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[MUSIC PLAYING] Brought to you by the Every Dollar App. Start budgeting for free today. I am drowning. Paycheck to paycheck is a nice way of putting it. I own a home. My biggest, I guess, mistake is an auto loan. I'm about 20,000 upside down on it. How'd that happen? Well, I purchased the vehicle about three years ago when I was making significantly more money, a recent and abrupt breakup with who I bought my house with. Oh, boy. Had me, because I drive truck and I did drive long haul over the road. And when the breakup happened, I switched driving positions to a local job. And so I'm making roughly, I'd say, conservatively, about 4,500 a month. 4,500 a month. OK. That's your take home pay. That's take home after taxes. OK. What other debt do you have? So you've got this car here, 20,000 upside down on. And what do you owe on it, by the way? 50, 50, 2,000. Yikes. And yeah. And you're saying it's worth 32. Yeah, roughly. And so I've tried to sell it for about a month and a half, close to two months maybe. And there's just-- I mean, I can't blame anybody, but it's not going anywhere. And what price point? What were you selling it for? Well, at first, I put it up basically kind of like a takeover payment. This is what's owed. And then I put a couple grand aside in hopes that I could maybe pay the difference, and that didn't go anywhere. And so I don't know if I should just do like a voluntary repo on it. No, no, no, no. Well, we'll walk you through some options. Let's get through the rest of your debt. What else do you have? OK, well, I got $230 left on my house, $53 on the truck, $12,000 credit card, a $3,000 credit card. And I got my lowest one trying to do the snowball. I got my lowest one down to about $600 now. OK, good. And that's all the debt. All right, so if we knock out the credit cards, all that's left is fixing this car problem. Now we just have a mortgage to deal with. Correct. All right. And so with the truck payment, my mortgage is just under $2,000. It's $18.28. And the truck payment is $9.79. And so-- That mortgage is eating your lunch a little bit right now when it comes to your take-home pay, don't you think? It is. And so where I live, I look around, luckily me and X are on good terms as far as the house goes. She moved out. There was no-- I don't know really how to put it. Her name wasn't on the deed or the mortgage. She didn't have any equity in this thing? She does. She's not on the-- how the mortgage company explained it as I'm the primary, but she is on the mortgage. OK. So what happens if you stop paying? They go after her? No, no, no. She moved out, and that was part of my-- I don't know if it was maybe an ego thing, but it was in the heat of-- like I mentioned, the split was not mutual, and it was very abrupt. And out of emotion and maybe ego, I said, OK, boy, you want to do this? I don't. I'm not losing my house. So have you refinanced? Or did you get her name off the loan? We are in the process of working those details out, but that is the end goal of getting her off the house. OK. And so with the credit cards, one of the higher credit card, that's kind of eaten up by trying to do just the minimum payments, which on the one, it's like $600 a month. What were you making before as a trucker? Yeah, you mentioned you changed your trucking schedule to where now you're making less. So you're making less doing local. What were you making before? I was making about 120. How can we go back to that? Well, currently, I've got a kiddo and animals at home. And so going back to what I was doing is kind of out of the question for another couple of years anyway. Is the kiddo new? No, no, no, she'll be 18 in about a year and a half. So again, how does that change from before? Because you had the kid in the pits before. We're just trying to understand what made you make that shift and why you wouldn't go back to it temporarily to clean up this mess. Well, the reason I was able to be gone on the road was because the ex was at home. And so when she left, because when I was on the road, it was payday hit, I sent her the money, and the bills were paid. When does your 18-year-old go off to college or kind of do their own thing? She's thinking about it. She doesn't know if she's going to go to college or not. And you feel like you've got to be home with her? To a degree, just because a lot of her growing up, I was on the road. And so I feel like kind of between a rock and a hard place. And I'm just kind of-- I feel like I'm doing minimum-- Here's the deal. If this is between a rock and a hard place and you're saying, well, there can be a voluntary repo. Probably can't afford the mortgage long term. I'd rather you go to work now for a year and clean this mess up, because here's the deal. You get out of this credit card debt, and we get out the underwater piece on the car. Now we can breathe again. But you need to be making eight grand a month instead of four grand a month in order to make this work. OK. Because to your point, even cleaning up these credit cards is going to free up $600 a month. I mean, that's going to change the equation big time with your numbers to have an extra $600 a month to put towards this upside down car payment. So if I'm you, I understand what you're saying. Kids, obligations with pets, I could care less about in this situation. But with your daughter, maybe it's you having a sit down conversation with her and saying, listen, I know I haven't been there. I have made a mess of things, and I'm getting about the business of cleaning that up. And part of that is me cleaning up my financial life so I can be there for you. That's a different kind of sacrifice. But it's the one that'll stick with her, seeing her dad get out of a mess and just own up to the mistakes and go, I want to have a different legacy for your future. Maybe you help her cash flow college, but you got to have money to do that. Create your free every dollar budget today, the simplest way to budget for your life.
