25 Minutes of People Making Bad Financial Decisions in 2026

Welcome back to today's episode. Today we're going to be going over a good amount of people being financially illiterate. It's sad, but everybody knows, everybody knows that this is the truth nowadays. And so I guess let's get into it.

Home today, and because of the price point being $900,000, they're really wanting a pre-approval, um, or they'll take a pre-qualification letter. To show it, but I need to finish your loan application. Okay, let's, let's start here income-wise. What is it that you receive over there? 9 or 90? $9 an hour. What about, what about your wife?

Does she—

$11 an hour. Okay.

Okay, chat, let's, let's add this up in the comments section. What would that make their total income per year? I did real estate for a little while, and this is something that we genuinely ran into pretty often. Um, it's unfortunate, it's sad, but people have this massive expectation of what they can afford and what they want in a home. And it's just the harsh reality, the harsh truth of being an adult in the United States of America in 2026. Like you have to be making more than that. And so what people would do in my situation, they would come up to me and be like, hey, I want this, this, and this. I want a pool. I want a massive backyard. I want turf in the backyard. I want it to be two-story. I want it to be mid-century modern. I want to be built before 1955 in pristine condition on 10 acres and all this stuff. And I'm like, okay, cool. Um, we can go and look at this stuff and I'll put together a list for you. Actually, we're not going to go look at it. We're not going to go look at it. We're, we're gonna— I'm gonna send you a list of the, the criteria that you have sent me and we're gonna see what the budget and the price range is on these. It is flabbergasting. We end up every single time going all the way back to like, okay, maybe their expectation list cost $800,000 in this market when in reality they can only afford $100,000. It's crazy. It's very humbling too if you've ever gone through that experience.

This, this is gonna be a little bit of an issue. So the thing is, with, with those two incomes, it's going to be less than what the mortgage is every month.

This. Yeah, it's a sad time. It's a sad time to go through this. Um, let's see this comment. Just because the bank approves you for $400K does not mean you should buy or can afford a $400,000 house. 100%. That's one thing. Whenever we were going to get approved for our home loan that we currently live in, they were like, okay, you can get technically up to like $500,000 of a loan. But here's the thing, can you afford the monthly payment, or do you want to be locked into something like that? So we literally cut that in half because we're like, okay, what does a monthly payment look like, and can we actually, um, can we actually afford something like this? Here's some more comments here. Well, maybe we'll just move on to the next video here. How about that?

Related, if it's not going through, you're trying to make a transaction of $1,453, but the account balance is only $400. $35.27. So you are not able to make this transaction. The previous representatives let you know that the balance is not sufficient to purchase this, so you ask to be transferred to the fraud department because you feel that it's fraud, that the transaction is not going through, but that is not the Okay, so they're, they're calling the bank because they think the bank is committing fraud on them whenever they're trying to make a $1,400 purchase.

That is, that is comical. I couldn't imagine having that sort of job, like where people call and they, they basically They just are financially idiotic sometimes. Okay, let's go to this next video here.

And though I'm broke, I'm in desperate need of some retail therapy, so we're gonna do a retail therapy.

Let's go! No budget shopping.

Okay, I thought I would spend more in there, so I'm not mad at $92. I'm gonna go find Ulta. I know it's somewhere around here. My car is not happy right now. Okay, next stop is Ulta.

$192. That's, that's a little bit much just for a random shopping— my shopping. Okay, it's dark now. It's dark now.

Cut short because I've been having some car issues the last couple hours. We're gonna have to figure that out before we hit up the Coachella.

Okay, now at this point I just want you to, to realize that we have been to Sephora and probably multiple other places, and now we are back in our car. It's nighttime now, so it's been a few hours. Like, it's— there's been some time here, and now we're back in our car. It is nighttime and it's not starting.

I wonder if she's—

I wonder if she's married. Like, I'm genuinely curious.

That's my plan.

So I guess she is.

Anyways, I figured it out. I just got a new car.

Okay, okay. She walked away with a brand new car. I can't imagine if I was like, okay, to my wife, like, it's okay, you can go shopping, like maybe spend like less than $100 or a couple hundred bucks, or if you have some cash, just use that. But if my wife told me like, hey, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go shopping because I need to blow off some steam or whatever, get the dopamine hit, whatever. And she comes back with a car. A brand new car, I might be a little bit confused and frustrated, to be honest with you.

Called to talk about it today, and if money makes you uncomfortable, just scroll right past. But I think that we are in a society where we don't even know what it is like to live within our means. Like, we don't even know what our means are. We don't know what our thresholds are because we've never done the work to try to figure that out.

I think that whether you are making A little bit of Dave Ramsey action can help you out here.

$250,000, I think that you are likely still living outside of your means because we don't know what it's like. We all believe that we can afford a $50,000 car, we can afford a $10 coffee every single day. I think our grandparents would be rolling over in our graves knowing how much we spend on a day-to-day basis. And I think that's why I agree. I'm 32. Swimming in debt. They have no idea what it's like to live within their means. They're swimming.

You know what's profiting off of all of these, um, these people is the banks. It's the banks. This comment says, this is why I believe it should be mandatory for parents and schools to provide lessons in financial literacy. The amount of unnecessary debt worldwide is insane. I completely agree with that statement. It's sad and like we've all fallen guilty to it. Like these credit card companies are super good at hooking you in with like promotional deals and like, hey, if you sign up today and you send this to a friend or if you sign up an account today, we'll give you $500. I've done that before. And then that $500 gets spent, and then we end up putting way too much on it because the newest iPhone came out, or the newest bag came out, or new shoes, or like whatever. And then you look up and you're $5,000, $10,000 in debt on top of your student loan debt whenever you're only making $50K a year. That's where you get stuck in these companies. These credit card companies are charging 30% interest right now, which I hope there's a change to that pretty freaking soon because it's really just a scam. Like, is it actually the American dream? Is it actually the American dream to buy a house, to go to college? Like, I don't know. Let me know in the comments. What do you think?

Are $4,000. Where's my money actually going? Like, where is it literally going?

I should not be struggling.

I just sat down and looked at all my bills.

This depends on— okay, so she's basically saying, hey, I have $4,000 of monthly income and it has all gone by the end of the month. It's because you don't look at your bank statements. Unfortunately, there are tools out there, by the way. The other day— and, and I run a business, so I do this for the business and guys, guys, guys, guys, I don't have it all figured out. Don't, don't take this as like official, like this is just what I do. And so for our business, as an example, I run a media company. We, I have taken all of my bank statements before and I have used Claude to analyze everything and act as a CFO. You can do the same thing with ChatGPT. And I've had it do it for the business and I've had it do it for my personal finances as well. And so boom, you have literally a once in a lifetime opportunity that has never happened before to have an artificial intelligent assistant look over and they don't miss things. Typically they used to now like a year and a half ago, 2 years ago. They, they would miss things, but they hardly ever miss things now, especially when it comes to numbers and math. And so literally just do that, upload all your information, give it your data, and say, hey, I need you to act as a top 1% CFO, and then build a Google Sheet to go and organize all of this information for me. How can you make a 6-figure salary and not have any savings? It's easy, man. It's easy. So one thing that I have realized the more that I'm in business, it doesn't really matter how much money that you make. It matters what you do with the money. So you can, you can literally make $1 million a year and If you are stupid with what you do with that money, you're going to have the same amount of money as everybody else, which you're going to still be living paycheck to paycheck because you have 2 Lamborghinis that you're trying to pay off. You have a $400,000, $500,000 home that you're trying to pay off. And so your mortgage is $8,000, $9,000 a month. Like, it's ridiculous. And so definitely try to go and either use an app— like, this is not sponsored, these are just things that I've done— Claude. ChatGPT is fine too. And Rocket Money is a good app. There's lots of other finance apps, but like, use these tools that are accessible. Because you think about our grandparents did not have access to these tools, and they figured it out by hand. They did it. We have become so lazy that even with the best tools You still aren't using them. So go use them.

Who make $150,000 a year to $200,000 a year are living paycheck to paycheck.

Okay, let's, um, we need to watch, we need to watch that one again really quickly.

There you go. A recent study came out that 47% of Americans who make $150,000 a year to $200,000 a year are living paycheck paycheck to paycheck. Now some of you are thinking, how in the crap does that happen? If I was making $200,000 overconsumption, living above your means, just proves the point, you guys. That's so much of personal finance. It's your behavior, it's your habits. I mean, lifestyle creep, it's a real thing. When you're used to living at $100 grand and then you make $120, you get used to that, and then you get used to $140, and it keeps going up regardless.

Do marketing companies have gotten ridiculously good? At this exact thing. Like, it's kind of ridiculous how good the marketing has gotten because they make you feel like you have to buy this thing. Like, you have to buy the newest iPhone every single year. And now Apple has come out with a new leasing program, which I don't know what I think about that yet. Like, you're— we're not owning anything anymore. So that kind of freaks me out that literally our entire lives are going to be subscription-based. And so we are going to be trapped and we're never going to be able to pay off anything. That's what that means.

Ask me why am I half a million dollars in debt. It's because I went to half a million.

What did you do to become a half a million dollars in debt? Like, even the most expensive private schools on the planet. Like, that's crazy. You mix that, maybe she has like a $500,000 like mortgage or something crazy.

So that's when my debt journey started, just like a lot of us. Why would you give me that much money? I took out $40,000 worth of student loans.

Okay, there's student loans, check.

Everybody has those nowadays. Towards it every month, a drop in the bucket. When I was in college, I also started getting credit cards.

Okay, credit cards and college students. What kind of sick people do you have to be to give a credit line of $5,000 to a college kid who has zero income? If you're in college, bro, if you got a credit card, if you have a credit card, Don't spend more than $100. Like, if you spend $100, do it on gas and then pay it off like at the end of the month. This is basic, basic stuff.

So that's where my credit card journey started. I probably have about $27,000 worth of credit card debt right now. And I was—

okay, $27,000 of credit card debt. I think the average, depending on your credit score, interest rates is anywhere from like 25 to like 30. I've seen 32%. Let me know what was the highest credit card interest that you've ever seen. But like, that's crazy. Like, do you know what that means? That means for every $100 that you spend, you're going to be paying back $130 by the end of the year. So now multiply that by 27. Like, it's crazy. And it sucks. Like, I've been in these situations before too. And it is— it's not fun. Because like we ended up going and making like some settlements with some credit card companies, which is cool, but it dings your credit. Just stay out of that situation if you can, because literally like we were at a point personally where we were, I think it was like we had a card like at $10,000. And this was just like life expenses over the course of 2 years and having a baby and not being able to pay it back for a little while. But the interest was about 30% on this card. And so we would make a payment of $1,000. That's a good chunk, you know, $1,000 of extra money that you didn't need for that month. And they would charge us interest in $800 for the next month, like ridiculous. Like, how are you supposed to get out of that, bro? Yeah, it's just—

it's so hard paying it off at one point. I really was. I was trying my best. I was budgeting, I was putting, you know, $1,000 towards it every month. Once you get into credit card debt, it's literally so hard to get out because of the interest rates. I took out a personal loan to consolidate two of my credit cards. So at this point, I think I had maybe like $6,500 left on that. So that kind of worked, but the system is really set up for you never to get out. And at this point, it's hard for me to care about credit card debt when AI is taking over and we about to go to war. I also had two mortgages, one of my houses, so that I can make a profit and pay off some of my debt. But I had put thousands of dollars towards it right now.

That's kind of a smart move, not gonna lie.

For like 3 weeks. And you're trying to—

okay, that's, um, I never— I guess paying— the issue is paying 2 mortgages at the same time is like in insane before you have a chance to— like, that, that moment in time is very hard. Let's just say that first things first, I bought $100,000 worth of Bitcoin. I spent $14,000 on my rent for my condo. $100K on Bitcoin? Hold on a second. Yeah, I've been thinking about— I've been, I've been kind of studying some trading stuff, some crypto trading. That stuff is wild. The idea of trading Bitcoin, the reason it's wild is because it is so volatile. And it is strictly based off of like, there's, there's no like real businesses behind it or like decision makers. It's just like what the world thinks that it's worth decides the market value. And we're probably going to move towards it one day. And, and I could look back in 10 years and be like, bro, I should have invested. But it's still risky. Like, I remember back in high school I think the, the price of Bitcoin was probably like at $5,000, and I had bought like $400 or $500 worth somehow, for some reason. It was— and then it like, there was a massive spike, and then it came straight down. And so I saw how volatile it was, and literally within like one day, everything could completely change for the better, for the worse. And I decided, you know, this is a little bit— this is a little bit too risky for my life. I have 3 cars, so I paid 3 car notes. Maybe those were bad. Okay, McLaren is $3,000 a month and my G-Wagon is another $3,000 a month. Obviously I got to insure the cars. My insurance is $1,800 a month. Okay, let's, let's break this down. $14,000 in rent, $3,000 mortgage, $4,500 from a McLaren 720. I don't Yeah, that shows you what tax bracket I'm in. I don't even know what kind of car that is. I know what a McLaren is, guys. Chill out. I know what a McLaren is. Okay, so he has a McLaren and an Escalade and a G63. Yo, that's— credit card bill this month was $8,400. I didn't really pay too much, and then I took one— okay, so he obviously has $8,400 in credit card debt. The amount of waste in this budget goes back to what I was saying earlier. It gets crazy. One of my friends to take courtside, that was $4,500. And then I took another group of my friends to go to dinner at one of my favorite restaurants, pay for everybody, and that was $2,800. $2,800 dinner.

Wow.

For taxes. Now I'm broke. Okay, so a $200,000 month. To be fair, he is investing some of that, which I'm thankful for. I really am. I'm, I'm grateful that he's at least doing that. Let's go to the next video here. We'll be broke.

So we bought a house that we could not afford.

Story of everybody's life.

And I don't mean like tight budget afford. I mean we had no idea what it actually cost every month. $700,000 in Los Angeles County.

Hey, it's probably like a 2-bed, 1-bath, 750 square feet. That's— let's see what she says.

For 27, we saved the down payment, we signed everything. We thought that was the hard part.

You could just move to Texas immediately.

I'm a teacher and my husband is literally an accountant, and we are still figuring out how to pay off this house. This is that story, and I'm telling everything.

Okay, so you have— Okay, so we got an accountant. This— I don't know why you don't have a hold on this. I'm just surprised at the amount of people that film themselves saying the most embarrassing things ever and broadcasting it to the world. Well, that happens a lot. I'm just saying that happens a lot more than you expect. It happens a lot.

It's gonna be a problem. Like, I know I'm out of control with spending. Yep. My impulse buy.

Impulse buying.

I can go to Target and spend $600, then take it all home and regret all of it.

Then return it.

But I don't.

Okay.

So then I just am negative $600 for going to Target.

And how much is this loan that you took out that he doesn't know?

16,000.

$6,000. Why are we doing that without his knowledge?

I don't—

he thought you were pulling from an emergency fund. Not that that's even better, but what kind of lifestyle are you guys living? Champagne taste on a beer budget, seems like. Dude, that's a hilarious way to put it. Champagne taste on a beer budget. That's hilarious. I need, I need to, I need to save that one.

Americans falling behind on their credit card pay payments. So this is an analysis from two groups, the Century Foundation and Protect Borrowers, and what it shows is that 111 million Americans— so that's about 40% of all U.S. adults— are carrying a balance every month on their credit card. So they are not paying off those bills in full. Of that, more than 27 million Americans can only afford to make minimum payments every month. And what is also sobering is that a growing share of families are maxing out their credit cards, opening new accounts, or then turning to other high-cost, potentially high-cost options like payday loans or buy now pay later. Now I know—

what do you— let me know in the chat, what do you think this is from? Is it inflation? Is it just greedy banks? Financial advice. What do y'all think? Because it's easier to make more money than to pinch pennies. If you only have $20,000— yo, dude, yeah, totally, totally— blow it on your dream car, blow it on your dream vacation. If you just blow money like crazy, like it doesn't matter, then you have a taste. Then you have a taste of what it's like to spend money. You're gonna feel incredible. You get a taste and then you lose it. Once you taste how good it can be, to have unlimited freedom, all the things you've dreamt of, you're gonna work 10 times harder to get those things. Okay, so yeah, just put yourself in a hole, bro. Put yourself in a hole. Spend all your money. This is just straight up freaking bad advice. Like, don't listen. Don't listen to that one. If any of these videos you listen to, don't, don't let it be that one.

Having a little bit of buyer's remorse with the Nissan. I love it. I just spent a lot of money yesterday tinting it because in the back of my head I knew that I probably wasn't going to keep it long, but I was just trying to make myself like, like it more, I guess. Go and look at the Ford Expedition Maxes.

Growing up in the Ford Expedition Max.

Tinted right now so that we can hurry up and pack it up, and then we're gonna be leaving.

Disney day. First of all, Disney is ridiculously expensive.

Thanks, babe.

There she is.

2 or 3 more duffel bags to stuff in here. Darmato would have never— I think that we are Disney ready.

So right, you know what's funny is you can do that with any other car. Like, you don't need the most expensive vehicle. All right, guys, that's been 25 minutes of solid financial illiteracy. And, and it's sad because there are lots of people going broke, there's lots of people living above their means. Everyone's fallen guilty of it, but just take notes, don't be like these people, and we'll see you in the next video. Peace.