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Doug is in Milwaukee. Hi, Doug. Welcome to the Ramsey Show.

Hi, Dave and George. It's a pleasure and I'm to speak with both of you.

You too. What's up?

Hey, just wanting to confirm what I think you would say, but I'm approaching 65.

I still want to work past my 65th birthday.

I recently became unemployed, so I'm job seeking.

But I have a small 401K from my last job, only about 25,000.

And I wondered if it would be wise to cash that out and pay off consumer debt of about 20,000.

Well, obviously, you're not going to have penalty on it, but you will have taxes on it.

What concerns me is what that leaves us with, which is nothing, and you're 65 years old.

Yeah.

So, I mean, obviously what you would love to have is a big old pile of savings and no debt right

correct you know and so uh how how can we best get there and then how do we use this money to do

that um i would prefer to leave it alone almost as a symbolic act that i'm going to add a bunch

to my retirement as soon as I

can get reemployed and clear this 20,000.

But in a worst case scenario, I would clear it.

I would use the money and clear the debt.

But I think you need to have the mindset of I got to get this debt cleared quickly so that I can

quickly add to my retirement

nest egg because you need to be doing both agreed agreed yeah so what were you making

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