How Do You Survive Financially When You're Barely Making It?

Hey everybody.

Welcome to Financially Confident Christian Live.

I'm Ralph Estepp Jr. And I'm so glad you're here today.

This show is for believers who want to grow in confidence with their money and finally break that cycle of financial shame and live with confidence.

This show isn't about shame.

It's not about pressure and it's not about pretending.

This is a show where we have real conversations about fear and pressure, about debt, stewardship and hope, and about that next right step.

I've got three questions today from listeners just like you.

We're going to listen into a travel nurse whose family is stretched to the limit, a 36 year old who feels behind because she's just gotten started, and a couple trying to make the right tax decision.

These are people going through and doing everyday right things and still feeling like they're not enough.

Does that sound familiar to me?

It sounds familiar to me.

This is a no judgment space.

You're not alone.

You're not too late.

Here's how it works.

If you're joining me on Clubhouse, you can join me on stage or post right in the comments.

If you're on YouTube, feel free to drop it in the chat.

All right, let's get started.

Now.

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If you're joining us on Clubhouse, you can ask to be brought on stage and actually ask your question.

I'm happy to answer it.

Well, let's jump right into our first listener question.

This listener question says this says Ralph, my husband lost his job in February and went back to school to get qualifications so he can actually support our family.

I'm a travel nurse so my income covers the mortgage and the basics.

But we're really stretched in.

He's starting a part time job this week.

But even with that, we're going to be really struggling to get through the next year.

We have a toddler and another baby on the way.

Sounds like you got your hands full.

I make just enough to disqualify us from food stamps, but our grocery bills are killing us.

I feel like I'm doing everything I can to save, but I don't know how we're going to make it.

How do I survive one more year while being broke?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Well, first thing is thank you so much for sending me that question.

This is a question I get all the time.

There's a lot of people in a very similar circumstance to you, and it sounds to me like you're doing everything right.

You've alluded to that in your question.

You're like, ralph, I'm saving.

I'm doing all these things.

Your husband is going back and getting skills, which is all great.

So you're doing all the right things, but you're still feeling like you're short.

And unfortunately, like a lot of folks, you're making too much money to qualify for help, but not enough to feel stable.

And listen, I'll raise my hand and say, right now, the price of groceries is outrageous.

I went to the grocery store with my wife a week or two ago, and she always thinks, like, I'm crazy when I walk down the aisles because I sort of like sticker shock as I walk down.

It's like, this cost how much?

So I totally get it.

Add to that the weight you're carrying that you feel like you're carrying this alone while your partner rebuilds.

All of those things are good things.

But I understand the pressure.

I understand the overwhelm that you're feeling.

But I want to start off with some main things here.

Number one thing, you're not failing.

You're making all the right decisions.

Your mortgage is paid.

Your family's fed.

Hey, your husband's building towards something better.

If you said to me, hey, my husband's not working, he's laying on the couch like a bum, then we'd have a different discussion.

But your husband is doing things to help himself.

He's doing things to better himself.

All of those things are success, even if it doesn't feel like it right now.

Now, one of the things you mentioned in your question was qualifying for benefits.

I think you might want to take a look at that again and check what you actually qualify for.

I'm going to list a few things as we prepared for this show.

We got your question ahead of time.

I. I wanted to list a couple things that might be useful to you.

One of the things you could look at is wic.

There are local food banks.

A lot of churches have church pantries.

And you might be saying, ralph, I don't really want to be involved in that.

I totally understand that.

But if you're a hospital employee, a lot of hospitals have assistance programs.

A lot of these things go missed.

A lot of people don't realize that just one conversation could really free up some real money for you.

The other thing I want you to understand is all of this has an end date.

And you mentioned you are having a baby.

Congratulations.

I'm getting ready to be a grandfather here pretty soon.

In fact, just yesterday as I record this, my daughter in law went to the doctor and they moved her due date up.

So it's about any day now.

We're just super excited.

But I also realize in your situation, this has an end date.

Your husband's income is going to grow once he gets through his retraining or whatever he's working on.

You weren't specific in that.

He's going to get a better job, he's going to be re employed, the baby's going to arrive and next year is going to look a lot different.

The pressure that you're feeling right now is real, I get that.

But it's not permanent and you can't define your whole existence around it.

And plus, to be frank with you, it's not good for your mental health.

I want to go to scripture now because with this show I always want to put some scripture into what we're talking about.

And this one comes from the book of Proverbs.

This is the Proverbs, chapter 8, verse 11.

It says, for wisdom is more precious than rubies.

And in a lot of ways your husband is getting wisdom right now.

That's what he's doing.

He's going and bettering himself.

He's getting that education or that training.

That right there is an investment in your family's future.

And that is an absolutely beautiful thing to do.

And listen, I came from a single income.

My mother and my dad split up when I was younger.

So I totally understand that transition.

So right now in the chat, if anybody is feeling this same pressure, I would love to hear from you.

Is there anything that you can provide or any ideas that you have to help this person survive this difficult time?

What's interesting is in addition to that we found an article.

Now this article was written by something called Coast Capital.

It's called Breaking the Cycle of Financial Shame.

And we'll put a link to that in the show notes.

I encourage you to check it out.

And the reason why this article is so important is it really highlights the fact that your family situation isn't unique.

There's actually research on exactly what you're experiencing.

And I want to share that with you because it changes how you see your own struggle.

Here's the main points that it talks about in this article.

First thing, feeling like everyone else has it figured out except for you.

I think all of us lean into that at times.

We feel like there's no way I'm the only one that's on this aisle.

And I feel like I'm all by myself on this.

But guess what?

There's a lot of people that have gone through what you're going through.

There's a lot of people that are right now going through what you're going through.

The other problem that this article talks about, I'm going to get to some statistics here in a couple quotes in a minute.

The other thing it says here is thinking about money constantly but never talking about it.

Now you've reached out, so you've already broken that bond of just keeping it inside.

A lot of people just take this inside and they don't share it with other people.

They don't talk about it with other people.

So that is the first step of that, because believing you're alone in this struggle is really hard, but you're actually in the majority.

A lot of people are feeling these same stresses.

Let me give you some examples of this.

Here's some statistics right from this article.

36% Of people feel shame about their finances.

That's more than one in three.

The whole focus of this show is helping you break that cycle of financial shame.

But listen, you're not alone in that.

36% Of people, just like you, feel shame about their finances.

Here's another statistic.

74% Think about money for more than they talk about it.

So they think about it, but they don't talk about it.

But the thing I love about this article, it states a very basic thing.

It says when people finally open up, they realize they're not alone in this.

And I think that's so important.

Let me give you some quotes from the article.

One of the quotes is from this woman named Amy Chao, and it says the silence that shame imposes is prevailing, preventing us from having important conversations and actively taking steps within our control that can unlock financial opportunities and improve our situation.

It's that silence because we all are feeling the shame.

But that very silence is preventing us from having the important conversations and actively doing something within our control that can unlock some opportunities.

Here's another quote from somebody named Chantel Chapman.

She's a financial trauma researcher, and she says this.

She says financial shame isolates us and can lead to avoidance patterns, making financial literacy support and pathways to actions inaccessible.

Again, it's that financial shame.

We put ourselves in this bubble, and what it does is it isolates us from things that can help us, and it makes us avoid things.

It doesn't allow us to go and get that literacy that we need, get the support we need.

Here's another quote from Chantel.

She says naming this experience is a starting intervention to overcoming shame.

We can see ourselves in the data and know we're not alone.

And I think that's a big part of this.

Once you see that you're not alone in this, that you're not the only one that's dealing with this, I think it makes it so much easier.

So here's my take on this whole thing.

You, as a travel nurse, you're not an exception to this.

You're actually the rule to this.

The shame that you're feeling, the struggle you're feeling, comes from silence.

It's not the situation.

So the first thing is to break that silence.

That's really the first move.

Which leads me to Proverbs 28:13.

Whoever conceals their sin does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy.

Listen, talk about this with other people.

You're not alone in this.

You're not the only one that's going through this.

And I want you to have hope in that.

Now, has anyone else that wants to share, feel free to come up here and make a comment.

If not, we're going to move right into our second question.

And this one I've titled already.

Behind.

And here's the question we got.

Ralph.

I'm 36 years old, I'm single.

I've got no kids, no 401k.

And, oh, here, I'm sorry.

He says, I'm 36, single, no kids, living in Orlando.

I make $35,000 a year at a job I hate.

As soon as I heard that, I said, oh, I'm very interested in this one.

How many people are in jobs that they hate?

Let me continue.

He says, I have no retirement, no 401k, no health insurance, and $216,000 in student loan debt from a degree I can't really use.

Wow.

So in a job you don't like, single, 36 years old, $216,000 in student loan debt.

Then it goes on.

The one thing I do have is $10,000 in a high yield savings account that I worked really hard for.

And I want to stop right there.

That is an accomplishment, because I think about it like this.

You got a huge amount of student loan debt over your head.

You're in a job you don't like, but you've been able to put away $10,000.

So right away, give yourself some encouragement.

That is a fantastic thing.

Well, let's continue on.

He says, my student loan payments just jumped from zero to $217 a month, and I feel like I'm barely getting by.

I grew up moving home to home, and I'm completely on my own financially.

I've got no financial safety net at all.

I do have a little wiggle room, my budget each month, but I don't know what to do with it.

I want to set myself up for the future, but I don't even know where to start.

How do I.

What do I do financially when I feel like I'm already behind?

And I just want to thank you so much for sending that in.

It took a lot of courage to send that in.

There's a lot of young people just like you that are saddled with student loan debt, and they really don't know what to do about it.

And for so long, for the last several years, they've been in these forbearance periods where they're not making any principal payments at all.

And then all of a sudden, it's like, wham, I got to start paying this monthly, which is a good thing in the long run because all of those loans are just collecting interest.

And trust me, that mountain is just getting bigger and bigger.

But the first thing I want to do here, the first thing you need to understand, you've got to stop comparing yourself to people who had a head start that you never got.

You were very clear in your circumstances.

You said, I moved around.

I didn't have anybody helping me.

I had no financial safety net.

What I really hear you saying is you come from a place where no one really showed you how to be financially successful.

And I totally understand it.

I work with a lot of people every day that are in that same situation where they weren't given any guidance.

You know, you may come from a family where maybe mom and dad were financial wrecks, and you wonder why you struggle.

But see, the thing is, you've learned something from that you learn, I put money away.

Listen, $10,000 is not a small amount of money.

That's a lot of money for somebody who's just starting out now.

And I understand the pressure you're in right now.

You got this payment that's suddenly jumping.

There's no warning, there's no plan in place.

And then you've got this other situation like I've got this student loan debt.

I don't have a lot of money set aside.

I'm not putting anything into retirement.

I got a job I hate.

I got a career field I got a degree in that I can't use.

And what you really saying here is you don't know which financial problem to solve first when everything feels urgent.

But number one thing, like I said, you're not behind, you're starting from someplace, but you've got no help.

And those are two different things.

So here's the first thing I'm going to encourage you to do.

Pick one direction for some wiggle room in your particular case.

The first thing I would do is start to build that emergency fund.

You've got $10,000, that is good, that's a savings account.

But I would start to build an emergency fund that you can go to if you have a struggle in during one month.

Now, a lot of people will tell you to do three to six months worth of income.

Let's not start there.

Let's start at $1,000 or $1,500 and just add a little bit to it.

Hey, even if you can only do 25 or $50 per pay, just put it into that retirement fund.

The other thing I want to mention here is you're not doing anything with retirement.

Which leads me to this question.

In your company 401k plan, is there a match?

And what I mean by that is, if you contribute, does your employer contribute as well?

If you, if there is and you're not putting anything into it, it's kind of like, think about this.

Let's say you're walking down the route and all of a sudden you see a hundred dollar bill laying on the sidewalk.

And you say to yourself, hmm, there's $100 laying on the sidewalk.

Do I pick it up?

Do I bend over and pick it up or not?

Well, if you've got a 401 at work and your employer is offering something for you if you put money into it, it's the same analogy.

So if you have that, I would encourage you to at least contribute enough to get to the amount of matching.

Because if not, you're walking past that $100 bill and, and just letting the fellow behind you pick it up.

That is a big thing.

The other thing you want to do is take a look.

How can you work on getting that student loan debt down?

Now I'm not telling you to work on all three things at once.

Just pick one.

So right now, if I'm you, the first thing I'm doing is reaching out to HR and finding out is there any matching for your retirement plan.

And trust me, I'm not trying to shame you or judge you, but if there is, you're losing money, you're leaving money on the table.

If you don't at least contribute that in the minimum amount, a lot of places they'll match up to 3% which means for every 3% you put in, they're going to put 3% in as well.

And at 36 years old, whatever that is that you started, that money will grow really quickly.

So don't neglect that.

Maybe right now, maybe if you don't have that, then look at the emergency fund or look at paying off debt.

You also might want to take a look at, at what they call low income driven repayments for your student loan.

You're not the only person that's going through this.

That payment that you're in right now might be higher than it needs to be.

There may be some ways to get that down a little bit especially there's a lot of talk about this in the press all the time.

But here's a scripture verse to encourage you.

It comes from Proverbs, chapter 13, verse 4.

It says the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied.

And you've already proven your diligence.

You said I have no financial people behind me.

I've got no safety blanket.

But you're surviving, you've got money set aside.

So keep going.

Now this actually brings up an article that we found in reference to this question.

It was actually written by Kiplingers and it's the title of it is 2026 changes to student loans you need to know.

And again we'll put a link to that in the show notes because this is one of those hot topics we get a lot of questions about student loans and I mentioned a few minutes ago when what they call income driven repayment.

And I want to spend a minute on that because the rules change this year.

If you've got student loans and you haven't looked at your options lately, this is important.

Here's the things, here's some top line Things being on a repayment plan that no longer exists and not knowing what comes next.

That's where you are right now.

All of a sudden you said it went from zero to $217.

You feel like the rules have changed.

When you thought you understood them, a lot of people thought, well I'm just going to continue to not have to pay anything on this.

Now I, I think that's a pie in the sky idea.

But again, I could make an argument that college had been selling kids on these education that you get this degree, you spend two hundred and some thousand dollars on it, is it worth it?

But now you know, it's too late for that.

But maybe there's something you can do to look at the options.

So let me get into some specifics here.

What this article talks about is there was something called the save plan that one's gone.

Borrowers on it that were in forbearance and interest are building since August 2025.

So what happened is there was a point, as I recall, this is around the COVID time, believe it or not, we're still talking about COVID stuff where you are automatically in forbearance.

But the problem is once this hit in August 2025, the interest started to accrue again.

Now there's a new plan that's launching July 1, 2026.

It's called wrap.

And the way this works is payments are 1 to 10% of the adjusted gross income based on the total balance.

So at $35,000 of income, there's a thing called an IBR.

It's basically income based repayments.

Your payments based on your income could be well below that $217 that you're actually paying.

Let me give you some quotes from the article.

This is directly from Kiplingers.

It says under this new plan, payments range from 1 to 10% of the borrower's adjusted gross income.

So they're looking at your income.

So depending upon your income, and I don't have all the specifics here in front of me, but you might be able to reduce that $217 down to a more manageable number.

The minimum payment is $10 a month.

Now again, there may be reasons that you don't want to just make the minimum payment.

A lot of people don't think about this, especially with student loans, they think, well I'll just go into forbearance and I'll just forget about it.

The problem is as you forget about it, it's kind of like sitting in a taxi and driving all over the town and just sitting there, not getting out.

The ticker keeps going.

You're still getting interest added to this on a monthly basis.

So even though you might qualify for a lower income payment threshold, that debt's still going to be out there.

It's not going to go away.

Here's the next quote from Kiplinger who says because IBR limits your payments based on your income, it may be the best choice for borrowers with higher income and debt levels.

And here's another thing it says before you take on debt to fund your child's education.

Now this is more directed.

This is a person named Jack Wang who's a wealth advisor and he's kind of putting the cart before the horse, which it doesn't help you, but it really is what we're talking about here today.

And that's what he says.

He says before you take on debt to fund your child's education, make sure you have a solid plan for your own financial security.

So here's my take on this.

Here's what I would do if I were you.

Make one visit to studentaid.gov we'll put a link to that in the show notes.

But again, it's studentaid.gov or have a conversation with the student loan counselor because that could change your monthly cash flow.

Right now what you're telling me is things are tight.

Lower the payment, free up some room and build from there.

That may be a way to resolve this situation.

Might be a better situation for you.

And again, I understand it.

There's a lot of misinformation out there.

There's a lot of talk about student loans.

We're actually going to be talking about this on a future show on the Daily Financially Confident Christian.

And we have a person that wrote in a question that their daughter's looking to go to college and she's got these pie in the sky dreams about where she wants to go to college and the mom wants to have a conversation with her about do you realize how much this is going to cost?

And this is my own little pet peeve because I think that the way this works is if you're a student going into college, if the student loans will pay for it.

You don't think about how much this is really going to cost you.

You don't think about how, how much these monthly payments are going to be once you graduate and you get out of forbearance.

And then you don't think about this degree that you got.

Does it really make enough to pay for this?

That's a tough conversation, but it's a conversation that we as a country needs to start having with people before they sign for those student loans.

The reality of the situation, and this is going to be maybe offensive to some universities, but universities have kept on taking the cost going up and.

And up and up because the student loans are covering it.

But is there value there?

That's a really tough thing to talk about.

Well, I'm going to open it up for any questions we have.

I'm going to check the chat here, and I'm checking the clubhouse live.

I don't see any questions.

So we're going to move on to our third question.

And this one is completely in my wheelhouse as a professional tax advisor and accountant.

So this question is.

It says, ralph, my wife wants us to file our taxes separately because she says it'll keep her student loan repayments lower.

I get this question several times during the year.

It's amazing again, how much misinformation is out there.

But this one's a little more interesting.

Let me continue what they say, but I've always heard that filing jointly is almost always the better move.

I will agree with that.

In general, filing jointly is almost always the better move.

Now, there are circumstances, there are certain nuances where it doesn't always work that way, but.

But in general, that is a general statement.

That's true.

But let me continue what they're asking me.

It says, is there ever a good reason for a married couple to file separately?

Yes, there are.

I'm going to throw one out there that a lot of people don't think about.

I had a client maybe about 15 years ago, came in and sat down with me in my office, and husband and wife, you could tell there was a little tension.

And the wife said to me, she says, raf, she says, can you be honest about something?

I'm like, well, that's why you're here.

And she says, my husband is a loan shark.

And I said, okay.

And she says, he, you know, he's a bookie.

He does all these kind of stuff.

And the husband, I thought he was gonna come on glued.

And she says, but if we file a joint tax return and the IRS comes after him for tax evasion, would I be responsible?

And I said, yes.

I said, if you file a joint tax return with your husband and you are, you're what's called separate and liable for those taxes because you're filing a joint tax return.

So she looked me square in the eyes and she said, so what are my options?

I said, well, you can choose to file a joint tax return.

If you do, then you would be joint and what they call, I'm sorry, joint and severely liable for that tax.

In other words, the IRS can come after you, they can come after both of you, they can come after your individual or they can come after both of you.

So I said your only two options, you file jointly or, or you could do Mary, filing separately.

And I said, but the thing you need to understand is if you file separately, what that means is that there are going to be some changes and we're going to talk about those in a couple minutes.

But in this particular question, what you're really trying to do is you're trying to make the right call as a couple, but you're getting conflicting information.

This is my annoyance with the Internet, with TikTok and YouTube and all these clowns all over the Internet say, well, do this and do that.

I've seen it happen a lot right now.

But with clients that are going into Social Security to getting Social Security, I don't know if somebody at the Social Security Administration is just giving bad information or what, but I've got client after client calling and coming in for their appointments and saying my husband and I need to file separately because the folks at Social Security told me if we file together, I'm going to have to pay tax on my Social Security.

Completely wrong information.

But I must have dispelled that 15 times there.

But you really have to focus in on the, the short term savings, are they worth the long term trade offs?

Because what your particular question is one of those situations, and I've dealt with this several times actually, where if you file a joint tax return, then your repayment amount is based on your adjusted gross income from the joint tax return instead of your individual income, not joint income.

But you have to be careful that you're not making a choice based on what sounds right instead of what the numbers actually say.

Because again, there are a whole bunch of people out there promoting these ideas that just aren't true.

So let's get into the nitty gritty of this.

I want to address some of the things.

First thing is your wife is not wrong.

There are situations where filing separately is better.

In this particular case, filing separately can lower your wife's loan repayments because of that IBR plan.

Again, it goes back to that income based repayment plan uses individual income, not your combined income if you file separately.

But again, just remember this, a lot of people don't think about this.

Yes, that's great.

It cuts down on the monthly payment.

But again, that mountain is still growing because the interest is still going up.

So you might think you're making a great short term decision because you're cutting back on the amount you have to pay every month.

But what you don't think about is in the long term, that mountain is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

And like I said, I've worked with clients in this very issue.

I actually have one I'm thinking of right now.

I don't want to share their specific information, but he actually had a more interesting situation where he went into a field where if he would work in a particular field for 10 years, after 10 years, they actually forgave all his student loans.

So for the past 10 years, we filed separately him and his wife because he didn't want to have to make payments during that time because the payments would have been wasted.

Because at certain point, after working in his field for 10 years, it's a beautiful situation, actually working in his field for 10 years, the student loans were wiped out.

They're gone.

So in his particular case, that mountain that I talked about, that interest growing was irrelevant.

So for us, we filed it separately every year.

It kept his income under a certain threshold.

He didn't even have to make payments because by the time we added his children, his dependents on here, he didn't have to make any payments at all.

And for him, he's just pushing the stone uphill.

But at some point that stone got crushed because it got written off.

But the real question here is, does the loan savings outweigh the tax increase?

I'll give you an example.

One couple saved $9,332 a year filing separately.

At the same time, I've worked with other clients that have lost $1,000.

There's no universal right answer.

You've got to run the numbers before you file.

This is one of those times where don't try to do this yourself.

Go hire a professional accountant.

Go hire somebody that knows what they're doing because you got to run the numbers and make sure it makes sense for you.

Another thing you can do, and we'll put a link to this in the show notes, is you can use the Federal Student Aid Loan simulator that's@studentaid.gov and then you can compare the tax differences.

But this isn't a time to guess.

And our scripture verse here that I found was from the Book of Amos.

This is one I use a lot when I counsel married couples.

And it's Amos 3.

3 Says, do two walk together unless they have agreed to do so.

The thing is you've got to come to agreement.

You got to understand the numbers and stop guessing at them.

But here's a great.

We have a little bit of a follow up on this one.

We actually found right from the student loan planner, there's an article called Married Filing Separately for Student Loans.

We'll put a link to that in the show notes.

And this question comes up more than people realize.

So I want to dig into some actual research because the answer is not as simple as most people think.

A lot of people think.

And like I said, I've dealt with situations where it made sense.

I've dealt with situations where it doesn't make sense.

But here's the problem.

When you file separately, and a lot of people don't know this, there are tax credits that are tied to filing jointly.

If you file separately, you, you lose those credits and depending upon your situation could be child tax credits, it could be education credits, it could be rental property losses.

All of those things, if you choose to file separately, will go away.

Or they could be limited.

So you've got to make the decision not in isolation, but looking at the whole picture.

When I sit down with tax clients, husband and wife is a very common scenario.

I have software that'll run all the different scenarios at the same time.

Sometimes it works out better, sometimes it doesn't.

I would say I probably do 500 individual tax returns a year.

Of those 500, probably five out of 500 benefit from a financial standpoint on filing returns separately.

Now, there could be other reasons like I talked about, I got that client that's a.

Well, he's not a client anymore.

But I had clients that were doing, we'll call it inappropriate things and the spouse didn't want to be involved with that.

But generally it's unusual for it to work.

And you also have to think about the long term effectiveness that one decision could affect the rest of the years.

So here's some key findings we found in this report.

Filing separately does mean that those identified payments are based on the income of only one person.

So that could lower your payment.

But again, understand the interest is still accruing, it's still growing.

You're just adding it to bigger.

It also means that you lose the student loan interest deduction.

So that could be part of this too.

You could lose part of your earned income tax credit and part of the dependent care credit.

Here's another thing a lot of people don't tell you.

You can amend a joint return, but you can't amend joint to separate.

That's an important thing.

So you can amend a return to joint.

Like if for some reason you decide to file a joint tax return and let's say later you find out it would have been better to file separately, you can do that, but you can't amend joint to separate.

I think I may have just messed that up.

Let me rephrase that.

You can amend separate returns.

Let me rephrase it because I just totally fouled that up.

I wasn't losing my mind today.

Here's the deal.

If you file separate returns, let's say you and your husband decide we're going to file separate returns.

But it works out that it didn't make sense to file separate returns.

You can amend the separates to make them joint.

You just can't do it the other way around.

So here's some quotes right from that article.

This is right from the student loan planner.

If you file jointly, your payment is going to be based on joint income no matter what.

So if you want your payment based solely on your income, the most recent return on file must be separate.

So that's what it's telling you.

But again, I probably said this 15 times already, but don't lose sight of the fact that you're still going to pay that.

Now, unless you have that sweet deal like my client had.

There are physicians, there are nurses that have the same deal.

If you work in your field for a certain number of years, they actually will forgive those student loans.

In that case, that's probably a good thing to do.

Here's another thing it said in the article.

It says if filing separately costs you less in taxes than what you save in student loan payments, you've got the green light again.

Remember who's writing this.

They like the fact that you're paying them interest.

There's another thing it says in here.

You can flip flop from year to year.

The IRS doesn't care.

It's just what makes sense for you to do now, this year.

So again, it depends on your situation.

Go hire somebody, go pay a little bit of money and make sure it's the right thing for your situation.

So here's my take on this whole situation.

Your wife isn't wrong, but you've got to work together on this.

If you don't have all the numbers yet, make sure you get those and fix it before you file, not after.

Don't just do what everyone else does.

Think through it and decide on this together.

Okay, so now that we've kind of Closed out.

I'm just going to check the room here.

If you see me looking aside, it just, I want to see if there's anybody that wanted to ask a question.

The whole point of this show was really to get people to come and ask questions.

That's why I'm here.

My goal is to help you with whatever financial situation you're going through.

And like I said, I'm going to be here every Friday at 1pm on Clubhouse, on YouTube, on Facebook and LinkedIn.

If you've got a question, you can throw it in the chat.

If you want to send me something, go right to our website.

That's financially confidentchristian.com question.

Hey, and if you want to, you can actually leave me a voicemail.

You can go to financiallyconfidentchristian.com voicemail.

All of these things.

Bring up a couple of things.

Let's talk with the first one, the nursing it.

If you're in survival mode and the nurse was really in survival mode, find one program you haven't tried, whether that's the food bank, wic, employee assistance.

Just find one thing and let's talk about the other person.

If you feel behind, take $1 of wiggle room and move it somewhere.

Build that emergency fund.

Like I said, check in with your company about the 401.

Make sure you're not leaving that $100 on the sidewalk.

Think about that debt.

Just make $1 in one direction.

And if you're filing taxes next year, we're too far too past tax season now.

But run the numbers.

Meet with somebody that's a professional.

Don't go on to online site or go look at TikTok or YouTube and just say wow or Reddit.

I'm gonna go figure out what it says on there.

Run the numbers.

Talk to a professional.

Don't guess.

Know where you act before you act.

Just one step.

You're not failing.

That's the thing that the common thread that goes through all these questions today.

You're not failing.

You're surviving.

You're starting and you're deciding.

That's movement.

And if you want more of these type of situations, these type of questions, I answer these every day on my daily show.

The best way to get to that is go to financiallyconfidentchristian.com Again, that's financiallyconfidentchristian.com and like I said earlier, if you want a copy of of my faithful money framework, we talked about that a lot on the last show.

So you go check that out in our show feed or you can join our Patreon community.

You can get it absolutely free.

It's at financiallyconfidentchristian.com FCCLive Again, that's financiallyconfidentchristian.com FCCLive Same time next Friday.

But how about we pray as we close out today?

Lord, I just want to thank you for these people with the questions today.

Thank you for their honesty about where they really are.

Lord, you feel the shame.

And help them break that shame cycle.

Help them see they're not alone.

And give them one clear next step this very week.

Remind them all that survival is success, starting is courage, and deciding together is love.

And I just ask this in Jesus name.

Amen, friend.

Let me leave you with this.

Your financial situation doesn't define your worth.

It just doesn't.

Your willingness to change, it does.

So I will see you again next week.