Last week I was kind, gentle and uplifting, encouraging you to make sure you “put your money where your mouth is” when it comes to what you say you value. I meant every word I wrote and have given that encouragement to hundreds of people before. Your comments tell me it was a message many of you needed, and I’m glad it helped. This week, I have to go a bit in the opposite direction. Just like when you are trying to cure a disease, you have to choose whether to work on the symptoms or the root cause. Today, I’m working on the root cause. I do not want you to stay broke!
As I’ve written many times before, the normal American is broke and has been taught that’s just the way it is. The normal American has been sold the idea that to own nice things (of which we are all “entitled,” right?!), he/she has to make payments. You’ve been told you cannot live life without debt or that debt is a tool. Pish Posh. That’s a bunch of garbage. Believing those lies is roughly the same as believing the “food” you pick up through the McDonald’s drive-thru is top-quality, organic health food. Mmmmmm, delicious!
Last week was about love. This week is about reality. In our subconscious brains, there is something going on and, because it is subconscious, we don’t even recognize what’s happening up there. That is, unless someone points it out. What is going on in our heads when we make financial choices? For example, what is happening in our subconscious when we buy a new car when the one we have now is just fine? And when the car payments will keep us from saving from retirement? What makes us decide that an expensive vacation to “get away from it all” is exactly what the doctor ordered when stress gets the best of us? What drives our spending habits?
Today I’m going to “think out loud.” I’m going to verbalize the internal thoughts of the normal American and you’ll quickly see (and hear) some truths about your subconscious. For some of you, it’ll be funny. For some of you, it’ll be sad. For some of you, it’ll be offensive. For many of you, it’ll be a catalyst for change. My goal is the last one – I want to change your thinking, which can change your behavior, which can change your life, which can change others’ lives.
Here’s the thing. This video is dangerous. Why? As one of my mentors pointed out to me long ago, we have to be careful when we speak as an authority because oftentimes we find out we were wrong. We thought we had it all figured out and we thought everybody else was wrong. Reality is sometimes a cruel teacher. If I turn out to be wrong and spending more money than you make is the source of a great joy, I’ll recant. Otherwise, please take a few minutes and consider the implication if I’m right on this. It would mean millions of modern Americans are wrong, but it would mean your Great Grandma was right. It would mean your Economics professor is wrong, but the family working its collective tail off to be able to scream, “WE’RE DEBT FREE!!!” live on the Dave Ramsey Show is right. I’ll let you decide.
Okay, your turn. Did you learn anything? Did the video make you laugh, cry, or get angry? I’d love to read your reaction – I’m sure you had one!
You two are hilarious!! I love it Stacy! 😉
🙂 Thanks.
You make sense to me, Stacy, because we live like this as well. For years, I was a practicing lobbyist, in the air or the vehicle all the time, suffering from stress, had a heart attack. In a rare quiet moment, I had to ask myself if I really wanted the rest of my life to be like that. Approaching 60, I felt I couldn’t keep it up forever. So we pared down, paid off all debt except our home (working on that), and I took early retirement. The new lifestyle allows us to live on my husband’s teaching salary. The only thing we don’t do anymore is regular trips to Europe! Not much of a sacrifice, in my opinion. I went back to school and became a Christian marriage and family counselor. Our financial situation allows me to minister to couples who have no way to pay for their care. Praise be to God for new beginnings! Stay out there, lady, telling people there is a much better way to live!
🙂 Thanks for your encouragement to us!
TOO FUNNY! Unfortunately….normal! As Dave Ramsey says, normal is broke and I don’t want to be normal. It’s sad that people fall for the marketing ploys (like the microwave!). It’s also sad that the majority of society lives just like this! I agree it’s unconsciously but I also think its a society
“requirement” as such. We look at people that have the old cars and
houses that they can actually afford and say “poor them” when really
they have a better handle on things that the majority! Another thing I
hate to hear is when someone says they are getting a credit card or
financing something to increase their FICO score! WHY WHY WHY! I just
don’t understand!
I drive a ’97 and Stacy drives an ’01. We live in a house built in 1961. Could we “afford” (by “normal” (aka BROKE) standards) to buy bigger/better/faster/newer? Sure! But we wrote a check for our house, paid for each car with $100 bills and look forward to doing the same for whenever one of these needs to be replaced. Notice the word…NEED to be replaced. By the way, Stacy’s bumper sticker reads, “debt is normal…be weird!” It is from Dave’s store. LOVE IT.
Thanks for these posts and videos! As we get out of debt, and just plain try to make ends meet, I always benefit from the encouragement to stay on the straight and narrow with my money. You and Stacy are my top inspirations for managing my money wisely and thinking before I buy. Thanks for being brave enough to say, um, actually, we are NOT entitled to those things. We don’t even need them.
Thanks, Cheri! I’m glad we can offer encouragement to you.
Love this and you guys are great! Love following the blog and I am so trying to be debt free. My husband lives the part you play in the video, lol. Constant battle. But, in less than two years we will be (Good Lord willing) mortgage free and just have the up keep to kill us. Better the up keep than the up keep and the mortgage, right? My husband is retired, very little income there and health issues too. My Blazer is a 2000, less than 85,000 miles and I’ve always tried to take care of it. Until it leaves me stranded, I’m perfectly content with it. That is our constant battle. You can tell by the mileage I don’t travel or stay on the go. My husband believes you will always have a car payment and mortgage/rent. So I love the role Stacy plays in the video. PS, my husband is a Stacy too…..yes in the south we name our males STACY 🙂 Sure hope her attitude would rub off on him! Keep up the good work!
🙂
Stacy….I love you!!! I wish you lived next door to me. You are awesome. I want to be your friend. 🙂 You guys are a hoot and so right.
Thanks, Janet. From your IP Address it looks like you’re a bit west of our locale so unless you could convince Stacy to move (not gonna happen), you’d have to consider heading east to be our neighbor. Come on, though…we’re friendly folks ’round here. ;0)
Funny 🙂 Shelby says “hi” to Andy 🙂
🙂 If Andy could talk, I’m sure he’d be saying “hi” right back!
This video is great! I laughed so hard over Stacy’s reaction!!
Even if she doesn’t verbalize it, you should know that is her reaction anytime she sees stupidity. ;0)
I’m impressed that Barry could make this video knowing he wasn’t going to get good reactions. 🙂
That was sort of the idea. I wanted to have the idea professionally made into a video, but we’re cheap. ;0) Her reactions are what she and I would react to (maybe/hopefully more lovingly) if someone were to do this to either of us!
Funny and true! Great video.
Thanks!
Great video and it really helped to drive the point home. I appreciate you both taking the time to create something like this to help others. I have just recently started following this blog and have learned so many interesting things from Stacey, and now I can say the same for Barry.
Working at our local community college, I see students all the time who put themselves in the same predicaments that you portray in this video. Most of our students receive a financial aid reimbursement since they qualify for a set amount and the tuition and books are usually lower than said amount. It is so sad to see them take the money and buy “fun” items instead of “needed” ones. Once, I overheard a student say, “Man, I can’t wait to get my financial aid, I am going to get a whole sleeve done!” Of course, he was referring to a tattoo that covers his entire lower arm. This was a boy who had a wife and a young child and all he could think about was blowing that financial aid money! I will stop with my rant about fin. aid and how students abuse it. I could probably start my own blog with all the thoughts I have about this subject alone.
One key thing that you all touched on, which struck a cord with me, was the fact that we must make payments if we are to own nice things. I remember several years ago I was having a discussion with my mother on the phone and was saying something about wanting to buy a particular item but I didn’t want to have another payment since I had just paid something else off. She said, “If I were you, I would just buy it and make the payments. I figured out a long time ago that if I wasn’t making a payment of some kind toward something I wanted, I would just blow the money. So you might as well be getting something you want out of the deal.”
Believe it or not, I thought those were words to live by. It’s not her fault for thinking that way, she was trying to get by the best way she knew how. I don’t fault her for the words of “wisdom”, because they have really helped me to grow. I now know there is a different way of life! I hope to someday be one of those families who calls up Dave Ramsey and screams I’M DEBT FREE!!!!
WOW! Thanks for adding to this discussion. I know a few people who can’t make their budgets work simply because they don’t know what to do with money if it isn’t making a payment on something. Sad. Freedom from payments is AWESOME – once you’ve done it you won’t want to go back!
My husband just was blessed with a big raise at work, so he and I are currently attempting to kill a huge student loan so we can be debt free by 30. This means we are renting and putting our dream of owning a home on hold…but it’s frustrating at times to feel like certain family members are ashamed of the fact that we rent when we could buy. I figure the kids are little so when is a better time to live in a small space and avoid buying stuff! Hard to explain that to people who are ok with debt.
We live in a paid-for house, drive paid-for cars and have ZERO debt. If I lose my job tomorrow, it would be sad, but we’d be fine for a LONG time before it would matter financially. Let them make fun of you now. It’s all good. You can retire at 50 because you were smart at 25 and they’ll still be complaining about ‘having to’ work every day because they owe on everything under the sun.
By the way…CONGRATS on the big raise!
How do you get someone to realize that they do make enough to get by. My mom makes 40k per year, and she takes care of my little brother half of the time(shared custody). She thinks that she can’t possibly get by on that and that she needs government assistance(for which she can’t qualify). By the way, she lives in a suburb of Cleveland not NYC or Seattle. I’ve been trying to help her balance her budget.
The funny thing is that her net income is 2300 and her expenses are 2000, and that’s including buying “fun” things like alcohol, cigarettes, cable, cell phone(with data plan), among others… Even after I wrote it all out for her, she insisted that “Well, 300 isn’t all that much. What if I have to spend a little extra for gas for work or I invite company over for dinner. Groceries and gas fluctuate you know.” my response was, “Mom, even if you spend an extra hundred on each, ($500 for groceries and $200 for gas) you still wouldn’t break your budget.”
She got fed up with me, even though she wanted my help… I think she just wanted pity… and stopped talking about it. I want to help her. But how? How do I get my mom to see that she has enough income(plus more) to get by?
Thanks for your help, Stacy!
Dave Ramsey calls this “powdered butt syndrome” (http://www.stacymakescents.com/powdered-butt-syndrome). If proving the math doesn’t convince someone of their financial reality, there’s not much else you can do (again using someone else’s adage) “until the pain of staying the same is worse than the pain of changing.” I have a lot of friends/family who live very differently than me and they disagree that debt is bad or that living on a budget matters. I love them, but anyone who thinks they don’t make enough money when the math PROVES otherwise is simply being immature and refusing to take responsibility for their own situation. These are the types of people who make our government system so terrible. I HATE paying my tax dollars when the system “helps” people like this. It isn’t about money – it is about attitude, priorities and choices.
Completely agree. I just wrote about government assistance on my blog. The gist of my post was, I don’t think gov. assistance is a sin, but I think that it’d be better if the church took care of the poor/hungry rather than put our gov. more in debt. I just really want my mom to see that at her income level she should be fine, even thriving, not struggling paycheck to paycheck. You’re right though. It will take her getting so tired of her situation before she decides to do something about it.
AMEN! If the church (meaning the people in the church) would do what we are supposed to do, all these government programs would likely be unnecessary.
Hahaha! I loved it! Yep, the new car rang true for our family, my husband wanted a never been owned car….don’t ask me why! But we are planning on paying it off early although I agree, cash would have been best.
🙂 When I got my first BIG raise at work (when I was 23), I just HAD to buy a big fancy car for myself. What did I do? Bought a car that meant Stacy had to marry a man with debt and go to work to make payments so we could get rid of that debt. STUPID…but a GREAT lesson to learn and to share!
Cute idea! AND such an important message. Thank you for speaking the truth of God’s Word.
Thanks for the encouragement, Jackie!