Episode 226. “She’s chasing FIRE. I want to enjoy life now.”

Laura (34) and Cameron (38) earn over $200,000 a year and save thousands each month, yet every decision feels like a crisis. 

Laura, a first-generation Mexican American, grew up in financial chaos and now enforces strict rules, from tracking every purchase in YNAB to keeping Cameron on an allowance. Her dream is to hit Coast FIRE in five years. Cameron, meanwhile, just wants to enjoy life today—take a trip, fix the car, maybe even expand their family. Their daughter is four, and the question of whether to have another child looms large. 

Can Ramit help them break free from fear, build shared goals, and find a balance between saving for tomorrow and living fully now?

In this episode we uncover:

Why Laura enforces strict financial rules yet still feels unsafe despite saving half their income
How Cameron’s “passenger” role with money leaves Laura carrying the weight
Why their $228,000 household income doesn’t feel like “enough” in an affluent Chicago neighborhood
How childhood experiences shaped Laura’s scarcity mindset
The emotional toll of living as if they are still poor, even with nearly half a million dollars in net worth
How FIRE gave Laura a sense of control and safety—but at the cost of enjoying life today
How chasing control keeps them feeling perpetually “behind” and unable to thrive
The stark contrast between Laura’s authoritarian role and Cameron’s passivity
How they can move beyond survival mode and start thriving by defining a shared Rich Life vision

Chapters:

(00:00:00) “I keep my husband on an allowance”

(00:09:58) Ramit breaks down their numbers

(00:25:05) “We feel poor… on $228,000 a year”

(00:41:37) “My parents racked up debt in my name without me knowing”

(00:54:48) “I keep us living small”

(01:10:21) “CoastFi says we’re fine—so why doesn’t it feel real?”

(01:24:06) “What would make the next 10 years magical?”

(01:33:54) Where are they now? Laura and Cameron’s follow-ups

This episode is brought to you by:

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Facet | Facet is waiving their $250 enrollment fee for new annual members, and for my audience, Facet is offering $300 into your brokerage account if you invest and maintain $5,000 within your first 90 days. Head to https://facet.com/ramit to learn more about which membership option is best for you

Links mentioned in this episode 

Get tickets for my next live event—September 26 in Los Angeles—at iwt.com/events

Transcript 

Download the full transcript PDF 

[00:00:04] Laura: I found out about the FIRE community, and to hear that you could save half your income and retire in seven years was magic.

[00:00:15] Cameron: I would get overwhelmed, and mostly it was just watching Laura move numbers around, and it’s so hard for me to have the interest and to follow it.

[00:00:22] Laura: I feel like I keep us living very poor. It wouldn’t matter how much our money grew. We are not allowed to spend anymore than we’re spending now.

[00:00:34] Cameron: I’m saying, “Hey, loosen up. Spend this.” She’s like, “Of course, it’s easy for you to say. You don’t know what we have coming up. You don’t know any of this.”

[00:00:41] Laura: He wants to have fun. He wants to have a good time. He wants to enjoy himself. And I’m over here stressing all the time. Fun is a future thing you can do if everything else gets taken care of.

[00:00:52] Ramit: Why don’t you allow yourself to enjoy your money?

[00:00:55] Laura: That’s not what it’s for. It’s for the future. I really don’t even feel like the money I have can be spent.

[Narration]

[00:01:02] Ramit: What would you do if someone stole your identity? And what if the people who stole your identity were your parents? That’s exactly what happened to today’s guest. In her words, “My parents took out lines of credit in my name. In the process of uncovering how they wronged me, I vowed to always be able to take care of myself.”

[00:01:25] Today I’m speaking with Laura and her husband, Cameron. You’re going to hear how this betrayal shaped Laura’s entire worldview about money. But that fear and that lack of trust is now affecting her marriage.

[00:01:38] For this episode, I partnered with DeleteMe because identity theft can happen to any of us. And when we think of identity theft, we think of the annoyance of having to close a bunch of accounts, but today’s conversation shows how identity theft can go way deeper. It can change the trajectory of your entire life.

[00:01:56] I use DeleteMe myself. I even got an account from my parents because I don’t want their personal information floating around online. So if you want to protect yourself and your family, go to joindeleteme.com/ramit, and use code RAMIT for 20% off.

[00:02:12] All right. I’m about to open Laura and Cameron’s conscious spending plan, which breaks down their net worth, income, and where they spend their money. You can download and create your own conscious spending plan for free at iwt.com/csp. Here’s the numbers. Assets, 319,000. Investments, 335,000. Savings, 29,000. Debt, 245,000. Net worth, 438,000. Monthly income, 19,000. Fixed costs, 47%. Investing, 20%. Savings, 22%. Guilt-free spending, 11%. Honestly, these are some pretty impressive numbers considering Laura and Cameron are in their 30s, but I have a lot of questions, so let’s get started.

[Interview]

[00:02:56] Ramit: Laura, application was quite haunting. You wrote, “I created a parent-child dynamic where I enforce money rules for the household, keep my husband on an allowance, and ridicule all of his purchases.” Laura, is it working?

[00:03:22] Laura: No, it’s not. I don’t want to be the only person making decisions about money. I don’t want to feel like I’m looking through all of the bank charges, and I get the dings on my phone, like Amazon purchase, Amazon. I’m like, “What is this game he ordered?” More games? It’s always games.

[00:03:44] There’s frequency in purchasing that really bugs me where our spending is different in that way. He makes small but frequent purchases for things that he enjoys, and I make infrequent, but big purchases towards family improvements, professional development, health improvements. So I know I have a problem with how I view the money is being spent, where his money is being spent on his enjoyment and my money is spent on improving our lives.

[00:04:20] Ramit: Was that you trying to explain how it’s not working and then–

[00:04:23] Laura: It’s not working.

[00:04:23] Ramit: Explaining how you’re actually right?

[00:04:25] Laura: I’m not right.

[00:04:27] Ramit: Oh. What part are you not right about?

[00:04:29] Laura: I don’t want to be judgmental about how he spends his money. We’ve already agreed this is his money and this is my money, and I should not be judging what he spends it on.

[00:04:40] Ramit: Okay. Do you believe that as you say it out loud?

[00:04:44] Laura: I believe I should not be doing it. I haven’t stopped doing it.

[00:04:49] Ramit: Okay. All right. How long have you been together and how long have you been married?

[00:04:53] Laura: Together 13 years. 

[00:04:55] Cameron: Married nine years.

[00:04:58] Ramit: Okay, okay, nine years. All right. Kids?

[00:05:01] Cameron: Yes. One daughter.

[00:05:03] Ramit: How old?

[00:05:04] Cameron: Four.

[00:05:04] Ramit: Four. Okay, great. When you think about money in your relationship, what is the one or two words that come to mind? Cameron?

[00:05:15] Cameron: Stress, planning.

[00:05:19] Ramit: Laura?

[00:05:21] Laura: Fear and future.

[00:05:24] Ramit: Stress and planning. Fear and future. Similar. Quite parallel. Right?

[00:05:32] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:05:32] Ramit: Okay. Do you both see money the same way?

[00:05:35] Cameron: No, I don’t think so.

[00:05:37] Ramit: Oh. Laura?

[00:05:40] Laura: Probably not.

[00:05:41] Ramit: Hmm. Interesting that your words were quite similar, right? Are the two of you decisive about money?

[00:05:50] Laura: No. I have a lot of analysis paralysis. I prefer to research a lot and gather information and put off a decision. It feels good to me, like I’m educating myself on it.

[00:06:04] Ramit: Okay. Cameron?

[00:06:06] Cameron: I avoid almost all money talk and basically let Laura handle it. So if she is circling around on a decision, then we both are.

[00:06:21] Ramit: You guys like that?

[00:06:23] Cameron: No.

[00:06:23] Laura: No, no.

[00:06:25] Ramit: How come every couple I talk to is like, no, I [Bleep] hate this thing that we have kept doing for the last 15 years, every single day of our relationship. Am I the only one who’s like, maybe we can change it then? Is that why you’re here?

[00:06:41] Laura: Yes.

[00:06:42] Cameron: There you go.

[00:06:43] Ramit: Okay. You guys expecting me to wave the Abracadabra wand and then suddenly you become decisive?

[00:06:48] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:49] Ramit: Oh yeah. Both of them nodding. Okay, great. All right. Should we take a look at the numbers?

[00:06:55] Laura: Sure.

[00:06:56] Ramit: All right. What was it like creating the CSP together?

[00:06:59] Cameron: It was actually enjoyable, I think. It was one of the few times we’ve sat there and had to work together on a budget financial-based project, and we didn’t get upset at each other. I think we agreed on a lot of things. I liked it a lot more than I expected to.

[00:07:22] Ramit: That’s cool.

[00:07:22] Laura: Yeah. I will say we’ve come a long way. If you asked us like five years ago to go through our money, it would’ve ended in a fight.

[00:07:31] Ramit: You both sounded surprised that the conscious spending plan was enjoyable. Why is that?

[00:07:37] Laura: I was surprised that he would enjoy it. Because he usually shuts down, or I will literally take the phone and the camera and the spreadsheet and the computer. I’m like, “I would do it myself.” But I really had to hold back and say, you’re going to do this job and I’m going to do this job. And I tried not to grab the phone out of his hands and do it myself.

[00:07:56] Ramit: Cameron?

[00:07:58] Cameron: Yeah, I definitely felt that this time. I felt that we were both working towards something.

[00:08:03] Laura: I run my own net worth spreadsheet, but it’s just numbers on a spread. It’s not any numbers that we feel or see. We save a lot of money, but we don’t get to enjoy it.

[00:08:14] Ramit: What is the cost of that?

[00:08:17] Laura: It’s stressful. It’s a negative view of money leaving our hands.

[00:08:23] Ramit: Cameron?

[00:08:25] Cameron: Yeah, I agree. There’s a lot of times Laura specifically will be looking at this stuff or going over it. It’s nighttime before bed and it just starts a spin on what are we doing?

[00:08:39] Ramit: What is this, like 10:30 at night?

[00:08:42] Cameron: Yes. Yeah. I’ll be falling asleep and then she’ll be like, “This is what I think we should do with this emergency.” And I’m like, “I can’t talk about this right now.”

[00:08:54] Ramit: I don’t like a lot of like directive rules for people because, I don’t know, I treat them like they’re smart. Maybe I need to make a [Bleep] rule. No talking about money after 8:00 PM. What is going on here, America? Everybody’s sitting around, and it’s always one person. It’s the person who is obsessed with spreadsheets.

[00:09:13] And they’re like, “Hey, look at this spreadsheet. I ran this calculation yesterday. But if we add a variance of 6.5% over the next 45 years, it actually turns out we might be able to afford to take two extra vacations per year.” And the other partner’s like, “[Bleep], [Bleep]. I was sleeping.” And then it never goes well. Any of this sound familiar?

[00:09:34] Laura: How were you in our room last night? How did you know that happened?

[00:09:39] Ramit: Ramit Sethi coming out with this first and only prime directive. It’s simple. No talking about money after 8:00 PM, you [Bleep] freaks. Nobody. Nothing good is happening after 8:00 PM talking about your finances. That’s it. That’s my rule. Hold on. Okay, I’m back in the game. I’m here to help. Can we just look at the numbers?

[00:10:03] Laura: Yes.

[00:10:05] Ramit: All right. Laura, can you read the word in bold and then the number in full next to it, please?

[00:10:11] Laura: Assets, 319,000. Investments, 335,814. Savings, 29,338. And debt, 245,238.

[00:10:27] Ramit: Total net worth?

[00:10:28] Laura: 438,914.

[00:10:31] Ramit: Okay, $438,000. What do you think of those numbers? Why is it so silent in here? What is happening?

[00:10:35] Laura: Because it feels like fake money on a spreadsheet that’s not ours. It’s money we’ve been stocking away for a very long time, but we don’t see it or touch it. I have a goal of hitting Coast FI. I feel like maybe someday we’ll get there, but those numbers don’t mean a whole lot to us right now. It doesn’t make us feel safe or wealthy or anything.

[00:11:03] Ramit: Let me translate. These numbers, which are quite substantial, almost half a million dollars, they don’t feel real to me. Therefore, I’m going to dedicate the rest of my working life to making them even bigger because surely then they will feel real to me.

[00:11:23] Laura: That’s right.

[Narration]

[00:11:24] Ramit: Laura is pursuing something called Coast FI, which is part of the FIRE movement or Financial Independence, Retire Early. Let me break this down really quickly. There are variations of FIRE. There’s lean FIRE, which basically means you save aggressively and live on a small amount, like 25,000 a year. Or there’s fat FIRE, which is saving and investing enough to live on hundreds of thousands or millions per year. There’s also Coast FI.

[00:11:49] Coast FI means you save really aggressively, typically early in your career, that you can stop contributing to retirement altogether later in life. The math says as long as you don’t touch the investments, compounding will grow enough to fund your retirement. You’re basically coasting. Mathematically, it makes a lot of sense.

[00:12:08] But one of my critiques of the FIRE community is that they often overfocus on the math and under focus on psychology. In my experience, FIRE tends to attract people who want control, and it often also attracts people who already have a scarcity mindset. Like Laura, think about it. She admits running spreadsheets at 10:30 at night. She’s obsessing over every Amazon charge and dismissing her husband spending as frivolous compared to her own.

[00:12:37] FIRE gives her an outlet to double down on that need for control. It gives her rules, charts, formulas, and the promise that if she just saves a little more, then she’ll finally feel secure. In my opinion, what would be dysfunctional behavior in other circumstances is now blessed because she’s working towards Coast FI.

[00:12:59] But guys, it doesn’t work that way. People who are hyper frugal really think that they will one day feel safe with their money. It almost never happens. They save more. They still feel afraid. So what do they do? They double down to save even more. The very system that was supposed to create freedom often locks you into a prison of deprivation.

[00:13:20] Now, there’s a lot of good when it comes to FIRE. In fact, I’ve created an entire YouTube video on FIRE. But I want you to understand the math part is bulletproof. It’s just math. But the psychology can become a problem unless you actively work to improve your money mindset.

[00:13:39] If you want to improve your money mindset, I built a free mini course to help you. You can download it at iwt.com/mindsetpod. It’s free, iwt.com/mindsetpod. Now, Laura believes more savings will finally make her feel safe. I don’t really agree, and I’m going to explain this to her right after this.

[Interview]

[00:14:02] Ramit: It doesn’t feel real, so I’m going to work even harder, because then maybe someday it will feel real to me. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Just if the number’s double, you think that’s going to make it feel real?

[00:14:15] Laura: No.

[00:14:15] Ramit: So what would make it feel real to you?

[00:14:19] Laura: Spending some of it.

[00:14:21] Ramit: Why don’t you take out 5,000 bucks and spend it? Whoa. Look at that face. What was that? Can you describe that? Hold on, Cameron, can you describe that face that Laura just did? Look at this face.

[00:14:31] Cameron: Yeah, that’s fear.

[00:14:33] Ramit: Yeah, fear, bewilderment, or even– Laura, how would you describe it?

[00:14:41] Laura: That goes against everything I’ve been doing.

[00:14:44] Ramit: Right. Spending money, the money you’ve been accumulating goes against everything you’ve been doing. Now I see sadness. Why is that?

[00:14:56] Laura: We work so hard. It doesn’t feel like we can enjoy our money right now. I actually don’t know when we will or if we will.

[00:15:09] Ramit: Meaning you might just accumulate, accumulate, and then what?

[00:15:14] Laura: No. Meaning that I’ve set our financial plan to Coast FI on a very small budget, which means we would have to be living on less than we’re living now in order to achieve that. So we’re not going to retire and then spend money. This is our baseline to make it a reality. It’s only going to get worse.

[00:15:38] Ramit: Yeah. Why’d you do that? Why’d you set that goal?

[00:15:42] Laura: I set this goal before we were married, before we had a kid, and that goal is not realistic for the life that we’ve created. And I should probably let go of it.

[00:15:58] Ramit: Let go of it. Adjust it. Adapt it.

[00:16:02] Laura: Make a new plan.

[00:16:04] Ramit: Coming back to the numbers not feeling real, what if I challenged you to spend a $1,000 of the money?

[00:16:10] Laura: That would be– Cameron’s like, “Yeah, let’s do it.” I’m like, “Oh, on what? Pay down debt?” I don’t even have the muscle to spend money. When I get money, when we have a surplus in our paychecks, what do we do with it? What bill can I pay? What debt can I put down?

[00:16:29] Cameron: When there’s something you really want though, when there’s something you really find that you feel is important to you, like you were talking about the larger purchases earlier, you will spend it on there.

[00:16:42] Laura: Yeah, I could. If I had to spend $1,000 today, yes, I could figure out what to do with it.

[00:16:49] Ramit: What if you had to spend 5,000?

[00:16:51] Laura: We have something in mind that we could spend 5,000. Yeah.

[00:16:55] Ramit: Really? What utility-based purchase would that be? Lawn mower?

[00:16:58] Laura: A couch.

[00:16:59] Ramit: Oh, that’s so nice. How did I know? How did I know that it was a functional purchase? Let’s look at the income next. Cameron, can you read off your combined gross monthly income, please?

[00:17:16] Cameron: $19,000.

[00:17:18] Ramit: 19k a month means you make a household income combined of $228,000 per year. Did you know that?

[00:17:27] Laura: Roughly yes.

[00:17:29] Cameron: No. I don’t know anything. I don’t even look at my paychecks. When I come in, I show up, I do my job, but I do not look at these numbers. And that’s one reason why even talking about this is out of my comfort zone. I don’t know the basics of what we do as a family. And it goes back to that relationship Laura and I have, is I avoid it, and she takes it on.

[00:17:55] Laura: He asked like, “How much can I spend?” And that’s why I have an allowance for him.

[00:17:59] Ramit: Did you give him an allowance for the purchases of games and stuff like that?

[00:18:02] Laura: Yes. And I will say that allowance has changed. It used to be– do you want to tell them what it used to be?

[00:18:08] Cameron: What, when? I remember it was $100.

[00:18:11] Laura: Oh, it used to be $5. It was $5.

[00:18:13] Cameron: I don’t remember that.

[00:18:15] Laura: Yeah.

[00:18:15] Cameron: No, but I will say we both carved out fun money per month that we can use on our own for anything that each of us would want. And even that little change, what, six months a year ago, at least for me, has made a big difference.

[00:18:32] Ramit: What did it feel to you to have that fun money?

[00:18:35] Cameron: It felt like I could make my own choices about what I wanted to purchase. And before everything was so joint where it was like, “I’m thinking of doing this. I’m thinking of doing that.” And as Laura said, if I’m looking at multiple $30 purchases or going out to a baseball game or whatever it is, having that ability to just make those choices is obviously a lot easier, I think, for both of us.

[00:19:03] Ramit: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:04] Cameron: So that’s been definitely an improvement in my opinion.

[00:19:07] Ramit: That’s good. Everybody should have their own individual guilt-free spending money. I like that. Laura, what do you spend your individual guilt-free spending money on?

[00:19:17] Laura: I’d probably make two big purchases a year.

[00:19:21] Ramit: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:21] Laura: So I don’t spend the monthly. I actually just remove my monthly money and put it in towards whatever else the family needs.

[00:19:29] Ramit: Oh, that sounds familiar.

[00:19:31] Laura: And then I’ll make two or three gigantic purchases. I’d say in the last couple of years, big purchases have been fitness and nutrition program that I committed to. And then I resigned, and I’m so happy I did that. A personal styling session that actually got really into inner child healing and future visualizations, I was very happy to do it.

[00:19:56] Ramit: Okay, that sounds awesome actually. I love both of those things. Did that come from your individual money?

[00:20:02] Laura: Yes, kind of. I didn’t stockpile it or anything. I just said, “This is a thing I want.” And it comes very spur– I do the research and I tell him like, “This is a thing. It’s a big ticket thing. I really want it.” And he is like, “Yeah, you should do it.”

[00:20:21] Ramit: But you’re using the money in your individual account to pay for it. Right?

[00:20:26] Laura: It’s typically more than that. So we give ourselves $150 a month and I never spend mine. But then I’ll come to them and say like, “This thing is $3,000. I really want it.”

[00:20:36] Ramit: Oh.

[00:20:38] Laura: So we’re actually doing the–

[00:20:40] Cameron: The CSP.

[00:20:42] Laura: — the CSP, we found that my average that I was spending was 450 a month and his was the 150 limit.

[00:20:51] Ramit: That’s interesting because you’re the one who’s anxious about his spending on–

[00:20:54] Laura: I know.

[00:20:55] Ramit: –2-dollar game. What did that make you feel as you realized that?

[00:20:58] Laura: Like a jerk. Like I am over here hounding him for his Amazon games and I’m the one making the big purchases.

[00:21:10] Ramit: Yeah.

[00:21:11] Cameron: Yeah, that was a surprise. It was a surprise that your average was high. And it also made me feel like, okay, it’s not just me who’s spending the family’s money.

[Narration]

[00:21:21] Ramit: This moment is so revealing. Laura has trained herself to believe that spending money is almost dangerous, that it goes against everything she’s been doing. She even admits she doesn’t know when or if they will ever be able to enjoy their money. This is scarcity. And yet the numbers tell a totally different story.

[00:21:42] When they looked at their spending, it turns out Laura actually spends more than Cameron on guilt-free spending. She makes big infrequent purchases on things like coaching programs, and she’s happy with those choices. But because Cameron spends smaller amounts on games, on things she deems frivolous, she judges him for it. This is how scarcity can distort your relationship with money.

[00:22:05] It convinces you that saving is good, spending is bad, and the only way to feel safe is to keep saving more and more. Because of course you’re a good person. But in reality, they already have close to half a million saved. They make over 200k a year. This is a very healthy income, especially for a couple in their 30s. Listen as I ask them how they feel about their income.

[Interview]

[00:22:30] Ramit: These conversations are interesting considering the income that your household makes. How would you describe your income?

[00:22:40] Laura: It is the most we’ve ever made together.

[00:22:44] Ramit: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:45] Laura: So that’s the income. However, our expenses are the highest they’ve ever been.

[00:22:52] Ramit: We’re not talking about your expenses. Just talking about your income.

Okay. Is your income high, low, medium? What is it?

[00:22:59] Laura: I think it’s average to low for the area and the age group.

[00:23:07] Ramit: You think your income is low for your age group?

[00:23:10] Laura: And area. Yes.

[00:23:13] Ramit: Okay, hold on. You two are 34 and 38 years old. Where do you live, general area?

[00:23:20] Laura: Chicago North Shore.

[00:23:23] Ramit: Who the [Bleep] is earning– what? What?

[00:23:26] Laura: Everyone on our block owns a million-dollar-plus home. We live in a condo, and we own the garden unit, and we joke that our street is the Titanic and we’re the people in the bottom deck like doing the Irish jig. We live in a very affluent area, and we make significantly less than the people around us. For me, the people in my industry.

[00:23:56] Ramit: Okay, then you’re going to be really surprised at the number I’m about to give you. Do you know the median income in your neighborhood?

[00:24:05] Laura: No.

[00:24:06] Ramit: You said your income was low, so $228,000 should actually be– what should it be? 5, 6, 7, 800,000?

[00:24:15] Laura: Yeah. 3, 4, 5.

[00:24:17] Ramit: Yeah. The median household income in North Shore Chicago is $127,000.

[00:24:23] Cameron: Well.

[00:24:24] Laura: I don’t know if that’s true.

[00:24:25] Ramit: There’s almost no neighborhood in America, certainly not around there, where the median income is $400,000. What are you realizing right now?

[00:24:36] Laura: I still think that for the industry that I’m in, I’m not making as much as other people. And for the neighborhood that we live in, we definitely do not make as much as our neighbors.

[00:24:50] Ramit: All right. So you want to feel poor for the rest of your life?

[00:24:53] Cameron: No.

[00:24:54] Laura: I think we are making– so this is the most we’ve ever made, and I recognize that. We’re not trying to keep up with anyone. We are on our own path. But we do recognize that we don’t make as much as other people that we’re around.

[00:25:13] Ramit: The reason I’m asking is that it’s very hard to feel appreciation, to feel grateful, to make decisions on offense with your money, if you constantly feel behind. Your numbers and the way you feel about them are completely at odds with each other. Making $228,000 in your 30s in Chicago is a lot of money.

[00:25:34] And the fact that the first thing both you say is like, “Oh, we actually don’t make that much. Our income is low compared to other people,” is grossly out of touch with reality grossly. And by perpetuating the narrative that you have told yourself, oh, we’re actually poor. We’re not necessarily, not even close to as affluent as our neighbors, then you will go the rest of your life feeling behind.

[00:25:59] You see the exact same thing when you talk about your net worth. It doesn’t feel real. Same thing. You’re grossly out of touch with your own numbers. What do you get out of that?

[00:26:09] Laura: Feels like we’re chasing something that we’re never going to have.

[00:26:14] Ramit: Yes. And why do you do that? What do you get out of that?

[00:26:18] Laura: I think I get satisfaction in knowing I’m doing all these little things and I can control a lot of little things, but I don’t ever feel like I’m in control of the big picture.

[00:26:30] Ramit: Yeah. I think you get significance. It’s me or it’s us against this unforgiving world. And in order for us to win against this crushing weight of the world, we need to be so aggressive. We need to save. We need to put aside this money, invest aggressively.

[00:26:48] And if we make any extra money, what do we do? We invest it. Oh, and by the way, we retire at 40 and live a worse life every day for the rest of our lives. That’s the way that we win. How does that strike you?

[00:27:00] Cameron: I think that sounds accurate.

[00:27:03] Laura: Awful.

[00:27:04] Ramit: Awful.

[00:27:05] Laura: Exhausting.

[00:27:05] Ramit: Yeah, but it actually gives you some meaning. It gives you something to wake up and do. How many spreadsheets have you created to manage your money?

[00:27:19] Laura: A lot.

[00:27:20] Cameron: You were still working on the one you made 12 years ago.

[00:27:23] Laura: I’ve had one since 2012. I just keep adding new tabs.

[00:27:27] Ramit: I should have asked– sorry. Sorry, my mistake. How many tabs have you created?

[00:27:31] Laura: I don’t know, probably 30.

[00:27:35] Ramit: Okay. In my opinion, that’s about 28 tabs too many. And what do you get when you create a new tab?

[00:27:44] Laura: It’s a thrill. It’s exciting. It’s like, oh, what am I going to do this year? Like, hey, what am I going to beat? How do we level up? How do I make this number get bigger?

[00:27:52] Ramit: That’s right. Significance. It’s almost like playing a game. It’s almost like that new tab is your new reality. What if we get a car? What if we go on vacation? What if we send our kid to college? And you can spend the rest of your life in your freaking spreadsheet instead of actually living life. That’s what so many people do, particularly people who have found themselves slipping down into the FIRE community without an actual purpose.

[00:28:18] Laura: Yes, yes.

[00:28:20] Ramit: All right. I got to look through the rest of these numbers here. Fixed costs. What’s the fixed cost number combined?

[00:28:32] Laura: 47%.

[00:28:35] Ramit: Okay. That’s pretty low, well below for the 50 to 60% that I typically talk about. Right?

[00:28:41] Laura: Just under it.

[00:28:42] Ramit: Okay. All right. Good. If you’re below the number, you could spend on whatever you want, in my opinion. Just so we know, you make 228k. Your rent or mortgage is 2,100. You have childcare of $1,960 a month. Okay.

[00:28:58] Laura: Yes.

[00:28:59] Ramit: Just for kicks, can I just like strip that out and see what would your number be if you didn’t have childcare? Can we just take a look at that hypothetically?

[00:29:06] Laura: Oh, we’d be rich.

[00:29:08] Cameron: We talk about that a lot.

[00:29:08] Laura: We feel so poor.

[00:29:09] Ramit: Sorry, what did you just say? You’d be what?

[00:29:10] Laura: We’d be rich. We have so much money. We’d feel so poor having pay this.

[00:29:16] Ramit: Laura, look in my eyes. You are rich. Do you not understand that you are rich? You’re in your 30s. You make $228,000 a year. You have $438,000 in net worth. You are wealthy. Did you ever realize that? Neither of you.

[00:29:37] Cameron: No.

[00:29:37] Ramit: If you just keep this up and just allow the money to compound, you know how many millions of dollars it turns into. You know. You’ve run the calculations, right?

[00:29:45] Laura: Yeah.

[00:29:45] Ramit: What does it turn into?

[00:29:47] Laura: If we Coast FI in four years, we’d have enough to have 2 to 3 million at traditional retirement age.

[00:29:56] Ramit: That means you stop working in the age of roughly 40, and you would still be multimillionaires at the age of 65. That doesn’t strike you as being wealthy? That never occurred to you.

[00:30:08] Laura: That is our plan. Yes.

[00:30:11] Ramit: That’s not what I asked.

[00:30:13] Cameron: I feel like we still are general talking about this. We feel like it’s still not enough, or will it cover? There’s still that fear of, how long do people live? How long will that last us?

[00:30:27] Ramit: I think you guys like to worry.

[00:30:29] Laura: Yes. We are both worriers.

[00:30:31] Ramit: I think you love it, actually. I think it gives you a lot of meaning, gives you a lot of purpose. I think that if you didn’t worry, you’re not sure who you would actually be or what you would do.

[00:30:40] Laura: Yeah.

[00:30:42] Ramit: So you worry about a house. You get the house or the apartment. Then you worry about retirement. Then you make a plan for retirement. You knock that out. Then you worry about your kids’ college. Then you make a plan and knock that out. Then you’re like, “What else are we supposed to worry about?” Oh-oh, heat seeking mode.

[00:30:59] Let’s find something else. Long-term care. Nobody knows how much it can cost for long-term care. So therefore, we need to plug in tons and tons of money. There’s actually no ceiling on it. Oh, and if we still end up with money, God bless our kid or kids, they can have some of the money and begin the cycle again. How does that sound?

[00:31:17] Cameron: Not good.

[00:31:19] Ramit: That’s a good way to spend the rest of your life, just being scared. Is that why you guys are here?

[00:31:25] Laura: Survival mode and scarcity mindset got me here, but it’s really holding me back.

[00:31:35] Ramit: Can you share an example of how it’s specifically holding you back?

[00:31:39] Laura: I will say, I have a food hoarding mindset. I grew up poor. Spending usually only happens at the grocery store. That’s my big spending area, and I’m in charge of the grocery. So I’ll go and I’ll find everything that’s on special, and I’ll stock it in our cabinets.

[00:31:59] And sometimes it goes bad before we can even use it. But I get a thrill out of finding the sale and stocking up our cabinets and knowing we’ve got months of food. We will survive. Why am I wasting all this time thinking about survive? Food? You can tap your phone and food will come to your door. I don’t need to spend time going to the grocery store and hunting down deals. It is costing me time.

[00:32:23] Ramit: Do you spend more than you planned when you walk out?

[00:32:26] Laura: Always. I go to the store with 20 items on the list, and I walk out with 50.

[00:32:32] Ramit: What’s the approximate amount you would spend on a grocery shop?

[00:32:38] Laura: 120 per store per visit.

[00:32:42] Ramit: How many times would you go per week?

[00:32:44] Laura: At least four.

[00:32:46] Ramit: Four times. So you’re spending 500 bucks a week, roughly $2,000 a month.

[00:32:51] Laura: We’re spending about half of that. So some stores I just go in, I get a couple things. But it’s a lot. And food prices have gone up, so it’s where I used to spend less than 100, it’s like $120. What is happening here?

[00:33:06] Ramit: Cameron, have you ever noticed this?

[00:33:08] Cameron: Yes, definitely.

[00:33:10] Ramit: What’d you say about it?

[00:33:12] Cameron: I don’t know. I’ve told Laura like, “You bring home a lot. We don’t need all this.” But it’s also an activity that she really enjoys, to go out and get all this food. I don’t think I realized some of the hoarding stuff.

[00:33:29] Ramit: You didn’t realize that until just now?

[00:33:31] Laura: You didn’t realize that our fridge is packed to the gills, and I go to the store when we don’t need anything.

[00:33:37] Cameron: We have talked about that. Like, we don’t need this much. But I don’t know. It’s part of this whole general thing, I think, that we’ve been talking about.

[00:33:47] Ramit: Which is?

[00:33:48] Cameron: Which is living in a way that maybe isn’t our present situation. Living like maybe it made sense 10, 12 years ago. It’s different, but we’re still doing the same things that we had done.

[00:34:04] Ramit: Laura, can you tell me a little bit about how you grew up with money? I’m so curious.

[00:34:08] Laura: I’m first gen. My parents immigrated here from Mexico, and I remember that we were quite poor. We’d move every year.

[00:34:17] Ramit: Wow.

[00:34:18] Laura: There was one house that had a mouse infestation, and we just had to live with mice. My parents had to work sometimes two jobs. But also, they wanted to give us a better life than they had. And by many accounts they did. They truly came from nothing. We were able to buy a home, but the bank also took the house, so they weren’t very good with money. And I could see that they wanted to spend the money on nice new things.

[00:34:54] My mom wanted every new gadget. We had spinners on our van when spinners were a big thing. Why do we have spinners? Brand new soccer shoes for my brother anytime he wanted them. They liked stuff. They liked pointing to the things that they were working for. To their credit, they did give us a better life than they had.

[00:35:17] However, there was no other financial education. They don’t know anything about investing or saving. I’m their retirement plan. They don’t have one. I learned to get a job and to work. And the messaging I got from my parents was at least graduate high school. Neither of my parents did.

[00:35:39] And they worked manual labor jobs, and they still do. So any job that you can do with your body for as long as your body can work is a good job. I work in software development. There’s no way to say like, I work on a computer, and you see things on your screen.

[00:35:57] It’s like that’s not a real job to them because you’re not using your body. It’s not manual labor. My parents taught me– I don’t know if they ever said this directly, but there was this idea that if you graduate high school and you become a secretary in a big fancy building, that’s all we want.

[00:36:19] Everyone they know is a janitor in a building. So I would say my family had very low expectations of me, and I was never surrounded by people who were doing more than that.

[00:36:34] Ramit: Wow, that’s quite a story, especially for where you have ended up. When you tell that story about your upbringing, especially the mice infestation and your parents, their dreams, for you being a secretary, I can see you getting emotional. What are you feeling when you think about their lessons?

[00:36:54] Laura: They wanted me to be small.

[00:36:58] Ramit: Wow, small. You mean in your job. The highest you could dream is a secretary?

[00:37:05] Laura: Yeah. But also I think they were limited to what they had been exposed to. So their world of view was very small. They didn’t know how to support me or encourage me because, in their defense, they’d already given me a better life than they had.

[00:37:30] Ramit: Are they still alive?

[00:37:33] Laura: Yes.

[00:37:34] Ramit: Are you still in communication with them?

[00:37:36] Laura: Not really.

[00:37:38] Ramit: Okay, okay. Would they understand your lifestyle today?

[00:37:43] Laura: No, no. I think my mom still makes fun of us because we drive the same car we’ve had since 2014.

[00:37:51] Ramit: Wow.

[00:37:51] Laura: Where my mom still gets– she’ll lease a new vehicle every couple of years. She’s always showing up to the house in some brand new– I’m like, “Holy [Bleep]. How are you doing this? You have no retirement plan. You have no savings.” She wanted to retire a few years ago and she asked me like, could I help her? And I’m like, “How much do you have?” And she asked me, “Is that enough?”

[00:38:15] And I said, “You can do a simple calculation. Do you know how much you spend in a year? Okay. And then divide how much you’ve saved by that.” I’m like, “You can retire for two years and then you have to go back to work.” And she didn’t not like that.

[00:38:30] Ramit: What did she say?

[00:38:31] Laura: She’s like, “Oh, I want it to be done. You’re saying I need a million dollars to retire. I’m never going to get that.” And to be honest, she won’t. At her age, and with her income and her spending, she will not have a million dollars.

[00:38:48] Ramit: Yeah. It sounds like your parents liked to spend money and still like to. What happened to you that, in your own words, made you hoard money?

[00:39:01] Laura: I would say it’s because of my parents. When I was 18, I pulled a credit report for myself and found out they had been using my social to take out lines of credit.

[00:39:16] Ramit: Wow. What did they do with the money?

[00:39:20] Laura: One was a furniture store line of credit, so I guess they bought furniture. One was a general credit card. One was in already debt collection. So I was in college. I was first person to go to college, only person in my immediate family. So getting no support there and dealing with debt creditors, debt collectors, I felt so much shame because other people get to go to college and have support from their families, and I was getting dragged down by mine.

[00:40:01] Ramit: And they used it for furniture?

[00:40:04] Laura: Yeah. Other stuff. I don’t know. So when I found that out, I confronted my mom. She was like, “Oh, it was just to get this or just to get that. I was going to pay it off. You were never going to know. No, not sorry. It was so chill. Yeah.

[00:40:23] Ramit: How much do you remember they took out?

[00:40:25] Laura: It was 10 to 15,000 maybe, which is a lot when I’m 18 and I’m in college and I don’t have a job and a debt collector, they’re calling me.

[00:40:35] Ramit: What happened with the debt collection?

[00:40:38] Laura: I made my mom pay that one down, the immediate debt collector. I closed the other accounts. Told her she had to pay the balance first, and then I closed the accounts. And then I vowed to almost cut them off, to never go to them. Not that I ever could. I was never going to go to them for money, but I vowed that I would take care of myself.

[00:41:05] Ramit: Wow. Now can you trace that for me? How did that experience shape who you are with money today?

[00:41:14] Laura: Right around that time, I found out about the FIRE community, and to hear that you could save half your income and retire in seven years was magic. It was purely like, how does that happen? How do you just invest money and then you don’t have to work anymore? I’m like, “This is the ticket.”

[00:41:34] Ramit: And when you say magic, why do they feel magic?

[00:41:37] Laura: Because I came from a family that you exchanged your body and your effort in exchange for money. And here I was like, “No, you just have to put the money in this account and let it grow.” And you exchanged time for money. And while you’re doing that go and figure out other career paths. I don’t have to work in the same way as my parents did to make money and to have money.

[00:42:05] Ramit: When you put it that way, it does seem quite magical. It’s like, let me get this straight. I don’t have to go work long hours, sometimes overnight hours, not see my family, beat up my body work when I’m old or older. Instead, I can just be really aggressive when I’m young, make some tough choices, but I’m fine.

[00:42:26] I can actually live on less. I don’t need all that stuff. And then I just put it in there and let it compound for years and suddenly I never have to work again? Sign me up. Did it give you a sense of control?

[00:42:39] Laura: Definitely. Control and safety.

[00:42:43] Ramit: Tell me about the safety part.

[00:42:46] Laura: That I wouldn’t have to move around as much my family did. That I could create a safe and loving and stable home that I never had. And I did that.

[Narration]

[00:43:00] Ramit: That is really tough to hear, and it explains so much about Laura’s relationship with money. At 18, she discovered her parents had open credit in her name, total betrayal from the people who you’re supposed to be able to trust the most, and she was left with debt collectors and this residual fear around money. So what do you do when that happens? A lot of people find ways to control it. And around that same time she found FIRE.

[00:43:26] What a perfect fit for someone who wants more control. In fact, it can even feel like magic. A system with rules and formulas. A system where you can win. A way to finally feel safe. Now most of us didn’t have our parents steal our identity, but identity theft is on the rise and the numbers are truly staggering.

[00:43:47] Last year alone, the FTC received over 6.4 million reports and more than 12.5 billion was lost to fraud. You can’t stop every scam out there, but you can make yourself a smaller target. That is why I personally use DeleteMe. They clear your info off of all those creepy sites that sell it, and they actually send you a report so you can stay totally up to date with what they have done. I can see exactly where they found my information online and proof that it’s been removed. And if something strange ever pops up, I can talk to a real person on their team to get it removed.

[00:44:23] For someone like Laura, that means fewer spreadsheets, fewer things to control. You just sign up and that’s it. DeleteMe works in the background, constantly scouring for your personal information. This is exactly why I want to help Laura and Cameron change their mindset and get over their fear of money. Let’s get back to the conversation.

[Interview]

[00:44:42] Ramit: When was the last time you took stock and appreciated how far you’ve come?

[00:44:48] Laura: It’s something I’m working on. I’m working right now with someone on inner child healing. As you can see, it’s really hard for me to own my narrative about my childhood because it feels like things that were done to me that I had to survive and overcome. I want to get to a point where I can tell that story in a really positive way, and I’m not there yet.

[00:45:16] Ramit: I totally appreciate that. It’s hard. I can even see it in your answer to my question, when was the last time you appreciated it? And your answer was, “I’m working on it.” That’s code for someone who doesn’t appreciate their own progress. I know because that’s how I grew up. What’s next? What’s next? What’s next?

[00:45:36] I’m not really thinking about it. What’s appreciating? That’s just a waste of time. Let’s get onto the next thing and it’s taken a lot. That’s exactly the answer I would’ve said before I met my wife. You work with a therapist?

[00:45:52] Laura: I have worked with a traditional therapist, and I’ve been doing other things too. We’ve gone through couples therapy three times, working with someone who’s more focused on inner child healing. I’m very interested and enjoy spending time on different types of healing.

[00:46:12] Ramit: Okay. I think I understand more about why you have this approach with money and why your numbers look the way they do. Thank you for taking me behind the scenes I would’ve never known.

[00:46:25] Cameron, can I ask you about how you were raised with money? What do you remember your family saying about money when you were young?

[00:46:33] Cameron: I think my youth is very opposite from Laura’s story. I think my family was more upper class, I guess. I had stay-at-home mom. My dad worked– an executive– for big companies. He was doing sales, so he traveled all the time. We always had two cars growing up and one of them was a company car. Both my parents, but my dad especially loved spending money.

[00:47:02] So growing up it was just like, yeah, if you need this, buy it. I really didn’t think about money. I didn’t worry about money. They helped me with most of my college, student loans. And then my first job out of college, I also went into sales. I didn’t enjoy it. I wasn’t happy. Everything in that job was focused on money. It’s all just goals, money-oriented goals. Every month resets, and I was very stressed out. I wasn’t happy.

[00:47:38] I did that for maybe three, four years, and then I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t really have a plan. So I made the choice right around when we got married in 2016 to leave this sales job, which at the time I was the breadwinner between us, and we were relying on my income more than Laura’s. I changed to go to a very low hourly rate wage at something I’ve never done before. A very small company in the suburbs, and I still work there today.

[00:48:18] Ramit: What do you do for a living? What’s the job?

[00:48:21] Cameron: So it’s a gardening company. We grow and design organic vegetable gardens, mostly for residential homes, backyard gardens, school gardens, things like that. So when I started the job, I was like physically out in the gardens doing that. Now I basically manage all the operations, the day-to-day, hiring, schedule, client communications, all that.

[00:48:45] Ramit: Let me go back to– your income here is 63 or so approximately per year. Right?

[00:48:55] Cameron: Yes.

[00:48:56] Ramit: Okay.

[00:48:57] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:48:58] Ramit: How do you feel about that income that you have now?

[00:49:03] Cameron: Echoing what Laura said earlier, it’s the most I ever made, especially in this job, so I feel really good that I’ve worked my way from what it was when I started here. But I still compare myself to peers and friends my age who are working other jobs at larger companies, whatever. And I find myself comparing what I think they make to what I make. And that’s still something I struggle with and plays a part in some of my avoidance with all this, because I feel like I’ve never really been successful at making money.

[00:49:47] Ramit: Can I make a quick correction? Looking at your numbers, your gross income is actually $84,000 a year, not 60 something. That’s your take home. Did you know that?

[00:49:58] Cameron: No.

[00:50:00] Ramit: Okay. This is interesting. Can I ask, what did you think your income was if you had to guess?

[00:50:06] Cameron: If I had to guess, I probably would’ve said 75.

[00:50:10] Ramit: Okay, so your income is almost $10,000 higher than you thought. How does that strike you? What do you feel hearing that?

[00:50:18] Cameron: I feel that’s great. I feel happy. But it’s also that same where it’s just a number on a page.

[00:50:26] Ramit: You don’t always feel any happier, right?

[00:50:28] Cameron: No. What is that going to do here or there?

[00:50:31] Ramit: I agree. If it was 95, would you feel any more happy or satisfied?

[00:50:36] Cameron: Probably not.

[00:50:38] Ramit: Are you guys starting to see this? The number on a page is not going to change the way you feel about it. The way you feel about money is highly uncorrelated to the amount in your bank account. Look, I made a accidental math mistake. I thought your income was 60. You agreed with me. Then I recalculated. Oh [Bleep]. It’s actually 84,000. Oh yeah. Okay.

[00:51:01] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:51:02] Ramit: Zero change. Zero affect change. It means nothing to you. What are y’all noticing from this? Laura, you look like you’re thinking about something. Go ahead.

[00:51:12] Laura: I feel like I keep us living very poor. It wouldn’t matter how much our money grew, we are not allowed to spend anymore than we’re spending now.

[00:51:24] Ramit: Would you say that you keep your family living small?

[00:51:28] Laura: Yes.

[00:51:29] Ramit: Can you think of anyone else who kept their family living small?

[00:51:33] Laura: Yes.

[00:51:34] Ramit: Who?

[00:51:35] Laura: My family.

[00:51:36] Ramit: Yeah. How often do we hear it, people behaving the way they do with money, never connecting it to their family story and the habits and the attitudes that they grew up with? It literally doesn’t occur to them. Did it ever occur to you?

[00:51:53] Laura: Yes. And it’s come up before in therapy when I don’t like who I am when I am this person. It’s like, oh, that is my mother talking. That is my dad talking. I know that I take on that persona when I’m getting really frustrated because I didn’t learn how to communicate at a young age like Cameron. And I have had to learn how to do that as a couple. I’m so glad we did.

[00:52:17] Ramit: You’re telling me your immigrant parents didn’t teach you how to be verbally adept with your emotions? 

[00:51:22] Laura: No.

[00:52:23] Ramit: I find that hard to believe.

[00:52:25] Laura: Yeah. That TV was always on. Who needs to talk if we’re watching TV?

[00:52:29] Ramit: That’s right. It’s quite interesting. It’s quite interesting to see these lessons passed down through generations, especially when the lessons that are passed down become less and less relevant due to changes in socioeconomic status.

[00:52:52] Laura: Yeah. We were here because we survived. Survival skills are skills for a reason.

[00:53:02] Ramit: When do you get to move beyond surviving?

[00:53:04] Laura: Probably now. Probably five years ago.

[00:53:07] Ramit: Mm-hmm. Because if I made $228,000 a year and I had a loving family, one of the first things I would do would be to stop using the word survive. We’re past survival. That’s not a question for us anymore. I’m going to make sure I have enough saved up. I’m going to make sure that I create a culture in this family so that it’s not just me. It’s my partner as well.

[00:53:32] We are partners in this venture, in this business of running a household together, and we are going to collectively decide how we are going to thrive. We’re not going to use the word survive. We’re not going to talk about it. That’s a given. That’s what our savings rate and our investments are for. If one of us gets hit by a bus, of course, we’re going to survive. I’m more interested in thriving and living a Rich Life. What would happen if you said something like that, Laura?

[00:53:59] Laura: If I said that Cameron, would be like, “Finally. Great, let’s do it.” He’d be so happy for me.

[00:54:05] Ramit: Really?

[00:54:06] Laura: Yes. I feel that in our marriage, in our relationship, he wants to have fun. He wants to have a good time. He wants to enjoy himself. And I’m over here stressing all the time. Fun is a future thing you can do if everything else gets taken care of.

[00:54:26] Ramit: You agree with that characterization, Cameron?

[00:54:28] Cameron: Yes, I do. Yeah. And it’s not like, “Hey, I’m just going to blow our money and go out to the bar.” But it is important mentally, whatever, that we take time for ourselves and go do things and loosen up a little.

[00:54:45] Ramit: I agree with what you’re saying, Cameron. I agree. Having fun is important. This is a marathon of life, and honestly, it’s more than a subsistence life. You’re both very, very fortunate to be in the situation you’re in, but I’m a little confused because, Cameron, you don’t seem particularly engaged with the finances in the family.

[00:55:08] If I’m Laura and my partner doesn’t even know his income within $9,000, doesn’t know the household income, doesn’t know where the money’s going, basically it’s just like, “Hey, I just want an allowance, and then you do whatever you’re going to do?” I don’t really take him seriously when he talks about money.

[00:55:24] Cameron: Yeah, that’s fair. And that’s some of the arguments we’ve had in the past– is if I’m saying, “Hey, loosen up, spend this.” She’s like, “Of course it’s easy for you to say. You don’t know what we have coming up. You don’t know any of this.”

[00:55:35] Ramit: What is the role that each of you plays in the financial arrangement in your household? Laura, you are the what?

[00:55:45] Laura: I would say I’m the parent. I’m the authoritarian. What I say goes. I set the rules and I make sure everyone’s following them.

[00:55:53] Ramit: Okay. And what about for you, Cameron?

[00:55:58] Cameron: Yeah. I’m the passenger.

[00:56:00] Ramit: Are you the child?

[00:56:02] Cameron: I wouldn’t say it’s parent-child.

[00:56:04] Ramit: You do get an allowance.

[00:56:07] Cameron: Yes, but we talked through it. We talked about how much we think makes sense and what it should be. It wasn’t directly just, “Here’s this.” That part, there was a discussion about.

[00:56:20] Ramit: Okay, so we have the authoritarian and the passenger. Would that be fair to say?

[00:56:27] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:56:27] Ramit: Does that work?

[00:56:29] Laura: No.

[00:56:30] Cameron: No.

[00:56:31] Ramit: Good. I’m glad you both agree on that. That’s not a healthy dynamic at all. You could just see like it’s so many ways that this could go bad, worse. Laura gets hit by a bus. What happens now to the family? Cameron doesn’t really know what to do with the money. Cameron hasn’t been engaged with the money. You have a kid. That’s a big, big, big existential generational problem.

[00:56:58] Or Laura becomes increasingly resentful or increasingly frantic and frenetic about money. Results in some really bad stuff happening. Resentment builds up into really bad stuff. Potential separation or mental health spiral because it’s taken on all this stuff and just spiraling. We already talked about food hoarding. Who knows? These are things to discuss with a therapist. You can see that it doesn’t– there’s not really rainbows at the end of that story.

[00:57:27] Laura: Yeah.

[00:57:27] Ramit: Let me understand a little bit more about your jobs, because I think that’s a crucial piece of this. Laura, you mentioned you’re a software engineer or you work in software. Is that correct?

[00:57:36] Laura: Yes.

[00:57:37] Ramit: Okay. Do you like it?

[00:57:39] Laura: Mostly yes, it’s very exciting. I think technology can be very creative and it’s always changing. I would like to work less, and I would like to be more aligned with a nonprofit, something that is really mission driven.

[00:58:01] Ramit: Hold on, hold on. If you like your job, why do you want to retire in five years?

[00:58:06] Laura: I don’t want to work as much.

[00:58:08] Ramit: You want work less.

[00:58:09] Laura: I want to work less, and I want to work in areas where I know I would likely be making a lot less.

[00:58:16] Ramit: Okay. That’s quite different than retiring in five years, the very goal that you’ve spent your adult life working towards.

[00:58:24] Laura: We want to coast by, so that we just have to cover our daily expenses without having to put money aside for retirement. So we’re front loading all of our retirement savings now, and then it could free us up to choose to work less or work in different industries.

[00:58:41] Ramit: So you’re staying in this current job so that you can front load that, meaning invest a lot, and then eventually step to a different company, probably where you earn less, but you won’t have to invest at all or nearly as much.

[00:58:57] Laura: Yes.

[00:58:57] Ramit: Okay. And when you do that, if and when you step to a different company, taking lower pay, what will the effect be on Cameron’s career?

[00:59:06] Laura: Hopefully none. Hopefully he can work less too. That’s the goal, to not need to make as much and work as much to live off less. And we’ve set ourselves up really well for that. I think we both wish we had more time at home, more time with each other, more time with our kid. This is really stressful times to have a 4-year-old and be working two full-time jobs. Our relationship is like logistics. We’re just sharing a scheduling calendar.

[00:59:38] Ramit: I hear you. That is stressful. Like you said, when you said our relationship is just logistics, that it’s not fun. It’s just like, who needs to be where, when? Who’s picking this person? What if the kid gets sick? What if this happens? So I can understand that you both want to have more flexibility. How do you think other couples do this, Laura?

[01:00:02] Laura: I think they do what everyone else does, which is save your 10% and spend your money now and hope you have enough in retirement.

[01:00:11] Ramit: You don’t want to do that?

[01:00:13] Laura: No.

[01:00:14] Ramit: You want to invest max and then “coast” for the next 45, 50 years.

[01:00:24] Laura: Yeah.

[01:00:25] Ramit: Okay.

[01:00:26] Laura: I want to know the money is there. I don’t want to hope I can retire someday. I’m actively working to coast, to not need to contribute to our retirement. So if I know the money’s there, I know we’ll be safe.

[01:00:42] Ramit: Cameron, how do you feel when it comes to work and earning money?

[01:00:46] Cameron: I think I am in alignment with Laura that yeah, if we could get to a point where we’re working a little less, that would be great. I did have a year or two at my current job where I worked four days a week, and I thought that was such a sweet spot. I don’t think either of us are going to just not work, especially Laura.

[01:01:09] She need to be productive. We want to be doing things. I think it’s fair to say that we would be making less money, obviously, if we’re working less hours and in a different industry, whatever it may be. So I’m in agreement that yes, I think we can work less, but there’ll always be something there that I think we can somewhat count on.

[01:01:33] Ramit: Is there ever a time in this plan of yours where you can spend more?

[01:01:40] Laura: Before we did the CSP, I would’ve said no.

[01:01:43] Ramit: And now?

[01:01:45] Laura: So we did the CSP, and we had two projections. We had been deciding– it took us a few years to decide do we want to have another child? And to me, that was a decision based in fear. Like, how can we afford another child? We would have to keep working for even longer, so it is scary to me to think about how we could afford that life when the only lifestyle I’d been working towards is coast by. So adding a second child would change that plan. So it had always been a decision out of fear.

[01:02:25] Ramit: Do you see what’s happening right now? What was my question to you?

[01:02:28] Laura: I don’t even remember.

[01:02:31] Cameron: The question was, is there a time to spend more?

[01:02:33] Laura: No.

[01:02:34] Ramit: Okay. When your entire life is guided by fear, you actually cannot even basically physically hear the question I ask. I think what just happened is you heard snippets. You heard a word, something like plan and future, and it’s almost like your brain is wearing goggles. It’s like garbled and you’re seeing it through these different lenses, and you heard, “Oh my God.” The future might involve a second child. A second child means a lot of money. Childcare is crazy. We got to figure this out. I’m not sure. And you just went down that path. And that is a microcosm or a tiny example of how you have been living your adult life when it comes to money.

[01:03:20] Laura: Yeah. I heard spend more, and I’m like, “Hell no.” We can’t spend more. We have to save more only.

[01:03:26] Cameron: I thought when we were doing the CSP, after looking at the numbers, we both saw that and said to each other that we are making more than we ever have. And actually, this is more than we thought. And if we are going to do things like have another kid or go on trips and do all this time while we have kids that are living here with us, this is the time to do it. That at least came up during the process of doing the CSP.

[01:03:55] Ramit: That’s pretty cool. Where did it go? Because that didn’t come up in the last question I just asked.

[01:04:02] Laura: So we ran the numbers. We can temporarily afford two kids in daycare. We’d feel a crunch for about one overlapping year as the 4-year-old needs one more year of preschool and then the other baby needs daycare like that. That double daycare year would be a lot. And then our 4-year-old would be a five-year-old who’s in public school and it’s free.

[01:04:33] Ramit: I’m not a parent, but that sounds tough for a year, no doubt, financially speaking. But one year in the course of a lifetime doesn’t sound like that much. What do you think? Am I being dismissive?

[01:04:44] Laura: One year in the course of a four-year plan to finally achieve something we’ve been working towards is a lot. That’s derailing the plan.

[Narration]

[01:04:54] Ramit: I want to quickly jump in because what I see here is more than just fear. It’s actually over complication. Laura and Cameron have built their entire financial life around tiny details. Do you see it? Spreadsheets with 30 tabs, manually entering every purchase into YNAB, debating numbers down to the penny. It looks like discipline, it feels like discipline, but it’s really just avoidance.

[01:05:19] If you tell yourself you can’t move forward until you have the perfect number reconciled, then you never really have to move forward at all. And those tiny details are irrelevant. They’re also keeping them stuck about big decisions like whether to grow their family. You’ll notice that the dynamic also reinforces this.

[01:05:37] Cameron never really had to learn about money since his parents took care of it. Then Laura. He became the passenger. When Laura became what she herself calls the authoritarian. Structurally, the way that they have set up their dynamic guarantees that they will stay stuck in these same patterns. Guys, this is why I always say fight for simplicity. Because the more complicated your system gets, the smaller your life becomes. Let me try to help them make a change right now.

[Interview]

[01:06:07] Ramit: Is this story serving you, Laura?

[01:06:10] Laura: No.

[01:06:11] Ramit: Then why are you stuck following it?

[01:06:14] Laura: I don’t know. If we had something that we knew we were working towards, this would be a lot easier. We’d know where the money was going and we’d be excited about it. But we don’t, and I spin and I ask for things. When Cameron says I’m a pendulum, that’s why he’s like, “Yeah, whatever. Whatever you say. One day you say we’re moving to Spain, and then one day you say we should, I don’t know, buy another property or start a business here.” I don’t know what I want, but I know I want something big, and I want it to be different, and I don’t want to keep doing what we’re doing now.

[01:06:51] Ramit: You’re sure?

[01:06:52] Laura: Yes.

[01:06:55] Ramit: Sure? You’re pretty good at it. You’re pretty good at saving a lot, minimizing expenses, getting the 1-dollar plums. Why would you want to give up the competence of saving money and walk into an area where you are incompetent? I’m not using that pejoratively, but people who don’t know how to spend money are literally incompetent. They’re not competent at it. Why would you want to do that?

[01:07:21] Laura: Because I was 18, 20 when I made this goal, and it doesn’t actually fit the needs of our family now. If I were on my own, great, I would’ve achieved it already. I could do what I want. That’s not my life. We’ve got a kid. We want more for her. I don’t want her to hear these conversations that we’re having, like, that wasn’t on the list. We’re not getting it. No toys. Put that back down. That’s what she hears from us.

[01:07:50] Ramit: She hears that now?

[01:07:51] Laura: Yeah.

[01:07:52] Ramit: Okay. This Coast FIRE plan of yours, Coast FI, can I take a look at it?

[01:07:58] Laura: Yes.

[01:07:58] Ramit: Okay. All right. Let me describe what I’m seeing here. So we have a spreadsheet. Coast FI calculator. And let me just read the inputs here. They’re quite interesting. Current age is 35. Target retirement age is 67. Okay. Safe withdrawal rate, 4%. Inflation adjusted growth rates, 7%. That’s 7% returns. Annual expense, 84,000.

[01:08:24] Annual passive cash flow is zero. FI number or the number you need to be able to live off of is 2.1 million. Your Coast FI number, which is how much money you need to have invested today to be able to reach your FI number is $240,000. Okay, keep that on screen.

[01:08:48] Laura: Okay. Well, that’s the inputs. And then the next page is the projections.

[01:08:53] Ramit: Hold on. All right. Just so we’re clear, it says you need 248,000. You have 335,000 invested.

[01:09:00] Laura: Yes.

[01:09:01] Ramit: Let’s go to the next sheet you were going to show me. Timeline calculator. Okay. What is all this [Bleep]? God, this is confusing.

[01:09:08] Laura: Those inputs and then down here it is.

[01:09:11] Ramit: What the [Bleep]? What is this? Row 20. You’ve already reached Coast FI. What are we talking about?

[01:09:15] Laura: If we only want $84,000 a year, which would be less than we have now. So it’s about how comfortable we would want to be in retirement, and then do we want to keep working? Will we keep working?

[01:09:33] Ramit: Just hold on a second. Okay, this is crazy. Take this off screen. So your FI number is, you could have $84,000 a year. Basically safe income. I’m skipping over a bunch of stuff, but basically you can make 84,000 off your investments. You spend $99,000 a year.

[01:10:02] Laura: Yes.

[01:10:03] Ramit: If we subtract your savings and your investments. That’s not that big of a difference, right?

[01:10:09] Laura: Right.

[01:10:10] Ramit: This whole conversation has felt very existential to me.

[01:10:13] Laura: That’s assuming we stay with one kid. We would want to have one more. Are we going to keep working or not working? Are we going to need to buy health insurance? Childcare would go down and health insurance would go way up if Cameron doesn’t have any at his place. I feel like I would have to keep working. It wouldn’t be part-time if we wanted health insurance.

[01:10:36] Ramit: Is this literally the conversation that I told you people have? They’re like, “First we got to save for the kids, then we got to save for coffee. Then one day we got to save for long-term healthcare insurance.” Is this not literally what I just talked about?

[01:10:46] Laura: Yes.

[01:10:46] Ramit: Okay, so do you see what happens if you approach the world through this lens? Let’s keep worrying. Like Whack-a-Mole, we’ll just keep worrying about one thing after another. Why? Because it allows me– when you play Whack-a-Mole, you actually feel like you’re in control. One thing pops up, I can fix it. It’s a very transactional way to go through life.

[01:11:08] Laura: Yes.

[01:11:08] Ramit: You make tiny wins along the way, but you actually lose the war.

[01:11:11] Laura: Yeah, I agree. We’re playing small, and I like that so far I’ve been able to control these little things, but now it’s real. Now what are we going to do? We’re going to hit this number that I’ve been working for over a decade towards. We’ve got this little girl, we’ve got this great family. Now what?

[01:11:34] Cameron: Saying now we can enjoy it. I think we both somewhat feel this way, is that, I said before, there’s this window of time why we have our child, another one, where we talked about we want to travel. We want to show them the world. We want to spend time with them.

[01:11:55] That’s a limited amount of time. And that’s something that’s really important to us, is taking them places, going on trips, taking time away from work. I feel like that is one of the major goals. And I think you’re right. We look at it in these tiny, little– in two years we’ll be here and then the goal sticks keep getting moved back or something else pops up. And we never really feel like, okay, we’re there. Now let’s book this trip and go here and do this thing.

[01:12:27] Ramit: Laura, you must be well versed in the downsides of the FIRE community.

[01:12:32] Laura: Yes.

[01:12:32] Ramit: What’s the number one warning or horror story that the FIRE community talks about besides running out of money?

[01:12:42] Laura: Oh, that’s the big one.

[01:12:45] Ramit: That’s 90% of it. What’s the other 10%?

[01:12:49] Laura: I’d say more recently what I’ve been hearing is, so you retired. Now what?

[01:12:55] Ramit: Exactly.

[01:12:56] Laura: You never strengthen that muscle. You scrimp and save for so long. When do you stop doing– how do you stop doing it?

[01:13:03] Ramit: Exactly. And only recently have they even started to talk about that.

[01:13:07] Laura: Yes, yes.

[01:13:09] Ramit: And I think it’s great, but I think that if you only start talking about something decades into it, meanwhile, other people have been honing that muscle for years and years and years, it’s very difficult to learn that skill. And in fact, you’re reinforced by a community that actually keeps you playing small.

[01:13:25] Look at your life. You are living your life through a series of spreadsheet cells. You started a plan using a Coast FI plan however many years ago. 15 years ago, dutifully filled in these cells every day, updating every week, every month. Oh my gosh. But life is not lived in that linear of a way.

[01:13:47] And actually life is not lived in a spreadsheet. You can win at the spreadsheet. Your spreadsheet looks really nice. It’s really well done. It’s filled out well. I’m happy about that. I’m not joking. I actually am impressed that you have taken the time to be as diligent and as forward looking as you have, and in part because of the way you were raised.

[01:14:06] That is what you have to do to put that attention and thoughtfulness into a spreadsheet. But I’m afraid that you have missed the point of a Rich Life. Because you can win at a spreadsheet and lose at life.

[01:14:22] Laura: Yes.

[01:14:23] Ramit: To me, when you talk about your kid or kids, when you talk about time that you have together, when you talk about taking a trip or going to a zoo or a museum, that gets me excited. And I go, “Talk to me about that.” I’ll help you figure out how to use the money to make that work. There’s 10 different ways you could do it, but this dogmatic approach to, I picked a spreadsheet when I was 18 and now I have to win at this spreadsheet, it’s actually closing the world off to what life is, and it’s forcing you to live in the confines of a spreadsheet.

[01:15:00] Laura: Yeah, which is why these numbers aren’t real to me. These are numbers I’ve been staring at and working towards for over 10 years, and my life isn’t any significantly different. This is the most we’ve ever made, but it’s also the most expenses we’ve ever had to have with the mortgage and childcare. It feels like we have not yet been able to enjoy our money. We got together. We were making pennies. We got married. I used all of his savings.

[01:15:29] Ramit: Why don’t you allow yourself to enjoy your money?

[01:15:31] Laura: That’s not what it’s for. It’s for the future. I really don’t even feel like the money I have can be spent.

[01:15:39] Ramit: What would you need to ask in order to get clarity?

[01:15:45] Laura: I’m going to ask, Cameron, what do you want us to spend our money on? If really we’re already here at Coast FI and we can pump the brakes on all of the retirement investing, what would we spend our money on?

[01:16:01] Cameron: To me, I think it’s travel. You’ve talked for many years about, if your life went a different direction and you didn’t have kids and the job, whatever, you would be traveling the world. You want to show our daughter that stuff. So we have places, we’ve talked about where we want to go and things we want to do.

[01:16:21] And again, it seems like it’s always like, oh, and next year we can do that. Two years we can do that. We can start doing that now. We can book some trips and plan, and that can be a goal still that we’re working towards, but it can be a real thing right now.

[01:16:39] Laura: Where do you want to go?

[01:16:41] Cameron: Well, we start with– we talked about Yellowstone as a big one. Start with that.

[01:16:49] Laura: When do you want to go?

[01:16:51] Cameron: This fall.

[01:16:53] Laura: Okay.

[01:16:54] Ramit: Okay. That was awesome. Round of applause on that. That was so cool to watch. Cameron, you stepped up. You were like, “Hey, wait a minute. We’ve talked about this. We could do this. We don’t have to wait. We can do this now.” Laura, I love that you went back. “Okay, so where would we go?”

[01:17:10] You got specific, boom. Cameron had an answer. I love the answer. And Cameron, I don’t know if you caught it, but Laura’s response was like, “Wow.” It instantly grabbed her. And I love the push for more specificity. When? Fall. Okay. It’s that feeling of that chill you get in your brain when you and your partner are on the same page.

[01:17:31] It’s like, wow, we’re alive. We are a team. That’s pretty cool. Okay. Yellowstone is one. Again, I’m not here to tell you to spend more money. That’s not my job. I’m here to help you figure out how to live your Rich Life. Laura, what would you need answered in order to know how to do that?

[01:17:53] Laura: I would need you to do some planning and figure out what kind of trip that would be and how much it would cost. Are we flying there? Are we renting an Airstream and making a road trip, or is it a guided tour? What would we want, and how much would it cost?

[01:18:13] Cameron: I can do that.

[01:18:14] Ramit: Cameron, what would you need in order to be an active participant in managing your finances?

[01:18:20] Cameron: Mm-hmm. That’s a good question. I think in the past when we tried to have a regulated sit down to go over this stuff, I would get I would get overwhelmed with the spreadsheets and filling this out, and mostly it was just watching Laura move numbers around, and it’s so hard for me to have the interest and to follow it. So having a clear, obvious goal that’s happening in six months or a year, whatever, and those choices are being felt pretty soon, that helps me for sure. It’s a more visible goal.

[01:19:00] Ramit: Laura, what do you notice in Cameron’s response? I saw the realization going through your eyes.

[01:19:06] Laura: I thought we had a clear, obvious goal, but that goal was a number on a spreadsheet that was my goal, and it was not his goal. And when we’re just talking about hitting a number, we’re not talking about what benefit we get in our life. What are we going to experience together that we are excited about? It was never the Coast FI goal.

[01:19:29] Ramit: Exactly. It was never. That’s the problem with so many FIRE plans, endless instrumentation on a freaking spreadsheet with a complete lack of focus on this. Look at my hand. This palm out, palm up. What do I get? I don’t care about a number. Most people don’t care about a number. Laura, you don’t even care about a number.

[01:19:50] It’s driven you for 18 years, but you actually admitted you have no connection to it. It doesn’t even feel real to you. People in general are not emotionally moved by a number, not even the freaks on the most obscure FIRE subreddit, not even them. We can be much more moved by walking outside with our daughter and seeing a sunset and getting an ice cream cone. That can be more moving than literally having $5 million in a freaking spreadsheet.

[01:20:19] And what Cameron is saying, Cameron not being deep in the FIRE community, is like, “I don’t respond well to something that’s 40 years from now. I want to be able to take our daughter to the zoo or something like that. And I want us to be able to do something. And I want us to be able to do it this year. That would connect me.”

[01:20:42] Laura, I think if I were you, especially as the purported money person in a relationship, I would be looking at this moment with a sinking realization. Holy [Bleep]. I have not created a healthy culture of money in this household where my husband understands what the hell is going on with money.

[01:21:05] If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, he’s helpless with the finances, and that’s my fault, Laura. And secondly, this is perhaps even deeper. The only way I can create a healthy relationship with money in our household is for me to create a healthy relationship myself. If I do not have a healthy relationship with myself and with my relationship with money, then how can I create one with my husband in our house?

[01:21:34] Laura: Yeah. It’s something we know. In other areas of my life, I’ve been working on it. I had a therapist as I was pregnant because I knew that I would have to be re-parenting myself as I raised a little girl. So I feel like this is the last big thing, but it’s probably the biggest one. We spend most of our day working and earning this money.

[01:22:00] Ramit: What do I get? What do we get? Have you ever had a shared goal, a shared vision?

[01:22:09] Laura: I would say most of them have been mine. My goals that I make him achieve with me.

[01:22:16] Ramit: Right. Is that a no? Sounds like a no.

[01:22:19] Laura: No.

[01:22:20] Cameron: Small, like getting the house, working towards that. I would say that it is one of the major ones, but other than that, no.

[01:22:33] Laura: We started this call. What do we want? We want a shared vision, a shared Rich Life that we can both be excited about because just hitting Coast FI is something I was excited about that didn’t really matter to him, and I’m not even that excited about it anymore.

[01:22:50] Ramit: Okay. Is it time to go from one person having a solo goal to having a shared Rich Life vision?

[01:22:58] Laura: Yes.

[01:22:59] Ramit: Okay. You want to do that right now? Okay, let’s do it. I’ll give you all 90 seconds, and you can write down anything that would make the next 10 years absolutely magical. Some of them can be, you would do them solo. You could do them together, husband and wife. You could bring your daughter along or any future children. Totally up to you. The next 10 years, what would make it magical? Go ahead. What was that like writing those things down?

[01:23:39] Cameron: It was nice. There are things I wrote that were floating in my head as ideas that I didn’t think I’d write, but I did.

[01:23:48] Ramit: Cool. Laura?

[01:23:50] Laura: It was hard at first. The first 1, 2, 3 were hard, and it’s like, oh, we could do this and we could do that. It’s like everything else. It’s hard to do it. It’s like setting a writing goal. It’s hard to write that first post or that first chapter. It’s like you got to keep going to do the thing. To have energy to do the thing, you need to do the thing. We’ve never invested energy in thinking about how money could be fun.

[01:24:18] Ramit: Yeah. Can we compare notes now? I would like for each of you to share one thing, and I would like the other person to get excited and curious about it. That’s how we approach this. Go ahead, Laura. You start with the first one.

[01:24:33] Laura: I want to live in either Mexico or Spain and both of us take Spanish language classes, and [Bleep] too.

[01:24:43] Cameron: I definitely want to take Spanish lessons. That’s something we’ve talked about. And I’m open to living in Spain or Mexico. I did have Spanish lessons on here. I want to visit Japan with you and [Bleep].

[01:24:59] Laura: I want to go back there with you. I think you would love it.

[01:25:02] Cameron: Yeah.

[01:25:03] Ramit: Hold on. Get more curious. Where, when? What do you want to eat? Get into it.

[01:25:08] Cameron: Okay.

[01:25:09] Laura: What would you want to eat when we’re there?

[01:25:12] Cameron: Definitely sushi, ramen. I want to try it all. And where to go, I don’t know. I just want to go Tokyo. There’s so much, but I definitely want to go.

[01:25:26] Laura: I would want to take you to Kyoto. When I was there I thought you would really like it.

[01:25:30] Cameron: Yeah. And our daughter loves Japanese food, so we know she will enjoy it.

[01:25:36] Laura: I wrote living closer to your parents.

[01:25:41] Cameron: Yeah. And I think that’s another one. Where? What is closer?

[01:25:47] Laura: I don’t know how close I would want to live, but closer than we are now.

[01:25:51] Cameron: Well, maybe we say within three hours or less. Yeah. I wrote that I want to open a business with you in the next 10 years.

[01:26:06] Laura: What kind?

[01:26:07] Cameron: I’m not sure. I think I lean towards restaurant.

[01:26:12] Laura: What will we sell?

[01:26:15] Cameron: Sandwiches or Mexican food, like street food. Something casual, lunch-based kind of food.

[01:26:23] Ramit: Can I just ask, Laura? I noticed the tears. Are these happy tears?

[01:26:26] Laura: It’s something we’ve talked about.

[01:26:28] Ramit: But just in general, as you’re hearing this.

[01:26:31] Laura: Yes.

[01:26:31] Ramit: Okay. At first I thought it was tears because you understand the margins of a restaurant. But then I’m–

[01:26:40] Laura: 75% close in the first year.

[01:26:43] Ramit: Okay. All right. Keep going.

[01:26:45] Laura: Was I next?

[01:26:46] Cameron: Yeah.

[01:26:47] Laura: I would want to truly take a couple of years off. Just not work. It would be great to do that if we had another child and just take those first two years off like we know now how hard that time was.

[01:27:04] Cameron: Yeah. I think that’s a great goal. I think that would help us with the little one and help you. And I think we can do that.

[01:27:19] Laura: Maybe we pair that with living closer to your parents for a short amount of time.

[01:27:23] Cameron: Yeah. You’re right. That’s a good idea.

[01:27:25] Ramit: Can I pause you here? What’s this feeling like right now?

[01:27:29] Laura: Possibilities.

[01:27:32] Cameron: And combining. This is another thing, is we’ve talked about all these things at different times here and there, but talking about them all in one place, like what just happened is like, you want to do this? Oh, that pairs well with this other one.

[01:27:45] Ramit: That was really cool. Oh, we could take two years off and live closer to their parents. You’re starting to see these synergies, these opportunities that were previously just unconnected satellite ideas. It’s really, really powerful and beautiful. Laura, if you weren’t afraid, what would you do next?

[01:28:06] Laura: I would quit my job. Just trust the Coast FI number, like, okay, I did it. I don’t need this money anymore. We could live off of Cameron’s income. I would be home with my daughter. We wouldn’t have to be worried about paying for daycare. Have another kid, and maybe another one.

[01:28:29] Ramit: I don’t know if that’s the right financial decision or not, but I know that that is a very useful guideline to start viewing the world through. Is it so polar opposite of how you currently do it?

[01:28:41] Laura: Yes.

[01:28:42] Ramit: Cameron, you need to get involved with the money right now. And I know that it’s been challenging because even for me, it’s overwhelming to listen to some of the spinning that happens and look at these spreadsheets. It’s a lot. In some ways my money situation is simpler than yours, and that shouldn’t be the case.

[01:29:03] Your money situation should be infinitely simpler than mine. But I need both of you to be involved if you want to be able to escape this trap of the spreadsheet. That means Cameron, you probably need to– have you read either of my books? You probably need to. You probably need to to be able to connect with Laura and speak the language she’s speaking. A lot of what’s really being communicated here is loneliness.

[01:29:29] It’s like, I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel like I have anybody looking out for me. I need to do this all on my own. So give me every burden. I’ll plug it into this spreadsheet, and I will live smaller and smaller and smaller. Laura doesn’t say that, but that’s what’s being communicated. Laura, is that true?

[01:29:48] Laura: Yeah, I’ve had to do everything alone.

[01:29:52] Ramit: So Cameron, one of the best ways to combat that is to become her partner, and that means start off– you have a structured approach here. You take one, take both of these books. Read them. Have a book discussion with her. Host it. And ask her questions. She’ll love– optimizers love to talk about their numbers and their knowledge and all that stuff, but at the same time, you’re actually going to be becoming competent with money.

[01:30:17] And you may discover that she actually has made a couple of decisions you don’t agree with. I would love that. My wife has challenged me with some of the decisions I’ve made. She runs our internal analysis that we do every quarter. It’s awesome. That would be amazing.

[01:30:34] Then the two of you can together craft your vision of a Rich Life. This is the kind of thing that you can actually use money and feel really good about it. It’s as small as an art class, as big as an international multi-generational family trip. It’s so cool. As for the job, those are bigger discussions.

[01:30:57] Yes, you got to be able to look at the numbers. And Cameron, you’ll be able to work those numbers up yourself, and both of you can talk about them. But also you have to decide like, what do we want in our life? What’s important now? What’s important later? Let’s start with the vision first. The money can come later.

[01:31:13] Cameron: Okay. Yeah. I recognize that you’ve been doing this on your own and it’s time for me to step up. I think looking at it a bit from a real goal is helpful to me and having us start with these are the things we really want is also helpful. But I need to do my part. So yeah, that’s a good starting point, the book, and discussing it. And maybe starting afresh from building this out using a different form or a different version of a spreadsheet or something like that.

[01:31:48] Laura: I want to say thank you to Cameron. I want us to do this together.

[01:31:54] Cameron: Me too.

[01:31:56] Ramit: That’s awesome. I love that. You two are a team. It’s so obvious. You really are. You two light up when you talk about your families and being able to travel, being able to have a vision, maybe future kids. It’s really quite lovely. Just a couple of pieces of feedback I want to share with y’all. Cameron and I already mentioned you would lead a book club with one or both of these books.

[01:32:21] I would probably start with Money for Couples because there’s a lot of dreaming in it. There’s a lot of recalibration. Who are each of you in your relationship with money, and who do you want to be? So you can lead that discussion? And I’m sure Laura will come and participate.

[01:32:40] Laura, if I were you, candidly I would unsubscribe from all of the FIRE related stuff that I’m in. I actually don’t think it’s serving you anymore. The spreadsheets, the subreddits, the email reminders that you get, you know it. You already know that stuff like the back of your hand. It’s not going away.

[01:32:58] But I would start looking at what is your future. Obviously, I think my material’s really helpful. I think there’s a lot of great material out there. But to focus on the future and deciding what your Rich Life is. As you two start to create a vision, I think you’re going to discover a totally fresh way of looking at these big discussions that have consumed you.

[01:33:19] Questions about where are you going to work? Is one person going to take a step back or pause working for a while? Should we have a second child or maybe more? Those conversations, it feels like you’ve been running,  running,  running. Talking about them. I think those are still very important conversations to have.

[01:33:36] But it’s almost like you’re going to approach eating chicken, the same chicken you’ve had, but it’s going to have different spices. It’s going to taste different. It’s going to be more engaging and rewarding to talk about jobs. Because it’s not like you should do this. I don’t know about that. It’s going to be like, oh, we have a vision together. Let’s figure out how the pieces of our life fit in there. That is what I want for you.

[Narration]

[01:33:59] Ramit: I want to give a huge thank you to Laura and Cameron for speaking with me today and for being so open. We’re going to get to their follow-ups in just a minute. And honestly, they surprised me. The truth is, people who have trained themselves to never spend almost never change. They think they want to. They may even come to me and ask for help.

[01:34:17] But when it comes down to making decisions to actually spend more money, they don’t. What they often do is just wrap their inability to spend in a coat of virtue. Oh, I don’t need that nice car. I’m simple. I don’t need that dinner out. I’m practical. I don’t need that fancy wine or even to get a new jacket. Why would I need that?

[01:34:39] They claim they want to spend more, but when it comes down to actually doing it, they usually change nothing. And that is because of their identity. They have created an identity, almost a prison in their own head that they could simply walk right outside of, but it’s hard.

[01:34:59] I will say that by the end of our conversation, something shifted, maybe. Cameron leaned in. He got engaged for the first time, they were able to dream about something as it relates to their Rich Life. Hearing them talk about it gave me hope. Maybe they can make some changes.

[01:35:14] The real shift is starting small. Take the trip, like the Yellowstone trip. And don’t overcomplicate it. Try something simple. Start to feel good. Realize it’s not going to compromise your retirement, and then keep going. I also want to thank this episode sponsor DeleteMe.

[01:35:31] For people like Laura who’ve lived through financial betrayal and still carry that fear, DeleteMe offers peace of mind. It’s one small way to take back control and to protect yourself. If you use DeleteMe, which I personally use, you’ll get 20% off all consumer plans when you go to joindeleteme.com/ramit and use promo code RAMIT at checkout. Now let’s listen to their follow-ups.

[01:35:57] Laura: My biggest takeaway was realizing with your help that we’ve already hit Coast FI, which was this big goal that I set I’d been trying to achieve. And I’d been obsessing over tiny details in that spreadsheet for a long time, but I had never let myself celebrate that milestone.

[01:36:15] And if I truly believe in the math of Coast FI, then I don’t need to keep contributing to my retirement right now. I can use that money to buy back time with my family, which is most important to me. So as a result of our conversation, for the first time in 15 years, I dropped my retirement contributions to zero, and that was terrifying.

[01:36:41] So my immediate next steps are building up our emergency fund and saving for a car. And that should take probably eight months. Another shift that I’m doing is instead of having conversations that are really stuck in the short-term, like arguing about what’s going to happen in the next year, like car and daycare expenses, you helped us zoom out and frame, what could we do in the next 10 years that would be wildly exciting and fun?

[01:37:15] And we’ve never been excited about our money. It’s just been a chore. I’m also reclaiming more time. I cut a weekend commitment, and I’m using grocery delivery only and just doing those two things. This past weekend, I finally enjoyed slow mornings with my family instead of hours at the grocery store. So these are small changes, but this is time that I’m reclaiming, and it feels amazing to spend that with my family. Thank you.

[01:37:53] Cameron: Biggest surprise, that I’ve also been living with this survival mindset for years. I think I was so used to it. I didn’t realize it. And by being absent from the financial discussions, I’m leaving Laura to figure all this out alone, and I am allowing the survival mindset that she’s had for most of her life to run our family. And that’s really not something after going through the call that I think we need to do anymore.

[01:38:26] We can afford all the things we want to do. The time is now to do them. So we need to think big, stop getting stuck in the day to day minutiae, and actually do these things. Changes, I’m decided to work four days a week during the slow time at my company to give Laura and I a chance to be together and, again, start doing the stuff we talked about.

[01:38:53] And then being a part of the financial discussions as we have them and really trying to keep the focus on the big picture, the goals that we have over the next 6, 12, 18 months, and again, not the day-to-day transactions. So thank you.

[01:39:12] Laura: Hi, Ramit. This is Laura. It’s been three weeks since our call with you, and something that has really stuck with me from our call was talking about how much fun we could possibly have with our time and money. So last weekend, it was a beautiful Sunday, and we each had plans to be out of the house. It was like a logistical nightmare, and I asked, “Can we just cancel all of our plans today? What would be the most fun that we could have right now as a family?”

[01:39:44] And within a couple minutes we decided, wait, we’re going to go to an amusement park. So we canceled all our plans, took our kid to Six Legs, and she got on every rollercoaster that she was tall enough to ride. And we had a really good time. And we would not have been so spontaneous without asking ourselves that question and giving ourselves permission to use our money to do something really fun.

[01:40:07] Right now we’re in a cabin in Georgia, and we took a road trip down here, and we stopped. We made an excursion out of it. We got last minute tickets to a cave to see an underwater lake. So much fun. We are creating beautiful memories for our daughter. And even while we’re here on our trip, we’re asking every day like, “What’s the most fun we could have today? What is something we could do that would be really memorable and enjoyable for the whole family?”

[01:40:35] So thank you for sharing that positive mindset and really simple question that we can ask ourselves because it’s working, and it’s been amazing. Thank you.

[01:40:46] Ramit: If you like this video, check out another one of my favorites right here.