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Welcome to Money Talk for Real, a podcast where I talk about making money, spending money, and everything in between. This episode, I have another listener submitted financial situation that I want to talk through. If you want to submit yours, you can do so on the website at moneytalkforreal.com and click on the debt help link. This person says, uh, let me see here. Let me get my notes that they submitted. Um, they feel like they're uh okay, so I've been listening for a little bit. I feel like my situation is they they they feel like they could be doing better than what they are, but they're not. She's 31, single, no kids, makes around $82,000 a year, thanks to her uh take-home pay around $5,200 a month, somewhere around there. Um, not struggling to pay bills or anything, but just feel stuck, like they're not actually making progress. Rent is about $1,850 a month, car payment is $480,000, insurance $150, groceries are probably around $450, eating out $400-ish gas around $200, subscriptions around $100, and then random stuff to include shopping, Amazon, et cetera. They say probably like $500 a month, and then for debt, about $12,000 on a credit card balance, about $9,000 left on the car loan, minimum payments on the cards are around $300 total. Savings, they do have $3,000 saved, roughly, not a ton. They realize that, but they do what they're saying, they feel like they're getting stuck is because they make decent money, but they're not really getting ahead. They want to save more, they want to maybe invest, maybe even think about buying something eventually, but every month it feels like the money is kind of gone. So their question is why does it feel like I'm not making progress? And what should I actually be doing differently? All right, this is a really good one, in my opinion, because on the surface, this looks like someone who should be doing pretty well. They have $82,000 a year income, no kids, uh, not, you know, not crazy expenses, and yet she feels stuck. And honestly, she's right to feel that way because she is in what I would call, I guess, the middle zone. And there's a lot of people who live here in the middle zone. They're they're not broke by any means, but they're not thriving. They're just kind of maintaining. I've talked about it before. I've even used the phrase for survival mode, middle class survival mode. The bills get paid. Life is fine, but nothing is actually improving. Nothing is changing for the good, for the positive. So let's kind of look at what's going on here. She's bringing in about $5,200 a month. Expenses, again, rent $1,850, car $480, insurance, $150, groceries $450, eating out $400, gas $200, subscriptions, $100, miscellaneous $500. That's about $4,130 before the debt. And then you add $300 for credit card minimums. Now we're at roughly $4,430. So she should have around $700 to $800 left each month. And this, that, that $700 to $800 left, that's the key right there, is that she does have extra money. She has a gap. She has a margin. She has positive cash flow. It just doesn't appear that she it's being used intentionally. This is not an income problem in this example. Let me start by saying that. And it's really not even a spending problem. This is just a direction problem. Her money has no assignment. Now, there are a couple things that are worth pointing out. The $400 a month eating out and the $500 miscellaneous spending. That's $900 right there that frankly is not really controlled. And that, you know, anytime your money's not controlled, you have no discipline with it, that's where the progress is going to disappear because that's where the money disappears. The truth is, this is how people making $80,000 a year end up feeling broke. It's not because they are broke, it's because their extra money gets absorbed into lifestyle. And a lot of terms like miscellaneous and random, those kind of terms that we don't really know where they go. They're just super vague. So, what would I tell her to do? Um, number one, define your goal. And if to the to the girl that's the lady that submitted this, if you're listening, define a goal. This one's big. Right now, you're trying to live life. You're trying to maybe save a little bit, you're trying to maybe invest a little bit, you're maybe trying to pay off debt. That doesn't work. I would pick one thing, one focus. And in my opinion, for her, the focus would be the credit card debt. The high interest credit card debt. I don't know what her interest payment is, but anytime you have the word credit card in a sentence, high interest is also associated with that. Number one, have some sort of structure. It needs structure. Your money always needs structure. Not complicated, just clear. Fixed bills means you know exactly how much money a month you are spending on things that you have to have to live off of. Some sort of limit or spending cap, some, you know, whatever that is for you, um, set a limit or a cap on I will spend no more than X amount of dollars per month on random stuff and stick to that. It is work, it takes discipline, but you have got to do that. You can't just say, well, I had a good month, I'd I'll spend a little more. No, no, let's focus here. Spending cap, a limit cap on whatever on your spending for the month. Everything else that's left over needs to go towards the debt, the credit card debt. We could talk about the car loan as well, but for now I would focus on the credit card debt. The third step here is to free up some cash. And this, you know, she doesn't even have to go crazy. But even if she can reduce the eating out from $400 a month to $250 a month, again, I'm not diehard. I'm not telling you to never eat out, just reduce it. $400 a month to $250 a month, the miscellaneous spending. If we can get that from $500 to $300, let's say, that's another $200. So that's $350 a month freed up instantly. If we can just reduce, again, and we're not eliminating, we're not changing your life, we're just reducing some things. $350 a month, boom, right there, freed up. Now, she already had around $700 a month freed up. I said $700 to $800. Let's call it $700. If you add the $350 to that, she's got over $1,000 a month freed up that she can throw at the um excuse me, at the credit card debt. And then eventually the car debt. But that if you can do a $1,000 a month, that's about a year that that $12,000 credit card balance is gone. One year. Boom, done. And you didn't really change anything. You just put a cap on your spending from miscellaneous, you reduce that, and you reduce the amount of times you eat out. That's real progress right there. And you see, it did not take that much work. Once the debt is gone, the $300 minimum payment every month disappears, but the $1,000 a month momentum stays. Now she can either A work towards paying off the car loan and be completely debt-free, or she can build a savings account, you know, stash money away for in a rating day fund, stash money away in savings pretty fast. She can start investing, she can start actually moving forward. And frankly, feeling less stressed, feeling like you're not stuck. The whole reason she submitted the question was feeling like she's stuck. If you get the credit card paid off, and especially if you get the car paid off, but let's just talk about the credit card, you get that paid off, and you can start saving a thousand dollars a month in a high interest savings account or investing it into something that pays dividends, that's real progress. You will no longer feel stuck after that. If you're listening, what I want you to take away from this is you don't feel stuck because you're doing terrible. No one you're you're probably doing better than what you think. A lot of people say they feel stuck and they think they're doing horribly. No, you're doing fine. You don't stuck, you don't feel stuck because you're doing terrible. You feel stuck because nothing is just clearly improving. You're not seeing results slap you in the face, so to speak. And there's probably other people listening right now that are in this exact same spot. You might have a decent income, you might have a stable life, you're you're not living paycheck to paycheck. Everything's fine again, but there's no momentum. There's no forward progress. You just feel stuck in the middle, the middle class trap. And the way you would fix that is, like I mentioned in the beginning, pick a focus. Pick on one thing that you can double down on and focus one thing at a time. Don't worry about savings and investing and pay. No, no. One thing. Start with one thing, start small. Pick a focus and be laser focused on that. Then control your leaks. Put a spending cap on it where you're leaking money. Maybe it's in the subscriptions. In her situation, I cut back the spending and the eating out, but you can maybe cut back on subscription subscriptions too. That's your choice. But control the leaks and then make your moves with intention. Be intentional in her case about paying off the credit card debt. Maybe paying off that car payment. Move intentional. Be intentional with your money and you're in control of your money. If you've got a situation like this, please send it in. You can do so at money talkforreal.com slash debt help. That's money talkforreal.com slash D E B T H E L P. You can type it and send it in like she did. Or even better, you can record and just talk into your microphone on your phone or computer. You can do it straight through the website and just kind of lay out your financial situation and I will play it on this show and I will run through it and try to help you best I can. To the lady that sent this in, if I did not directly answer your question and you're listening, please email me and we can talk about it in privately, uh, not on the podcast. And I can try to help you even further if I did not answer your question. But please send it in. If you have a financial question, a financial concern or financial situation, I'd love to talk to you about it. You can be an anonymous, you don't have to tell me, you know, your real name or anything. That's totally fine, and we can figure it out. Again, you're not stuck. You just need to pick a direction, and I don't think you've necessarily done so yet. Thank you so much for listening. Please leave this podcast a five star review. You can also follow me on Instagram at money talk underscore for real. And I will catch you on the next episode. This is Money Talk for Real.