This is the Ramsey Call of the Day, part of the Ramsey Network.

Joining me today is Ramsey personality, Rachel Cruz.

Dakota is with us to start this hour in San Antonio.

Hi, Dakota.

How are you?

Hi, I'm good. Thank you so much for taking my call. Sure. What's up? So I wanted to see if I could get a little bit of guidance from y'all.

I live with my boyfriend and we have a baby together, but we do not have our finances combined. I bring debt into our

relationships. He does not have any debt. So I'm currently working on the baby steps using the

snowball and have been trying to knock that out. But we do have quite a few shared finances. Um, like we pay for my 50 50 for my daughter's

daycare, 50 50 for rent, groceries, all that stuff. So we're constantly like binmoing or writing

each other checks or things like that to reimburse. And so I was just going to see, do you recommend

continuing to keep our finances

separate until I knock out the rest of my debt, or should we go ahead and combine them to

make our everyday expenses easier? So Dakota, why don't you just get married?

Because I have a lot of guilt about having the debt, and I want to knock it out before we get married.

So you're waiting for marriage to pay off your debt?

Yes.

Okay.

I would encourage you.

I would not wait.

I wouldn't wait.

And I would encourage people who want to get married, not to, they don't have to wait.

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