[MUSIC PLAYING] Brought to you by the Every Dollar App, start budgeting for free today. So my question is, is the American dream still possible in your opinion? Because I've seen a lot of things and headlines recently that have made me really scared as someone who's 18 years old, seeing things about how like $100,000 a year just doesn't cut it anymore to get by. And I'm just kind of scared for my future. So I wanted your input. OK. I think if you go back and had some fun and went back and read headlines at any time in the last 150 years, you could find headlines that would tell you the same thing. 1950, 1940, 1970, 1990, I think you could find-- you can always find headlines that say that the world is coming to an end and that the dreams are dead. My friend Zig Ziglar used to say, he said, every morning I read the Bible and I read the newspaper so I can tell what both sides are doing. So whatever you look for, you will find. And so this is part of it. There's a mindset issue I can tell already here, but let's lay out your financial situation as to why 18, you're already feeling this cynical. Right. So I had gone to an out-of-state college for my freshman year. I just finished that up. And I accumulated $16,000 in student loans. They're all federal, but obviously I wasn't happy about that. And I started listening to Dave's and kind of realized I was a poor decision. So I came back home and I'm going to go into a community college and then transferring to an in-state university. To cut down that cost and not go into more student debt. Good for you. What are you studying? What are you studying? Finance. Good for you, OK. And so what makes you believe that if you get a degree in finance that you can't prosper in America today, other than headlines? I don't know if one of my issues, too, is where I live. I live on Long Island. And like a good house around me would be about $600,000. And you know, I'd want to follow your rules, paying 20%. So I don't have to pay for the private mortgage insurance and stuff. So that's all I can do. And again, at no time in history, he has an 18-year-old bought a good house in Long Island. That's fair. I mean, unless they hit the lottery or something, I mean. So it takes a little while to get out there, get your career moving, get your income moving. And maybe when you're 30, you buy something on Long Island. Because Long Island's wonderful, but it's one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. I mean, Manhattan, Long Island, Silicon Valley, Orange County, I mean, you can go into some of the major cities, Tokyo, London. And normal people making normal incomes can't afford to buy a home in those markets. Never have been able to, by the way. That's not new. When I was your age, an 18-year-old making a normal income couldn't even think about living in Manhattan or Long Island. It's called an ultra high cost of living area, which means you need an ultra high income. But that does not translate to the American dream is dead. The dream of an 18-year-old owning a $600,000 home on Long Island is dead, but that dream was never alive. All right, that's a fair point. So what is your definition here? What are you actually looking to achieve? I think my goal really is to just kind of everything you guys say, be able to-- I mean, now I just have a little bit of debt. But get out of that stay out of any future debt, buy a home, just finish my good career. So everything you just laid out for us is very much possible. Can you get out of $16,000 of debt? Yes. Can you stay out? Yes. Can you build an emergency fund making a normal salary and working in something related to finance? Yes. Now, the house is going to take longer to save up for, depending on where you're going. But it always has taken a long time to save up for. Right. OK, so maybe I'm being a little too ambitious. Well, I don't know why an 18-year-old's glued to the headlines anyways. I'm not saying you're too ambitious. I'm just saying don't base an overarching statement of the American dream is dead, or you can't-- meaning you can't prosper. You can't win based on you can't afford to do something today. Those are two different things. That's all we're saying. And so, yeah, you can get there. But the way you win this stuff is one step at a time, one step at a time, one step at a time. It's not very few people leap into success. Most people do it by degrees and by, of course, correction and a little bit of time and this and move and keep scratching, keep clawing. And you work your butt off for 20 years and you look up and you're an overnight success, that kind of thing. And that's what you're facing is there's an incremental process in this journey that-- and I was talking to somebody about this this morning. It was a Deloney, actually. We're talking about, and with one of our producers as well, that since the advent, was it 2003, the smartphone came out? If I remember right, Apple did the smartphone 2003. So it's 20 years that we've all been living with increasingly with a magic wand in our hand. We can access the entire breadth of the world's knowledge, give or take, idiots on the internet. You can access and purchase, push a button thing, show up on your front porch. You can book a tea time. You can book a restaurant. You can book an Uber. All with this magic wand in your hand, you can send a text to a friend anywhere in the world and they'll get it instantly. You can send an email to a friend. Anywhere in the world they'll get it semi-instantly. Never in the history of mankind have we been able to do things so efficiently and so quickly and what it's done to all of us, including me at 63, not just Dylan at 18, is that has spoiled us and we have no patience. I have absolutely no patience. My reasonable, you know, there was a day I could actually stand in line for something. I refused to stand in line for anything and I think it's because of this stupid smartphone. I think it's atrophied our delayed gratification. Exactly, I am unwilling to wait for anything. And Dylan, I think you got a little bit of that infection too and so does George and so does everybody listening to this. We're less willing to wait for anything than probably in the history of mankind because we don't have to. We've got a magic wand in our freaking hand. It's magic. It's just touch it and stuff happens, man. And Dylan, I'm gonna send you a copy of my book, Breaking Free from Broke. I wrote it for that exact reason to show people it's still possible and most people, they overestimate what they can do in a year, they underestimate what they can do in a decade. And yet go, that's the quote. From 23 to 33, I was broke to millionaire. I thought it wasn't possible and I followed a proven plan. That's the quote. Dylan, you're gonna be fine. You're gonna be very prosperous. You're the right kind of guy. You're thinking and you're asking the right questions. Turn off the news. It's never caused someone to be successful yet. George, I had an additional thought because it comes up in my argument with Rachel over housing right now that people are really struck, Gen Z struggling to get home 'cause it's a real tough time to buy a house and Gen Z has to buy their first home has a real difficult market to do it in. It's one of the toughest markets, maybe in 40 or 50 years. Okay, legitimately it's tough. But then it goes to where Dylan was and that translates with drama into people's minds and say, oh, well, that's it. This whole thing called America's over 'cause I can't buy a house right now when I want to. So by definition, that means this thing's over because wages have not gone up as fast as house prices and so we're just screwed and that just is the end of times. Jesus is coming back. That's it. We're gonna be left behind, do it. I mean, that's it. Don't curve Cameron. That's it. And so what happens is that I can't do it right now turns it inject a little drama into that fact and that translates to this whole thing is over. It'll never happen. Yeah, the American dream is dead, home ownership is dead. It's unrealistic and you boomers who bought your house for a box basket of strawberries don't understand. So the actual and that's all over, you know, stupid tic-tac and everywhere, right? That the whining and the victimization of the Gen Z, right? If we don't laugh, we cry. So you got to make me into that. The truth is, it is very tough. And the truth is for Dylan right now, he's looking at some very tough things. But the truth is, is that you can never, in your decision-making paradigm or your philosophy or theology of life, take a snapshot, a still framed snapshot of a moment in time and declare that to be true about life. That's not true about life. That's true about a moment in time 'cause life is not a snapshot. Life is a film strip. So the next frame in the film strip, something has moved and changed. And then the next frame, something has moved and changed again, thus we get a movie, right? Frame by frame, by frame, by frame, by frame. So if you took a snapshot when I came out of college, so slightly older than Dylan, with a finance degree, as a baby boomer, I'm the last of the baby boomers, I was born in 1960. And that's the last date of baby boomers. Everyone after that is another generation. That's the last date of boomers, okay? So I'm the youngest of the boomers. I came out of college in 1982. Interest rates for houses were 17%. (laughs) So, you know, hey, 6%, hold my beer, okay? They were 17%. And so if I took that as a snapshot at 22 years old and said, I can't afford a house, 'cause guess what? Nobody could. If I took that as a snapshot at that moment in time and extrapolated that because of drama, as a new way of looking at America, how wrong would I have been? It's inaccurate. It's inaccurate. And if you believe that, then your actions will follow and you'll never make any-- Right, because it's over. Why would you-- You're screwed. But you know what you can be sure of at 17%. Next year, it's gonna be higher or lower, but it's unlikely to be 17%. By the way, by 1984, I was selling homes. I was 24 years old with a real estate license. I was selling homes in a 14% fixed rate market and people were buying them. Wow. Wrap your brain around that. I can't even get my brain around that today. And I did it. I was there. But I can't get my brain around it. But if you took a snapshot of that, that's the year, by the way, that adjustable rate mortgages were invented. Wow. When we were at 14 fixed, we came up with, the very first time I was 24 years old, I heard of an adjustable rate, an arm mortgage, and we could sell them for 12%. 2% less than fixed rate. And people are running towards anything to get the stinking sky high rates down. And then before we knew it, we were back down at 10. And then I said, we'll never go below 10. And of course, we sure did. We went to nine and then we'll never go below nine. We'll never see. And then we're at six and we stayed at six forever. And then 2008 happened and they jammed the rate down to try to recover the economy down into the threes and it stayed down in the threes. So all of that to say there's a little history lesson, boys and girls of interest rates, but interest rates affect house affordability, home affordability, because a lot of people borrow to buy a home, not everybody does, but a lot of people do. And so you cannot take a snapshot in time and say, this is your whole life. This is your life today. What about 1988 when I filed bankruptcy? And I had a brand new baby, a toddler, and a marriage hanging on by a thread. What if I take a snapshot of that and say, this is my entire life? And you extrapolate that as if it is the future. - As if it's your identity. - You graph your current crisis into the future and you say, this is all there is. That's not glass half full. That's inaccurate critical thinking skills. They're improper critical thinking skills 'cause it's not how things work. It's not a snapshot, boys and girls. It's a film strip. And so yes, it's very tough right now for a Gen Z to buy a house. Completely understand that. Is this a permanent problem? Absolutely not. A hundred percent sure it's not. How's it gonna be solved? Well, heck, I don't know. I didn't know how they were gonna solve 17%. I didn't know. I had no idea George would be driving an electric car. What do I know? - Didn't know those existed when I was 18. I thought that was a, you know, a battery with wheels. The catch is fire, but you still drive it. And so, you know, I mean, see what I'm saying? It's just, this is, I think that's worth talking about, y'all. I think it's a big deal because hope deferred makes the heart sick. That's proverbs. Hope deferred, hopelessness. Hope deferred makes the heart sick. And when the heart is sick, you were saying exactly right about, it affects your decisions, it affects your behaviors. So you don't engage in things that are gonna cause you to win because your heart is sick and hopeless. Well, it's cynicism at the end of the day. That's what this generation's facing. And that just means it's negativity wrapped in fear. So I'm gonna be negative and I'm scared. It's never gonna be any different. And therefore, I'm gonna tweet about it and make fun of it because it's the only way to know how to cope with it. And I think that we also meet people who are 18, who are rock stars who go, yeah, it's hard, but you know what, I'm gonna get the second job for now and I'm gonna get out of debt. I'm gonna stay out of debt. It just points back to the Ramsey plant. If you really believe that there's no hope, then stay out of debt and get out of debt is your best bet to get to where you wanna be. It works in down times and it works in up times. It's the only plan that works in both. And so that's the thing. It's distressing 'cause I want to, and I'm going to be as best I can, empathetic, not sympathetic, but empathetic to people's, you know, if you're 26 and you're distressed 'cause you can't buy a house right now, I get it. That's what empathy is. That means I get it. I see you, okay? You're seen. I am not going to let you engage in my presence with improper critical thinking skills, inaccurate critical thinking skills. And that is to extrapolate with drama your current stuckness into the future. You are not stuck forever. You're stuck today. Some of you can't do it. But well, you know, I was on a stinking TV show doing an interview and a guy's like, "Well, the median household income in America is 80,000 in the median house. Median house price is 426,000 or whatever it is, 400 or something thousand." And that means that a median house price, a median income can't buy a median house. And I'm like, "Yeah?" But real people don't live in medians. Most of them anyway. - Just a stat. - Yeah, 'cause I mean, well, median includes, median is the middle. It's not an average. It's the middle number. And so that includes Silicon Valley in that number. And most people aren't dealing with Silicon Valley. It includes Orange County. And most people aren't dealing with Orange County. And certainly with a median household income, you're not dealing with Silicon Valley or just like we were telling Dylan. So it's just an inaccurate way to analyze the situation because it's not proper. And then it steals people's hope. And when you start dealing with stealing people's hope, I will make fun of you 'cause you piss me off. Create your free every dollar budget today, the simplest way to budget for your life.
