’ll notice that both of them answer in terms of problems, often in terms of the past. “How do you feel?” “Well, it’s okay, but I’m not sure it’ll be enough. And when I was younger, I always thought–” Sometimes the best thing you can do is to notice your thought patterns and your speech patterns and change them because our language often becomes our destiny. Like this. They might say, “I’m really proud of how far we’ve come. I still feel anxious about my future. But my top goal right now is to appreciate where we are as a family.”

[Interview]

[00:29:38] Ramit: You struggled to connect to your feelings, right?

[00:29:40] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:29:41] Ramit: Yeah, I get it, as an Indian guy. I totally get it. Somewhat similar upbringing, I’m sure. Not really taught about how to connect with our feelings. I noticed because when I ask you how you feel, you give me a thinking answer. In fact, you pivoted to, “Are we going to have enough?” Which is a mathematical question. Talk about this with your therapist?

[00:30:04] Nathan: Yeah. What just came up to my head was you come home one day and you get an A minus and your dad’s like, “Why didn’t you get an A?”

[00:30:13] Ramit: Yeah. Happened all the time. I’m sure we both know a lot of people who grew up with similar upbringing. Parent like, A plus, that’s expected, all that. It’s interesting that some people take well to that, and they’re like, “Yeah, I like to work,” or, “I have high expectations,” whatever. And I think one of the things that I hear from you, you told me, is I constantly need reassurance that I’m doing right, which I’m 100% sure traces back to childhood.

[00:30:44] Nathan: Talking to therapists, it’s definitely always the central part of me that we talk about, and a lot of times they go, “Hey, look, you’re enough.”

[00:30:55] Ramit: You are enough already, without even looking at all the millions of dollars you have. You don’t believe it though.

[00:31:04] Linda: He also doesn’t believe it if I am the one that tells him. He needs to hear from somebody other than me.

[00:31:09] Nathan: Hearing stuff from your loved ones, you’re like, “Yeah, you’re my loved one. You have to tell me that. When you hear it from other people, it’s different.

[00:31:18] Ramit: What Linda said is really interesting. She may have the exact math that I have, but you’re not going to listen unless you hear it from, what, a financial advisor, a guy who wrote a bestselling book, etc.?

[00:31:31] And while it’s cool, we get the chance to talk, in life, ultimately, what makes you successful is to be able to parse what’s going on and then make most of the time the right decision for yourselves. It’s like, “Hey, if we compound $1.5 million for 40 years or 30 years, how much will we have?” You can run that. What does the calculation tell you? Will you have enough?

[00:31:59] Nathan: It says around, anywhere from the sites have gone, seven to 9 million.

[00:32:05] Ramit: Is that enough?

[00:32:06] Nathan: Right now, I’d say no,

[00:32:08] Ramit: Okay. All right. What is the number that’s enough. Is there a number?

[00:32:13] Nathan: Probably 10, 11.

[00:32:15] Ramit: Okay. What’s the difference between seven and 10?

[00:32:20] Nathan: So what I’ve tried to do is calculate, “Okay, what is college going to be for my kids?” So I got two kids. I want to have the option to pay for my kids’ college if they need it. Guessing they’re going to have two kids each, so that’s four kids. Want to give them a little nest egg if they need it. I want to give my kids some down payment for a house if they need it. Honestly, there’s things that my parents were able to do as refugees. I am sad or nervous that I won’t be able to necessarily do the same things that they’re able to do for their three kids.

[00:33:04] Ramit: Linda, what do you think hearing this?

[00:33:06] Linda: I have faith that we will be able to sort it out. Yeah, you try to make the best decision with the information you have at the time, but if you make the wrong decision, I think we’ve proven over the past eight years that we’ve been together that we can fix those decisions.

[00:33:23] And so I struggle that he doesn’t have that same faith and that he carries so much anxiety about all of these things because I don’t necessarily agree that we won’t be able to provide all of these things for our kids and grandkids.

[00:33:41] Ramit: All right. I’m just writing down a few words I just heard from you. I just want to point something out. We’re sitting here talking about your CSP. We haven’t even gotten to the income yet. The words that you both use to describe the current situation is sad, struggle, lost faith, and don’t have confidence. We’re all looking at the exact same numbers. And this is the beautiful and confusing part of money psychology. We are all looking at the same numbers, and all three of us see something completely different. How can that be?

[00:34:14] Linda: So part of it is that we’ve been maxing out everything that we can for the past couple of years, and we are not currently maxing those things out.

[00:34:21] Ramit: And if you’re not maxing things out, it makes you, according to your own definition as a saver, a what?

[00:34:30] Linda: I don’t know.

[00:34:31] Ramit: A failure. Think about it.

[00:34:33] Linda: When we were maxing everything out and we were doing everything we should, Nathan was not as riddled with anxiety about it as he currently is. But since we’ve stopped doing what we’re used to and we’re focused more on more short-term gains than long-term gains, I think it’s been a struggle.

[00:34:53] Ramit: Give me an example. What happened?

[00:34:54] Linda: Nathan spends a lot of time in the conscious spending plan, but then I don’t necessarily think when he like hits a button on Amazon he’s consciously spending.

[00:35:02] Ramit: He loves the conscious spending plan, but he also loves spending unconsciously. Okay, go on.

[00:35:08] Linda: In this coming year, we’ve made the decisions we made in order to get our forever home and build this life for our children. So we have to be more conscious of what we’re buying and be more aware of where we’re putting our money and focus on the things that are really important.

[00:35:25] Ramit: You guys are not getting the point. You’re stuck in the weeds. You’re stuck in the tactics. We are three of us looking at the same exact numbers. One of us, Nathan, is going, “This is a [Bleep] disaster. I’m worried. I’m stressed. How am I going to have enough to pay for my great grandchildren’s college graduate school? There’s no way. I’m sad that I can’t do it. Sad. That’s the word you use, Nathan. Sad. Talking about $1.5 million net worth in your 30s.

[00:35:55] I’m sad that I can’t do something for people who are not even born yet. Your kids’ kids. I’m not kidding. This is what you said. Then we have Linda who’s going, well, he worries a lot. We are spending a lot, and it’s stressful, and he’s spending unconsciously. So there’s that. It’s a lot of, like, he, he, he. It’s good, but it’s also bad. And then there’s me going, “What the [Bleep] is going on right now? When I calculated this, I easily calculated $11 million at retirement.

[00:36:35] I didn’t even do anything. I just plugged in the exact numbers you have, and it’s 11 million. I didn’t even talk about your assets, selling your assets. That’s way more money too. 11 million bucks. And I go, “Yeah, your spending is a little high, but there’s some obvious reasons why. We can fix that in 10 minutes.”

[00:36:49] But here’s the point. You are looking at the world through a set of lenses, Nathan, where you are always through exclusively going to see the downside. You could have $20 million right now, and you would not be happy. You would be worried. What would you be saying at 20 million? I don’t know. There’s a lot of risk. We’re paying out too much in investment fees. What about our kids? Trust costs a lot of money. And the question I have for you is, do you want to go the rest of your life feeling bad about your money?

[00:37:17] Nathan: No.

[00:37:18] Ramit: Are you sure?

[00:37:20] Nathan: Positive.

[00:37:20] Ramit: Okay. Who are you if you’re not worrying about money?

[00:37:24] Nathan: I’m lazy. I am somebody who’s not striving to be better.

[00:37:30] Ramit: Yeah. Because in your mind, the opposite of worrying is lazy. Linda, what is it for you?

[00:37:37] Linda: Relaxing.

[00:37:38] Ramit: Yeah. That’s how it is for most people, Nathan. The opposite of worrying is relaxed, calm. But for you, because you not only were raised worrying probably, you have now come to actually thrive on it. Think about it. You come home from work, and you go, “CSP time. I’m worried.” And it gives you that feeling, doesn’t it? Like I have a purpose. I’m worrying.

[00:38:06] And now you’re not just worrying for yourself, you’re worrying for your family and your great grandchildren. I am worrying because that’s what I do as a man. That’s my job, is to worry and provide for five generations forward. But if I took away the worry from you, then what would it leave?

[00:38:26] Nathan: Vulnerability. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I’m totally exposed now. This is who I am. Is this good enough?”

[Narration]

[00:38:35] Ramit: I’m going to cut in here because this is such a powerful statement. If I take away the worry, is this good enough? Am I good enough? I think most of us feel this in some way. I know I do. If I wasn’t a CEO, who would I be? What if I wasn’t a husband? What if I wasn’t in shape? What if I wasn’t known online? Who would I be?

[00:38:58] And if you really twist a knife on that, starts to feel very uncomfortable. Nathan takes his anxiety, and he redirects it to working harder. And in a way, that’s constructive, which is why optimizers like Nathan can often get lost in their optimization. They justify it. They say, “Hey, me being in control has gotten me good results, so I’m going to get more in control, and therefore I’ll get more good results.”

[00:39:27] But there’s a problem. You can’t control everything. In fact, the more you do, the more you start to lose a sense of what’s truly important. When I started my business, I was a control freak. A lot of entrepreneurs are. In fact, I told myself that a lot of entrepreneurs are control freaks. Ha ha ha. It became a half joke to me. I obsessed over every tiny detail. I wrote every email, every Instagram caption.

[00:39:51] And as my business grew, I couldn’t keep up worrying about the small details. There just weren’t enough hours in the day for me to obsess over every single social media caption and email, everything. And I had to systematically strip control away from myself. And my team certainly helped.

[00:40:10] They told me over and over for years, “You shouldn’t be doing this anymore.” It took a long time, and that is what allowed my business to grow. It also allowed me to focus on the bigger picture, and frankly, it allowed me to have more fun. My challenge here is to help Nathan see that there’s a better future ahead, one in which he can willingly give up control because he’s earned the right to.

[00:40:36] Let’s take a quick pause to support our sponsors.

[00:40:40] Now back to the show.

[Interview]

[00:40:42] Ramit: Who am I if I’m not worrying about money?

[00:40:45] Nathan: What I want is when I’m not worried about money, I can be out of my head. I can be joyful.

[00:40:51] Ramit: That’s powerful. It’s really powerful. I’ve seen this meme online about someone who is in a prison, but the prison, I think, is coming from their own brain. And the prison has a door. They can just walk right through it. But because it’s coming from their own brain, they don’t realize it. It feels very much like that’s what’s going on here. Do you see the same way?

[00:41:15] Nathan: It’s definitely exhausting in my head. I want to break from shackles so that I can just be relaxed. Because I know at my core, Sunday mornings, I’m feeding my kids. We’re dancing to music. We’re just having an awesome time, awesome time. And then somewhere around– 12 o’clock hits, I’m like, “Okay, what do I need to be doing?” We got to worry about the house. We got to do all these things. I can’t just sit on the couch and just watch Netflix.

[00:41:48] Ramit: This is like the Asian Cinderella. The clock strikes 12, and then you start going like, “[Bleep], what do I need to worry about? Pick up the broom. I need to do this. I need to recalculate the CSP and run a compound interest calculation.” Damn. All my Asian friends are like, yeah, me too. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

[00:42:10] Let me give you an example from my own life. So I set my life up so that I’m not really worrying about money. What do I mean? Day-to-day bills are paid automatically. When I make a big purchase, I take a lot of time to research it. I carefully consider, can I afford it? Things like that. And I buy below my means.

[00:42:34] I spend a little bit of time on monitoring stuff, like a monthly meeting. Occasionally, I log into my accounts just to look at the stock market, but that’s about it. I have a lot of fun with money. I’ve built that skill. So I travel, and I get clothes and whatever, and I always connect it.

[00:42:56] So when I’m traveling, I’m like, “Wow, I’m so thankful to be in this beautiful hotel.” And I think back to me starting to invest at age 14, and I connect it. That money and that mindset is what allowed me to eventually be in this beautiful place at this time. What do you really want out of today’s call?

[00:43:14] Nathan: To relax.

[00:43:15] Ramit: All right. I can help you with that. Do you truly want to change the way you interact with money?

[00:43:21] Nathan: Yes, I want to feel better about money, and I want to change my relationship with it. I want to break away from what I was taught in my money psychology that’s been drilled into me. It’s going to be hard, but I want to move forward and not backward.

[00:43:41] Ramit: Great. Let’s go through the rest of the CSP, and then we’ll talk about how to do that. All right. Income. Nathan, go ahead and read this combined monthly income right here.

[00:43:52] Nathan: 30,417.

[00:43:54] Ramit: All right. So you make $365,000 a year combined. Did you know that?

[00:43:59] Linda: Yeah.

[00:44:00] Ramit: Great job. Nice job. All right. You take home 22. You’re doing a bunch of pre-tax investing, right?

[00:44:07] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:44:07] Linda: Yeah.

[00:44:08] Ramit: Your fixed costs were at 76%. What do you think about that?

[00:44:12] Nathan: I think it’s high.

[00:44:13] Ramit: It’s high. Okay. And why is it high?

[00:44:15] Linda: Because of our mortgage and our daycare.

[00:44:18] Ramit: Yeah, it’s those two things. But candidly, your mortgage is not that bad for your income. It’s fine. You’re at 23.3%. No big deal. It’s your daycare. It’s 4,400 bucks a month. That’s a lot. Daycare is expensive. I’m sorry you have to pay that much, but that’s what it is. And how long will you have to pay that for?

[00:44:36] Linda: Two more years with the big one, four more years with the little one. To me, in the next year, we’re going to refi, so we’re going to bring that mortgage down by a grand at least. If we did it today, we’d be at least a grand in the positive. And then, yeah, daycare, we’ll have before and aftercare, but we’ll save about $3,000 a month when we do that.

[00:44:56] So I feel basically, in my mind, we’re in the most expensive financial position because we’re paying this daycare premium and this interest rate premium. So if we were to take a hit on our retirement investments, college investments, or whatever this year, I feel okay with it because I have faith.

[00:45:16] Ramit: Okay. And Nathan, how do you feel about it?

[00:45:19] Nathan: I feel comfortable that that won’t always be there.

[00:45:24] Ramit: Great. Okay. Both of you have a very healthy answer to this situation. I totally agree. I look at that, I go, “All right. It is high. It’s temporary.” You know the exact month and year it’s going to stop. As you put it, Linda, you are currently paying the most you are going to pay. You could refi right now.

[00:45:44] Your daycare is going to go down and then way down. So your fixed costs, I could tell you right now, I don’t have enough storage space in my raid array or whatever the hell to go through every category in here; groceries, subscription, dad repayment for school, cleaner, kids swim, hardwoods. We have Linda therapy, Linda phone and gas. Fine. Credit physical fee.

[00:46:15] Do you see this constant need to be overly precise? And because you spend all your time down in the weeds, which is exhausting, you have no vision for, “Do we even have a lot of money?” When I ask you, “How do you feel about having $1.5 million net worth?” You have no answer because you are obsessed with getting this precision down in the weeds. It’s not serving you.

[00:46:41] Your savings is at $1,600 a month for general savings. You have a healthy savings account at almost $80,000. That’s pretty good. I think, the problem comes at spending. So I think you both realize this. You actually broke out your guilt-free spending. You really broke it out. We’re talking $13 a month for a Christmas tree.

[00:47:07] So the real problem here is not that you have 50 line items. The problem is that you’re spending $1,361, and if you factored it in, you’d be $2,000 a month short, as you wrote. That’s a problem. What do y’all want to do about that?

[00:47:26] Linda: Refinance our home. To me it’s like we just have to ride this wave and be more aware of what we’re spending on. And we might not be able to do the vacation this year, but next year after we lower some of our fixed expenses, we’ll have more on guilt-free spending.

[00:47:48] Ramit: I feel like we’re playing jeopardy tonight because every answer is the most American answer ever. Hey, we got a spending problem. What should we do? Refinance our suburban house. Wow. Ding, ding, ding. Every American’s like, “Why is this guy making a joke about it? What’s wrong with refinancing?” They refinance all day long. Never pay off their mortgage. Sure, you can refinance, but that’s a one-off thing, and you happen to be lucky enough to be able to do it. Maybe it happens, maybe not. Whatever. What else? You want to cut back on your spending?

[00:48:23] Nathan: What I was wondering is, “Hey, can we not max out our investments?” So we’re at 17%. Can we bring it down to 10 and still reach our financial goal?

[00:48:36] Ramit: Could you? What do you think about that?

[00:48:38] Linda: When we bought the house, my strategy was, we buy the house, we don’t save to Nathan’s retirement for one year because I have an employer match. So we want to take advantage of that. And then once we refi and we have more money, we would start saving in Nathan’s retirement again.

[00:48:59] And when we started this rabbit hole of conscious spending and all that, he lost faith in that idea because he didn’t feel like I did enough research on coming up with that financial strategy and that if we didn’t put the money in our retirement now, you lose that opportunity for the year of 2024.

[00:49:19] And for me, I was like, “Well, this is our worst financial position. So in a couple of years, when we have more money, we could just put it in a brokerage account if we have that much extra.”

[00:49:29] Ramit: That sound logical to me. Nathan, what was your response to Linda’s suggestion?

[00:49:35] Nathan: I don’t think we need to max it out. So then I was like, “Okay, great. We can start spending a little bit more.” And then Linda’s like, “Whoa, now you need to reign it back in. We don’t have enough.” Our Rocket Mortgage is saying that we’re going negative.

[00:49:50] Ramit: I’m still a little unclear. So first, Linda had this suggestion of like, “Hey, let’s not max out our investments because we’re living in the most expensive time right now.” And then Nathan was like, “I don’t know about that plan because I’ve started using the CSP. That makes me nervous.” But then Nathan was like, “Hey, that actually might be right. Let’s stop maxing out.” And then Linda was like, “Hold on. You have not adjusted your retirement, so we’re actually overspending.” And that’s where you are today?

[00:50:27] Linda: Yeah, because he didn’t adjust it back down. We’re still putting the same amount in retirement.

[00:50:31] Ramit: Why? Aren’t you at the same place? Both of you are like, “We don’t need to max out our investments.”

[00:50:36] Linda: Nathan wants to still max them out until maybe this conversation. I think you are convincing him that we might not need to, but yesterday he didn’t think we were doing enough–

[00:50:46] Ramit: Nathan, you’re operating on pure scarcity, and that is coming out in these very peculiar ways. One of the ways it’s coming out is like, “We need to max out our investments.”

[00:51:00] Nathan: I thought compounding interest was one of the most powerful things. So if we missed out on that, then we miss out on accumulating wealth.

[00:51:09] Ramit: That is technically true. If you do not contribute X dollars for the year of 2024, ’25, yes, you will miss out on that compounding. And over 30 years, that will probably turn out to be a pretty decent amount of money. So what?

[00:51:24] Nathan: Yeah. Then going back to the failure thing, then we’re a failure because we didn’t get to where we were planning on getting to.

[00:51:30] Ramit: You already exceeded what you were planning to. You already beat that number. The thing about scarcity is that people who have a scarcity mentality are very good at convincing themselves that they’re not being scarce. They’re just being careful. Like, “We’re young. We should max it out because it’s compounding, etc.”

[00:51:50] You have learned enough to be dangerous with investments. Compounding is powerful. You should try as much as possible to max out, especially when you’re young. All those things are true. You’re totally right. But because you are so in the weeds, you are missing the big picture of what is going on here.

[Narration]

[00:52:10] Ramit: Let me explain what just happened here. Nathan and Linda have high fixed costs, and some of this is temporary. Some of this is because of the new house. But they don’t really understand the true picture here; Because they’re so focused on the past and they are looking at the world through a pair of scarcity-based lens, they aren’t accounting for how much they’ve already saved and invested.

[00:52:33] Instead, they’re hyper focusing in the weeds. He’s saying, “We need to max out investing for compounding.” And she’s saying, “When we refinance, everything will be okay. Yes, their mortgage increased, but the issue here is that Nathan and Linda haven’t adjusted how much they’re contributing to savings and retirement to offset their fixed costs. They plan to do that, but they didn’t actually follow through. Why? Because Nathan is indecisive. You can see how these deeply rooted beliefs in ourselves, our insecurities, our lack of confidence, our anxieties come out and manifest in the most peculiar of ways. They did not adjust their spending. Why? If you trace it back, trace it back probably to his childhood, it has to do with insecurity, and needing to be reassured, and needing to be told that you are enough.

[00:53:32] It’s a very difficult way to live. Imagine going to a restaurant. You order an omelet. But right before your food comes out, you see somebody else. You change your mind. “Eggs Benedict. That sounds better. Can I have that instead?” And just as you’re getting your cup of coffee refilled, you go, “Ah, too much caffeine. Can I have an orange juice instead?”

[00:53:47] You can’t even enjoy what you’re eating because you’re wondering if you picked the wrong thing. Being indecisive is a terrible way to move through life. But as we can see here, the connections between what we are doing with our money and why are often very nebulous.

[Interview]

[00:54:06] Ramit: What is the big picture? Describe the situation happening in your family finances.

[00:54:12] Nathan: I’m spending so much of my energy doing one thing, and at the end of the month our cashflow is negative.

[00:54:17] Ramit: Yes. Meanwhile, what else is happening?

[00:54:20] Nathan: Our investments are growing.

[00:54:24] Ramit: Yeah. By how much?

[00:54:26] Nathan: By 7 to 8%.

[00:54:29] Ramit: Okay. So finish the whole sentence for me. At this year in my family, we are losing money every month. We’re spending more than we make, and–

[00:54:37] Nathan: We are gaining $70,000 in our investments every year.

[00:54:45] Ramit: Yes. Okay, so what is the logical conclusion?

[00:54:48] Nathan: Invest less so that your cash flow is positive or net neutral.

[00:54:53] Ramit: When I see a young parent or parents, I’ve always said, “Give yourself a little bit of room. If you have a 8% savings rate, bring it down to 5%, even 3%, even 1%. Just keep a little bit of money going. But for a couple of years, give yourself a little bit of ease. All I ask is that you make it systematic. So you sit down and you go, “Look, this is the kind of life I want us to live for the next four years.

[00:55:22] “The next four years, I think we should spend more on X, Y, and Z because we are busy, baby’s young, school, childcare, all that stuff. So I want to do X, Y, Z. And after that, those expenses will go away, and we will resume aggressive investing.” What do you think about that?

[00:55:43] Nathan: I would like to do that.

[00:55:44] Ramit: What you wanted me to come on here and do is to help you analyze, make sure you’re going to have enough for your family, right? It’s not the real problem at all. You can do the math yourself. When are you going to feel confident enough that you’re doing the right thing, that you don’t have to second guess yourself?

[00:55:59] Nathan: The answer is you may never feel that way, but how I want to feel is I want to feel, starting tomorrow, comfortable that way.

[00:56:07] Ramit: Okay. I like that. Love that. Now that is talking about the future, literally tomorrow. I [Bleep] love that. Good answer. Where is your therapy fee, Nathan? I don’t see it in the fixed costs.

[00:56:19] Nathan: Right. So the therapy was in the past. And then through my job, I was getting a free session every month.

[00:56:30] Ramit: Nathan, that is the most important expense on this CSP, and you are literally being a cheapskate. What percentage of the time have we spent talking really about your mental health today?

[00:56:42] Nathan: The whole time.

[00:56:43] Ramit: Yeah. And yet there’s literally $0 dedicated towards it.

[Narration]

[00:56:48] Ramit: There’s a phrase: show me someone’s calendar, and I’ll show you their priorities. My version is: show me someone’s calendar and their conscious spending plan, and I’ll show you their priorities. There are entirely too many people living in their spreadsheets who think they’re one optimization away from finally feeling good.

[00:57:08] You know what the truth is? Most of them would get more benefit from going for a walk, from seeing a friend once a week, and probably talking to a therapist. Now, as a man with immigrant parents in the US, I have a lot of compassion for what Nathan is wrestling with, and I see a lot of similarities between how he grew up and how I grew up. And I’ve seen a therapist, and it’s helped.

[00:57:29] One of the things I want to do on this show is to demystify mental health because it directly influences your Rich Life. Your Rich Life is not just about a bunch of numbers on a page. How many episodes do I have to show you to get you to understand that? It’s about so much more. Money, yes, but also how you feel, what choices you make, your confidence, your ability to enjoy things.

[00:57:53] And one of those things is to know when to spend money to improve your life. Think about it. If your sink was leaking, you would call a plumber, and you would pay basically whatever they asked for. But when it comes to our minds, somehow we rationalize our suffering to save money. Makes no sense.

[00:58:11] Being cheap with your own self is no way to live, especially when it comes to your mental health. I’m going to see if I can get Nathan on board after a quick break to support our sponsors.

[00:58:23] Let’s get back to the conversation with Nathan and find out why he hasn’t been seeing a therapist regularly.

[Interview]

[00:58:29] Ramit: Explain that to me.

[00:58:30] Nathan: I have a pretty long commute from work, and so when I go into work, I go, “Man, we have a great life.” I think as a whole, I’m feeling pretty good after our conversation here. It definitely is something I feel like I should be going regularly to.

[00:58:44] Ramit: 100%. Nathan, this should be a big expense. You should be happy to spend a lot of money on it once a week minimum.

[00:58:57] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:58:58] Ramit: Your view of yourself and your money is not in alignment with reality, as I see it. As I always say, your feelings can be real, but they may not be telling you the truth. You can really genuinely feel that way, but our feelings can lead us astray. And you could literally make an extra $10 million, and you would still feel bad. You would not feel enough, etc. This is something that needs a lot of work, and I would highly, highly recommend it.

[00:59:26] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:59:27] Ramit: All right.

[00:59:28] Linda: I think he sometimes has anxieties about these kinds of things, and it can sometimes extend outside of money that doesn’t allow him to enjoy his weekends or his evenings.

[00:59:42] Ramit: Obviously. You’re basically screaming that. You’ve told me, “I come home from work. I’m tired, and I start talking about our Rich Life.” That’s actually not a healthy reaction. And you can see Linda’s like, “I don’t want to talk about this [Bleep] anymore.” She probably hated me the minute I showed up here. This [Bleep] guy. Stupid Rich Life [Bleep]. I’ve been hearing it every day for the last five years.

[01:00:07] Linda: Honestly, it makes me feel better because I crunch less numbers, and I lead with gut instinct of what feels right, so it makes me feel like I understand finances better than I might have thought I did.

[01:00:27] Ramit: I think your intuition seems to be pretty good. I do think you can lean on your intuition right now because you both make a lot of money. I think that if one of you lost your job or you had something happen to the house, you had to do some emergency repair or something, I think things would get very, very stressful very quickly because you haven’t built a healthy relationship with money either of you.

[01:00:54] So right now, Linda, you’re going off gut, and your intuition tends to be pretty good. Logically, you were like, “Let’s cut the investment and redirect it here,” which is a good intuition. I agree. Nathan, you’re just like. “Oh my God, the world is going to end, and we need to calculate everything.”

[01:01:12] The good news is you’re earning a lot, you’re investing a lot, so the nuts and bolts stuff is good. That part is great. The actual win comes from creating a principle, which is we fight for simplicity, turning the page, and starting to work on the communication around money.

[01:01:30] What is our Rich Life? It can’t be a conversation that’s happening at 9:00 PM every day. That sucks. It’s got to be something fun. It’s got to be something different, and you got to talk about it in a different way. Then how do we simplify this? Because this is not working. And what’s the point of having $1.5 million in your 30s and you’re all like, “Oh, boo hoo. eol.” Sucks. You should be grinning for joy.

[01:01:52] “Wow, I love being able to take my kids out to pizza. I love being able to buy flowers for my wife. I love being able to surprise my husband with something from Amazon.” Not hearing any of that. So the real win comes from turning the page and focusing on that connection. That is what’s going to get you to actually feel good about money.

[01:02:20] Nathan: Honestly, some of our best times together is just going to a restaurant and bar sitting next to each other. She loves to sit next to each other and cuddle and just talk.

[01:02:30] Ramit: And when did that last happen?

[01:02:32] Linda: We do it once a month to the best of our ability. And we have for the last two years since our son was born. We tried to make that a priority.

[01:02:41] Ramit: I love hearing that. I don’t hear it enough. What if you did more stuff like that? I think it’s so awesome that you already do that once a month. What else could you do for that type of connection?

[01:02:52] Linda: Like this past weekend, we went to the pumpkin patch, and we bought the wristband to allow you to get to all of the rides at the pumpkin patch. And it felt, not frivolous, but like we should have been able to do it guilt-free. And I feel like we talked about the cost of the wristband when we shouldn’t necessarily have needed to. He was like, “How much is it?” And I said, “It’s $20 a person, but Devin’s free.”

[01:03:24] Nathan: And then I was like, “Oh, that seems like a lot. All right.”

[01:03:27] Linda: And then I said, “Well, if we went to a museum, it would be the same cost.” And that’s where–

[01:03:32] Ramit: Are you all seeing this dynamic? Do you guys what happened? What role did each of you play in this conversation?

[01:03:40] Linda: He stressed about it, and I justified it.

[01:03:42] Ramit: He’s stressed about it. And you are what?

[01:03:44] Linda: Justifying the cost.

[01:03:46] Ramit: Yes. Do you see the dynamic here? Nathan, you are stressed because to you stress means care. I’m stressed, therefore, I care. If I don’t express worry, then who am I? I’m a lifeless shell of a man. I’m nothing. So I have to express worry. And the only way I know how to deal with money is to agonize over it, and usually verbally, basically snaring whoever happens to be around me, which is my wife.

[01:04:16] I’m worried. I’m anxious. Are we going to have enough? Is it seven or 8%? And on and on and on. Just constant worry and anxiety out loud. It’s toxic. And then Linda’s role, she’s on the other side of the boxing ring. Linda, what’s your role?

[01:04:30] Linda: Justifying.

[01:04:31] Ramit: It’s going to be okay. Here’s why this actually makes sense. If you compare it to the price of a movie, and on and on. And then Nathan gets to what? Nathan, once you hear that reason, what do you get to do?

[01:04:45] Nathan: Make that decision.

[01:04:47] Ramit: Make the decision and go, “I didn’t have to do it myself. She told me it’s okay. He told me. Ramit Sethi came on this call and told me it’s okay. The teacher told me. The financial advisor told me. Everybody told me. I don’t have to make the decision myself.” So when I ask again, what did each of you get out of it? Nathan first.

[01:05:13] Nathan: It’s undue stress.

[01:05:15] Ramit: To you, your invisible script is, stress is life. You are most alive when you are stressed out. You see that?

[01:05:25] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:05:25] Ramit: And the opposite of stress is what?

[01:05:30] Nathan: Calm.

[01:05:32] Ramit: Can you think of a time where you made any significant financial decision without stress?

[01:05:36] Nathan: Everything has some little bit of stress. I was going to say golf clubs, but I do the research, so I spend all the time there, making sure that I’m getting the right one. So there’s stress in here. There’s stress in there.

[01:05:47] Ramit: Maybe when you have $10 million, then you won’t feel stressed.

[01:05:53] Nathan: What we’ve seen is no matter how much money you have–

[01:05:58] Ramit: It’s not a numbers problem. It’s here. It’s here in your feelings, and it’s here how you think. Yes. And so back to you now, Linda, what did you get out of that conversation about the credit card and the pumpkin patch?

[01:06:11] Linda: I was able to take care of him and calm him down.

[01:06:14] Ramit: Yes. You were the voice of?

[01:06:18] Linda: Reason.

[01:06:19] Ramit: Yeah, of reassurance. He’s agonizing again. Oh no, he’s doing what he does. I need to step in, Linda, and?

[01:06:30] Linda: Take care of him, take control of the situation.

[01:06:34] Ramit: Yeah. Maybe take care of him.

[01:06:38] Linda: Another thing, recently, there’s moss on the roof, so we have to take care of the moss, and he wanted to do it himself. And to me, there’s a lot of things you can DIY, but removing moss from your roof that stops water from getting into your home, it’s maybe something you should leave to an expert.

[01:06:56] Ramit: Okay.

[01:06:57] Linda: And he could fall off the roof. There’s a couple of different reasons I don’t want him up there. So I was like, “Oh, our friend is a cheap guy. Go to him.” And then Nathan needed me to validate and make the final decision of hiring the guy.

[01:07:11] Ramit: You can see that these deep feelings come out in 1,000 different ways. If it’s not the pumpkin patch, it’s the moss. If it’s not the moss, it’s the mole cleaner. If it’s not the mole cleaner, it’s the dishwasher. It’s 1,000 different– you can never play, forgive the expression, whack-a-mole.

[01:07:32] You can never whack enough because there will always be something until you tackle the root cause, not the symptom. And the root cause is feeling, I’m not enough. For me, worry and stress is life, and not feeling stress is death. And the dynamic that has emerged between the two of you, Nathan stresses out, agonizes worries, articulates it out in many different ways, and then Linda comes to the rescue. “Hey, it’ll be okay. Let me calm you down.”

[01:08:04] Linda: I once saw some article about people who keep the door open are way more stressed out than if you just make a decision and live with it. And I think he struggles with there’s a better option. There’s always a better option. And to me it’s like, “Well, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. We made a decision. Let’s just see if it’s a good one. In six months we can reevaluate.”

[01:08:25] Ramit: Okay. I agree with that. I think overthinking is one of the worst possible traits that you can have. But the fortunate thing is you can change it in many different ways. One, overthinking often just deep down comes from a sense of insecurity. Did I get it wrong? I need to be perfectly right. What if I’m wrong? And on and on and on. You can work through that in therapy. But second, we can create some rules and systems. So right now, what’s an example where Nathan was doing some overthinking about a purchase?

[01:08:55] Linda: I bought him the drone for his birthday and then it was the wrong one, so we returned it. And then this year I bought him the drone that he wanted for his birthday, and he was like, “But the new one’s going to come out soon.” Eventually what I ended up doing was green lighting him to buy the drone. So he was able to do his own little happy research and purchase drone.

[01:09:16] Ramit: Did it work?

[01:09:17] Linda: Yes, we have the drone now.

[01:09:19] Ramit: Great. So what do you notice about that example?

[01:09:22] Linda: That he took control.

[01:09:24] Ramit: You gave the responsibility to him. Think about how often he spins up anxiety and then tosses that anxiety ball to you. It happened at the pumpkin patch. And what did you do when he tossed that anxiety ball to you?

[01:09:42] Linda: I took it.

[01:09:43] Ramit: You received it. You engaged in it. You didn’t even toss it back to him. What’d you do?

[01:09:52] Linda: Just petted it and made him feel better about it.

[01:09:55] Ramit: Yeah. So what would be another approach?

[01:10:03] Linda: I say please make that decision yourself.

[01:10:06] Ramit: No. That’s what you basically do already. Take the ball and toss it back to him. Nathan?

[01:10:13] Nathan: To say like, “Look, I don’t have an opinion on this. This is a decision you have to make.”

[01:10:17] Ramit: Whoa. And would you receive that well? What would you do if she said that?

[01:10:22] Nathan: With our dynamic, it’d feel very foreign, and I tossed it right back. But I guess what I would like to do starting soon is taking it and running with it.

[01:10:33] Ramit: Okay, I love that. Can we make an example right now of something that’s going to happen in the next three days where you would normally toss the anxiety ball to her, but she’s going to toss it right back to you?

[01:10:42] Nathan: I haven’t made that decision on the roof person yet, but–

[01:10:46] Ramit: Can we just do it right now?

[01:10:49] Nathan: Linda, you’re sending back the decision to get somebody on the roof, and I will make the decision tomorrow to text the guy to come to our house, and he is going to take care of the roof.

[01:11:04] Linda: Thank you for making that decision. I’m happy that you found someone that you’re comfortable with, and I appreciate it.

[01:11:12] Ramit: Love it. Okay. Round of applause. Take the win. That was really good. This is fun, right? It’s theatrical. It’s almost absurd. You have to make it a little absurd. And both of you clap, and it’s all this stuff. Because the first few times you’re already going to feel weird. But then after a while, you’re like, “Oh, [Bleep].” Then you can even make a joke out of it. Are you trying to toss me the ball right now? You know I don’t catch that ball. Good luck. That was a nice try, but it’s back to you.

[01:11:39] Linda: I like that.

[Narration]

[01:11:40] Ramit: Hearing the story from the pumpkin patch really helps crystallize their money dynamic. He gets anxious, she calms him down, and then he’s absolved of responsibility. This is where the real challenge begins for Nathan and Linda as a couple.

[01:11:55] They’ve been stuck in this never-ending cycle of Nathan making a decision, panicking, walking it back, and then Linda getting pulled into that panic. But if Nathan is going to learn to be decisive, Linda is going to have to set boundaries, and she’s going to have to work to recalibrate that relationship. That can be uncomfortable, but with practice, I feel very confident they can do this together.

[Interview]

[01:12:18] Ramit: Can we look at the numbers again real quick? You’re investing approximately $70,000 a year. You have $694,000. 30 years or so to grow, right? 7%.

[01:12:28] Linda: Mm-hmm.

[01:12:29] Ramit: Okay. $12 million. Is that enough?

[01:12:33] Nathan: For my analytical part, yes. I would say, yes.

[01:12:37] Ramit: You’ll get $494,000 per year in safe withdrawal for 30 years. You’ll safely be able to withdraw that, and you’ll still have money left over. Linda, you look a little hesitant.

[01:12:53] Linda: It’s the conservative side. It doesn’t factor in any of our assets. So I’m good with it.

[01:12:58] Ramit: Yeah. That’s millions short of what you will actually have, millions.

[01:13:04] Linda: I think where I get concerned is kids’ college, and saving for that.

[01:13:09] Ramit: You’re really financially out of touch. I love that I get to do this on this show. I talk to people and they’re like, “Am I going to have enough? 12 million does not seem like it’s going to take–” I’m like, “What the [Bleep] is wrong with you?” What? Hold on. I got to show this on screen.

[01:13:25] I know people are mad right now watching this, and I’m going to make them more– I’m going to fuel the rage. Look at this. 30 years. No. Make it 35 just for kicks. What’s going to happen to this $12 million? It’s going to turn into $17 million. You can’t stop this freaking compound interest at a certain point. Make it 40 years. What happens if you save for 40 years? It’s $25 million. What are you going to do with $25 million?

[01:13:52] Linda: So many Christmas trees.

[01:13:53] Nathan: But tell me this though. Because our cashflow is negative now, we probably have to reduce that.

[01:13:58] Ramit: Good point. So I’m going to take it back to 30 years. We’re at $12.3 million, and you’re like, “Hey, we’re in negative cash flow, so we need to cut this down.” How much you want to cut it down? Instead of 70k per year, you’re investing how much?

[01:14:10] Linda: 40.

[01:14:11] Ramit: Okay. Beautiful. Let’s take a look. Instead of 12.3 million, 9.3 million. Let’s do a 4% calculation on that. And that’s $373,000. Now, I want you to understand something. I don’t think you’re only going to contribute $40,000 for the next 30 years. Truthfully, if you cut this down for, I don’t know, what’d you say? Three more years, four more years until daycare is taken care of, the effect overall out of $12 million will be minuscule.

[01:14:48] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:14:48] Ramit: Think about that time value of money now. Is that $200,000 worth more to you now as young parents, or is it worth more to you as part of $12 million when you’re 65 and hopefully healthy?

[01:15:02] Linda: Now because it’s the hardest phase of life that we’re in right now.

[01:15:06] Ramit: Yeah. Parents got to give themselves some grace, some help. And the fortunate thing is you guys actually can afford it. So to me, I always say it’s a tragedy to live a smaller life than you have to. In this case, the tragedy is just blindly maxing out without even knowing what you’re doing. Why? Why am I maxing out 70k versus 40k?

[01:15:32] What am I getting? Is it worth it? And the truth is that 10, 20, 30k is worth way more to you for the next three, four years. And then you can go right back up to where you were. That’s how you think about it. So I don’t want you to get sloppy with your spending. I really want you to actually go back and talk about your CSP and come up with a set of agreements.

[01:15:54] We need his guilt-free spending, her guilt-free spending, and our guilt-free spending. That pumpkin patch conversation should have never come up. If it were something like me and my wife, we’re not talking about that. That’s not at the level of conversation we have. We already have guilt-free money set aside. Swipe the joint card. That comes out of our joint guilt-free spending. Never talk about it again. That’s how we operate. How are you feeling seeing these numbers?

[01:16:24] Linda: Good. I feel like we have a plan that I can tell Nathan believes in.

[01:16:27] Ramit: Oh, okay. What about you?

[01:16:29] Linda: Can move forward.

[01:16:30] Ramit: What about you, Linda?

[01:16:32] Linda: I feel good that we’re on the same page.

[01:16:37] Ramit: Okay. Nathan?

[01:16:39] Nathan: Yeah, I know. I feel great. Honestly, I just wanted to talk to you about it.

[01:16:44] Ramit: I think the important thing, Nathan, is that while I’m happy that the two of you are on the same page, and I actually think that there have been several breakthroughs today, which I’m really happy about, the ultimate breakthrough is for you to get to the point where you are not looking for confirmation from a third party.

[01:17:05] Sure, it can be healthy to get help. Sure, read the books, get the training, all that stuff. Great. But it becomes crippling when you cannot depend on yourself. And for that, that is actually going to be one of my pieces of homework to you. I don’t think I’ve ever assigned therapy.

[01:17:26] And of course it’s your money, your life, but I would highly encourage you to sign up, take that ball this week, and get that scheduled. To me, of all the things that I see, that is the number one thing that I would tackle. You have the chance to have a good time for the rest of your life or to have a really bad time, to stress, to agonize, and then to tell yourself, “Oh, I’m careful. I like to research.” You get the chance to rewrite that chapter, and I think that that starts by working with a therapist regularly. A good one, not the free one.

[01:18:07] And couples therapy will be so helpful for the dynamics, like the ball, the anxiety. There’s so many dynamics that I see that a proper therapist, given enough time, could really help you on. And the money part, while important, is just one piece of an overall dynamic.

[01:18:28] It’s worth it. Truthfully, a marginal extra $5,000 per year of you investing doesn’t really change much, but couples therapy once a week, etc., would be massive. Remember, most people who are thinking about money, they just don’t have enough of it. So they’re just like, “[Bleep]. We’re operating from a true scarcity.” You guys are playing a different game. But the thing is, you’ve constructed this reality where you are also scarce.

[01:18:59] “We need to max out all our [Bleep].” No, you don’t. You need to decide as a unit, how do we allocate our money? It’s up to you. If you look at your allocation like a pie, you’ll quickly realize, “Oh my God, we are overweighted on some stuff and way underweighted on others.” And the Amazon stuff, throw it in. Let’s put that as part of the pie. Instead of fighting about it, let’s just carve out a little slice.

[01:19:26] Everybody can get what they want from Amazon. Maybe it’s not as much as you want, but honestly, the way you all talk, I think you can easily afford that stuff. The Rich Life is not waiting for 40 years until you have $10 million. The Rich Life is like, “Who goes up on the roof? Oh, we actually can afford to pay somebody to come over and do it for us.” Rich Life.

[Narration]

[01:19:45] Ramit: I want to thank Nathan and Linda for sharing your story. I also want to take a second to acknowledge how difficult it is to come into a public space like this and talk about issues like mental health. Please remember, I’m not a therapist, which is why I regularly recommend my guests and everyone listening see a therapist. Nathan and Linda showed up. They had real breakthroughs in the way that they view money, but the real work starts when this conversation ends. Let’s listen to their follow-ups and see if they were able to make a change.

[01:20:17] Linda: Hey, Ramit. Thanks again for chatting. It was a really good conversation. I think my biggest surprise is that I feed into my husband’s money anxiety, and there’s some simple things I can do to address that behavior. Another thing I was surprised by was you saying that the small purchases don’t matter and that I shouldn’t worry as much about them.

[01:20:37] I’ve always viewed these as death by a thousand cuts, so it was really interesting to hear that that mentality isn’t really helping me. I’ve learned that in this stage of life with little kids and high daycare payments, it’s okay that we don’t save as much for retirement, and the feeling so stressed about money right now doesn’t have to be our mentality while we’re waiting for those daycare payments to lessen.

[01:20:57] The conversation also reaffirmed that we’re being responsible with our money and lowering our overall savings doesn’t mean that we’re making the wrong decision. Something that we’ve changed since we chatted is that we adjusted our retirement allocation for Nathan so that we have more disposable income, and we’ve adjusted our CSP to simplify money tracking and understanding where the budgets are. Thank you again. Bye.

[01:21:22] Ramit: Now let’s go to Nathan’s follow-up video.

[01:21:27] Nathan: Hey, Ramit. Thanks for having us on the show and talking with us. My biggest surprise was that in effort to be clear, concise, and transparent with my finances and thinking Linda wasn’t meeting me halfway, I’ve created more chaos in my life, and I’m doing too much. Our conversation with you quickly turn to the root causes of my money anxiety to help address our problems as a whole instead of getting into the weeds of our CSP, which I’m really thankful for.

[01:21:58] My biggest takeaways are that I am good enough and that I need to relax and enjoy life more. In turn, that will bleed into more positive relationships with my work, and friends, and family, kids, and most importantly, Linda.

[01:22:15] Specific changes I’ve decided to make, I’ve decided to go back to therapy to work on myself. I’ve booked an appointment already. I’ve reduced the amount I’m contributing to my retirement investments to free up more money for more positive cash flow, and I’ve removed many tiny details from our CSP to make my life more simple and less chaotic. I appreciate the time. Thanks.