Chuck is 40, getting married soon, and currently lives with his retired mother. With a healthy income and a solid amount of savings, he called into “The Ramsey Show” to ask if he should buy a second home so his mom could stay in their current house while he and his future wife move elsewhere.
Hosts Said No Way
Chuck explained that his church elder encouraged him and his fiancée to live alone during their first year of marriage. While Chuck agreed with the advice, he was torn. “Mom doesn’t have anywhere to go,” he said. She’s 67, healthy, and living off about $2,200 a month from her pension and Social Security.
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His plan? Use his $130,000 in cash savings to buy a separate home outright so she could stay put. But that didn’t sit well with personal finance expert Dave Ramsey.
“She’s 67 years old. She’s not 88 years old. She’s not an Alzheimer’s patient,” Ramsey said. “She just needs to have a life. It’d be good for her, be good for you, and it’ll certainly be good for your relationship.”
Instead of buying another house, they told Chuck to help his mom find a nice one-bedroom apartment nearby. If she needed help with rent, so be it.
“You need physical separation and emotional separation,” he said. “You’re 40 years old. You’re just getting married. There’s nothing evil about this.”
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Chuck owns the home in his name and still owes $140,000 on it, so while it’s not paid off, he has significant equity, as it’s worth about $550,000. With a base salary of $150,000 (sometimes hitting $180,000) and his fiancée earning $72,000, the numbers made sense for Ramsey’s alternative: let mom rent, and Chuck and his wife stay in the house.
“We love each other at a distance,” Ramsey joked, making it clear he wouldn’t be moving in with his own kids anytime soon. “The only chance I move in with them is in an urn on the mantle.”
Ramsey emphasized that this isn’t about being unloving. “You’re a good man,” he told Chuck. “You’ve done a good job taking care of your mom. She’s only 67. It’d be awesome if she went and had a thing called a life.”
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For people like Chuck, who are juggling financial planning, marriage, caregiving, and big life transitions, a service like Domain Money is a smart next step. It offers free strategy sessions with certified professionals, tailored for households earning $100,000 or more a year.
At the end of the call, Ramsey was straightforward. If Chuck’s fiancée had called in and said her future husband planned for his mom to move back in after a year, he’d call it a “hard pass.” He said he would tell her not to marry him if that was the plan.
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