From Debt to Independence: A Journey with Dylan Bain

Are you ready to redefine your understanding of debt and learn new strategies to manage it effectively? This is your chance! Our guest Dylan Bain, a seasoned expert, throws light on the labyrinth of good and bad debt, illustrating how deeper emotional undercurrents - even past traumas - can affect our financial choices. We also redefine debt as a claim on your future time, offering a new perspective on its connection with our most non-renewable resource - time.

We don't stop there! Are you an 18-year-old, looking for ways to establish credit without getting mired in debt? This discussion is just for you. Dylan and I unravel practical steps to understand loans, the difference between the interest rate and APR, and how to decipher loan terms. Learn how to leverage debt to your advantage while avoiding the common debt traps that many young adults unknowingly stumble into.

Lastly, we shift the lens to an often overlooked aspect - the intimate relationship between personal finance, relationships, and life itself. Together Dylan and I discuss the importance of building a supportive network, financial independence, and how unresolved traumas can impact our financial decisions. With a mix of life coaching insights and an open conversation about money, we aim to offer you an enriching experience that extends beyond the realm of finance. Don't miss this riveting episode as we peel back the layers of debt, money, and their undeniable influence on our lives.

Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:08

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Curious Ulsterman podcast, the podcast designed to equip you with the tools and wisdom you need to thrive as an adult. And in today's episode I have repeat guest on the show, dylan Bain. And in today's episode we discuss the topic of debt. We also discuss how there's no such thing as good or bad debt, how past traumas affect your financial decision making, and we also discuss how to pay off whatever debt you do have quickly and efficiently. But without further ado, here is today's episode on debt with Dylan Bain. Dylan Bain, welcome back to the show, brother.

Speaker 3: 0:46

What's up, Johnny?

Speaker 2: 0:47

Hello, and the reason for today's conversation. It wasn't even supposed to happen. Really, you were expecting you were going to be coming on in a few weeks time, but I shared a post on my Instagram story. I looked at it and I'm like, well, it sounds good and it looks pretty as an Instagram post. I'll share it. It might be useful information to somebody. And not two minutes later, I received a message from your good self going ah, there's a lot. There's a lot wrong with this post. It's not outright wrong, but it needs a lot more context than you obviously explained it.

Speaker 2: 1:16

That post was about debt, which is this very vague monster I would describe it as, especially if you're an 18 year old. It's this behemoth that you know is coming, but it's unavoidable. There's no training to deal with it. I removed that post and went. Well, actually, if that caught me, how many other people was it catching out? So hence why we've invited you back on the show today to educate us and give us a bit of financial literacy, at least within this, within the minutia of debt. So take it away. What, what, what's from your perspective, define debt, so to speak? Because to me, it's just this big, scary monster that we all have to wrestle with eventually.

Speaker 3: 1:59

Well, okay. So so right off the bat no, we don't right Like. Right off the bat, there's already a societal expectation and, of course, I could be sitting here, you know, feeling in conspiracy theory about debt and societal expectation all day long, but the reality is that we all expect debt, but we don't need necessarily debt. Okay, but it makes a lot of sense if you have companies that are going to collect 14% interest on whatever debt you have. They want you to have debt. And there's a lot of and we'll get into why. There's a lot of reasons why people want you to have debt.

Speaker 3: 2:33

But let's just level set right there that, out of the box, the expectation that you have, you're bringing into this conversation, is I need to have debt, it's going to happen. It's like the weather. There's nothing I can do to stop it, and nothing's further from the truth. You know now. You know there's a. There's a huge question as to whether or not it's feasible to accomplish your goals in the timeframes without debt. There's a question of you know, how can I leverage debt to my advantage? But whether or not you need it, let's just start there. You don't necessarily need it, okay.

Speaker 2: 3:06

No, that's fantastic. You've already kind of blown my mind because, for context, the reason I said that debt is unavoidable is I'm I am in the fortunate position to own a house. I don't own it outright, obviously it's. I'm paying a mortgage on it, but I know that's not a position a lot of people in my age group are in. It's a nice problem to have. I have a mortgage to pay, but I feel like you touched on it there briefly about societal expectation. You know you are expected at some point to settle down to get the wife, the kids, the white picket fence and own a house. Now, unless you are in an extremely fortunate position and wealthy and can just buy the house outright or build your own. Fair play to you, but that's from at least my experience and the majority of the people I know. We don't have that luxury, so we have to go to the bank to get a mortgage to that that was the angle I was approaching from.

Speaker 3: 4:06

Yeah, and I have a mortgage on my house too. Right, like, let's just level set that like I'm not living a debt free life because I have a mortgage and I live in a high cost of living area here in the United States. But let's be honest that that was a choice we made. Oh, 100%.

Speaker 2: 4:19

Yeah, right Like that's.

Speaker 3: 4:20

There's a huge difference between saying, well, this was unavoidable, I had to have a mortgage, versus man, I could have modified a van and gone and lived in that yeah, 100%. You know, if you talk about having a wife and kids, like, there are people here in the United States right now who have bought school buses and have, you know, a husband, a wife and two kids living in a school bus seeing the United States. So there are options like but let's just, let's keep our sovereignty well in hand while we have this conversation 100%. So your, your Instagram post was basically saying that there's this idea of good debt and bad debt 100%. And in that that's what I reacted to, because let's just be, let's. You asked me to define debt, so let's just define debt Technically speaking, debt is somebody who loans you money that you are expected to pay at some future time, plus a premium called interest.

Speaker 3: 5:13

Okay. Or to put it another way, debt is somebody laying claim to your future production in life in exchange for money. Now, oh right, okay, those are. So I gave you technical definitions. You take an accounting class, you do a finance class. That's what they're going to tell you. It's money we give now with the expectation of paying in the future with a premium called interest. But in reality, money is what you exchange pieces of your only non-renewable resource time to get. And so if you are sitting there and saying, well, I'm going to take money now, that money represents pieces of time, pieces of your life, that they're giving to you now, that you have to give them in the future, so they have secured a claim on your future life and production, that's true for a mortgage company.

Speaker 3: 6:06

That's true for a car loan, that's true for a student loan, it doesn't matter. That's what that is. And when you start to think about that type of thing, you have, you have a, you have a separate. Now suddenly one sounds okay, that that sounds reasonable. The other goes well, hold on a second. My life is mine to live, not if you're in debt.

Speaker 2: 6:25

Right, not if you're in debt. That's very, that's very true. Yeah, very, very true.

Speaker 3: 6:29

I mean stop and think about what in your situation. You, you know you have a mortgage, I have a mortgage. I don't believe you're married, but I have a wife and two kids and a roommate. Okay, I can't get up and walk away. So that debt. Not only does the debt shackle me down, because I can't just cancel my lease and go move someplace else. If I had to move, I got to vacate the house, I got to get it sold. If it doesn't sell, I got to pay a mortgage plus rent someplace else. There's a big risk in even having a house. You know, economically I've I've tied myself to the Denver metro area here in the United States and I'm fucked if I got to go someplace else. I'm sorry, I don't know if I can swear on this.

Speaker 2: 7:07

No, no, it's a. It's an easy, easy going podcast. There's an when I, when I post the episode, it's like does this episode contain explicit language? Yes, and about 90% of mine end up doing so, so crack on.

Speaker 3: 7:20

Yeah. So I mean, that's the thing to understand. And when you looked at this good debt, bad debt thing, mortgage debt, was considered to be quote unquote good debt. Well, no, it's not, it's still debt. So really, the way I should say is there's horrible debt and not as horrible debt, because honestly, if we want to have the maximum amount of freedom and sovereignty. You and I both need to pay off our damn mortgages so that we have the flexibility to actually live our lives for whatever might come Right.

Speaker 2: 7:52

Yeah, that that changes everything, like that. I'm a little bit stunned there I use that word, that when you say horrible debt and less horrible debt. I've just, I've just never heard it that way and I I'm trying to like empathize and imagine if I was 18 and heard that suddenly it's like, well, I don't know, from your perspective, what would you advise an 18 year old? What would you advise an 18 year old or someone who's just entering adulthood, who has, is getting this perspective? But you know they want to go to university, they're obviously going to have to get student loans and debt If, like, they're eventually going to probably want to own their own place, they're probably eventually going to want to have wife, kids, all that kind of thing.

Speaker 2: 8:40

It's. It just seems to be in a strange way that if you want to live the average life, like have your fun, certainly when you're young, and then settle down, then it seems like it seems like debt is unavoidable, which you said. Obviously it is avoidable, but I don't know, it's almost. I was thinking about this before the episode. It almost seems like you're funneled into it and today by by society I'm not, I don't mean that society is. There's some sort of secret meeting right, how are we going to get all the kids into debt?

Speaker 3: 9:10

But you know that's not true, that means all right.

Speaker 2: 9:13

okay, I'm like the collar worms.

Speaker 3: 9:16

Yeah, no, no, no See, like, like my biggest thing is is I, I despise conspiracy theory. Okay, and, and when it comes down to conspiracy theory, like, I just feel like this idea like, oh my God, if, if we all wear a mask, then pretty soon we're all going to be, you know, slaves in a boat somewhere, or whatever. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: 9:35

Nonsense. Big claims, like big claims, require big evidence. Oh yeah, okay. But when it comes to credit cards and debt, it turns out that there is big evidence, correct? Like let me give you a good example, okay, of the conspiracy to try to put people into debt. When I got to university, the first thing I learned about money is that money does not grow on trees, but credit cards do.

Speaker 3: 9:57

Okay, so, I showed up to university and the first day that I was there there was Citibank, there was US bank. You know, visa had their. They had tents set up around campus offering credit card applications to freshmen. On the very first day that most of these people had ever lived separate from their parents, they're getting the opportunity to put themselves into debt for 24 and a half percent interest.

Speaker 2: 10:25

No that run away with haste.

Speaker 3: 10:28

Right. So now you're now you're going to handle your handing the opportunity. You know they don't have cash right Now, but you're handing them a credit card to an 18 year old who is now going through a huge emotional trauma and moving out of your house, out of your parents' house. Is a home emotional trauma? Right, it's, it's a necessary one, but it it still weighs on you. So you hand them a credit card. They're going to go out and party and now they're going to, and they don't ever have to emotionally lose the cash of actually giving up the cash and watching that cash stack dwindle down. They just forever can swipe that card. And I was one of those kids and you know what, when I hit my credit limit, did they call me and say hey, dylan, you know you hit that credit limit. Oh, hell, no, they just raised a credit limit. By the time I was done with my freshman year, they had given me a $25,000 credit limit on a credit card.

Speaker 2: 11:16

That's insane.

Speaker 3: 11:18

It's it is insane, but it also is good business. If you're in the business of trying to collect interest rates, which is how those companies make their money right, then naive 18 year olds is the best thing you could possibly go after. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 11:34

Because it's almost predatory in a way, isn't it?

Speaker 3: 11:37

Well, and then, of course, what's part of the sales pitch with that? Well, you want to get this credit card so you can establish credit.

Speaker 2: 11:43

I was. You took the words out of my mouth. That was going to be the literally the next thing. Surely this isn't good for your longterm credit score.

Speaker 3: 11:51

Well, but they sell it to you that way, right? So so, when you're 18 years old, just understand that, like, like people, you are a fat, happy goose and those wolves are coming for you, and then it's going to be with that, it's going to be with everything, what. You know what the most common purchase for people to make out of university is? I don't know the number one most common purchase.

Speaker 2: 12:12

My mouth is too short.

Speaker 3: 12:14

It's a new car, of course.

Speaker 2: 12:17

Of course. Yeah, so here you got here you got some kids.

Speaker 3: 12:21

You know at that point you're what 22? Yeah.

Speaker 3: 12:24

You're coming out of university and you think to yourself well, I'm now an adult, I got my first adult job. It's some low paying shit job somewhere, right, but you got it at a college and you think I I'm going to treat myself and get myself a car. And they buy a new car, like forgetting that new cars are horrible investments. Oh yeah, 100%. But like, stop and think about that for a second. I like if I were to go buy a new car right now, my new car would exceed the largest I've ever paid for any student loans ever. Wow, okay.

Speaker 3: 12:59

Right, so your typical car in the United States is coming with. I think the average is about 375 a month for a depreciating asset that 90% of the time is going to be doing absolutely nothing.

Speaker 2: 13:11

Yeah, yeah, actually, when you think about it that way yeah, that's, that's insane.

Speaker 3: 13:15

Well, and so you stop, and you know, stop and go back. So what advice would I give to an 18 year old? The first is don't don't have a credit card, Like, just just don't do it. You can establish credit later. Right yeah.

Speaker 3: 13:27

You can always establish credit later, and if you really want to establish credit, just ask your parents to make you an authorized user on the card, because then you get their credit. So if your parents have been responsible with their credit, just get an authorized user on their card. That entire credit history is now going to come over to you and so you know, if you're 18 years old, your parents don't even have to give you a card. You don't even have the option to spend on it, but you can do that. So you could be 18 years old with 25 years of credit history right out of the box.

Speaker 2: 13:55

That is very handy. I wish I knew that.

Speaker 3: 13:58

Right. So if the argument is we need to establish credit, there's that. Here's another way that people can establish credit right, and credit card companies won't tell this. If you have a cell phone bill, like I have Verizon Wireless and I've had Verizon Wireless for years at this point, but you can call them and ask them hey, can you please report my payment activity to the credit bureau? And they will. And now, if you've paid your cell phone bill on time, now you, without ever having to take on any debt, you now have a credit history, and a good one at that. And you can do that with water bills, you can do that with all sorts of stuff that doesn't normally show up in a credit report. So the argument of trying to establish credit is just bonkers right out of the box. So, as an 18 year old, understand that establishing credit is not necessarily as critical as everyone tells you it is.

Speaker 2: 14:48

Yeah, that's so interesting because I've never owned a credit card and my credit score is touchwood, for now, outstanding, because you know exactly that I, until I owned my, my first property, it was my, my phone bill. You know that was probably the biggest expense I really had. And then, certainly, once I got my mortgage and I've, you know, never missed a mortgage payment touchwood again. But yeah, that's that built up my credit score and you know it got to the point where at 20 year, I was thinking about getting a credit card and then I thought about it as, like, I've gotten this far without it. I don't really feel the need for one.

Speaker 2: 15:31

Personally, I think that's certain something we could probably have you on again to I know we're haven't even finished this episode and talking about having you back on again but maybe to do a whole episode dedicated to just credit cards and just that whole philosophy, because, like, we could talk all day probably about that. But within the scope of this conversation about, about debt, we've covered quite a lot and such a short amount of time and I feel like that, although we've defined it and we've said that you don't have to get into debt, but there is societal pressure watch out for these traps with debt, though I'm with the concept of good on bad debt. Sorry, horrible and less horrible debt.

Speaker 2: 16:18

Thank you, yeah, and even with that, do you still? Is there any way that a young person, 18 up to uni age could leverage debt to their advantage in any way? Or is it just? You know, this is just going to be a thing of life that you just have to grin and bear, unfortunately.

Speaker 3: 16:40

So the first thing I'll say and I've said this on this podcast before you have to understand that we're talking about personal finance, and personal finance is always more personal than it is finance. Okay, yeah.

Speaker 3: 16:51

So, flat out the gate, if you're 18 years old, understand that as you stepped into adulthood, you're carrying a whole bunch of shit with you. You don't know it, you don't want to know it, you don't want to look at it, but there's going to be some shit in your past and how, what happened with your parents, even if your parents were great parents, and that's going to carry through into your financial world. And when I do financial coaching, nine times out of 10, it ends up in life coaching, which I actually just started a life coaching business. Because of that. You know, and it's because people will you know. For example, you know if your parents say well, I can't afford that, we can't afford this, right, and I've heard that.

Speaker 3: 17:29

I've been at the store and I've heard parents say, you know, the kid says I want a candy bar, right, okay? So what's going on there? Psychologically speaking, the kid's excited about the candy bar. His brain wants the sugar, so that you know he's being awarded for it. He thinks he's going to the person that who is his provider, right, his parents and going I want this candy bar. And the parents go don't put that down, we can't afford that.

Speaker 3: 17:51

Now, first off, that we can't afford. That is bullshit. We all know that that's bullshit because I guarantee you can go through that cart and find other stuff that they can afford, that they probably shouldn't afford. But from a kid's perspective. Now they suddenly have a, they're built in a scarcity mindset my provider cannot provide because we don't have enough money. Okay, that's going to set you up. So I'm using this as an example because I've seen it a lot. But when you come as an 18 years old and they hand you a credit card, you now have infinite access to avoid scarcity. You're going to start running away from that previous trauma and everybody has it, myself included my parent. I grew up very privileged and I still had it right. So understand, when you're 18 years old, that these people who are peddling debt, they know this and they're going to use it to their advantage.

Speaker 3: 18:43

So take some time to understand how your own relationship with money works. If you grew up in a place where we didn't have a whole lot of money, you're going to have some effects that you're going to have to work through. Now that's a harder lift. So let's go to something a little bit easier. How do you, how do we in your place you deal with societal expectations. I don't use student loans as an example, right? The United States student loans are horrible, horrible. It's a racket. Okay, so you have to start doing a cost benefit analysis. Right, you need to start thinking about your life in a couple of different ways If you're going to go take student loans, and this is a, I think, the prime example. This is where people say that student loans are quote unquote good debt. They're defining good debt as debt I can use to make me more money than the debt I incurred.

Speaker 2: 19:40

Yes, yeah, that's exactly the way I've always thought about it.

Speaker 3: 19:43

Exactly Now, as a CPA, as a certified public accountant, and I work in the corporate world there are times where I would make a presentation to the board saying this is debt that we can't afford not to take on. Okay, I do make that statement professionally. After I have had an entire army of financial and now analysts and accountants that have crunched the numbers in every possible conceivable way to leverage all that expertise, that I'm sitting there with a report that gives me a 75% chance that this is going to work out. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 20:15

The average human does not have access to those resources. No, Right. So now let's go back to the student loans example. If I just make a blanket statement, student loans are good debt. Why wouldn't you want more of what you think is good? Oh crap yeah.

Speaker 2: 20:32

Man, that's like a war. It's like a war of words, isn't it? It's very tactical how it's used.

Speaker 3: 20:37

The whole thing is Go read a credit card agreement. You'll agree with me by the end of it. This whole thing is like good debt is a marketing term. Why are you at university to get a degree, to go pursue whatever, right? Whether it's your dreams I want to be a great artist, or you know, in my case, I just went because I wanted money. Right, I took on student debt to get my CPA. I make far more than my student debt right. For me, it was the quote unquote good debt. No, it was a necessary evil, right. Because what ends up happening is you get kids who go into university and they say well, you know it's good debt. So then they feel good about however much they take. By the end of it they end up with $100,000 in debt in a degree that they can't use to get a job. Yeah, 100%. So now they've mortgaged their future for nothing.

Speaker 2: 21:32

Do you see how that works? Yeah, it's pretty. It's almost, dare I say, a bit scary. It's like when you're 18, it almost feels like unless you have someone, perhaps like yourself, with people's best interests at heart that they're almost like lamps of the slaughter. It's almost like a factory churning thing of you know, here's a young, naive people and we're going to bag them for life and teach them that, or at least a plant. That's either credit cards are good and then, once they're in, they're in. You know that. So I'm like, I'm quite I'm glad I managed to avoid that particular financial trap, but it's straight out of the, straight out of school. 18 year old, or even your 18 year old self, what would you?

Speaker 3: 22:24

say to them what's your plan? Oh, that would be, that would be what it. What's your plan? Yeah.

Speaker 3: 22:30

And let me give you a great example. This is not somebody straight out of university, but I'll get the whole story. So I you know my financial coaching practice. I live and die by referrals.

Speaker 3: 22:42

Well, a friend, a guy I did a coach, a coaching session with. I helped him and his wife dig out of almost a quarter of a million dollars in debt. Oh, wow, he. He recommended, he recommended me to this other woman who then paid for my sessions on behalf of her son. Okay, and I sat down with him and he had his undergraduate degree was in, I think, broadcasting or something like that.

Speaker 3: 23:06

Right, but he had decided that he, you know, he wasn't, he wasn't getting any money, he was, he didn't have a good job, he could barely afford to pay a student payments. And so he had decided to go back to school and get a master's of fine arts and MFA, and she had decided. His mother had decided that she wasn't going to stop him because she didn't think she could convince him, but she could pay for me to try to convince him. And so we sat down and the first thing I asked him with was and then what? You go get this MFA. And then what? Well, it'll help me be more competitive in the job market.

Speaker 3: 23:40

Okay, who has the job you want? How did they get there? Does this MFA really help you or does it just put you further in debt? And the answer, of course, is it just puts them further in debt. The, you know, to get a master's of fine arts and I'm not shitting on the arts by any extent, I'm just being realistic about what this is Right. Your masters of fine arts and and universities know this, so they they offer all these certificates which are not actually great in the job market. They offer all these master's degrees, you know, on the promise that it's going to help you get a job, and that's bullshit, you know. And so this guy's going to go back and incur another, you know $60,000 in student debt that he can't discharge in bankruptcy on a degree that isn't going to put him any further up the Starbucks chain than he is currently.

Speaker 2: 24:29

So I don't need to laugh, folks. I I'm not looking down on anyone on Starbucks or if you're in the arts. That was just. It's funny and it's true, though, isn't it?

Speaker 3: 24:38

Well, but he, he was like well, but I mean, this is good debt, I use it to make money, and I was like your previous debt isn't making money right now either. So if you're 18 years old and you're going to school, you know my question to you would be what's your plan? Well, I'm going to go study psychology. This is the one that makes me go bonkers. Do you know how many psychology degrees universities manufacture on a daily and a yearly basis? It's huge. You know how much you know. At the average, starting to get salary for someone with an undergrad wouldn't psychology is $25,000. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 25:08

Why? Because almost all of them go work at Starbucks. Yeah. Or or equivalent. And so if I got a student who's just come out of, you know, just starting a university, and they're going to encourage student debt, then they're going to go into psychology. I'm going to ask them what's their plan, if their plan is, since I'm going to finish this undergrad and then I'm going to do master's degree and then I'm going to get my PhD so that I can actually practice as a psychologist. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 25:33

If their answer is anything other than that, the answer is don't go to university. You haven't figured it out yet. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 25:40

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 25:41

Go do something else.

Speaker 2: 25:43

I think my, oh sorry, you have a plan, yeah, no yeah 100%.

Speaker 2: 25:48

Well, I think my brother accidentally did that. He strapped the bat, did not want to go to university and then decided, actually it would be better if he did go to university. And, to be fair to him, now he's a design engineer and you know, manufacturing custom forklift trucks for this big company, so in that case it worked out better for him. You know, he he did stick a step back and think what did he want to do? And, you know, got his ass into gear, worked hard and nice didn't. Quite a good job.

Speaker 2: 26:19

Unfortunately, there's a lot of people who, I feel like, go through the motions because it's what's expected of them to go through school, unless you're going to go into your trade. Go through school, go to university, get a job, have your fun, finish uni, settle down, get the house, and it's like something you know. You've got a mortgage and then you've got your student loan debt and it's just, and then you'll probably have debt from your car and then you'll have debt from, you know, here, there and everywhere. It's just, it seems like it's just. It just seems like it's like it's this quite insidious monster, quite frankly.

Speaker 3: 26:55

Well, it's just, it's a societal expectation. Okay, no, let me, let me you know. Try to unpack that psychology here for a second.

Speaker 2: 27:02

Yeah, please. You're very good at this. You keep reading my mind. I'm going to go to what I want to ask you next. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 27:09

So, so, let's just let's. I pulled up the Instagram post that you had, right. I went and found the original where it came from, yeah, cause you did pull it down. So examples of good debt are mortgage debt, education, business ownership and investing slash loans. Yes.

Speaker 3: 27:22

Okay, let's just stop and think about this. The investing, the investing loan. Okay, let's just talk about how that goes. What I do, what you do with that, is you're going to take that loan, I get it from wherever, and I then go and buy assets that I consider to be an investment, whether it's real estate, stocks, bonds, cryptocurrency, whatever. The bet you're making is that that asset's going to appreciate more than the loan will, and this is called margin.

Speaker 3: 27:53

Okay, when you especially if you're doing it in stocks if you have the Robinhood app and you're trading stocks and you're getting game stop for because you're on Reddit and they're all telling you to go all in and have diamond hands on whatever stock, robinhood makes it really easy for you to buy in margin, and that's great, because, if you stop and think about it, if the stock does explode, you bought more of it on margin. The stock went up with a loan state static, and so you make boo-ku bucks, and there are people who do that. I know people who have done that. I know people who are millionaires because of that. I also know far, far, far more people who are in bankruptcy because of it. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 28:28

Okay, and so you know, this gets you know other phrases to hear you got to spend money to make money. Right, I'm leveraging. No, you're, you're, you know? The next next statement people say is I'm leveraged to the eyeballs. Um, you know, and that's where this, this happens because the payoff could be huge. But, what they don't tell you is this is a high risk, you know high return type of thing, but because it's high risk, so few of us are actually going to make it.

Speaker 3: 28:56

We as humans tend to overestimate our abilities and underestimate our risks, and it's it's a huge problem. Let me give you another great example. If somebody's kind of saying, well, I took out a loan to buy Bitcoin, you know, what I hear is, I took out a loan to buy lottery tickets. Oh, if you hit it, it's going to be huge. But how? What's your chances of hitting it? Pretty, pretty small. And let me let me just put this into perspective Right, everybody, people buy lottery tickets.

Speaker 3: 29:25

It's the stupidest thing in the world. On average, the average lottery ticket you got to remember there's a huge payoff for one ticket and nothing for everything else. So we're talking about was weird, average, weird math, but the average return is 70 cents on the dollar. If you want to buy a lottery ticket, just give me the dollar, I'll give you 80 cents and you're ahead. Yeah, right, and this works for both of us, you know. So why not? Oh, because they want the chance for the big payoff, because they saw that guy with 15 seconds on the evening news of oh, I just had this life changing amount of money, I got a million dollars, blah, blah, blah. But the, what they don't see or what they don't calculate for, is that what we're all looking at? The one success who gets 15 seconds? If we gave 15 seconds to everybody who failed in that same experiment, you'd have to watch TV continuously for 25 years. Oh, wow.

Speaker 3: 30:11

And stop and think about that. Those numbers for a second, 15 seconds for every failure, calculates out to about 25 years for every single lottery. And the reason I'm bringing this up is that we're not talking about the library, we're talking about loans, we're talking about good debt, quote unquote. Well, that's because we all see the guy who succeeded. We don't see the guy who failed, and there's a ton of them.

Speaker 2: 30:38

One of the other things about.

Speaker 3: 30:39

Instagram stories. Exactly who gets on Instagram and be like, yeah, I just lost my house and I'm homeless now, Like nobody does that and the algorithm doesn't choose that person because it doesn't get a bunch of clicks, Right. So we, you know, between social media, the evening news, your, your, your information feeds are curated, whether it no matter who you are, and it's not going to pick the losers, you know. The another thing that they say on this good debt thing is business ownership. Oh, I got to take out a big business loan. You know that 70% of all small businesses fold within 12 months.

Speaker 2: 31:14

Oh, I was not aware of that statistic. No, oh yeah.

Speaker 3: 31:17

The ones who succeed do really really well, but 70% of them will fold within the first year. You know, the number one reason they fold in the first year is they are over leveraged. Oh right, they have too much debt. These people launched a business and they ended up having to make debt payments that cut into their profits. They couldn't reinvest in the business and they failed because of it. Yeah, yeah, and again. We don't see that.

Speaker 2: 31:43

Yeah, because it's not algorithmically pleasing.

Speaker 3: 31:48

And those people don't go on motivational speaking tours to schools and those people don't get held up by your parents as somebody to go look for. You know, and I can look at it, even in my own life, like you know, I have one uncle who he's just started business after business after business and all of them have failed, and he's a serial entrepreneur, is what he says. You know he makes enough money to keep himself going but he's never hit it big. Then I got my cousin who started one business and he's like, yeah, everyone's just started business. Well, he got lucky Right Like he got. He was at the right place at the right time and you know, he started his business right after the great recession. So getting a bunch of construction equipment was cheap because everybody was selling it. Like you can't reproduce that environment.

Speaker 2: 32:29

No.

Speaker 3: 32:30

You know, but everyone puts looks at my cousin was like, well, he did it. Well, I was like, yeah, he did it, but he also did it with cash. He also had an entire. You know he had my, my father, who is you know, I kind of call him a jack accountant because he's not really an accountant but he does all the bookkeeping and he's really good at it. You know he had his father who had been working for 60 years in the construction trades. You know it wasn't the same type of thing. But if we're looking at good debt, you know the bank is sitting there. How does the bank get paid with the amount of money they loan you? So they're sitting there and they're saying like, oh, this is good debt, take more, take more, take more. And they're just damning business after business after business. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 33:10

Schools are doing the same thing. You come in and they say this is good debt, you're investing in your future, you know? And they, they sell you this glitz and glam. It's not a thing. And then what do? What do 18 year old where are 18 year olds typically go for advice? Their parents?

Speaker 2: 33:23

and school teachers. Yeah, uh-huh.

Speaker 3: 33:26

And how do you think their, their financial pictures look Probably not great.

Speaker 3: 33:32

And, of course, are they going to sit there and go Johnny, don't be like me, don't take on that debt, don't sign it for their credit card, don't you're like? No, everyone believes that they're good. So they look at it and they go well, this is normal to me and I turned out okay. So you go, johnny, you go right, like that's what they say, and the banks, of course, have come into it. So the psychology here is that people, you're getting bad advice every single place you look and these people are confirming how you feel about it.

Speaker 2: 34:00

Yeah, that's so. That's so interesting. So, from our conversations so far, at the moment the two biggest things that people can take away is what's your plan and what trauma are you bringing to your financial game? Really, I think that's the two major things that you need to ask yourself what is your plan? And, as that example you used earlier, what? Even if you did grow up in a fantastic home with parents there's no perfect parents, you know what I mean we're all slightly screwed up in a small way one way or another, and that's okay. But if we were to round it off to a nice free number, apart from what's your plan, deal with your trauma, ideally through therapy, so that it doesn't affect your financial game. Is there anything else, any other advice you would give to an 18 year old or someone coming out of university to deal with those societal expectations, to deal with this insidious monster that is debt?

Speaker 3: 35:07

Yeah, I mean, it's a hard one because it's really ethereal to say like, oh, just understand that you've got something in your past that's continuing to make decisions for you without your consent. That's hard, you know, I'm almost 40 at this point and you know I'm just now, you know, in the last couple of years going oh yeah, yeah, I really wasn't over that thing, yeah, and I think, for 18 years old, like you, either you get. You get. You know generally two types, right? The people who are going to replicate their parents' lives, right? Or the people who've decided that they're nothing like their parents and totally independent because they do everything exactly the opposite, right, I mean, when it comes to debt.

Speaker 3: 35:52

So, like, we gave the ethereal ones. Like, have a plan. Like, if you're going to school, for you know where you have a high probability of getting a job and you know what the starting salary is going to be. Like the debt is a means to an end, right, but it's not good. Like let's not say it's good. You know, when you're buying the house, don't think that the mortgage debt is good.

Speaker 3: 36:09

We had an entire financial crash in 2008 because people, an entire generation of people, thought this. The other thing that you can do is you can start actually educating yourself as to how this stuff works. You know, as you put it, as you put it out there, you know it's it's a big thing, it's a beast, it's just a societal expectation. Not a lot of people are going to figure this out before it's too late, so let's just you know what are some things you can know. Number one you know I already gave you a mentality. Understand that debt is a mortgage of your future life, okay. Number two, I'd say understand that the people giving you debt do not have your best interests at heart and they get paid by how much to give you Right, which is where the good debt thing comes in, because why wouldn't you want to have more what you think is good? And then, number three read the terms.

Speaker 2: 36:57

Yeah, 100%. Read the terms.

Speaker 3: 37:00

Let me give you a great example of what I mean by read the terms Okay, and, and for an 18 year old, you know they're going to think interest rate. And they've heard the term APR. I don't know if that's a thing in the UK.

Speaker 2: 37:11

It is yeah, I knew a percent interest rate.

Speaker 3: 37:13

Yeah, okay, so do you know the difference?

Speaker 2: 37:15

No.

Speaker 3: 37:17

They're not the same thing. Okay, they're not the same thing, and it's really important. And interest rate is the amount of money that you spend on the money you borrowed. Yeah, okay, an annual percentage rate is what the interest rate would be if we counted all the fees as interest payments. Oh, right, okay, let me give you an example.

Speaker 3: 37:41

When you bought your house, if you pull out your mortgage documents I don't know Again, I'm speaking from a US context but if I pull my mortgage out and I look at my closing statement, it'll have my interest rate at the top, and then right next to it would have APR and the APR is slightly higher, right, right. And what they're doing is they're calculating the appraisal fee, the inspection fee, the title fee, the closing fee, all those fees, into this and then saying if this was interest payments, what is your real interest rate over the length of this loan? Okay, where this is tricky is that for credit cards, there isn't a startup cost. I don't have to get an appraisal on my unsecured line of credit, right? So they're the same number, but for a car they won't be Right.

Speaker 1: 38:27

See what I'm saying yeah, and for a house they won't be.

Speaker 3: 38:30

And why is that important? Because if your interest rate and your APR are very different numbers, it means that they made all their money by screwing you on fees.

Speaker 2: 38:40

Oh, right, okay.

Speaker 3: 38:42

So a great in this hat. This became law in the 80s because what they were doing was to say, oh yeah, this is a 1% interest loan. And people are like, oh, I mean, you have to remember early 80s, the interest rates in the United States were 17% to buy a house, so 1% loan, oh, that's great. But what they didn't tell you is that they had a origination fee for the loan. That was like 40% of the loan that you had to pay up front. They were just prepaying the interest. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 39:12

Right, it's a bit sketchy, but and so? So where do we see this a lot, right? So a 15-year-old need to be aware of this. Well, buying a car for one. If you go and you buy a used car, this is where they'll get you. But payday loans I don't know what it is in the UK, but like payday loan stores here in the United States, what it is you take your paycheck in and you say, here's what my paycheck is, but the next one hasn't come, and they give you a loan and they don't charge you interest. They charge you a fee, right? So if you're making a thousand bucks, they're going to charge you a fee. And they say, well, the fee is just going to be a hundred bucks, well, that's a 10% interest rate. And then they're going to charge you fees on top of that, and the interest rate on a payday loan might be 10%, but then the APR is actually like 40% or 60%.

Speaker 2: 40:02

I've seen some, I know when they were advertised on the TV pre-COVID, you'd see the extra small writing at the bottom of the screen this is a 1,000% APR loan on whatever you buy or whatever you take. I'm like, yeah, you're madness if you're absolutely crazy, if you've even thought about taking that out. But some people did.

Speaker 3: 40:24

Oh, but here's the thing they're praying in desperation, Right? Here's a very realistic scenario for an 18-year-old. You get to college, you get a credit card right. Those bills start piling up. So you get another credit card right. You pay a minimum payment to the first credit card and you get a second credit card and then you hit the limit on that and they finally cut you off right. So within a year, you're $50,000 in debt. Yeah Right.

Speaker 3: 40:49

Now your student loans are kicking in at the end of graduation. So at the end of graduation, you get all these student loan payments plus your credit card payments. You're paying at 17% interest. And you get that first job and it doesn't quite go as far as you think it should. Yeah, Right. And now you're desperate because you're getting squeezed. And so where do you go? I just need a little extra money to get to the end of the month. I got to hold some ends, right, I got to hold some ends. And they go down there and they think, oh, it's going to be fine, I just need to do this one time, Right, and it's never one time, it's not designed to be one time.

Speaker 3: 41:24

So from an 18-year-old perspective, we're getting into the psychology again. But like, read your terms. Understand how this stuff works. Understand that people understand what amortization is. What is amortization? Well, it's the payments over time. Understand the different.

Speaker 3: 41:42

When you get a mortgage, you're not paying it all up front, but they give you what's called an amortization table. That's what your payments are, and in the beginning you're going to pay a lot of interest. Why? Because in the beginning you have a lot of principal and if you don't understand the words principal and interest, that's a good place you to start. Principal is the amount of money you took out in the beginning. Interest is the amount of money you pay for the privilege of having that money. Right, it's the same thing with you.

Speaker 3: 42:07

Understand how capitalization works. If you have an unsubsidized student loan, you take that out your freshman year. They're like, oh, I'm not paying on it, but the interest might be capitalizing and what that means is you owe them interest, but they allow it to increase the loan balance, so they don't charge it to you. They just took their loan and made it bigger and then they charge interest on that new, bigger loan that they then attack onto the loan and then it gets a little bigger and they're going to do that every month. And if you take out a loan for $10,000 when you're a freshman, your very first year at uni, for four years it capitalizes and by the end of it that $10,000 loan is something like $15,000 to $17,000.

Speaker 2: 42:52

Yeah, that's insane. It's so baffling to me that we just let kids loose into the world with none of this information. It's like go and figure it out for yourselves and by the time they have figured it out, they've made a literary of financial mistakes or they're in too deep, before they know it, into some sort of financial debt which they then need to get a job. They hate to pay off the debt that they weren't aware of, that they could have avoided entirely. So I've actually got two questions. The first one, actually, I'd want to ask is what would be your tips for paying off debt faster and more efficiently? So what else? Your student loans, car payments, whatever If you're a student and it's all a bit overwhelming at this point that you realize crap I'm in a minimum wage job and I've, through an experience in not having any financial literacy, have accrued a lot of debt, as people do. What's the best way to pay that off in your opinion, or a good place to start?

Speaker 3: 44:03

Well, the best, the only place to start, is to stop the bleeding, right? Okay, you got to stop the bleeding, you got to stop it, and that's going to come through budgeting. If you've never made a budget, you can go to fiscallysavagecom slash tools. There's a free budget template in there that my website's still up and there's a balance sheet in there. But you have to stop the bleeding. You have to have a budget. You have to start looking at this.

Speaker 3: 44:30

Budgets are not a poor person's tool. Okay, I hear this all the time. I'm not poor, I don't need to budget. Well, you're going to be poor if you don't. So you get to choose. Choose your heart, right, and I've heard people well, I make enough money, I don't have to budget. Yeah, well, you're not as wealthy as you could be because you don't budget. Okay, yeah, I'm between my wife and I right now. I'm making more money than I ever have in my life and I budget and I'm anal, retentive about it. But I've also watched my net, my net worth, triple in the last two years, so take that for what it's worth. So that's step one.

Speaker 3: 45:07

If you're going to need to pay down debt, you need to budget. Okay, you need to budget. You need to start and let me let me say this as as a financial coach and as a CPA every one of your audience listening has complete blank check to screw up budgeting repeatedly for six months. But just try for six months. There is no God given reason why you should know how to make a budget out of the box. We're human beings. We're meant to chase down deer and sit around campfires and hang out with other humans doing things humans do. We are not meant to budget. Okay, but it's a, it's part of reality. So anyone who starts this process, they're going to screw it up and as long as I want to budgeting topic budgets are living, living documents. You need a new budget for every single month, okay.

Speaker 3: 45:53

It's not a set it and forget it. Every month it's a new budget when you get to. You know we're getting. We're at the end of September at the time of this recording. You know, next weekend my wife and I will be sitting down. We will be making a budget for October. Well, why do I do that? Because in October I know I've got expenses. I got Halloween, I got kids, I got costumes. November's budget is going to have to include Thanksgiving dinner here in the United States and December, of course, we have Christmas right. Those, those three months are going to be different budgets. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 46:22

Yeah, I'm quite liberating as well, Isn't it? It's, it's, it's the that permission, so to speak, to fail to take messy action, that if you screw up a budget it's not the end of the world. At least you tried.

Speaker 3: 46:35

Well, you got to fail fast, fail frequently and fail forward.

Speaker 2: 46:39

Oh, that's a great snipper.

Speaker 3: 46:43

Right, like you know, like you're not going to get it perfect the first time. The, the, the, the name of the game is to stop making your old mistakes and start making new ones. You know so if you're, if you're in debt.

Speaker 3: 46:55

And if you give me an example, I had a, I had a couple. They came to me for a financial coaching and we went through and I did the whole thing where I set up the personal balance sheet let's figure out your net worth, let's figure out what your picture is and they were a half million dollars in debt, oh my goodness. And and the point in which I started getting scared was when the wife looked at it and went wow, we're doing a lot better than I thought we were. Holy shit, when did you think you were? Wow.

Speaker 2: 47:21

I cringed a little when he said half a million dollars in debt. I think I'd weep, oh she was.

Speaker 3: 47:27

they were so happy they thought they were at least a million deep. Oh, and I was like what are you?

Speaker 3: 47:34

Wow, yeah. And so I was like, no, like, if you went out of this, like you have to start a budget and they had high income jobs, right? There's another great example Well, they, they made enough money they needed to budget. Well, yeah, then they ended up half a million dollars in debt but they screwed up their budget. I mean, they were, they had a hard time learning it for about six months because they had to unlearn and this is probably step number two unlearn all the shit that you brought forward. Yeah, right, the idea is a scarcity, the idea that they couldn't say no to their son, the idea that if they, their son was ever disappointed, that they were bad parents, you know, so on and so forth. You know, and you had, you know, they struggled at it. And then you know, I've been working with them for about 18 months and now they're sitting there saying you know, I, I live a life where I have a lot less stress. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 48:19

They're almost done paying off that debt after 18 months. But it had to. You know we had to start budgeting. And number two, we had to deal with the psychology. I did a lot of psychological coaching, right, yeah? So it seems weird Like, oh, we stopped the bleeding and get a budget. Now you're telling me to go to therapy. Yeah, I am. You know, hire a financial coach, hire somebody who can help you through this and understand you're not alone. There's a thousand people at like I can point you, I can walk down the street and be like, yeah, that person, I can walk through the, the, the parking lot of a grocery store and probably tell you half that person's story based upon the how their car looks.

Speaker 3: 48:55

Yeah, you know it's a Bentley with all the crap in the front seat. It's the, the, the lifted pickup truck, when the guy's walking out with shoes he hasn't, you know, he's been wearing for two years. And then number three, you know so. So we've got. You know. You got to look at your psychology. You know you got. You got a budget is number one. Number two you got to look at your psychology. And then that psychology piece leads to number three. Okay, and this is where people will get really angry at me because I recommend this but what you need to do is take all your debts do not look at the payments, look at the principal and line them all up from smallest to largest and pay off the smallest one first. Oh, okay.

Speaker 3: 49:39

Okay, and and here's where people will help me. Well, but you're not looking at interest payments. You're right, I'm not. But you're not looking at how much money I spend over time. You're already up to your eyeballs in debt. We have that ship sailed, okay, yeah, okay, you're not considering, you know, you're not considering what the debt was for. Maybe it was good debt. I've been over that, we've been over this. Yeah Right, you start off with the smallest one for one very simple reason it's a quick win. You're hacking your psychology. You want to see it win. If you, if you looked at your largest debt say it was $50,000 in credit card debt and you're like I'm going to pay it off first, you're it has. It has more staying power than you do. Okay, you're going to be paying it off. You're going to feel like you're going to make no progress and you're going to quit. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 50:24

But if you pay off that first one and then we have a credit card, cutting party right and I've done this with clients you line them up, we're paying off that first one. First they come on the zoom call, they show me their balance is zero. We close the account online together and then we get out of scissors and we cut up the card and we have this big celebration. I put on music, we dance around like it's huge, and now they want that second win. So they go get it Right. And then they get to say now they, now they've done it twice, and by the third time their attitude goes from I'm buried under debt to I'm coming for you.

Speaker 2: 50:59

Oh, that's really good.

Speaker 3: 51:01

Yeah, you know. So people will sit in. Here's the problem. There's tons of people out there will sit there and go. We'll get a debt. Call the consolidation loan. Just put it in a second mortgage. Fuck off with that. Yeah, pay off what you got. You don't want to put in a second mortgage. You don't want to put your house at risk because of your bad spending habits in the past. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 51:20

Right, if that consolidation loan. Go look at the APR on a debt consolidation loan. This goes back to understanding how it works. Yeah, but the easiest way to not have to pay off your debt is to not have it in the first place. Don't go buy a new car. Don't go buy a new car. Go buy a used car. It works just as fine. What do you need the car for? Just to get from point A to point B. Do, regardless of what people will tell you, your car is not an expression of who you are as a person, right, it's an expression of how you live your life.

Speaker 2: 51:52

Yeah, that's a huge difference. Oh yeah, there are some absolutely fantastic quotes in there. There were so many I'd want to go over again, but I did say I had two questions. The second question I wanted to ask was if you're 18 or coming out of university. Of course they can check out your podcast at Fiscally Savage. And something I would like to chat about at the end is you're now starting a life coaching thing at the end or you're starting a life coaching podcast movement, whatever at the very end of the podcast? I think that would help people too.

Speaker 2: 52:34

What I want to ask is what resources are available to kids, uni students, that they can check out by themselves. Is there any really good channels on YouTube you'd recommend? Is there a good book you would recommend? Is there a personality, a signed financial personality online that you would recommend? Because obviously they can check out your stuff, but when they've exhausted all your episodes and they can't exactly just call you up on the Zoom call, no, but they can't book an appointment with me, there you go. We can talk about that as well.

Speaker 3: 53:10

Right, if you go to Fiscally Savage and you'd be fair, you already kind of let the cat out of the bag. The podcast I've stopped, okay, and I'm transitioning into more of a life coaching standpoint. We'll get into that in a little bit. But you can go to FiscallySavagecom and sign up for a consultation and you can. Those range from several different things, everything from people just like I'm thinking about buying a car, talking me through the car buying process, to I'm applying for a job. I do job coaching to help people apply for jobs and stuff like that. So obviously I'm going to point to myself because I'm self-interested, but if you're looking for so, there's a couple of people. First off, dave Ramsey is a huge resource. I think in his podcast and on his show he's kind of gotten. I think he's lost his way a little bit because he's spending more time branching about politics than he is about finances. But his book, the Total Money Makeover, is foundational, foundational very strong word, yeah.

Speaker 3: 54:12

Just go get it, go read it and then read it again and on your eighth time reading it, you'll start to get it. So I think that he is a great resource. Chris Hogan's Retired Inspired is another book because he really goes like. The reason I like Chris Hogan's book is that he really goes into why are we doing this? Like, once you hit financial independence, what are you going to do? Right? And in my case, like you know, I already know what I want to do. Right, I have a vision statement for myself and I know that money is the way I'm going to get there and I'm really motivated to do it Right. And so I'm looking at and going. You know I want to be able to be donating $2,000 a month to charity, right? Yeah, I know I want to homestead my land. I know I want to have chickens and goats and take my daughter on horseback rides and stuff like that. Like those are things that I want. I want to be able to go out and serve the community and help foster stronger men in this world. Those are things you know, but I need money to do it all.

Speaker 3: 55:08

So Chris Hogan's Retired Inspired, dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover and then the other thing that I would say is that, like, find people who are heading in the same direction. You think you want to go, okay, and the warning I'll put on top of that is to say if it's really exciting, it's probably not where you want to be. So if they're telling you like yeah, let's go out, and then you get the Ferrari, like how do we get alone for like no, no, those people are bad, don't know. But choose Fi. So, as in, choose financial independence, choose Fi. Those guys on that show are great, Right, they're going to. They talk you through just financial independence, what it means, how you get there. I've learned a ton from them, and so those would be my three go-tos Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover, Chris Hogan's Retired Inspired and the Choose Fi podcast and all of their associated stuff.

Speaker 2: 55:59

Fantastic. I'll be checking out some of those as well. Just a note for the listeners if this is your first ever episode or you haven't checked out season one, dylan did do our most popular episode of all time how to do well in a job interview so do check that one out. And in season two he also did do a very popular episode on how to professionally network. So go and check that out as well, and I've no doubt this episode is going to be just as popular as the other two. It might be like my perfect trio of best performing episodes, no doubt, but that's all really good.

Speaker 2: 56:36

Something I do want to very quickly touch upon before we end the episode is and we were talking about this before the show that when we were talking about professional networking and that second episode you did, you talked about, obviously, the professional side of getting a job and building your network, but then that naturally transferred to life coaching skills and that naturally transferred to the psychology of why you want this and how to essentially be the best you can be. And I feel like this is so closely tied as well with what you've been saying throughout the entire episode from the financial perspective, in a weird way, your financial situation, from what I've gathered, appears to be the symptom and what's the underlying cause in much in the same way the psychology of the child having a scarcity mindset or whatever. How, from a dare I say it, you're not a life coach perspective, what advice would you have in general terms for these 18-year-olds or university students who, quite frankly, don't have life figured out? And I don't have, I'm not claiming to have life figured out- I'm not either.

Speaker 2: 57:58

I just have more experience in weighing it A lot of the life coaching stuff that you've done. What do you think would be the best advice you could impart upon a young man or woman?

Speaker 3: 58:13

Well, I guess the first question is do you want me to tell the story I told you before we hit record.

Speaker 2: 58:17

Yeah, yeah, crack on Absolutely.

Speaker 3: 58:22

So I mean, let's just get the sound bite of what's the best advice. Personal finance is more personal than it is finance 100%. Your trauma is making decisions for you without your consent, and I don't care who you are. You could have had perfect parents they don't exist, but you could have had the best parents. But you don't have perfect situations. You don't have perfect scenarios. You don't have perfect circumstances. It's just the way it is. When it comes to your money or comes to life, your trauma, your unresolved trauma, is driving the bus and it's driving the bus away. If you are somebody who's had several relationships and they've all failed in the exact same way, guess what? The common denominator was you, and it was probably not even you making those decisions. It was probably a scared little boy or girl inside of you that had some experience you have yet to help them through.

Speaker 3: 59:19

Money is one of those things people don't like to talk about it. You don't ask somebody how their sex life is. You don't ask them how what's their net worth? Some people are weird and they talk about it. Some people get in groups and do it together. I know people who have budgeting groups and I know swingers. But when you touch on people's money, you're touching on their life. It's the resources that they use to live their life, which means it's intimate, okay, and it's scary. And their parents did a horseshit job teaching them how to be good lovers, how to be good partners, and they did a horseshit job teaching them how to be good financial beings. Okay, I wouldn't have a side job doing life coaching or financial coaching if they had, okay, and the story that I told. So let's just now ground this into something real. The story I told Jonathan before we hit record.

Speaker 3: 1:00:12

I had this couple and I never, ever, under any circumstances, will financially coach one side of a marriage, because all I do is create a divorce. Okay, for all the Afro mentioned reasons, right, they're both bringing in their own shit into this relationship, but I'm sitting with the husband and wife and we're halfway through the session. I charged $250 an hour and I just called the time out and said hey, what's going on here? You guys are not connected together. And I suddenly transitioned from financial coach into relationship coach. They had had an argument about their budget, they had led to these other things, and now they're yelling at each other and she doesn't think she loves him anymore and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 3: 1:00:50

Like wow, okay, we go into the end of the hour and I say, look, you know I don't work for free. You know what. We can schedule another time or you can give me money now. He just texted me the money. He just sent it to me Like no questions asked, just here's an extra $250. And so I'm like, okay, well, now I'm into this and I kicked her out so I could just talk to the guy. And you know, from the context clues, I was kind of like I think I know where this is going. So I just asked him. I was like, look, man, do you fuck your wife or you just have sex with her?

Speaker 3: 1:01:19

We started off talking yeah, we started off talking about his budget, and now we're talking about this and you know, in retrospect it's it's one of these things where, like, that's a natural transition, right, you know that that's actually not that unexpected that we ended up there from talking about this other intimate thing that him and his wife have a hard time connecting on, you know. And what was the problem? She's expecting him to lead, she wants a clear vision. She wants him to paint it out, she wants to help him bring it into being. That's what she wanted from him. And you guess what? It was the same in the bedroom, right? So, you know, I gave him homework and I told him, like, hey, here's how this is going to go. Next time you're intimate, like this is what I recommend. Like, who went through the whole thing? I brought her in, I talked to her just by herself and went through the whole relationship coaching. I said, okay, I'm going to follow up with you in a couple of days, we'll see how it goes. And I text them and said, hey, how's it going? And they just sent me 500 bucks and said they wanted another session. There you go. So. So I transitioned.

Speaker 3: 1:02:19

But here's the thing, jonathan, almost 90% of my financial coaching clients have become life coaching clients. It's because when we start talking about financing, like, stop and think about this from a budget perspective I start looking at my budget. Then I start realizing my food oh, I don't want to eat out. It's really expensive. So I'm going to, but I don't know how to cook. Okay, now I have to have a conversation about cooking. Now we're going to have a conversation about food and what is emotionally satisfying for them. And then again we just went right back to the emotions, didn't we? What's emotionally satisfying for them? What feeds them, what nourishes them on a food? Oh, and then, by the way, their healthcare costs with all these prescription drugs. That's out of control. So, you know, if you lost a little weight, maybe.

Speaker 3: 1:03:00

And now we're talking about fitness, aren't we? Now we're talking about? So we went from finance to food to fitness. Now, now I start sitting there saying like, okay, we're having a lot of streaming services and we have, we have Bleed here elsewhere. How about some friends? Oh right, what are you doing to connect with friends? Oh, I don't know. That's why I have Netflix. Oh, yeah, so you're using Netflix to numb yourself when you come home. And if we cut that out, we can keep that money for ourselves and you get a better relationship. You can start fostering relationships with other like-minded people, okay, so suddenly we go from friends and they meet a girl. Now we're in a fucking Right. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:03:44

So, like this is not like when you start touching on the money, you're going to touch on everything else. Yeah, and having the courage and the grace and there I say it the professional help to help you navigate that space is critical, which is why I started the life, I'm starting the life coaching business yeah, because I'm having a bigger impact there.

Speaker 2: 1:04:05

Yeah, 100%. Man, I'm excited for you. I must admit, when we started chatting earlier, it was the last thing I expected to hear, but I'm really happy for you and, like you know, super stoked for your success and all the future success you're going to have. And I'm afraid that's probably going to be at the end of the episode. But, man, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on again. Like every time you come on, I always leave this episode, these episodes, smarter than I began. So well, definitely, like I said, I'd love to have you on at least once a season. Just, you know, for the amount of wisdom you can bring in, both financial and, well, now in life. So, yeah, I really do appreciate you as a guest and, you know, at this point I think you're coaching all the members of the curious Ulsterman podcast.

Speaker 3: 1:04:58

So thanks so thank you very much, Dylan. Thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure.

Speaker 2: 1:05:05

Yeah, before we do sign off, where else can the audience find all your content? I know you mentioned Fiscally Savage and that. Is there anything else that they can direct them towards?

Speaker 3: 1:05:16

Well, right now we got Fiscally Savagecom. I just started off my financial or my life coaching business will be called Savage Firelight and you can find me on Instagram at at Savage Firelight.

Speaker 2: 1:05:27

Right, fantastic, and I'll link that in the show notes as well. But once again, dylan, thank you so much. Thank you. There you go, folks. That was today's episode on debt with repeat guest Dylan Bain. I hope you got a lot of value out of today's episode and, if you did, please do consider subscribing to the podcast and giving us a five star reading and review on Apple. That would be really appreciated If you would like to stay up to date with more future content from the Curious Ulsterman, you can find us on all the socials at Facebook, twitter, instagram, tiktok and YouTube all the Curious Ulsterman. If you would please consider a one time or recurring donation to the podcast to support the show, that would also be really appreciated, and we'd like to thank you if you have listened in for the first time today and a big shout out to our repeat listeners in Colorado, london, bradford, manchester, portland and Maine, california and South Korea. I hope to see you all next week's episode folks, but until then I wish you all the best. Bye for now.