It’s Never Too Late to Start Building Wealth
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From the Ramsey Network, this is The Ramsey Show, where we help people build wealth, do work that they love, and create amazing relationships. I'm George Campbell, joined by Dr. John Deloney this hour. The phone number to call is 888-825-5225. And as you're listening, if you could do us a tiny huge favor, let us know what you think about the show, what you don't like, what you want to hear more about. And the way to do that is with our annual listener survey. It's now live. You can text the word survey to 33789 or go to ramsaysolutions.com slash survey. We'll also drop a link in the description wherever you're listening. And if you sign up today, you'll be entered to win a $500 gift card. And it means the world to hear what you think. And it definitely affects the content that we do here for the rest of the year.
And our pay, so it'd be nice.
Doesn't affect that, but thank you, John. You can put a good word. John Deloney deserves a raise. I was trying. He's doing so good.
All right. Anybody will write that.
Let's try to help someone, John. How about that? Andrea's in Phoenix up next. What's going on, Andrea?
Hi, and thank you for taking my call.
Absolutely.
My name is Andrea, and I am 60 years old, and I am employed. I make about, I bring home about $24,000, $2,864 a month. A month. Um, I live with my son and his family. The only outgoing bills I have is my car insurance and I pay for gas and any other incidentals. I want to know, is it possible for me to continue or to own a home and still say for my retirement, I have 69,000 in a 401k and I'll tell you a little bit. I was in Ohio and I relocated to Arizona before the pandemic. And since I've been here, everything has gotten so inflated. So my decision now is to go back to Ohio. But while I'm here in this kind of situation to save and not have to pay any bills, I have some time before I go back to Ohio. So ask me anything.
All right. So you told me your stated goal was I want to be able to own a home and retire one day.
Yes.
Okay. That's going to take a sizable nest egg and a pretty solid savings rate. So how much are you able to save right now? You're saying you got almost no bills. So out of that $2,864, how much is left over?
It'll be $2,154, like $2,154 minus the car insurance and the gas. But I plan on getting a job where I work from home, which is at the save on the gas. And I do have like $45,000 saved up.
Okay, that's in a savings account? Mm-hmm. And no debt whatsoever?
Well, no. If I have debt, I just pay it off every month if I use a credit card. But I did get the every... I recently did that. I'm still working with that, and I've just only been listening to you guys for like three or four weeks.
Awesome. Welcome to the party. Well, we have a pretty controversial stance around here, and that is debt robs you from your future, even if it's temporary, even if I'm paying it off tomorrow. And so John and I do not own a single credit card. We just use our debit cards. We use our own money. And what you're facing here, Andrea, is an income problem. We've got to get your income up because that's going to create more margin for you to save for that home. And so you're in what we would call baby steps four, five, and six if you're debt-free with an emergency fund, which you just told me you have $45,000 liquid?
Yes.
Great. And so we'll call that your emergency fund plus some down payment fund because you don't need $45,000, I imagine, to cover your expenses for three to six months. No. Okay. So your A1 goal, if it is buying a home, is to put money away for a down payment. But before we do that, we should be investing 15% of our income into retirement. So how much are you investing right now?
So right now, I'm not investing that much. I think I'm at 1%. And I can probably put that up to where I should be.
Why is it at 1%?
Because my mind was thinking before I listened to you guys, I was going to get more in my check to save more. But that hasn't worked out as well as I wanted it to.
Well, you can't save your way to wealth. We have to invest this money. Because right now, you're not even beating the rate of inflation if that money is just sitting in a checking account. Yes. If you invested, the stock market, the U.S. stock market last year, Andrea, in 2024, returned 24%. So you put $100,000 in that account. Now it has $124,000.
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