OK - I’ll try another one. I know you guys said he does better with people who are actually rich and helping them to relax, which arguably is where DH and I could probably learn something. But I admit I prefer the train wrecks - used to love watching Til Death do us Part and such! I just don’t think Ramit is the right person to talk to those people. I always felt that - back in the day when he was a young pup on the scene making like a million dollars a year 2 years after college, when I was a GS-9 newlywed with student loan debt 
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TAKE IT BACK!!! DO NOT APOLOGIZE OR I WILL COME OVER THERE!!! 
I love your hot take.
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Yeah I think some feistiness is good for you.
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Absolutely have you read this whole thread? We have discussed Ramit’s target audience quite a bit. Man i should read back through it.
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Omg today’s episode. This man is not living in reality.
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I’m a delicate flower today and this episode hit me in all of the wrong ways.
I’m curious for next week’s episode as their follow up.
Also I would like everyone to know that we did that math on our financial planner and I don’t like the way Ramit claims these huge $100ks of losses but I did look at how much it costs us every month. We are paying close to $300/month right now in advisor fees. This year it was worth it because we had a complicated situation and they helped with all of the paperwork. Going forward I’m not sure if $300/month makes sense for us. We look at budget categories less than this for optimization so it’s time for it to get scrutiny too.
So I am on the way of being skeptical of a financial advisor and we are talking about next steps for us.
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I mean I am guilty of only shutting down my whole life insurance as of two years ago so I am not in a place to judge (this ep was not about insurance really). But this man is scaring me. He is spinning up these elaborate money making plans and all of them are falling apart and he is not accepting it
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You’re really wise to think of it this way! I felt a lot of shame for a while about the whole life insurance thing but ultimately I’m glad I didn’t chase a less than ideal money choice with more less than ideal money choices, and got out when I did.
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What’s that phrase Ramit uses? Don’t follow bad money choices with more bad money choices? Something like that. I am failing to search in the transcripts.
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This episode finally drove me to the YouTube version. I had to watch this guy’s face as he talks!!
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OMG - this guy makes things so flipping complicated! Just his explanation about why his “net” income is more than his “gross” doesn’t make sense. He’s misusing those terms!
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Seriously - he can put more money on credit cards and therefore increase his “net” monthly income?!?! wth?
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Yes, I do not think his competence matches his confidence. To put it mildly
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We got part 2 today!
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Yeah, the husband got all caught up in get rich big and fast ideas from Robert Kiyosaki, snake oil salesman.
Gesz, this husband has a graduate degree in chemical engineering. He could be pulling down some serious coin doing that work instead of tying himself in knots in convoluted financial schemes.
But the wife is not blameless. The vast bulk of their debt is her school loans. I haven’t caught how much they are paying on those loans or IF they are paying.
And she is so proud of not having credit cards in her youth because her parents told her they were bad. How does student loan debt differ, hmmmm.
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I don’t want to get into an ideological fight, but I pretty strongly agree that student loans are completely different than credit card debt, especially for someone who came from a low income family. I’m happy to send you my master’s thesis to help explain why.
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my concern about student loans is that it’s often lumped into ‘good debt’, and there are so many predatory organizations that go after people who are from low income families who don’t have a social structure in place to protect them. And I don’t think that the lift from education is as big as it used to be, even while education in general has become more expensive.
This feeling is emphasized by my engagement over the past 18 months with people (wow, I’ve got 160 folks I’ve spoken with at different levels) trying to get into UX research, spending tens of thousands on useless bootcamps, going back to get a masters for an industry that has become oversaturated, and then coming out of a masters (or two or a phd) and not being able to break in. And then the huge growth of students from the global south who are coming to Canada for university and being gouged with the ‘international’ fees for universities that do not have a great reputation and will not open the doors they’re hoping for.
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Oh I know that very young people and especially those from backgrounds unsophisticated about fiancés are/were easily led into signing up for beaucoup student loan debt.
It’s just that practically, debt is debt. At least credit cards can be discharged with bankruptcy, the other cannot.
Trin is tied up in debt and interest for likely decades, just as bad as carrying large consumer debt. How she got the debt is different from student loans but she ends up in the same place.
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Yes, but hopefully she has an education that opens doors and allows her to earn a higher income than she would without it. There are always outliers who earn a high income without higher education but for the average person coming from a low income family, higher education is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for getting a job that earns a middle class salary. For low income students who can’t ride the money train of “mom and dad”, student loans (in the US) are a very necessary and acceptable reality.
That is not to say that people aren’t stupid with them and don’t use them to live outside their means just like with credit cards. Some people do and in those cases they are as bad or worse than credit card debt. But on the surface, without knowing further details, student loans in and of themselves are not in the same category.
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I just have to share this somewhere because it’s driving me crazy, and I don’t want to put it on my journal.
Summary
A friend’s wife spends all their money with no regard to how he has so much work stress to earn for their family. Now she’s taking private dance lessons for $400/week (says it’s only for a year and then she can switch to group classes for $100/week-- that is $20K!!!) and they have credit card debt that they’re trying to pay off. He doesn’t even feel like she loves him anymore and that she’s just using him for his money at this point. There’s a lot more but this is the most recent and I don’t know why he can’t just tell her she can’t spend like this, and clearly he’s not ready to leave her (there are kids, and she has threatened self-harm before) because this and much worse shit has been happening for years at this point.
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