The Debt Episode

Together, John and I hope to bring clarity to the world of personal finance, specifically relating to firefighters. Firefighting is a difficult job making sound. Financial decisions shouldn't be.

I know we've had some good stuff that we have lined up that we want to talk about, so I'm excited to be back. Thanks for bearing with us to all of our fans out there. Both of you guys.

So, without further ado though, we will, we'll kick it off and, we're gonna mix it up a little bit. And today, what are we gonna talk about? Lb

It is hard to live in this society without this feeling that you need to have debt or that, that it's an okay thing or it's a good thing. So we wanna talk about that. We wanna talk about those feelings surrounding debt. We want to talk about why it could be bad. We want to talk about if there's such a thing as good debt, and maybe some of the traps that are easy to fall into so that you can avoid them in the future. So don't feel bad, don't feel guilty.

We don't want you to feel like you're the, only person listening to this that's struggling with debt. Like this is something that Americans struggle with in general. And so we want to give you some knowledge in order to be able to navigate the pitfalls of debt because most of us, at one point or another have. Fallen into one of those traps, right?

You can live paycheck to paycheck and make $10 million a year. It's really just about how much money you're spending. So we're just gonna give you a little bit more, education surrounding this. This is one of the things that when Louie and I sit down with our recruits for kind of our finance 1 0 1 for firefighters discussion, this is always the one that I'm, I'm surprised at how much discussion. Debt generates.

Yeah. When we're talking about credit cards, when we're talking about mortgages, when we're talking about loans, and I think that's just because there's still a lot of misinformation out of there, about how debt works and how credit cards work and even how to calculate interest, all this other stuff. There's just a lot of, there's a lot of questions surrounding this that people, much to what you talked about, internally kind of struggle with. Bringing it up.

'cause it's, it's a source of conflict for them or a, a source of, shame sometimes. Yeah. So that's really what we're trying to do here is keep this just like we do at the firehouse table where we, you know, share our most intimate secrets. this is one of those things that we're gonna tell it to you, you know, from Louie and I's experience as well. I've struggled with this just as much as anyone else, so it really is from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

You're, you're right in there with us if you've, you know, had high credit card balances where you're wondering how you're going to, how you're gonna pay those off, or, you know, you took out too much of a loan payment on a, on a truck. The old 1309 edition, man, I've lived there, done that. So it's, you, you, you welcome aboard. Yep. You know, it's, it's part of that deal.

So it's one of those things that we strive for here is, one of the things that I love about the fire services, we're always trying to improve it for the next generation. And this is just one of those things that, you know, maybe we can share a couple of our stories to try to help, prevent you guys from future situations that we've run into.

So we've talked about this on different episodes before. I think even one of our first or second episode we ever did. We talked about the steps to becoming financial independent, and we distilled it down to three steps, right? And it's like our used car salesman pitch is

And we think that, you know, the center, at the center of becoming financially independent is the getting out and staying outta debt, because that's what Americans struggle with the most. That's what firefighters struggle with the most. And there's always temptation, right, to, get into debt now. So you can have whatever you want right now instead of later. and we just, we know that that is always gonna be present throughout your life and it's okay that, that temptation is there.

And it's okay if you have, debt right now that you haven't paid off. there are ways and strategies that we'll talk about for paying off that debt. but we don't want it to hinder your number one wealth building tool, which is your income, and that's what debt does. It robs you from that. So that's where we're at. And that's the high level view of why we're talking about it and why we think it's important.

so yeah, the temptations have never been greater. honestly, and how they can drill down onto your every want or desire. And now, because once again of technology, it's so easy. One click payments sometimes, apple Pay here, you don't even have to bring out a physical card anymore. It's just with your phone within a proximity.

Like they really have taken all the friction out of transactions and just made it as simple as possible, which just makes it that much more difficult when you're talking about tracking expenses. How much did I really spend? How much money do I have? All these things.

And it's, it's weird to get a, a strong sense of Hey, this is more money come going out than it's coming in, or whatever. When you're just dealing with that, and that's hard for anyone, even people who have dealt with cash in the past. But if you're a younger person, 21, 22, 23, you're, you probably don't have a lot of experience with physical cash because everything you know is so digitalized.

Super easy to fall into into those buy now, pay later traps, credit card traps without even realizing, The pain that comes with spending all that money. Yeah. that's tough.

so I definitely have those same reactions and those same emotions, but it's definitely a generational gap as well. Whereas like my grandfather, and my father-in-law, all they do is carry cash. Like literally never have any plastic. It's just cold, hard

So in order to talk about that, I think we need to take a little bit of a detour here and talk about, something that I really like to talk about. I think this is a great way to make decisions. and it's the old idea of opportunity cost.

Now, full disclosure, I'm not an economist. I went to Michigan where I did not major in economics, but I took a lot of economics classes. And this is something that, economists use to make decisions. Business leaders use this to make decisions. So the way that we do it, in our class for the new recruits is kind of what we're gonna do here. I'm gonna give you an example and John, you can, tell me if I'm missing the boat here or If I don't have the right idea. But here we go.

So this is the example that we give in our presentation.

So my question to the audience is what did it cost him to go to the movie?

They intuitively know that you could have made more money or you could have made money doing something else, but you chose not to do it. And that's what opportunity costs, Cost is. It's a key component. Business decisions. And a lot of people consider it the true cost of doing something because it's what you give up when you choose between options.

So with debt, John, the, the reason why we say this is a bigger deal than just the simple interest rate is because opportunity cost is the amount of money you could have earned by investing your money instead of paying interest to the lender. So then we like to talk about the firefighter's favorite, which is a new truck. Yeah. John, you mentioned the Ford F 1309, which is super common for new recruits to buy right after.

And if you were to let that money just sit and grow for the rest of your career, it'd be worth $313,000 in retirement. That sounds crazy, but what I'm submitting to you is that the opportunity cost of buying that new Ford, F1, F 1309, or Ram 1309 or whatever it is that you're buying, that the true cost of it is not that 54,000 or 55 that they tell you it's gonna cost you or the, over the length of your loan, but instead it's what you give up by not investing that money instead.

So you're giving up around $300,000 every time you do that, right? And how many times do firefighters go out and be like, eh, you know what, this. Truck

I think you can see if you keep doing that, you're in this vicious cycle if, and you are robbing from your future so that you can have these trucks now.

if we could get our folks to just buy not brand new vehicles and buy something that was used, you know, four or five years old that's got a little bit of mileage on it, and just save some of that difference, even if it's 30 or 40% difference from what a new vehicle is, you don't have to finance as much for one, and then you can take that. That difference, right?

If you could just take it from a $750 a month payment to a $350 a month payment, so save that $400 and put that into something like your 4 57 or a Roth IRA or a brokerage account. There's a lot of different investment vehicles that you could use. I mean, you would change the trajectory of your career and your financial life moving forward. Yes. I mean, that just gives you so many options and so much flexibility moving forward.

And that's, I think as we've done this enough and talked to enough people, like we understand that people need modes of transportation, right? They need a physical, a safe way in a reliable way from getting from one point to another. And we know, you know, generally our personalities, firefighters in general are, active people. So they actually do use their trucks to some degree. They put mountain bikes, they go camping, they go up in the back country, they do all sorts of stuff.

Just get something that's not brand new, something that's got some depreciation on it already. Something where you don't have to finance as much. and keep it longer. Don't keep it for three or four years. keep it for 10 or 15 years until the wheels literally fall off. Yeah. you could definitely change the tides of where your financial trajectory is headed. Yeah. Like hands down. Yeah. I,

Like we see it all the time where firefighter has a three or 4-year-old truck that is working great. Like it's fine. It is, it is plenty of truck or car for that person and they will still be like, eh, you know what? I want this new one or I want this better model or this upgraded model. And they keep doing that year in and year out or every four or five years I guess. And it is, that is brutal to your finances.

and To assume otherwise, no matter how good of a deal you got on your car, which we know everyone gets a good deal on their car, no one will ever tell you they got a bad deal. It is still taking from your future, it's still taking from money that you could otherwise invest and earn money on. And that's what our concern is. That's why we're talking about it, because we think that, we see that so often that we know it's taking real money out of you, out of the your future. pocket.

And that is typically something that starts to modify some of the behaviors or, you get married and then you have some kids, so now you have competing resources for your money. So now it's not about the new truck anymore, it's about trying to afford daycare or maybe co or education for your kids or something. You just have a different priority in life.

And it's really, it's, this is modifying behavior and perceptions more than it is about dollars and cents and math. Yeah. It just is, at the end of the day, that's what it's about. It's about priorities and values and how you're gonna value your time and your money.

You know, go around the room with the, with the new firefighters and say okay, cool, we know about financing and we know about taking out loans, but you know, there's gotta be a good loan to take out. Right. And there's gotta be a bad loan to take out bad debt. and it's really interesting to always hear people's perspectives on this. And I don't know, Louis, what do you think is the number one that people say is a good debt? guaranteed, like I'll take this to the grave, like this is good debt.

This is something to take a loan out for. That is good.

I think there's, we can't assume that everyone that took out $70,000 in student loan debt, has some kind of, high earning degree or that they are a, you know, an engineer or they're in a STEM field or something like that. It doesn't really always work that way. A lot of these people who are taking on 70, or $80,000 in student loan debt, sometimes they're teachers, sometimes. They're very blue collar, middle class incomes.

And I bet if you asked a lot of those people, if they think that that was good debt, they would probably tell you no. In retrospect, I wish I didn't take on that debt. I wish I would have went to a college that wasn't as expensive or. did something where I could have earned more. They, they there's a lot of regrets around student loan debt right now, and that you can just tell in our culture, the debates about, student loan forgiveness. and All these things.

You could tell that there's a lot of people that are unhappy and they don't consider it a good debt. Like it was common. Like I remember growing up it was just like, oh, don't worry about student loan debt. That's a good debt. And now I think that tide is changing and they're like, this is not really necessarily a good debt. could be depending on how you use it. But definitely it is not guaranteed good debt.

But I would be willing to say that tho the tides are shifting in that specific thing, to Louis's point, unless you go to school for a specific purpose, so whether that's engineering or accounting, or you're gonna be a physician or you practice law or something like that, where there's a tangible outcome. But just general education now or, or liberal arts. for the most part, especially with AI and the way things are going, it's replacing a lot of entry level things.

the blue collar folks are probably gonna have a leg up here in the future because you can't build houses yet with ai. You can't plum a, a house with AI yet. there's gonna be a lot of manual labor that still needs to be done, and those are gonna be the jobs that are gonna be commanding some salaries, and it's not gonna be on a lot of entry level stuff that you might have gotten from some type of a liberal arts degree. So it's one of those things, it's I understand the value of college.

I was like the Van Wilder. I can't tell you how many colleges I went to, and I had a great experience. Yeah. but did that put me in a better position to, to get this job? I, I really can't say that I was better prepared because I went to college. Now I had some experiences that might have been beneficial. but as far as the physical degree there, there was no benefit. Honestly, for me, in this specific profession, I'm not using that degree at all.

And because right now, once again, we've got hindsight bias, right? The, our real estate market in Colorado and really across the nation. since COVID has just gone, you know, up into the right, it's gone just vertical where we've increased, you know, some housing values, you know, almost, 50%. 60% from where they were even three or four years ago. So it's viewed as like a great investment that's gonna continue on that trajectory in perpetuity.

And it's, you know, it couldn't actually be further from the truth. And, you know, people that have never lived through a housing recession or a housing bubble, which happened in the GFC, you know, the late, 2007, 2008, up to 2010, and actually, when your value of your house automatically goes underwater, so you owe more money than it's worth. it, I, I can guarantee you, if, if we would've done this for a recruit class in 2010 or 2011, that probably would not have been the vibe, right?

Because there were so many flare closures going on. There was so much issue around so much, so many houses that have been built, and this inventory that's just stacking up and the value just kept going. down and down. So a lot of this is timing for one. Yeah. It's very geographic specific as well. Like our market here is different than it is in other places in the country. and I would just, I would just challenge that, you know, real estate to some degree can be at a good investment.

Just like any of these things can be, like taking out, student loans can be a good investment. It just really depends on how it's used and whether or not it's used appropriately.

there's a lot of people who, Take on too much house debt and they can't afford to invest or save for their future. And money is really, really tight. and They have to work a bunch of overtime or try to get a second job because they have stretched themselves in order to buy a house before they were ready. And that's a very personal financial decision.

Like we get, I mean, John and I always feel bad when we have to talk to these younger firefighters and these new recruits about buying a house because we're like, man, we realize if you don't own a house now, if you don't own a real estate after the last 20 years in this market, it's really hard to look at someone in the face and be like, Hey, you need to save 20% down and you need to buy a house that's way cheaper in a neighborhood that you might not like as much that you can afford it.

it's hard to tell people that, but you know, if you, if you just look at it objectively, it's a pretty bad time to buy a home. Like it. Mortgage rates are high, in the Denver metro area. Prices have kind of leveled off, I guess you could say that, but it's not it hasn't been a bubble burst. It's not like the prices have gone down by 30% and you can get these great deals, even though mortgage rates are high, people still want these high prices for their homes.

And, there's, there's more houses on the market now than there was maybe, six months ago or a year ago. But it's not like it's just flooded and driving the prices down.

So these houses are not getting slashed from a cost perspective because a lot of these people bought it, 5, 6, 10. 20 years ago, and they've got a ton of equity in that house. There's no reason for them to sell at a huge discount. And they'll just wait, just wait. And eventually that house will move for sure.

It will eventually move, it might get discounted a little bit, for them it's, it's worth to wait, three or four or five months to sell it for top dollar then to just slash the price by 20% to get it closed tomorrow. So you're just not gonna see that in, talking to realtors and, and everyone else. I just, in our area, Denver, I just, I don't foresee that happening anytime soon.

And the problem is the theory or the logic is flawed in that people, and even people that make a killing on their house, right? They sell it for a lot more than they ever paid for it. they never account for all the intangibles that they. Paid for the house as far as the maintenance, any updating they did, like all of those housing costs that go with home ownership, that never gets factored into the

Like people just never, and even you, Louie, who is very detail oriented, has a nice little spreadsheet, you would probably still be off, considerably when you actually looked at how much did it

And to John's point, you know, when you rent you're, the cost of that rent is, is the most you'll pay. You pay your rent payment, you pay renter's insurance, but that's about the most you're gonna pay when you own a home. You're, you pay principal interest, you pay your property taxes, you pay your homeowner's insurance, you pay your HOA, but that's the minimum you will pay. Yeah. And then everything else you do on top of that, all the maintenance and all the home improvement. I, you're right.

I, I could, I would have a hard time telling you and I'm detail oriented when it comes to my money. I would have a hard time telling you what I spent on my house. Like what I remember our old house like. I can just go buy and look at things. Whenever you buy a house, you're like, well, we need a new fence. Like when we moved in this house it had a Fence from 1986 probably that needed to be replaced. You know? How much is this to replace a fence? It's not five grand.

Like fences are absurdly expensive. Correct. The deck was falling apart. Talk about expense. You want a new deck, that's gonna cost you a pretty penny. water heater was like not original to the house, but almost that needed To be replaced. Oh, HVAC unit. You want one of those too. Guess what? That's gonna cost you something. Bathroom remodels. You got two or three bathrooms. You wanna remodel all of 'em. Guess what? The wife wants a new kitchen.

We want new cabinets with the nice sweet pullouts and that with the soft clothes and some granite countertops. John, I'm not these are not examples. I'm telling you that that's what I did on my house. Like this. is All of that cost a lot of money. Talk about opportunity cost. If I had not done that, I would've had more money. I, I would submit to people, and this is a very controversial thing, there's people that have debated this on both sides for a long, long time.

But I would submit to you that if you took the true cost of home ownership and you compared it to renting, you would not be as far ahead, if at all as a homeowner than you are renting. A lot of people don't like to hear it 'cause they just see the price and they go in the Denver real estate market, it goes up an insane amount. I get it. I do get it. And I'm not saying you wouldn't make money, but would you make as much as if you invested, you know, the difference between renting and owning?

I don't know. It gets really muddled at that point. Th That's a very long-winded way of saying, don't feel bad if you can't buy right now and you have other priorities in your life, like hopefully paying off debt, that's okay. That's, that's a good thing. And you are not, so far behind your peers and it's you'll never be able to buy a house. It's, I, I would just try to encourage people that it's okay, it's okay if you have to wait and you're not throwing away money by, by renting.

In fact, when you buy a house, you will throw away money in a lot of ways. I. mean, Houses are some of the biggest money pits you will get, and you don't get a return on investment on everything that you do to a home, especially if you're living in the home. It's not if you had a rental property or something that you, and you're a real estate investor, that's a little different and we won't get into that.

But when it's your own home and you're doing things because you want it and you like it that way, you're never gonna see all the investment return on that money, that those are just the facts.

'cause that's older generations, you know, that has what they were taught to build wealth is to buy a home and invest in that stuff.

So a lot of this stuff, the circumstances we are dealing with now, and Louis, and I probably sound a little tone deaf to some degree, but I have a lot of empathy and sympathy for, for our new firefighters and trying to figure and navigate this stuff because it is, it is very choppy, but there's a lot of places in the country and quite frankly, the world where it is very common to rent your, basically your whole life.

If you grew up in the Bay Area in California, a lot of people rent there just because, once again, the cost difference, you know, between owning a home versus renting, it's astronomical. New York City, a lot of other coastal areas, people that come from there, it's not as foreign to them the concept of renting a single family home and not, you know, and not owning it.

So a lot of this is just people that have grown up in this area or have been surrounded by people that have always owned their homes. It's, it's just kind of what they know and what they feel comfortable with. So, yeah, once again, we're trying to look out for.

your guys' best financial futures, and this is a very personal decision, but, the other thing I will say about home ownership is, it's really tough because, you know, you might find a place, a starter home, and then, you know, after four or five years you kind of outgrow it or you have a family and the, the transactional cost of real estate is criminal.

And that should not be defined by where your physical address is.

and We probably will at a later episode, just know that we, we do. Empathize with that situation of wanting to buy a home. And, we know it could be a big blessing, but it could also be a curse if you're not doing it right.

It's just costing 'em nothing but money. And you can just tell that they're frustrated. They're at their wit's end, this was a huge mistake. And for most people, this will be the one of the biggest financial decisions they'll make. So go in with your eyes wide open when you're making those decisions and have a solid reason and a game plan for attacking how you're gonna afford that or what that looks like.

and really just anything in which you're not going to get some type of, investment gain out of it would more or less probably be considered from just like a mathematical standpoint, not a great investment, right? By definition.

And you're probably spending more than you would otherwise. 'cause you realize, eh, it's just credit card, like no big deal. Over time that compounds and it is a brutal hit to your finances if you are carrying credit card debt and it doesn't help. you, It doesn't help you in any way except for getting you what you want right now.

So this is one, once again, like I was baffled when Louis and I first brought this up, to our firefighters. just the, once again, the amount of misinformation and disinformation surrounding credit scores was scary.

So that's one of the things that, you know, a lot of public safety agencies use it look at just to basically, see whether or not you have risky behavior. and it's just like a little but look behind the curtain into your personal profile,

Those are kind of the three credit bureaus. So as your credit is getting pulled, they will the, they will be the ones that report back and they all have a little bit of a different algorithm on how they calculate your physical score, but more or less universally across all three of 'em. This is how they calculate it. your biggest influence is on your payment history. All right. So once again, reliability. Do your, pay your bills on time. That makes up 35%. So that's a pretty good chunk.

So almost a third of your overall credit score is whether or not you are timely with your payments. So you make that monthly payment on time and you're not delinquent.

That's my amount that I can utilize if I max that thing out every month and put a thousand dollars on that. So basically I utilize 100% of my credit. the credit reporting agencies do not like that. That basically it's a, it's a risky behavior that's man, this guy is maxing out every month. ah, I don't know about this. he doesn't seem like he's responsible with credit when he is utilizing it. As much to its capacity. So that makes up 30% of your credit score. So once again, credit utilization.

So how much of that credit you utilize makes up about another third of your score? So kind of the moral of the story of that in our tip and trick is, is to just keep that utilization low. So if I've got a thousand dollars limit, it's basically just put a hundred dollars on there, pay it off. Now my utilization rate was 10%. That looks much, much better in the credit bureau's eyes. if you are responsible, you can typically get that limit raised.

It's as simple as a lot of times you can just do it on your app. on your credit card, you can obviously give 'em a call or do it online and get that limit raised. a lot of that just has to do with their little algorithm behind the scenes as far as how much money do you report, how much money do you make? They'll look back and see how much money you've utilized. And for most people, it's not a big deal to, to increase that.

So if you are trying to bump up your credit score a little bit, that's a simple little way with not opening a bunch of lines of credit with just making sure that utilization rate, stays low. beyond those. So those, so between those two, that's it, that's two thirds of your credit score basically is in those two components. So paying on time and not maxing out your credit cards, keeping that balance low. on top of that is, new credit.

So that's also, whenever you apply for something, there's what's called a soft poll and a hard poll or a soft inquiry and a hard inquiry. if it's a hard inquiry, which they are required to disclose, whenever you fill out something, that is what will go, that's what will get reported to the credit bureaus. If it's a soft poll, which a lot of these buy now, pay later, programs are, it doesn't get reported. All right? So that makes up about 10%.

So if you're going, you know, and trying to open up a lot of new lines of credit, that is obviously something that could be a little bit of a factor. But once again, that's only 10%. that's not gonna make or break any of this stuff. credit history. So this is just how long you've owned your credit? I still have a credit card that I specifically keep open. I use it once per year. I buy a pack of bubble gum or something else from the convenience store just to keep this open.

but it's been, what, almost 25 years that I've had this one credit card. So it's great. It looks like I've been responsible, I've owned this credit for 25 years. That makes up about 15% of your credit score. not always closing out your credit cards.

Because now you have less credit available. So if you have this credit card from your college days, assuming there's no fee on it. it makes sense to probably keep it open. There's not a really great reason to close that line of credit, because it will lower your credit utilization and it will increase your credit history, which are really important. So take that old credit card that you've had since college and buy a. Buy a. a couple cans of Zinn a couple times a year. And you'll be fine.

But really the moral of the story is here. Carrying balances does not somehow improve your credit. That was probably the number one misconception we heard time and time again. It's no, the credit cards want to see you have a balance. Well, of course they do. 'cause that's how they make money. But it, it, it is not going to make your credit score better. In fact, it'll make it, it'll make it worse because once again, your utilization rate is gonna be higher.

That's the amount you owe, which is a third of your credit score is gonna continually be used. for paying unpaid balances.

If you pay it off every month, you'll get the same benefits and that and have a better credit score than if you carried a balance. Month to month on that credit card. Yep.

So that's one way to prevent it. But something that got brought up in one of the, one of our discussions that I hadn't really thought about and I haven't used personally, but I know Louie can speak to this, is ways to protect your credit. And that is by freezing your credit. You wanna chat on that a

and then they have these new credits and it, you know, you could eventually get it fixed, but it can do serious damage to your credit in the meantime until they get it fixed. So there's, there's two lines of thought for how people can help with, stolen identity or, or, fraudulent lines of credit taken out one way. and the one that you see a lot of people pitch is credit monitoring.

And credit monitoring is basically, someone, a company telling you that your identity has been stolen or that new lines of credit have been pulled out, against your name. But that happens after the fact, so you basically have to do damage control after the fact. What I use and what I like and tell people that they should consider is doing a credit freeze. What a credit freeze does is it prevents new lines of credit from being drawn or taken out in your name.

Now, it does require more work to set these up because you have to go through each of the bureaus that John mentioned, so Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. You have to create an account and then you have to freeze your credit. What happens when you freeze your credit is that no one can pull out new lines of credit in your name, including you. You can't be like, you know what? I want this credit card. Let me go pull it out. Let me just go open this new credit card.

You will get rejected because they will not be able to open that line of credit when your credit is frozen. In order to get a new line of credit, you would have to log in to those bureaus, those credit bureaus, and. Thaw your credit or unfreeze your credit. and they have these kind of fancy ways where you can do it for 24 hours or even a week or whatever, and then it automatically freezes again.

so it, it requires a little bit more work, but then you can be more secure in knowing that no one is gonna steal your credit and open new lines of credit if you have those in place. So I strongly encourage if you don't freeze your credit that it's something you should consider doing because it'll prevent some kind of costly and just some headaches.

so I feel like a lot of the audience will probably resonate with this, but it's these buy now pay later. Firms that are starting to pop up and they're everywhere, right? so Klarna is probably one of the world's biggest. Affirm is another one. Amazon is onto this Apple. There's a whole subsidiary of different businesses that the, that they offer this. But it's very easy, right? Once again, you basically create account, but it, it allows you to pay over time. All right. Right.

And most of the time if you make these installment payments or you meet the certain time in which this has to be paid back, there literally is 0% interest. there's no catch to that. It's just like your credit card. If you pay it off in time, there is no fee associated with that. You are not paying any interest. It's

The problem with that is, they're catchy in that they actually are putting you into an actual a, a loan repayment plan, which once again, they're pulling your credit. It's a hard credit inquiry, so it's affecting your credit.

They don't read the fine print. And then they're basically being charged like true credit card rates, you know, 18, 19, 20% to finance that stuff. They've, they get it confused with the literally the 0% installments and now they go into a financing option. And I've seen a lot of our folks talk about using this and. Literally, you can use it for everything. You can use it to buy a little Caesars pizza as you can. You can do installment payments on that stuff.

So it's just one of those buyer beware, situations that we wanted to address with you guys because I, I've been hearing a lot about it. I've done a little bit of research on it and I know people that've used it and they've used it responsible just like with certain credit cards. But you really have to dig into the details with some of these things.

And I would just harken back to what we kind of talked about in the beginning and just really reprioritizing you know, the amount of money that you have and where it's going. And is this something really that you truly need? Or is this a want? Yeah. And a lot of times those lines get muddied by us. and there's a certain sense of entitlement with that goes with that, where we're just like, oh, I work hard. I deserve this kind of thing. So

but I think what we're trying to say is you're kind of playing with fire and the chances that you're gonna have that invested, which you're, if you invest for the long term, four, four months is not the long term. You shouldn't be investing your money, for four months with the idea of selling it higher and then being able to pay off your. little Caesar's pizza. You're playing with fire. so don't,

So there's other ways to do it, but I've just, I wanted to at least bring, put that, in our notes to shed a little bit of light on, because I know, there has been some people that have gotten burned by that. Yeah. So just buyer beware with, Klarna and any of these other buy now, pay later type, businesses. Boom.

Those are the kind of lessons that we want to get across here. Not judging anyone, not making you feel bad, just want you to consider that going forward.

Why didn't they talk about 4 57 loans? That is the number one question that Louis and I get all the time. Once again, we hear you and we will specifically talk about certain strategies and if you do need to take out, some type of loan, like where should you source that loan from, and best practices when it comes to that. But we just wanted to, once again, from more of a holistic.

Standpoint, talk about how it's how, what goes into debt as far as your credit scores and some of these finer details. So there'll definitely be a lot more to come on that, just as some other teasers. we will having an episode talking about. The beep beep B, the big beautiful Bill. once again, that's new legislation for those of the you that don't know, that's new legislation that was passed by President Trump. He signed that on our Independence Day, July 4th.

But a lot of moving parts with that. I still have not gotten to go through all of it and its entirety, but there's definitely some things that specifically, Could affect firefighters, and a lot of other moving parts with that.

So we're gonna have an episode all designated just to the big beautiful bill 'cause there are a lot of things that are coming out that will actually be beneficial honestly, to a lot of our members, in lowering some taxes and just keeping some other credits available and some other stuff like that. I've been asked a lot about that specific legislation. So Lou and I will do a deep dive on the big beautiful bill.

just kind give you some of the Reader's Digest or the chat GPT notes on how it's gonna apply to us. That's perfect. Perfect. All right, man. Without further ado, Louie, it feels good to be back in local