Matt Ragland's family rented out their Nashville home and lived in a tiny apartment for five months while his wife did travel nursing. They eliminated $20,000 in debt, cut monthly payments by $1,200 to $1,500, and paid off their car by choosing minimalism over comfort.
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Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to our apartment. I haven't really talked about this. I haven't done many videos here. I haven't done much here, but this is where we've been living for the past 5 months. And to be honest, I've been a little ashamed of it, and so That's why I haven't done anything here. You haven't really seen any videos. A couple of, couple of clips, couple of things here and there, but it's not something that, not something that I've wanted to show you because I've been a little ashamed by it. So that's why I want to tell you why I'm here. I want to tell you what I think about when I think about living here and the experience of it all and what you can learn from it as well, because I came here with a very specific purpose. We came here as a family to do something very specific, and it's been quite a sacrifice to do all of those things. It's taught me a very important lesson, and it's allowed us to reach a very important goal for us as a family. So let me show you around a little bit. All right, so this place is super small. Maybe not like the smallest place. It's not the smallest place we've ever lived. Kind of the grossest. Which sucks. Let me show you around, okay? And in here we have our bedroom. Small, efficient. By the way, these walls are cinder block. So not very, not very homey. They really make the place feel like an oven, especially because there's no air conditioning. We've actually been sleeping on an air mattress, a very nice one, highly recommended. Serta. It's nice, but we've been sleeping on it for 5 months. Clothes and personal items here. It's kind of messy, but I'll show it to you anyway. Won't show you my wife's. Bathroom. It's a small bathroom. Storage randomness. Sorry about the dishes. So that's it. We have— oh, and this is the only air conditioning for the whole place. So why be here at all? We've got a beautiful house in Nashville. It's 2,000 square feet. It's got 3 3 bedrooms, I've got an office there. Why be here when you have that? We came here with a very specific goal. I'm going to tell you about the goal first. My wife is a nurse and she wanted to do a travel nursing assignment so that she could make more money, we could see a new city, and most importantly, we could pay down a lot of her student debt. So that was the number 1 goal. I achieved most of that goal, like a huge chunk, a life-changing chunk of that goal. Has been achieved by coming here, by being in this uncomfortable place, uncomfortable situation. You know, I don't know if you noticed, but like we don't have a table here. I forgot to bring that up. We don't have chairs. We have one chair in my son's room. We've put ourselves in an uncomfortable situation. Now, could it have been more comfortable than it ended up being? We only planned on being here for 2 months at the start. Now it's been 5 months. So things that weren't so bad at 2 months are becoming becoming a lot more frustrating at 5 months. So there are ways, and looking back, maybe I would have stayed in a place that maybe cost a little bit more but was a lot more comfortable. That's totally on us. I'm not complaining about the air mattress. I'm not complaining about the lack of dining room table and chairs. I'm not complaining about the lack of a dishwasher because I chose— we chose all of this as a family. It is kind of a gross place, I'll say. Kill a cockroach pretty much every day. Every day I do that, but that's okay. This is something that I chose, this is something that we chose as a family because there was something that we wanted to do together and this was the leverage point. This was the thing that we could do because at the same time we put our house on Airbnb, we put our house, we've been renting it now to someone for the past 3 months, it'll end up being 4 months. So we're making money on the house, we're saving money on this apartment, and my wife's making a lot more money as a nurse. So all of those things tiered and stacked on on top of each other just makes it easier to achieve the goals that you set. We will have paid off $20,000 in personal credit card, car, student loan debt. $1,200 to $1,500 per month that we were paying, that is gone. Our car, paid off. My— the rest of my student loans, gone. All of those things that were stacking on top of each other and making it kind of hard to even be in Nashville, to be in this house that we had, all of that's gone. Now we still have a good chunk of student debt left, $200 to $300 a month cuts— those aren't cuts, those are kind of gashes— all of those are gone. Being in this place, being uncomfortable for a little while— we're coming down to the end, this is like, this is our last week of being here— being uncomfortable for a little while allowed us to do that a lot faster than if we had just tried to stay in the same routine that we were in. The last thing that I want to tell you about what the biggest lesson and one of the biggest takeaways from me for this time that we've been uncomfortable, but we've still achieved a lot of goals. Let's say, can you be uncomfortable even if you aren't achieving really great goals? That's the big takeaway, because I've been thinking a lot about simplicity and minimalism and been reading some Stoicism and thinking about that also in the context of Christianity and, you know, how Jesus teaches that, you know, I will provide everything for you. Do you really trust that? Do you really think about that? Because I think a lot of times I don't. Believe that, like, in my practical life. Tim Ferriss has talked about this with stoicism, you know, the simplest of food, the coarsest of dress. Is that okay for you? Is this the worst that I fear? This pretty much is the worst. I'm killing cockroaches every day. There's no AC. It's very tight. We don't really have things. It's funny, we sleep on an air mattress, but there's a $300 Vitamix and a $300 juicer in the kitchen. We don't really have things. And this place kind of sucks. We're okay. We're okay. If everything fell apart and we had to move into a place like this, not for goals but for real because things are bad, done it before. Done it before. We can sell a lot of things. We can have very few things. Sell the Vitamix and the juicer. We can be okay. Like, this 5 months has taught me that. And the next, the next month we're gonna be staying with friends, we're gonna be staying with family. We don't get back into our house until September. So it's 6 months of living out of boxes, and not in like the moving sense where it's just like, oh, I gotta go to this other box, but can be okay. And so I encourage you to think about What do you need to be okay? How low can you go and still be okay? Because when you think about what that is, that also provides you with a really good baseline for knowing what you're able to do to get to the things that you want, to reach the goals that you have. Something to think about. It's the biggest lesson that I'm taking away from this. Thanks for looking through my version of Cribs. It was actually kind of fun to show off. Everything for you. I would love for you to subscribe to this. Click the subscribe button, tell a friend about it. Tell me something that you are doing to reach a goal or to learn more about what you need to be happy, what you need to survive. Leave that in the comments. So leave a comment, subscribe, hit subscribe first. It really helps, like, share these videos. It really helps rank better. And so I would really appreciate that. Thanks so much for your support, and I look forward to talking with you next time. Bye.
