Live from the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, broadcasting from the Dollar Car Rental studio. This is the Dave Ramsey Show where America hangs out to have a conversation about your life and your money. I am Dr. John Deloni, and I'm taking your calls. Looking forward to connecting with you wherever you may be. Give me a shout at 888-825-5225. That's 888-825-5225. You get in touch with us also at Ramsey Show. Love to hear from you. All right. Let's go straight to the calls. Let's go to let's talk to Michelle in Billings, Montana. Michelle, how are we doing?

I'm great. How are you doing?

I'm doing so, so good. How can I help today?

Well, I am dealing with some kind of maybe marriage or covid or some kind of anxiety. And I was wondering if you could help me kind of navigate through that.

All right. Walk me through what's going on.

All right. So I am 30. And my husband is 32. We've been married since August of last year. And for the past few months, I feel like I've just kind of gotten cold feet about our future. So I felt great going up to our wedding. No cold feet there. But recently I really pump the brakes on wanting to kind of like settle down, meaning like buy a house. And I'm no longer interested in having kids. So there's definitely been like a paradigm shift in our marriage a little bit. And I just wanted to maybe get some insight on anxiety with that.

So it's a little too late to pump the brakes because you're already in it. And so you are having questions about buying a house and having kids. Is this him related or is this you related?

I think it's a little bit of both. So he has actually been working more than ever during covid. He's a pilot, so he is gone almost all of the time. So because he's been working more. I'm kind of in a living situation where I feel like I'm just kind of like holding down the fort. And then I have a partner who's here, like sometimes. So it doesn't really feel like I'm married, even though I am.

And so what about that set up? Right. So it's you get married, you have a couple of months of a great time together. This is the guy you agreed to spend the rest of your life with. And then a international pandemic hits and he goes to work. He looks at you and says, I'm going to make some money. I'm going to make sure we're staying afloat. I'm going to make sure that the people who I serve in my particular job are going to be taken care of. And during that time, you have suddenly said, I don't know if I want this to be my guy specifically, besides him working really hard and besides the complexities going on around the world, what makes you start thinking about bailing out of this marriage?

It's not that I necessarily want to bail out of the marriage because I feel like he's a good partner for me, I just feel like my vision of what our marriage would be like is kind of gone right now. So that's why I'm saying I don't know that marriage anxiety or discovered related or both or neither.

Or have you sat down and talked to him about what you want this picture to look like? Yes, I have had that conversation. It was pretty good. So he has talked about how, you know, we've talked about wanting to buy a house in the springtime. And before we got married, we decided that we would probably have kids, but not definitely. So when we got married, we knew would kind of be like an open ended kind of future with that.

So I talked to him about the fact that I'm getting cold feet about these things because because I feel like I'm not really married right now. A house or a child feels kind of oppressive, like it doesn't feel joyous to me. Hmm. So he said, oh, sorry.

Go on, let's stop using the words cold feet. Cold feet is is a term you use before you do something. And I want you to start thinking in terms of you already have.

You're in this. The whole world has gotten shaken up like a snow globe, and so you rethinking long term plans. That's super normal. You'd be weird if you were just trying to hit the gas and press through this as though nothing was going on. Right. And I think less than anxiety, you're feeling lonely.

And when we feel lonely, we that sets off those anxiety alarms. Right. But you're feeling lonely, and I don't want you to apologize for it. I'm glad you're feeling lonely because your partner's been on the road.

I also want to honor what seems to be a pretty great guy and who is stepping up in a really messy season. And you're continuing to have good conversations about what the future is going to look like. The future is going to shift.

And God, you are setting the bar for couples across the country right now. You know why? Because things got different and you guys didn't just split up and had opposite directions of your of your house. You had a hard conversation. So good for you.

I wish I could tell you, Michel, that because you do A, B and C, because you have hard conversations, because you're planning, because you have a good husband, that things aren't going to feel awkward and weird less than a year into this. But that would be dishonest.

That wouldn't be truthful, I think things are messy and they're hard, what you have to do is to remain connected to him and having good conversations with him. And you got to have some people in your life that you can connect to on your own. Do you have friends that you talk to you that you hang out with? Do you have a community where you live? Yes, I do. We're recent transplants, but that's so that's so hard is.

Yeah, so we're kind of in a space where we're kind of like making those connections, but we do have some already.

And so this is going to be awkward for you. I want you and I don't know what the what the covid world is like in Montana right now. I want you to be oddly, weirdly forward about developing friendships I had when I moved to Nashville. I'd lived my whole life in Texas. When I moved to Nashville, I actually invited a couple of new couples over.

We'd known them a little bit and our former life and we asked and my wife and I asked him with the following words, will you be our friends?

And it was super weird.

One couple was like, this is kind of weird. And we started laughing. We all laughed. I was like, I know this is weird, but I know what the research says about having a community. I know that I was working at a university and I was working 24/7, 365. My wife felt lonely. She was trapped in a house with two to fun loving but adventurous little kids. And then the second couple we had over were folks that we had known for a while.

Then they had moved to Nashville and we had moved to Nashville and we reconnected. And I asked them, hey, we're we're inviting you guys to be our friends. And what that means is we're going to show up. We're going to ask you into our lives and we're having challenges. When we're struggling, we're feeling lonely. We're going to call on you guys and the guy. Is it as a veteran guy, as a brilliant, got a doctorate, smart, wonderful guy that I look up to.

He started crying and he said, and I quote, No one's ever asked me that before. Would you just be friends? I think less than anxiety, which is a is a is an overly overused clinical term.

Michel, I think you're lonely and I think you're right to be lonely. I think your husband's working a hard, hard job right now and a hard, hard season.

And you guys do need to have that conversation about, you know, what is our life going to be if you're going to be on the road 24/7, 365.

I'm already a few months in feeling lonely, but I also think you need to do the hard work at home right now in a messy, toxic season when the world's on fire, literally when we can't be with one another, literally, and do whatever you can in your environment to create friendships, to create connections, go overboard with it and start developing that community and continue talking to your husband. Good for you. It feels awkward, but you're in the right place.

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That's burst oral care dotcom. You were listening to the Dave Ramsey Show, this is John Boloney hosting the show, taking your calls about your life, your marriages, your relationships, your mental health, maybe a money question here, here, there, 8255. That's Triplette 8255. I think up been sitting by Dave long enough, we could figure out a few, many calls here and there he is, the wizard. He's the one and only.

Let's go to Brandon in Los Angeles, California. Brother Brandon, how we doing? I'm great. How are you? Thanks for taking my call. Outstanding. Thanks for calling. How can I help? So I'm trying to basically coach my sister through a situation that she's in. She got about seventy five thousand dollars in student loan debt and she's in a unique situation in that she has a job on a military base that's like smack dab in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

And she's stuck there because of covid. She has like no expenses. She makes decent money. And we kind of ran the numbers and figured out that if she stayed there, she could be debt free within about two years. OK, but she's afraid that it's kind of starting to affect her mental health a lot. She's kind of got like rock fever, I think, OK, she had a minor medical issue that she can't get taken care of on the island because they don't have the resources.

So she's just trying to get out. She actually called me trying to figure out how she can get mental health counseling where she is because she's just not really sure if she can do it. So what was your advice to her? You big brother? Little brother? Yeah, big brother. Good for you, man. So. What was your advice? Yeah, so, I mean, my my you know, I told her to try to stick it out, of course, because I think that she needs to get out of debt.

But it's really hard for me to say that because I'm not in her situation. Right. So how long has she been there? She's been there for a year because she'd have to stay for another two years, should be leave it all be three years total.

And what's what's her profession?

She's basically the manager of a store. She was a hospitality major. So so let me just tell you about my my family's journey.

I owed a lot of money. My wife and I did. We had at the time six degrees between us. My wife's got a Ph.D. Editta. We went to grad school. We ended up with the, you know, six figures of student loan debt. And that's before it started getting obnoxiously expensive.

And we ran our numbers. We had a situation where we lived in a house and we sold our house, moved into a residence hall on the campus.

That where I was a leader. And we did it for one year and we sucked it up and said, this is going to be a crazy year. And we had a two year old and it was chaotic and it was incredible. We paid off everything we owed and we learned a lot about ourselves.

But we went into it with the sense of adventure. We went into it with a sense of purpose.

And we also had a deadline to it. And here's the the dot, dot, dot. I went crazy. I was struggling with anxiety. I didn't I didn't know what it was. I thought everyone around me was insane. I thought everybody around me had lost their marbles. And I recognized after a year I hadn't slept well. I had not taken care of myself. Well, my work got morphed into my day to day life, which got morphed into my marriage and my parenting, and it was just one continuous stream.

And so, in retrospect, am I glad I did that? Absolutely. Was it worth my mental health? I won't say it was worth it, but I wish I had planned better. But I'll also say your sister's got a point. And if she's saying I need to come home, then she needs to come home and build another plan, get another job, grind it out like thousands and millions of people have done following the right plan, financially, it's not worth sacrificing her soul.

That said, living like nobody else for a year or two can really make a transformative difference. And so my recommendation to you and to her would be No. One, see if she can get online counseling. Every counselor I know on planet Earth and I keep up with them all over the country has thrown their practice up online in some shape, form or fashion.

And my understanding is the whole profession has transformed in many positive ways. There are some challenges to it, of course, and I'm always a face to face kind of guy. But I would check and see if she can get some online mental health care.

I would also check to see if she can check, plug in to some of the resources that are going to be on that base there. They may be military only, but she may have some clearance there. And then I would I would ask her to start doing this in small increments, maybe think we're going to go through three months. I want you to commit to three months. You can help me. Her accountability partner, someone who both loves her and hold you accountable financially.

If she invites you into that conversation and she invites you into that role and then check in with her at three months.

And if she says, I can't keep doing this, then you start making an exit strategy. Right. And the whole time she's still she's still digging out of that financial hole. She's going to start gaining some small wins. And what we all need in life is small wins. Right. We look at this 75000 dollar. No, it's so big. It's insurmountable. It's not even real. It's a cartoon. It's so big. And I just want to come home.

I just want to come home. I'm stuck on this rock in the middle of the ocean. It's scary out here. It's nerve racking.

I just wanna come home and then you get a little bit of a win and then a little bit of a win. And suddenly that number 73000, it's 70000, it's 68000. And those little wins can sometimes be a bomb. That can sometimes be a limb, right? It can be a soothing a lotion for our soul. It can feel good.

And then you stick it out a few more months and a few more months. But I wanted to break this up into bite sized chunks, 75000 dollars and this creeping mental health challenge stuck in a rock in the middle of the ocean and two years, 24 months, that just seems insurmountable. It's not real. So let's break it up into little pieces. And I want you to be the big brother that tells her that her heart in her mind is worth taking care of.

And you know her. And you know, when you can lean in a little bit and say, I want you to stick it out, I love you and support you, I want you to stick it out. And you also know when you need to look and be the big brother says, I want you to come home.

You're my sister and I care about you. I want you to come home. So thanks so much for the call, brother. That's so good to have a brother. So good to have a brother and sister who you can lean on.

You can call. I think it's I think it's a an underutilized, underutilized relationship these days. It used to be that brothers and sisters stuck together through thick and thin and now folks scatter. They go to colleges all over the country. They the. Hear from one another, they become texting and email friends, and that's about it, and I always want to celebrate my brother and I the last few years have rekindled a connection in a way that's awesome.

I text back and forth, talk to him much more than I ever have, and me and my sister, too, and I'm better for it. So good for you, Brandon, for being a great big brother. The money is important. Dudes love to just solve some stuff, but take care of her heart, too. All right. So you and I know that a budget is key to your future goals. We've seen it proven for years.

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This is the Dave Ramsey Show. This is John Deloney taking your calls about your life, your relationships, your mental health, maybe even a money call or to give me a call at eight eight two five five to 25. That's triple eight eight two five five two two five. Want to give the YouTube crew a shout out?

I don't know what they do all day. I don't know what they do. They are invested in this show. They are in it to win it. I love you guys. Love you guys, man. They're in it. Glad to have you all along with us.

All right, let's go to the phones here. Let's go to Carla in Canada. Carla, how in the world are you?

I'm doing well, thank you. How are you? I'm doing so, so good. All right. Fill me in. How can I help?

OK, so my question is, we're on baby step to my husband and I, and I'm just trying to figure out how to manage between being Gizelle on tests and not burning out. I'm working as a nurse and it's been pretty crazy over the last few months.

Has it now? I did not know that. Hey, can we stop for a second?

Can we just stop? Can I tell you like this isn't John on the radio. This is John, husband John, dad of two little kids.

Carla, thank you for every day you're getting up and you're going in and you're going in and you're going.

And I just wanna say thank you. Thank you.

Most people will never know what you're going through as a nurse, the scrubbing in and the scrubbing out and the terror that you deal with every day and the the that fear in other people's eyes all day, it wears on your soul.

So thank you, Carla. Thank you.

So so how can I how can I help with burnout.

So I'm trying to get home baby step number two. And we want to we just got married in August and so we're trying to pay off all of our debt by next August. We want the anniversary. We make a boat 100000, but we're we're not going to make it. And so I have going back and forth about picking up a job, doing overnights. But then I have days where I got home from work and I'm like, I can't even make dinner.

I can't even do anything I love. And anyway, I'm trying to kind of figure out how Gizelle intends to be, but then also, like dealing with like just complete exhaustion and the mental and emotional fatigue about my job personally takes on me. So.

So you just got married, is that right? Yes.

OK, what is the the the panic in Rush? You said you set a goal to to pay this house off in one calendar year.

Oh, it's not a house. No, it's just ah I just we have student debt.

OK, ok, so this is just regular baby steps. All right.

So you know this and let's back out for a second. You just got married, which is a major stressor. How long do you know this guy.

But this guy. He's a good guy. Yes. Is he's amazing. Listen to how your voice just changed.

Yes, he is pretty good. So he's a good guy. That's a major life shift. And then you work a job. You've heard of the phrase secondary traumatic stress. Have you heard that phrase? Yes, I have.

OK, so for those of you who don't know what that is, there is trauma that's acute. And that's a nerd word for saying I was involved in a car wreck. I witnessed a shooting. I I was burned when I fell into the stove. Right. That's an acute trauma that you experience. Secondary traumatic stress is the stress that people experience. Who are the first responders, those who go in day in and day out? Those are the nurses, the doctors, the ministry that ministry staff, the counselors, those who for a living go into other people's pain to help be a part of the healing solution.

And what the research has found over the last hundred years is those folks over time get worn down as though the trauma is theirs, their body, for lack of better terms. To quote Vyner, their body keeps the score two and four.

So you have stress number two, which is you're in a hard job.

Stress number three is the world exploded, right? Yes.

And they looked at you to help be a part of the solution to that explosion.

And so I want to 100 percent affirm the alarm systems that are going off in your heart and mind that tell you to stop, to take care of yourself, to slow down for a second, to exhale.

This is not normal times, right? Yes. Yes.

So, yes, you feel right to be exhausted from your job. Feel right to be exhausted existentially. You just got me. Are you trying to figure out how to live with this guy?

He's awesome, but he's still just another guy, right? Yes. What does he do for a living?

He was in office so much he's actually able to work from home, which has been a huge help, very cool people to help out around the house. And he makes a lot of the food and takes care of things for me, which is very cool.

So tell me who else you have. What can. A support network do you have outside of him in your neighborhood, in your community? Yeah, as my family, I'm not from where I live currently. I have a couple of really close girlfriends that I see on a fairly regular basis right now just to kind of get to know my girl.

Good for you. Are they nurses are. No. No, they aren't. Oh, even better.

That's so good. So many of us who work in the pain of other people, we surround ourselves with only people who work in those jobs. And then all we talk about is other people's pain. And that ends up being not a great way to decompress. So here's the thing.

If you have reached your limit, your capacity, I want you to be at peace with that.

This one year deadline is somewhat arbitrary.

And I want to honor the fact that your Gizelle intense, you guys are sprinting and running, but if you're sprinting and running and suddenly you find yourself in a and, you know, quicksand, sprinting and running is just going to bury you.

And so be fully OK with sitting down with your husband and saying, we had this this dream date of one year, August of is it August 21? Was that going to be your dream date?

Yeah. OK, so it's January of 22. Oh, for Christmas that year, we're going to take another six months and we are going to celebrate Christmas together.

We're not going to buy each other presents.

We're going to write one last mortgage check and then we're going to start 2022 debt free and be fully at peace with that because you're kicking butt right now. You're working hard and it's not like you're doing this the rest of your life. This is a year and you're taking the year and you can take six months instead.

Right. OK, yeah.

Continue to not add debt, continue to not try to numb yourself with purchasing things and continue to be intense.

But I want you to recognize how hard of a job you're living.

And it may be that your husband, who's picking up a lot of the the the home stuff, sounds like he's an awesome guy, man. Good for you, brother. But who's taking care of the meals helping keep the house up? We work on a job from home. Maybe he can pick up a second term. He can pick up a second gig, a side gig. But if you're coming home and you're exhausted, you're working hard stuff, you're doing hard things.

I want to honor that and take care of your heart. Mind no sense in dropping dead at the finish line of the marathon. No sense. So keep running, but you may need to stop sprinting. You may realize I was going to do this marathon in three and a half hours. You know what? If you finish in four hours, you're finished. So we're going to hi5 you.

And good for you, Khalil. You're a saint. Good for you. All right. Let's go to Dan in Jacksonville, Florida. Dan, my man, how are we doing?

Hey, good. John, thanks for taking my call. You got a brother. How can I help? Hey, I would like to talk about how to transition to a different job, OK? I'm fifty six years old. I have a great job making one hundred and forty career, but I'm just bored and tired of this industry and working for corporate America. And I really like to make a plan to transition into something else for the last few years of my my career before I retire.

You're and your 56, you said.

Yep. All right. So you're 56. You make great money. You're clearly intelligent. What is it about that transition that you have, because it's not going to be a it's not going to be a content issue, it's going to be an issue, right?

No, no. I think it's I think it's more of a passion. There you go. What's in your heart that's keeping you from drawing up a plan for me?

Like I have put so much into the corporate job that I I've kind of lost my passions. I mean, I don't really have a hobby that I could change into a job, but. I just kind of feel burned out, like I'm just all about this corporate job. And so, Dan, let's do this, brother. I want to dig into this. And so I'm going to hold you over to the break. And when we come back, we're going to talk through what's going on, your heart and how you can make a transition.

This is the Dave Ramsey Show. This is the Dave Ramsey Show. This is Dr. John Deloney hosting today for the first time by myself. I hope everybody's doing well out there. And I hope that you are connecting with other people. You're finding relationships, you're finding connection, and you survive in this crazy season.

You are making it work. You're grinding, you're slowing down. And you need to you're taking a break when you need to and you are reaching out to folks when you need help. Scriptura of today is from Revelation 38, says, I know your works. Behold, I have set before you an open door which no one is able to shut. I know that you have but little power and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.

Barbara Corcoran says, don't you dare underestimate the power of your own instinct. Don't you dare underestimate the power of your own instinct. I love it so many people disregard their gut feeling. Somebody says, hey, you should do this and this. And they say, I don't know.

I don't know about that. And they knew it, they knew it, they knew that guy wasn't going to be a good guy, they knew that investment wasn't going to be right, they knew that go ahead and put my money in these things without fully understanding what it was.

What was about wasn't a great idea.

Don't you dare underestimate the power of your own instinct. I love it. All right. We're going to go back to Dan in Jacksonville, Florida. Dan is 56. He's in a job. He's working corporate America. He is killing it, absolutely crushed. And he makes great money. And he has lost all smoke, all steam, all passion for this job. Is that about right, Dan?

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And kind of looking for how to make a transition into something more enjoyable.

So when you say enjoyable, when you say I'm to be a burned out Woody, what are you driving at?

I think just. Bureaucracy in corporate America, you know, so many levels of getting everything approved and it's just I'd rather be my own boss, I think, in my own way. I used to do carpentry. I put myself through college. Yep. And I kind of feel like I'd like to go back to that. But, you know, I got I'm making great money. It's hard to stop. And I still have to pay off my house.

So I feel like I got to get that paid off.

So you've you've you've been down the road with my friend Ken Coleman. Right. You read his book, is that right? Yep.

So, you know, the path to, as he says, don't don't leap off the dock until you got a boat to land and. Right.

Right. You're feeling fried. There is something else going on here, my man. What would keep you from getting into woodworking and carpentry as a hobby, as something to do that fills your soul up while you go grind out this job and make your money?

And if you're carpentry, job turns into something that you would make that transition there.

I think it's probably the right direction, that's kind of like you were just talking about your instinct, I think that's what my instinct is telling me to do. I'm just, I guess, worried about I've got to stay in this job to get my house paid off and. And then know, how do you just quit a job that's making great money and launch a new thing, you know, so.

So, Dan, here's the thing I worked for. Gosh, I don't even remember now 15, 16, 17 years to be a executive leader at a college or university. And I got a Ph.D. in it. I tracked with great mentors. I worked really hard. I worked 24/7, 365 for years. I was on call. I was learning.

I've made so many mistakes. I tried to grow from those mistakes. And then I got to where I quote unquote landed. I was making money that my granddad would not have understood. And I was working at one of the greatest universities in the country, especially in their area. And then I met Dave and I met somebody here and I literally quit it all to come take a job doing something that I had never done before. It was all new, all of it, writing books.

I'd never done that. I'd written a dissertation. I'd written two of them. I'd never written a book. I'd never been on the radio. I'd publicly I've been done public speaking for years. I'd never done it the way Dave wants it done, which is you will be world class, you will not get on my stage.

And what that meant for me was I had to go back to school for a year and it was the school of hard knocks. It was a school of Hogan saying, hey, that's not good enough. We do it better than that. That's the school of Christie, right. Saying, Hey, John, I need you to step up here and Anthony O'Neill and Dave and Kelly and Ben and James, these folks who have reported to me, Amy, for year helping me learn and grow.

And I took a pay cut to do it. And it was has been the right thing every step of the way. It's what I want to tell you is there's something keeping you from pursuing the next thing you're trapped in this cycle of I just don't like it and I just am nervous about it. And so what I want to get to you is I'm living proof you can do this now.

I don't want to I don't want anyone to. I won the lottery here. Right? I mean, I'm working at Dave's place. That's that's silly. It's incredible.

But there you're too smart. You've done too well. You're too good at what you do, Dan, to not know what the next step is. There's something keeping you from taking that next step. What is it? Is it pride?

Is it fear? What is it? I'm not sure. Are you married? Yes, definitely. And what's your spouse think?

I'm sure she likes the security of my job. Of course she does.

The she like a miserable dying on the vine husband? No. Have you all talked about it? Absolutely.

Have you talked about it outside of. I'm just sick of this. Have you talked about it over a meal and you explained to her, I'm 54. I'm 56. I'm sorry. So I'm a little over halfway done. And the back half of my life. The back third, the back forth of my life, I have a different vision for it, and here's what that vision is. Have you done that with her? Yeah, we've started those conversations and and.

I'm not sure she's understanding how badly I want to change or. Ready to get us there? Yeah, so take me below, take take the work off the table, Dan, take the job off the table. This is just you as a guy in 20/20, watching the world around you burn. You don't sound like you're doing OK. I. Yeah, I feel kind of stuck and depressed. Yeah, you know, like I want to make a change.

You probably want to make several changes. Is that fair? Perhaps you. We're already in it now, and you might as well just be honest, we're in it now, there's probably several things, right? And I'm not sure I can put my finger on them, definitely, you know, I would like to have a less just call it corporate. Here's what you want, here's what you want, then you want your autonomy back. You want your freedom back.

But beneath that, you want to feel that again.

Right. And here's what you're staring at, brother. You're staring at your 56 year, a few years from retirement. You don't want to continue on the same path you're in and you feel trapped. And then you start asking questions like what all of us what has all this been worth? What's the point of all this? If I have to do one more TPS report, I'm going to lose it, I'm trying to tell my wife and I don't have the language to be vulnerable with her.

I don't know how to fully say I can't keep doing this. Because she's not going to understand. And so, Dan, I want you to do the bravest thing that a 56 year old man making 140000 dollars. And who's slowly starting to question the guy he looks and sees in the mirror? This is this is about work, but it's not about work. And this is bigger than that. You're 56 and you don't like who you are.

I want you to call a counselor in your area, and I want you to take the hard step of saying I'm depressed, I want to change, I want to be different and I need help.

And Dan, you're going to change your family tree once again. Good for you, brother. Thanks so much for the call. Thanks for being vulnerable. I want to thank Ben. I want to thank Kelly. Child Kelly. Daniel. Oh, my gosh. I called you Kelly. Child Kelly. Daniel, I want to thank everybody for listening. I almost made it without blowing it and I didn't. My first time, this has been the Dave Ramsey Show.

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