Ramit Sethi’s Life-Changing “Money Conversation” Script for Couples

Mindy:
What if you’re married or in a relationship and you and your partner do not see eye to eye on your finances? Money is one of the top things that couples fight about, but what if you could eliminate that fight altogether? Today we are joined by Ramit Safety, best known for his work as the author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, but if you follow him at all, you know that recently he’s been diving headfirst into money and relationships. He even rebranded his podcast to Money for Couples and he just came out with a new book also called Money for Couples. We’ll be talking about money and relationships with Ramit and we could not be more excited. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my sparkling co-host Scott Trench,

Scott:
Another clean intro. Mindy, great to be here. BiggerPockets has a goal of creating 1 million millionaires. You are in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone no matter when or where you’re starting or whether or not your spouse is currently on board with your financial plans.

Mindy:
Ramit Sethi, welcome back to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. I’m so excited to talk to you today.

Ramit:
Thank you. I can’t wait to have our conversation. I love coming back. Thanks for having me back.

Mindy:
Okay, Ramit, one of the biggest questions that we get and I’m sure you get too, is how do I get my partner on the same page with our spending and your whole brand focuses on enjoying the journey, whereas the fire movement focuses more on saving and frugality to get there fast. But either way, when both partners aren’t on the same page, shenanigans ensue. So what do you say to people when they ask you this question?

Ramit:
I think that getting on the same page is a very interesting phrase that we use. That is the number one goal. When couples come on my podcast, I say, what are we here for? They say, I want to get on the same page. I said, what does that mean specifically? And there’s a lot of blank staring and blinking. I think what a lot of us mean is we don’t want to fight and we want it to feel easy. It’s almost like we’re both on the same rowboat and one of us isn’t rowing or one of us is rowing in the opposite direction as we are and sometimes we don’t even know where we’re going. So we use the phrase, I want to get on the same page just as a general guideline to describe what’s not working. Lemme start with how we don’t do it.

Ramit:
We don’t do it by judging and berating our partner. We certainly don’t do it by saying, oh my God, can you believe how much they spent at target? Trust me, target is not your problem and it’s not the price of artichokes. I can guarantee that. What I think is missing in a lot of the conversations about money together with a partner is a sense of joy. Money’s actually supposed to be fun. We should be laughing, we should be teasing, we should be dreaming and there’s got to be something aspirational about it. What are we working towards? I could tell you right now, if you’re not in the fire community, your savings is not aspirational. No normal person cares about, oh my God, we increased from a 6.5 to a 8.2% savings rate. I’m sorry, this is the fire community from a 26.5 to a 45.9% savings rate.

Ramit:
Nobody cares. Normal people don’t care. Let me use a different phrase. Fire people are normal. I love the fire community. Well most of it, but non-fire people are not motivated by a percentage increase in a savings rate and that’s really the journey is what is your partner motivated by? Do they love the idea of a trip to Disneyland with the family? Do they love a beautiful coat? They love the ability to go to a yoga class. All of those are okay. Money is meant to be spent on a rich life and what we need to do to connect and get on the same page is understand what our partner cares about and then create a vision together.

Scott:
I imagine, and I know this is the case for a lot of folks, that the conversations about money have gone so poorly at various points in the prior parts of the relationship that bringing it back up is very scary, very overwhelming. Do you have any toolkits for somebody that is in that situation for how they can approach their spouse from a new angle in a healthy way?

Ramit:
I think you nailed it. Money is so fraught that it’s one of those topics because of repeated bad experiences. A lot of people walk around on eggshells and after a while they just sort of don’t bring it up or they’ll bring it up like this. I know that you probably don’t want to talk about this, but if that’s your approach, you’ve already lost the game because you’re playing on defense. So there’s a new way to do it. It’s a recalibration of money. We have to accept that money is an important part of our relationship. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s nothing to apologize for. I’m not going to apologize for wanting to talk about money regularly because money affects where we live, what we eat, if we raise children, how we raise them, all of those things. So I have very specific word for word scripts in the book and one of ’em is your first positive conversation about money.

Ramit:
Imagine that some of the couples I talked to on my podcast, they’ve been married for 25 years and they have never had a single positive conversation about money. Actually many couples have never really talked about money. Oh, they’ve talked about how much they’re going to fill up their gas tank for and how much the car payment is, but they never talked about the dream that they want to live with money or they never talked about, Hey, how should we invest our money or what is this all for? What do we get at the end? So a positive conversation with money would go something like this. You could start off by saying, you know what, I realized that in the past when we’ve talked about money, it hasn’t gone the way I’ve wanted. I think I may have been a little judgmental. I think I probably didn’t listen to you as much as I could and I would really love to change that dynamic.

Ramit:
I want to find a way that we can both get excited about money. So I’d love to have a conversation about money. I think it’s going to be awesome because, and then you tell them why it’s going to be awesome, it’s going to be awesome because we can finally connect over what we both want to do with our money. What do you think? Toss the ball back in a lot of relationships. You have one person, monologuing, we’re always going to be practicing tossing the ball back and forth. Then the next topic, here’s how I feel about money today. I feel confused. I feel lonely, I feel overwhelmed. And then what about you? The next topic, how I want to feel. I want to feel competent, I want to feel safe. What about you? And then when should we talk next? And that’s it. Give each other a hug, give each other a kiss, declare, victory, and go home. This is the biggest, most important point in money for couples. You don’t have to talk about it all at once. You have the rest of your life, so just feel good. Go from A to B, call it a day and you live to fight another day and talk and connect.

Mindy:
I really like that last bit. Okay, when should we talk again? Because I mean it’s all so like, oh, of course I should be in the same page with my partner. I just said it the same page with my partner, but I should also be in this dynamic conversation as opposed to monologuing. But it also, when you are the one who is the money person, you’re like, well, just listen to me. Let me tell you all the things, and that’s a sign of maturity that you can get over that.

Ramit:
I have so much compassion for all the weird ways that we interact with money because I have done them in my own life, whether with money or with something else. Okay, my wife, when we first met, we started to travel a little bit and she would plan our itinerary and it was packed, so packed, and I remember at one point we had just gotten home, things were running a little late, no time for a nap, and then we had to go out for a food tour and I was just not in a good mood. I was sweaty and I just didn’t want to do it. I’m like, this is supposed to be a vacation. So then we had a future trip and she was pretty busy and she said, can you help plan this itinerary? I said, no problem. So I make the plan. We get there and I’m like, okay, here’s what we’re going to do.

Ramit:
Guess what? My itinerary was packed hour to hour to hour. And I realized sometimes the person who’s planning the person in charge, they naturally just want to pack things in and we had to both laugh because the very thing I had critiqued her for was the exact same thing I had done. This is what we do with money. The person who’s quote the money person monologues comes up with a spreadsheet that has 10,000 cells and says, just look at this. It’s so simple, and the other person is just like, oh my God, I want this conversation to end right now. I hate my life. But then if you put them in charge, they would probably do the very same thing. So it’s not that anyone’s a bad person, all of us have positive intent. It’s that sometimes we need to look at a bigger picture. It’s not about convincing them about some number on a spreadsheet. It’s actually about stopping and saying, Hey, where are you? How do you feel about this? What does money mean to you? Let’s start there. No numbers. We’re not even talk about numbers for the first month, we’re going to connect, we’re going to dream, we’re going to talk about how we feel, how we want to feel, and once we connect there, the debt payoff date and the calculations on your retirement date, those are mere details.

Mindy:
We need to take a quick break, but while we’re away, we want to hear from you. Do you talk to your partner regularly about your finances? Please answer in the Spotify app or on YouTube during this ad break.

Scott:
We are so excited to jump back in with Ramit. What is a healthy shared concept of what good looks like? How would I manifest that? Do I put produce a written document with my spouse? How do you ensure that that is memorialized to some degree?

Ramit:
Oh, I love this question. I talk a lot about couples are running a business, the business of running a household, and we have to accept that. I think in America we have this real romantic concept, all these Disney movies about, oh, it’s all romance and all we need is love. I like love, okay, love is great. I love my wife, I love my family, but I also love a good agenda and I love a planning document where we track the decisions we make. This isn’t just romance, this is the business. So that means we do the same things that we would do in business. We meet regularly, we have a once a month money meeting, we have a running agenda and we always start with a compliment. We don’t jump right into the numbers. We always start by saying something like, Hey, I really appreciate that you planned our vacation last month.

Ramit:
You got us amazing seats on the plane and we had such a great time. And then the other person goes, because we always want to connect feeling good. It’s not about just the numbers. In fact, we could skip the numbers if we just feel good. That’s a success at the beginning. We want to track a few key numbers too much, probably a mistake. I am very specific about the numbers to track. There are four key numbers in my conscious spending plan. And candidly, those give people a very simple insightful outlook on their spending. Are we spending too much? Are we spending too little? Are we saving too much? Et cetera. People love a good benchmark, but there are also the softer side. This is the stuff that’s not talked about and that’s why I wrote money for couples. It is do both partners participate in money?

Ramit:
Usually we have one person who’s the money person. Huge mistake. Do both partners feel good about money? You can’t have one person who’s an avoider, one of the money types, they’re just like, oh, you deal with it, you’re better at it anyway. Nope, that’s unhealthy. And finally, do both partners have skin in the game? Are they each owning some part of the finances? Because you would never really have one person doing the parenting thing. That doesn’t really happen anymore. Everybody knows both parents need to be involved at some level. Same thing with money. You can’t have one person doing the money thing. It’s too deep and too embedded in your life and you need both partners to have skin in the game.

Scott:
I want to go off on a tangent here. You mentioned something that I really want to dive into, which are these money types and you mentioned the avoider. Can you give us some more of these categories of money types that you’ve encountered and the problems or ways to involve them better?

Ramit:
So the avoider is the most common. They love to avoid money and they use a variety of conscious and unconscious techniques to do so. Sometimes they will simply refuse to talk about it. Other times they will start a fight. I’ve had couples on my podcast literally start a fight right before so they could try to get out of talking about money. In fact, I had one young woman who was an avoider. I spent almost two hours with her getting her to enter one number in a Google sheet, one number, and I was patient. I have infinite time to work with avoiders if I believe there’s light. At the end of the time she did it. She was afraid of a variety of things, but she was quite good once she got started. What was

Ramit:
The number? It was some number. What’s your income or how much do you think you’ll have 10 years from now? It didn’t matter. The point was you can type a number in a spreadsheet and even if you get it wrong, it’s okay, we can always go and fix it. So avoiders are difficult to be partnered with because typically the other person really tries hard to get them involved and they use all variety of techniques. They try to convince them, they end up being put in the place of being a nag and it’s a really demoralizing place for the partner of an avoider. Anyway, that’s an avoider. The next is an optimizer. I’m an optimizer. Probably a lot of people listening are optimizers. We love our spreadsheets, we love our compound interest calculations. We love thinking about what are we going to have? What happens if healthcare costs rise 1.6%?

Ramit:
Oh my god, what am I going to do? And we love it. And actually there’s a lot of good that can come from it. Everybody listening has probably made a lot of money being an optimizer, you probably know your emergency fund, all these key numbers. So that’s the double edge of this because being an optimizer gets you to a relatively good place, but then it can become a problem. And this has typically been my critique of the fire community, which is living in the spreadsheet over optimizing, not realizing that you can turn the page and live outside of the spreadsheet, et cetera. So that’s optimizers. They’re also difficult to partner with because they often see things purely in terms of dollars and cents. They are often focused on cost alone. They don’t realize that life is not simply meant to optimize, et cetera. But again, all these can be worked with.

Ramit:
A worrier is the third of four. A worrier loves to worry about money, and I use that term decidedly because they often worry whether they have $10,000 in debt or 5 million in the bank. The way you feel about money is highly uncorrelated to the amount in your bank account. Mindy, Carl, you and I spoke on my podcast about this and it’s a common characteristic, the idea of worrying and many times after a while it becomes self-reflexive. Like worrying is all I’ve known. And when I ask warriors, can you imagine a life where you did not worry about money? They will often say, Mindy,

Mindy:
Nope,

Ramit:
That’s right warrior. And then finally a dreamer. The most difficult of all to be partnered with a dreamer believes that success is right around the corner with the next gig, the next deal, the next get rich quick scheme. They dream rather than doing, and this is really difficult, they often live in a world of subsidized creation, meaning if their partner left or if the money spigot turned off for them, they would have to get real very quickly, but because usually their partner earns more or they have money from their parents, they can live in la la land and believe that success is right around the corner. Put another way, these folks would rather win the lottery than invest a hundred dollars a month and it’s really difficult to be in a partnership with them. I don’t speak directly to them in the book, I speak to other folks because candidly they’re not reading my book.

Scott:
And so what are the toolkits for dealing with, Hey, I’m listening to this. I can see which one I am and which one my spouse might be. How do I approach my spouse differently based on their personality type here?

Ramit:
Is it very helpful to know who your partner is and who you are? And I think Scott, you make a great point. You can see threads of yourself and your partner. You may be two or three of these and you can change some of ’em. They’re a bit fluid. But once you understand a little bit about yourself, you start to see your own behavior and your partner’s behavior in a new light. Oh, no wonder they don’t want anything to do with money. No wonder every time I go and have a conversation with them, somehow it ends up like I have more homework. Oh, they’re an avoider and they’re using conscious and unconscious techniques to toss the ball right to me. Then I address exactly how to deal with it. So for an avoider, which would be very common for somebody to be partnered with, it’s important to have a series of conversations where you say, look, it’s really important to me that we both talk about money.

Ramit:
Here’s why I want us to be aligned as teammates. I want to know that if I got hit by a bus that you would be okay, that the kids would be okay and I want a teammate in this. I feel lonely and it’s actually more fun if both of us do this together. So I tell you exactly what the avoider will say. The avoider will say something like, you always want to talk about money. Why does it always have to be about money? Notice they’re not a bad person. They’re literally just saying words. If you asked them 10 minutes later, what did they say? They would have no idea. It’s automatic. So I teach you how to react to that. It’s very easy to get sucked into the weeds. No, I don’t always talk about money. It’s actually important for us. And the kids don’t do that. You just let ’em talk and then you go right back to your key message. I really appreciate you even talking to me right now. And what I really want for us to do is to create a way for us to talk about money once a month, something that’s fun for both of us. And so I have the scripts, I have the approaches, I even have what happens if they simply refuse to engage? These are all things that you want to know in your relationship.

Mindy:
Ramit, you said a couple of minutes ago that people need to have money conversations and you like agendas. Do you have an agenda that people can follow? Because we are all in this talking about money space and it’s really easy for us to sit down and chat with our partners, but for somebody who is just coming into this, they pick up the money for couples book and they’re like, I need this because I need to get on the same page with my partner, but I don’t know how to start. I listen to Ramit and he says, oh, have an agenda. Well, that’s great for you Ramit, but how do I do it?

Ramit:
Mindy, do I have an agenda? Of course I have an agenda. It’s in the book. I wrote it down word for word. Here’s what you do first. If they don’t respond, then you do this. I map that thing out. So you don’t even have to think, okay, you could be half illiterate and you would have the perfect agenda. Yes, I love showing, not telling. And the reason Mindy all jokes aside is that when my wife and I started talking about money, seriously, we were talking about a prenup. It was very difficult. So it started off pretty good and I came with an agenda and I had really thought about what I want to say. I was honestly so nervous. It was one of the top five most nervous moments of something when I’ve talked to my wife because bringing up a prenup is incredibly sensitive.

Ramit:
Anyway, talked about it and she was as receptive as I could have hoped. And so we began having conversations and they went well at first and then they didn’t. They started to become really heavy. I started to feel resentful because we were talking about big numbers and I always want to be generous and my wife also felt resentful and not listened to. So I remember thinking, oh my god, I’m the money guy that I will teach you to be rich guy and this is incredibly hard and if it’s hard for me, imagine how hard these kind of conversations are for other people and what I want, I desperately wanted Mindy. I wanted to listen to other couples talking about money. I don’t want five things you must do in a conversation. I don’t care about that. I want exact audio and video. I want to know what couples do, when do they fight, how do they respond?

Ramit:
And there was nothing like it. So we went through our own journey. We went to a therapist. It was eyeopening for us. We went through a lot. Then we got married and then we still had a lot of different things. We had to come to terms on how do we set our accounts up? What if one of us earns more than the other? All kinds of things. But it was so helpful to be able to have these conversations on the podcast and now in the book to show you exactly what you can expect if your partner is not in the fire community or if one of you is a spender and one of you is a saver or if you’re worried about spoiling your kids. That is why I wrote money for couples.

Mindy:
Can I ask, did you end up getting a prenup?

Ramit:
We did. We did. You know what happened? So we were fighting because we had the lawyers involved and all kinds of stuff and my wife finally said, we should see a therapist because this is not going well. And she was right. I’m so glad she proposed that and I was receptive to it. Both partners have to be willing to play ball. So we literally went on Yelp and we just searched therapist and we found literally the closest therapist to us. We walked outside and they were right there and we went to their office and she was so great. She asked us a bunch of questions and we were talking and she goes, she goes, let me ask you, how do you see money? She asked me and I’m like, so easy growth. Oh, rule of 72, compound interest. I could see these numbers floating in front of my head.

Ramit:
And then she turns to my wife and she says, how about you? How do you see money? And my wife says safety. I looked at her, what does that word mean? Safety. That’s like somebody saying beef. What’s the connection? I don’t understand. I haven’t thought about money and safety in 30 years. And that was the moment we really started realizing, oh my god, we truly see money differently and as an optimizer, which I suspect a lot of listeners are, I had been jumping straight to transactions. Well, if we look at this and we consider compound interest and we factor inflation and those words don’t mean anything if you see money differently. And that’s why I have so much compassion, even though I joke around a lot about the fire community, I actually love talking to people who are just a little over-focused on the dollars and cents because they have good intentions. They want to save, they want to invest, they want to live a rich life. It’s just that I see so much of me, I see the overfocus on numbers. I see the lack of slowing the process down and meeting my wife where she was and actually she taught me a lot about the emotional connection and about what does this money mean to us? What’s it for? Once we got aligned that way, then choosing our savings rate was truly just a minor detail.

Scott:
Alright, stay tuned for more after our final ad break.

Mindy:
Let’s jump back into it.

Scott:
Over the years, as you’ve interviewed many couples, you’ve come across a lot of optimizers. What are some examples that you’ve come across of optimizers, which I think you’re right. Most of the people listening to this are probably optimizers going too far in your experience and let’s not take the easy one with Mindy and Carl. Let’s not get that we’re literally on the call with Mindy.

Ramit:
Mindy, would you care to speak up?

Mindy:
Not about this.

Ramit:
Okay, so first of all, Mindy and Carl had an awesome episode on the podcast. They were so candid and I truly appreciate Mindy, you and Carl coming on. This stuff is not easy to talk about. It’s very private and Mindy, you’re so well known in the community and on this podcast that it would be so easy for you to simply coast on that. And what I really admired about you was coming on and asking for help. We have money, we’ve done well, we’ve saved correctly, and we struggle spending money. Can you help us? And I know that you expected, oh, we’ll probably talk about a couple of savings tips or something spent by a key chain and it actually got quite deep. This stuff is, it’s as deep as it gets because money is not just dollars and cents, money is who we are. The way we save and spend reflects our identity. It’s our values and you and Carl were with me every step of the way. I have to appreciate that Scott. I have folks that come on the podcast and again, their incomes and net worth range from quite a bit of debt to many, many millions of dollars.

Ramit:
What you’ll often find is that their net worth increases faster than their money psychology. So they are still optimizing over the price of blueberries like they had to when they were 19 years old, but they have four or five or 6 million in the bank and it’s very easy for people to listen and scoff. Oh my God, that’s so absurd. If I were them, I would be doing X, Y, z. And one of the things I on the podcast is very apparent is I’m not here to shame people. I’m not here to berate them. It’s not a circus. I’m here to listen and ask a lot of questions. We often talk about what they saw in childhood. Many of them will say that. My parents said we can’t afford that. That was the only lesson they got about money. And so they heard it 10,000 times. They started to believe it. Now even though they have millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands, they still deeply believe we can’t afford it.

Ramit:
Another technique that I use, I never tell people to stop feeling a certain way. If you feel worried about money, I’ll never tell you to stop, but I will introduce you to new ways to experience money. Just like if you don’t like tomatoes, I’m not going to tell you, Hey, you got to like tomatoes, but I will introduce you to different cuisines so you can develop a palette and that is what I love to do with money is show you the joy that money can bring. When I talk to folks who worry about it, they believe that worrying means they are good with money. And I go look at my face. Do I look like I worry about money? They’re like, no. I go, how come they go, well, you have a lot of money. I go, well, you have a lot of money, so why is it that I’m not worrying? And you are. And they realize, oh my gosh, we are in relatively the same situation. Maybe I can choose to experience my rich life differently.

Scott:
I’m sure you come across a lot of worriers who think they’re optimizers. I imagine that the dreamer who thinks they’re an optimizer is another persona that you may have come across in a couple of you.

Ramit:
Yeah, that’s a good one. They are often, it’s a tough situation. So I’ve spoken to a number of dreamers who believe they are optimizers. They are in one get rich quick scheme after another. If you take an objective look at their performance over say the last decade, it’s often a abysmal, but they are subsidized by somebody else paying their rent, another partner who has a full-time job, et cetera. When I often point out that the private investments you have done over the last 10 years, I could have got more on a government bond. It just doesn’t compute for them. They would rather dream about making a hundred million dollars than put a hundred or 200 bucks a month into the market. They also have their own vocabulary. We’ve all heard it from people on the internet. They go, I don’t want to trade my time for money.

Ramit:
That’s for losers. Oh, I wouldn’t want to work a nine to five. I go That person working nine to five makes about 10 times what you make my friend. What’s wrong with a nine to five? I think it’s great. And they have often been propagandized. They clicked on one link with Grant Cardone and now all they do is read Robert Kiyosaki and read all this. And they believe that nine to five is evil and you need to generate passive income all the time. I go, listen, why don’t we start with a little bit of money? Why don’t we get a nice job where you’re respected at work and you contribute And we can always add on business income on the side, but the thing is their partner needs to actually set some demands, set some expectations. Their partner in these dynamics is often enabling them and that’s what allows them to keep being a dreamer. So we can change all this, but first thing is we got to know what’s going on. That is what you learn, how to map what’s going on before we start to make minute changes in your relationship and money dynamic.

Scott:
Love that description of the various different types. Here I’ve got another persona for you. So this is one we’re starting to come across a lot more on BiggerPockets and money and it’s this concept of what we call the middle class trap. So we have a couple who’s worth maybe a million to $2 million in terms of total net worth, but a bunch of that wealth, maybe all of it is tied up in their 401k, their home equity and maybe because it’s BiggerPockets, a rental property or two that’s not really generating a lot of cashflow but it’s generating a little and they have some equity in it. And this couple or the person on BiggerPockets is coming to us saying, how do I actually take that portfolio and have it to use your words, give me a rich life, give me the ability to actually spend some of it before after tax because everything’s going to my mortgage payment, my 401k and maybe a little bit of savings here. Do you ever come across that persona? What do you advise those people to do?

Ramit:
I do. This is a really good one. I love that. I like your name too. The middle class trap. As we know often American’s largest asset is their house and their primary residence. And as I have posed on Twitter, which got a lot of people mad, I said, Hey everybody, here’s the scenario. You bought a house for 250,000 many years ago. Now it’s worth, I don’t know, 1.2 million. It is the largest source of your net worth, but what are you supposed to do? You want to sell it. You don’t want to rent because people who own a house think renting is beneath them. You’re going to buy another house. There’s no small houses in your neighborhoods. You’re a freaking NIMBY and you prevented housing from being built. So now you have no options except to translate that bigger house to a smaller house that you don’t even want or you could move to a different place.

Ramit:
Whatcha going to sell? Leave all your friends the place you get your haircut, your favorite restaurant, move to Florida, get skin cancer and die. What are your options? So people don’t like that when I talk about the most consequential financial decision they make in their life, but it’s important as you point out, Scott, we need to think about this stuff. If we’re putting a lot of our time and assets into something, what do we get? Everybody listening. This is a question. Put your hand out to the camera or I don’t know if you’re listening on your phone, just put your hand out like palms up and say this out loud. What do I get? I’m working hard, I’m investing my money. Maybe I own a rental property. What do we get for all this work all this time? And you better have a clear answer for that.

Ramit:
Anyway, Scott, back to the folks who are in this middle class trap. I mean the options are quite limited. You could sell the property, which is common. I talked to a couple of my podcasts that had seven houses and they were cash strapped. They had a big family of roughly four or five kids and I’m like, why don’t you just sell one of the houses, get a nice stack of cash. But that was an optimizer. They had gone too far. One is good, two is better, three is even better and on and on. And at a certain point we all realized as we get older, more is not always better.

Scott:
Also, that property appreciated and they cash out refinanced it three, four years ago and now if they sell it, they’re going to pay taxes on the gain and they’re going to have to pay depreciation recapture. And so they’re going to be left with 40 50 grand on that property, which is not close to the actual equity they have on paper. And if they 10 31. Yeah.

Ramit:
Is Scott from BiggerPockets making my own case for me that all you real estate freaks need to run the numbers before you make the biggest purchase of your life?

Scott:
Whoa. Absolutely. That’s what we’re all about here at BiggerPockets. Mindy and I, we wrote, we together wrote the book First time home buyer and we spend the first third of the book telling you not to buy a home. That renting is better for many Americans, and I know you agree with this. I’ve seen you all over social media making this point, especially in high cost living or very high cost of living areas like where you live. It’s just almost always a better option unless you’re going to live there for 30 years and you know it. Oh my

Ramit:
God, hold on. I need to take this moment and appreciate it. I feel like I’m seeing the face of God right now. This is the moment I’ve been in business for 20 years for everybody online, every real estate troll who came after me for the last 20 years when I said, Hey everybody, I have a simple proposition. Perhaps just maybe before you make the biggest purchase of your life, maybe just maybe you should run a simple buy versus rent calculation because in certain cities, particularly very high cost of living cities, but now even high cost of living, even medium cost of living cities, it can be better to rent. And they assailed me, but I knew because I know how to run a simple calculation because I understand math that I was right. I’m renting right now. I’m saving thousands and thousands every month. Scott, why do they attack me for encouraging them to run a simple calculation?

Scott:
I think they’re bad at math and they don’t run the numbers on it. And there’s this American dream tied to the house and there are some benefits. We obviously talk about real estate all day. If you’re going to house hack, if you’re going to live and flip your property, if you’re buying a starter home, if you’re in certain markets, if you have super high conviction you’re going to be there for the next 20 years and this is where you’re going to raise your kids, then those are all great reasons to buy a house. But it ain’t going to go up every year like clockwork on that. You’re going to have certain problems. There’s huge transaction costs associated with it and those are not usually factored in to the buy versus rent decision on there.

Ramit:
I love you, I love you. I agree with 100% of what you just said. This is amazing. See, a lot of people think that just because somebody talks about real estate that we fundamentally disagree, we do not. I have no problem with people buying real estate investment properties, run the numbers, buy it. It can be fantastic. It can can be a very nice part of a portfolio. I don’t mind. I don’t even mind buying a primary residence. I don’t even mind buying a primary residence if it’s a worse financial decision than renting. I just want you to know the numbers going in. That’s all. Oh my god, okay, I feel like I just got done with therapy. I feel like cleansed.

Scott:
Let me go back just for a second here because we’re struggling with this question and half our listeners are facing it. We just did a poll on BiggerPockets money on YouTube channel. And this is the problem that half our audience has is I am staring down the middle class trap. All of my wealth essentially is in my home and my 401k and I’m going to put myself in the shoes of the optimizer trying to get my spouse to agree with a change in this direction. And here’s the thing, we make 120 or $150,000 a year in household income. We’ve got the house, we’ve got the 401k, and I know that if I keep doing what I’m doing, I’m just going to compound the problem. I’m going to get more home equity. I’m going to pile up more of my 401k and today we spend 80, $90,000 a year.

Scott:
We save a good chunk. That’s why we listen to BiggerPockets money. We’re in that going from 26 to 42% savings bracket. But I can’t go down the whole stack of optimized decisions. I can’t max out my HSA, I can’t max out my 401k, take the match and then make the contribution limits for both parties and have cash left over to build some wealth outside of that 401k. So to make a change, my spouse may not be aligned with me moving. I can either wait 10 years and just let my income grow so much with my static cost of living that I begin to evolve away from it. Or I can make a choice to stop, for example, contributing to the HSA or the 401k and begin going into something like real estate or a private business or something like that. I’m thinking about that from a fire perspective. How do I approach my spouse with something like that?

Ramit:
This is quite a complex conversation and if your partner is not involved with money at all, this isn’t going to be something you talk about in the next six months. It is frankly way too complex. We’re talking about even two advanced people. We could be sitting here right now talking about this, Scott, and it would be we’d go down the rabbit hole and we could come up with two very different answers. So here’s what I would propose first, if you haven’t talked about money at all with your partner or your partner is not engaged on a regular basis, you got to start way back. Meet them where they are, connect with them, tell them why money is important to you. Admit where you may be a little bit too much of a control freak. Admit vulnerability is the easiest way to connect. Tell them what you have in mind for a vision of how the two of you can use money.

Ramit:
Ask them what they want, start that process. Please remember, we’re not in a race six months of continuing doing what you’re doing, especially if you’re in the fire community with a high savings rate. You’re good, you’re good. I would rather you do it in a healthy way than do it quick. Now you say, I feel so good about how far we’ve come. Remember, don’t skip the appreciation. Don’t skip the emotional connection when we started. I have to tell you, I was so nervous to talk about money with you and I think that I was nervous walking on eggshells. I think I’ve approached it wrong in the past and I just don’t think we’ve connected. But look at how far we’ve come. You are telling me things I didn’t even know about our investments. You’ve got us on the right track with our savings account. You even suggested we open up a 5 29.

Ramit:
I never thought of that. I wonder if we, we’ve come so far. I just want to give you a high five. I love you. Okay, lock that in. Now I think we’ve done such an awesome job at our dollars and cents on a day-to-day basis. I wonder if we can talk about the big numbers. We have these 4 0 1 Ks, we have this house. I’m wondering how do you feel about that? And that is where you begin that conversation. That will probably take another three months at least. And that’s okay because once they are locked in and you both agree, then you’re both rowing the exact same direction.

Scott:
And I think that that’s the key is that I bet you that a lot of people listening to this on BiggerPockets of money aren’t in a place with their spouse, where their spouse is totally out of the conversation on it. There’s probably reasonable alignment. I think it’s really hard to even progress towards financial independence without, with a total lack of alignment. But I think that there’s this discomfort like that next phase. I think a lot of folks will be like, yeah, I’m in that three to six month phase you just told me about. I’m just not sure how to move to that next level. And that’s the complexity of it’s a complex decision. It’s a big decision. And I would love to submit one tool that I’ve used in the past for your consideration. I kind of think, hey, if someone handed me a pile of two and a half million dollars three years from now, where would I want it to be? And that question I think sparks a discussion. And the tool then is just draw a circle on a piece of paper, a blank piece of paper and carve it out by bucket. I want this much in my home equity, this much in my 401k, this much in two paid off rental properties, whatever it is. And see how it feels. See how your spouse feels about it around there. What do you think about that as a tool for consideration?

Ramit:
I would use that if the person were quite advanced because lemme tell you why. First of all, I love the approach. I love the idea of just clear off the page and just dream with me. No wrong answers. If we don’t like it, we’ll just go to another piece of paper. I love that vision. You have to remember that in the fire community you are living in a bubble and it’s a pleasant bubble. It’s a bubble that’s encouraging you to save a lot. That’s great. But the average person does not know how a home equity means. They do not know what a refi means. They do not know their income and they don’t understand what the effective compound interest is or the drag of fees. So if you have a partner that’s quite advanced, I think your question’s awesome.

Scott:
Yeah, thank you for continuing to bring me back to reality and out of the bubble of the advanced PHI community here. So I think in part because of what I do here and how nerdy I am with my wife, I assume that that’s what most couples are like and she’s very advanced on these types of things and can talk through all of that. And so that’s probably not where most even BiggerPockets money listeners are.

Mindy:
I’m right there with you, Scott, but I get it. And tagging off of that, the average person, a lot of people who are just deciding that they want to get on the same page as their partner or they want to get their finances in order, they, they’re feeling like, oh, everybody else knows how to do this and I don’t. I’m the one who is deficient in this, which makes me not even want to do it because everybody else, it’s so easy for everybody. You’ve been talking to couples for a minute now about problems that they’re having in their financial relationships. What are some common things that you’re discovering from all these different couples that it was actually kind of surprising?

Ramit:
The most surprising is that they don’t know their household income. And that really speaks to the fact that most people derive most of their feelings and information about money from one place and one place alone. And that is their checking account. They literally open up their checking account and if they have enough money in there, they go, I’m okay. Do you know that a lot of people don’t even consider their retirement money real? They’re like, oh yeah, a 401k, but that’s not really real. I’m like, that’s real. It’s compounding tax advantage, but they don’t consider it real and that is mental bucketing. So part of that’s the biggest surprise is they don’t know their income. The second is that they don’t have a full picture of their finances. Very often I will ask people, how much would you need to make in order to feel good?

Ramit:
And I had this just recently. They said something like, I make 70, I need to make 50 K more. I said, okay, one 20. We actually added up all their numbers, including their bonuses and blah, blah, blah. Guess how much they made something like one 18 and they had this shocked look on their face because five minutes prior they had said, we need to make 50 K more. It turns out they actually make 50 K more. They were literally missing it like it was under the couch cushions. And this is very common by the way, people listening like How can you not know 50 K? It’s really easy. And still they didn’t feel good about money and there was a look on their face of realization, oh my god, we’ve been using a lack of money as an excuse. But it’s actually deeper than that.

Ramit:
The third thing is they simply don’t talk about money at all. They don’t talk about it. Money is one of those things, again, not in the fire community for the typical median person. They talk about money when they fight, then they go to sleep and then they paper over it until the next fight, which is about six weeks from now. Imagine doing that for 10 years or 15 years. Money becomes a source of frustration, shame, guilt, blame. You’d rather just not talk about it. So you hear a guy like me coming on and saying like, oh my god, money can be used to live a rich life. At first you go, screw you. Oh, you have a lot of money, you must be nice. And then you hear these couples, some of them making high income, some of them making median incomes even lower than median incomes.

Ramit:
And you realize, I don’t like this phrase, personal finance is personal. I don’t love it. I love a different phrase. Most of us are mostly the same. Doesn’t matter if you have 200 K in debt, 5 million bucks in the bank, you’re going to feel certain ways about money that are irrational relative to the amount you have. I find it comforting. Mindy, you and I are pretty much the same. Scott, you and I are pretty much the same. Of course we’ve got a few differences, but what a comfort to know that we all sometimes worry. Are we doing the right thing? We all worry. Are we including our spouse in the right way? We all worry. Are we sharing lessons with our loved ones in the right way? Are we spoiling them or becoming too overbearing? I love that. Knowing that we’re pretty much the same means we can use the same rule book and then we earn the right to be different on that last one or 2%.

Mindy:
Ramit, I follow you on Twitter and I love your quote that I see several times. It’s probably several times a month. You say when you rent, the rent is the most that you will pay every month, but when you own your mortgage is the lease that you’re going to pay. And I have been investing in real estate. I’ve been buying and selling houses since the mid nineties and that never occurred to me until I saw you post it. It’s like, oh man, you’re right. If something breaks in my rental, then all I do is call up my landlord and be like, Hey, could you fix this? And he’s like, sure. And he doesn’t tack that on at the end of the month unless it’s something that I broke, which is not what we’re talking about here. When something breaks in my house, I am 100% on the hook for the entire cost.

Ramit:
Yes, thank you for bringing that up. I kind of love this topic for one, because one of the parts of my rich life is never having to walk into a home depot as long as I’m alive. So you’re not going to find me in there, okay, I don’t want to smell the wood. I went there enough when I was a kid. I’m done. I don’t own a screwdriver, I don’t want to. And I recently posted this thing, which was quite funny. So I have a loose fridge, the handle to the fridge, and I texted to get it fixed. They sent somebody repair guy. The repair guy came over and said, it’s not like the fridge I grew up with. Lemme put it that way. It’s not like you just unscrew it and fix it. He said he’s going to have to take off the whole door and come back and fix it.

Ramit:
Now, this is New York. Labor is very expensive. Arranging all this stuff is expensive. Of course I’m not paying for it. The landlord is paying for it. My estimate is that it will probably cost between one to $2,000. That’s an estimate. I could be wrong, but it’s a ballpark based on educated guesses. So I just posted this and I reiterated that I’m very thankful to be renting and to sidestep all of these enormous phantom costs, particularly in New York City, which are often people can’t believe it, but there are thousands of dollars a month in common charges depending on where you live. People don’t even understand what those are. People went berserk online. Ramit, you’re such a loser. Why don’t you just get a screwdriver? That was the first comment. I have a couple of responses to all the trolls online who said, first of all, why would I get a screwdriver?

Ramit:
I don’t want to own one. I have zero desire and I’m not the one repairing it. Second, this isn’t something that ordinary person could repair. And I’m not even ordinary. I’m below ordinary. I don’t even know what’s the screw, what’s a nail? Nor do I care, don’t want to learn. Then finally, I have a little comment for the folks out there. There are a lot of people who were like, Ramit, you’re such a loser. Anyone knows that you should be able to repair things with your hands. Work with your hands. Don’t be such a liberal elite. And I was like, this is the masculinity crisis in front of us. The idea that in order to be a man, you need to be able to repair stuff. I’m like, in order to be a man, I need to be able to be extremely good at Twitter.

Ramit:
Okay? That’s my opinion. And also, would you tell a professional athlete to go on YouTube and learn how to fix this obscure door and then do it themselves? No, of course you wouldn’t. Why are you telling me? I didn’t get a lot of answers to that except for people to call me a loser again. Which could be true. That could be true if I’m a loser. It’s not because of the door though. I’ll tell you that there’s other reasons. So I’d just like to say we have a deep feeling in America that you need to self-sufficient. This is kind of the go west, manifest destiny. Everybody should own property. And it really shows up in peculiar ways. There is literally zero reason for anyone to, all jokes aside, to get angry at me when my landlord is paying a thousand dollars. Why would I spend my own time and money fixing?

Ramit:
It makes no sense. Why are you getting mad at me for what my landlord is paying for? If anything, I love it. It’s capitalism. But we have these deep beliefs that really come out in peculiar ways and color our own financial decisions. And what I am begging all of you to do is to please consider what is your rich life. If your rich life is, I love learning how to repair stuff, God bless, I’m all for it. But if it’s instead watching Netflix, go ahead. You don’t have to repair stuff if you don’t want to.

Scott:
I have a couple of reactions to this. First, I think that everyone involved in that exchange would agree that it was a chilling one really chilling conversation. Sorry, I couldn’t resist on that front. And second, I want to push back on a couple of things here around this, where you are the best or among the best in the world at what you do. And I think that professional athlete comparison is very apt. You live in New York City, is that right?

Ramit:
Yeah. And la,

Scott:
New York and la and when you live in New York City and la, everything is there. It is perfectly catered to the pursuit of being the best at whatever you do. That is you go out. There’s no reason to cook your own food in a lot of cases because the best food in the world is being prepared there. And that’s probably, I imagine how you want to live your life. That’s your rich life. You want to be the best in the world at Money for couples and I will teach you to be rich in building that business and everything else then needs to be a wonderful experience around there. And I think a lot of other people that are not in LA and New York, like that concept of self-sufficiency. And I want to make a case for the math here of fire in the opposite direction of what you said there.

Scott:
So let’s take a less extreme example. At a very high cost living area, let’s take a 3000 per month rental rate, that’s $36,000 a year and to fire you would need 4% withdrawal rate calculation. That’s $900,000 in assets. Whereas a paid off house, $550,000 paid off house that might rent for that $3,000 is a smaller asset base than the amount that’s required from a rental perspective. So that’s one argument around there. You would need $400,000 less in wealth to fire, you’ll be poorer at the end of 30 years because the investment of $500,000 is probably going to outperform that 4% rule withdrawal rate. But there’s a case to be made there that it’s good math for someone who wants to retire early and be done and wants to go that self-sufficiency route. I think in comparison. So first any reactions to that thought before I get to my,

Ramit:
I totally agree. We should contextualize all of this. If you are a high earner and you’re living in a very high cost of living city, then it probably makes sense to either call your landlord or if you own your place to even have somebody come and fix it. That makes perfect sense. In fact, when I run my own numbers on buying versus renting, which I do frequently, I always account for a very high maintenance rate because I’m not trying to go to Home Depot, so I’m never going to go and fix it myself. Somebody will always be fixing it for me. I’ve just planned for that. Again, that’s part of living a rich life. You’ve got to be honest. Honest with yourself, honest with the people around you. I’m honest, I’m not trying to be a home repair guy. Somebody else will do that and they’re going to charge a lot, especially if they look up my name, they’re like, oh, the rich guy, screw him triple the rates and what do I know?

Ramit:
I’m like, okay, rip me off. Here you go. I’m totally going to get screwed in my life. Okay, that’s one two, Scott, you make a great point. For a lot of people economically it makes perfect sense to lower your cost structure by moving to a cheaper city and saving a huge amount. And certainly most people are not even calling their landlord up to repair the fridge because for most people the fridge is not coming with the apartment. It’s their own place. So we need to account for all these things. But what I will push back on is there’s an idea that when I share examples of people living in all different places in the country, whether it be la, New York, very expensive places, or in the rural Midwest, I often hear that’s not real America. You’re being patronizing by talking about the 0.01%. First of all, millions of people live in many cities. We need to account for all Americans. And there’s a vast range of how people want to spend their money. So I think you and I actually agree, it’s just being honest about who you are, what’s important to you, and then putting your money behind that.

Scott:
The second part of my challenge here, I love that the second part of my challenge here is about rent inflation. And one of the things that scares me as well, scares is the wrong word. One of the things that I foresee or have questioned and then foresee is when interest rates rose in 2022, why didn’t rents skyrocket? That should have been the response as the cost to buy a home increases drastically, the alternative should go up. And the answer to it is supply America has produced as many multifamily units over the last two years as it has in its history. 2025 will be another year of an onslaught of supply because all those projects were started a few years ago and you’re seeing rents grow basically nothing the last two or three years, despite that spike in interest rates on it, you’re also seeing a lot of single family construction coming on the market.

Scott:
It’s not quite as much as the multifamily supply, but it’s created this weird dynamic where a new home is about the same cost as an existing home in many markets around the country, which will not continue indefinitely. And my worry is that come 2026, nobody’s starting projects now. Nobody started ’em last year. So we’re going to see we’re projecting 2026 to be historically low from a new inventory perspective. Are we going to see rents rise dramatically in a lot of markets around the country? And does that scare you or how would you respond to that Trollish comment on your X feed?

Ramit:
I think you’re exactly right. I agree a hundred percent with you. Yes, rents will probably go up because the supply pipeline has tapered off and it’s certainly nowhere near the explosion that it was over the last few years. As you pointed out, rents have either remained stagnant or gone down in many parts of the southeast, even Texas, even in California, rents have gone down quite a bit in different parts of California. I want to point out a couple of things. There is a difference between the actual rents and people’s perceptions of rent. People genuinely do not believe that rents ever go down, ever. They literally think rent only goes up and even when rents in their own city are going down, they are largely impervious to the information.

Scott:
Investors are very aware and real estate investors are very aware of them going down in Austin, by the way.

Ramit:
Yeah, they’re aware because they’re rational, but the typical homeowner or renter is totally irrational about housing costs. That’s why actually developers are quite sophisticated and big companies, they know how to run a spreadsheet, so they’re quite rational. For example, I used to rent from a large real estate conglomerate. They were super rational. They would try to raise rent every time they could. When rents went down in our area, in our category, they would just say, no rent increase. Of course, I would go into their office with a fat stack of papers and I would say, nice try. I want rent lowered by this much. And while they wouldn’t lower rent, you know what they would do? They would give me two months free sometimes three, and that is an effective rent decrease. That was four times in 11 years in Manhattan. So please don’t tell me rents don’t go up and down.

Ramit:
Of course, they’re particularly liquid in Manhattan, but they go up and down. You have to be aware of rents in your area and if you’re in a place, you need to actually negotiate and be willing to leave. I do think that from my conversations with lots of people in my community, very few less than 5% are aware that you can negotiate rent. They’re kind of in this really weird relationship with their landlord where they think their landlord can simply raise the rent anytime they want. And I go, landlords are profit seeking. If they could raise it more, they would raise it and they’re like, huh? I go, rents are determined by the market, not by the cost that the landlord incurs. It never occurred to them. They just think landlords are whatever. They can raise it anytime. People, if you’re listening, if you’re renting, you have power, you have power right now, but in 2026 and beyond, you’re going to have far less power. So know your power, leverage it accordingly. Scott is right. Supply matters. That is why I am a very vocal YIMBY for developing more and more so that we have more supply, which brings the price down, which brings you to my final point. Money is political. This is why I always talk about politics. It’s not just dollars and cents. If you’re wondering why your housing and your healthcare is so expensive, that’s politics. And that is why I talk about it so much.

Mindy:
I am going back to that Twitter thread that you have because I just had in my home that I own the refrigerator handle break. I was pulling, it’s the freezer handle. I pulled it. One side came out, completely came out, and one of the guys in your comment says, you don’t know what things cost. This is embarrassing. Well, why do you need to know what things cost because you’re not paying for it. Somebody else said, just learn how to use a screwdriver, bro. Okay, bro, I know how to use a screwdriver and I’m looking at this fridge and I can’t figure out how to fix it and it’s not a great fridge, but it still keeps things cold and I would like to be able to open it and use it. So I told my husband about it and he’s like, I’m just going to use glue and it doesn’t look great, but I don’t care because it’s my basement fridge and the fix worked. But if you don’t want to, I get a little heebie-jeebies that you don’t even own a screwdriver. How do you fix small things? But also that’s not your jam, so that’s okay. But I think it’s hilarious that people are so angry with you. I don’t care if you have a broken refrigerator handle. Your broken refrigerator handle doesn’t affect my life at all, but I care about mine.

Ramit:
Well, first of all, Mindy, thank you for saying that. I feel honored because I know that you are quite handy. I know that you do a lot of development and repairs and flips, you and Carl, and so for you to say that actually means a lot because I consider myself in the bottom decile. I mean, like I said, I don’t even know what any of these terms mean, so whatever. But I’ll tell you something about that guy who left that comment. The one who said, I don’t know how much anything costs. First of all, that was a savage response you had like, why do I need to know? That’s brutal. Even, I don’t know if I would say that online, but he then proceeded to say, he said, any fridge can be repaired. Any top of the line fridge can be repaired with a basic screwdriver.

Ramit:
I said, great. Can you link me to a top of the line fridge? He claimed it was $3,000. Okay, now I just want to point out that he linked a fridge from Best buy.com. There are fridges that cost a lot more than that. The fridge that I have costs more than that. Candidly, if I were to buy a fridge, I don’t think I’d pay a lot for a fridge. It all keeps food. Cool. What do I care? I really don’t care. I prefer if I’m talking about appliances, I want the most mass market appliance that can be repaired easily with anybody off the street. Okay? So I don’t care. But the fact is, when people are leaving comments online, they’re often sharing more about themselves than the actual situation. Why do you care what other people are spending their money on? If it’s their rich life, do it. If somebody on here is coming to me and saying, I want to own a big old ranch and they want to drive an RV around the country, I go, that sounds like hell to me, but it’s your rich life. It’s not mine. As long as you can afford it, if you love it, I want you to do it. That’s the whole point of living a rich life.

Scott:
It’s hard to believe that your fridge door handle breaking could produce such a big debate on political. Alright, on that note, Ramit, where can people find out more about you? Where can they find the book? When does it come out? Give us all the details.

Ramit:
Money for Couples out January 1st. I’m going on tour around the country. I bring couples live on stage. It’s a blast. And you can find me on any social media channel and on Netflix.

Scott:
Awesome. And I definitely encourage everyone listening to go check out the podcast, go check out the book Follower Meet on Twitter. He is very entertaining around a lot of discussions that go out there, so it’s fun to watch and I’ll watch of those. So thank you for all you do for the Money Community in America, Ramit and for, I think this is the third appearance here on BiggerPockets Money. We really appreciate it.

Ramit:
Thank you. I always love coming back. I mean, we have such fun every time and I love the pushback. I love it all. This is so good. Thank you for having me back.

Scott:
Last time we had you on, or maybe two or three times ago, we had a debate about a hiring manager versus an employee asking for a raise, so that was a fun one That was back on.

Mindy:
Awesome. Ramit, thank you so much for your time. It’s always great to chat with you.

Scott:
Thank you. Total

Ramit:
Pleasure.

Mindy:
Alright, Scott, that was Ramit and that was awesome and that also ran a little bit long. Should we get out of here?

Scott:
Let’s do it.

Mindy:
That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench and I am Midy Jensen saying Goodbye butterfly.