r/DaveRamsey

My husband and I are 25 & 27 and have upward projecting jobs.

We own our home, and we make ~$150,000/year gross. Take home is around $110,000, so we have been able to save about $2000-$3000 a month. We have about $66,000 in savings and $10,000 in 401k.

Should we buy a car outright for $17,000? That’d leave us about $49,000 in savings. I’m stumped because we have 2 cars, but they are both too small for a growing family. I’d like to keep both of these cars because they are paid off and get good gas mileage, but I’m having a hard time pulling the money out of my account for a new car! I’ve never made this large of a purchase. Financing is kind of a no go I think because the interest doesnt make sense. Thanks

Edit: okay yeah you guys are right I don’t need a third car. Yes I also know I don’t NEED a super large car right now, but it will sure be nice to have the space to grow.

Hey everyone, I am a guy in my later 20s and am sort of between steps 3b and 7. Like, I have no debt, 4 months of savings, and am putting money into retirement. But I am also trying (heavy emphasis on trying) to save for a house someday. I have 25k saved up so far and its slowly growing. I make 68k a year and looking to by a cheap 350k home, so I would need a 150k to 200k downpayment to make the payments 25%. Been saving 750 a month for a downpayment.

Daves plan states to save for a house you pause retirement while you do so, but if after 2 years you dont have enough, then you can start contributing again. See, this is where I am confused. I already did that from 2021-2023. Should I pause again for 2 years? or should I keep contributing?

I have asked the facebook group and they all say that I need to go back to 3b for a few years before I start contributing again.

My husband and I (no kids, 40s) bought a house 1 year ago. We rented a long time before that and did really like our rental. One in a million type of good landlord. Newer construction SFH. Really nice. Low rent. Close to everything. No CC debt, no car payments, still had student loans, 5 month EF. I had been having moderate orthopedic health issues for about a year and was not working at the time. Besides tackling the SL’s, monthly budget was ‘good.’ One income was fine. We were Davish. I know we shouldn’t have bought the house with SL’s.

We bought the house in a rural town about 40 minutes away. Close to family. While our offer was contingent on inspection I wanted to back out bc I knew the timing wasn’t right and I didn’t want to be far away from everything including my husband’s job. The inspection had enough to give us an out and I begged him to back out. Husband wanted the house so we got it anyway. Pressure from others to buy it as well. Mortgage more than our rent and I was afraid of the increase and repairs/maintenance since I wasn’t working and I didn’t know when I was going back to work. I didn’t want the extra stress. I came to my senses too late I guess so I’m just as much to blame but now I already hated this house before I even moved in. I cried on moving day. I knew it was a mistake. I was scared. My gut reaction was right.

One month after moving I had to have a major orthopedic surgery. I had major complications from the surgery (not surgeon’s fault) and long story short my life is forever changed. Chances are low that I’ll ever return to work. At least never full time again for sure. Most of my constant medical/PT appointments are now 40 minutes away every week. Some doctors are 2.5 hours away where I had the surgery. I’ll need to be in PT for life to manage and exercise in a pool. All 40 minutes away.

This house has killed our finances. Major repairs. Increased monthly expenses. We now have $16k in CC debt. Lower savings. Barely any margin in our month due to medical bills and endless medical bills coming and repairs/maintenance. We are not able to pay off any debt. Within the next year or 2 the roof will need replaced (not leaking yet) and the HVAC is 30 years old. Ticking time bomb.

We want to sell and go back to our rental when one becomes available. If we live in the rental we can pay off debt, including SL’s and comfortably live on one income again, close to the medical facilities that I need now and in the future. Hopefully I’ll be able to work in some capacity again. It won’t be for a couple years at least. We need this weight off of us. See how everything pans out health wise. Eventually buy again in the future once life has stabilized, baby steps have been accomplished and buy correctly.

House appraised at $250k, purchased $250k VA loan $0 down. So almost no equity after 1 year. Extremely low inventory in this town and it’s a great house in a desirable neighborhood. I would be ok with taking a $5k loss at the closing table bc otherwise I know we will be on the hook in a few years for a roof/hvac. I’d rather cut my losses now.

Would you sell now and take the loss or wait a few years and gain a little equity to break even/tiny profit but risk the roof and hvac replacement? I also weigh heavily the importance of being close to medical facilities - within 5-10 minutes of rental home.

Please don’t beat me up about buying the house. I already know it was mistake and I’m in the lowest spot of my life right now.

My wife and I just had twins. I make $156k, my wife makes $91k. Our mortgage is $2166 @ 6% without escrow (escrow would be $1297 but we pay taxes and insurance ourselves). Mortgage balance is $355k and home value is just over $1.1M. This is our only debt. Problem is they are about to start daycare and it’s going to be $4500/month. Utility bills are also expensive here. We live in MA. Should we just pause aggressively paying off the house for now?

My spouse and I paid off our house today!

On BS2, car loan is the largest remaining debt at $17,400 with a 13.7% rate. I've been throwing everything I can at it but the interest is making it feel slow.

The refinancing option came up and I've been wrestling with whether it counts in the spirit of the plan. The way I'm framing it: the underlying obligation doesn't change. The balance doesn't go up. I'm just reducing the rate on existing debt, which means more of each payment hits principal. The debt goes away faster or cheaper, not slower.

I ran numbers at a few places and the projected savings over the remaining term were substantial enough that I'm having a hard time arguing the "don't touch it, just throw money at it" approach is the better outcome.

I'm curious how others in the community think through this tension.

I feel insane. Post tax, my fiance and I make $13k a month together. This is after health insurance but before any 401k savings. We live in NYC, so the rent for our 1 bedroom is high for the country but below market for the area ($4.5k a month with utilities). After that, we’ve got some wedding expenses each month (deposits coming due, alteration costs,, etc.) that for the past few months have run us about $2k a month. That leaves $6.5k a month for everything else.

I don’t think we live extravagantly (couple of dinners out a month, otherwise cook at home, some travel to domestic cities like Boston that we’ve paid towards this spring). And somehow, at the end of every month, we’re saving like $1k. Our last “good” month was March when we saved $2k. I feel ridiculous and have no idea how 2 people in their early 30s are apparently blowing through $5.5k a month. I keep going through our receipts for the month and there’s no hidden mysterious purchases or anything. Everything tallies. But we should be saving more and we’re not. I discovered Dave Ramsey a month ago and am now trying to figure out the baby steps. I feel so embarrassed.

Edit: Updated the flare to BS4. Thank you all for the advice. We’ll build a budget and try to proactively steer the ship instead of just reviewing spending after the fact. The wedding is this June (less than a month now!), so yes, will be excited for that line item to go away. We don’t anticipate any debt from it and otherwise don’t have any debt. No car or car loan. Again, appreciate it and excited to join this community!

It seems like a bunch of people switched to the app and budgeting within their digital funds (bank) rather than cash. Just wondering what we're all doing. I did pick up the RC wallet yesterday because it finally went on sale, but now I'm wondering if I even need it because I've been budgeting within the app/ my bank. I was an avid paper envelope user before the app

hi, we have no debt & wanting to buy a house this year. I am a SAHM & I would love to help with the saving for a house but I have two babies under two & it’s so hard to find anything I can have them with me or work from home. if you’re a SAHM what did you do to help!!

Today my husband and I are officially making the last payment on $167K in consumer and student debt! It took us a bit longer than originally planned (4.25 years) but we cash flowed more than a few emergencies and a couple of babies in that time.

We are excited but I’m a little worried because the last 20K took us almost 10 months when it should have taken 3. We took FPU in 2022 and both of us are “free spirits” and I am just one tick more “nerdy” than he is.

I’m excited to invest again in BS4 but what can I do to make BS3 go fast and not dilly-dally??? All tips welcome!

Just want to get some thoughts here. I did a pretty dumb thing a few weeks ago. Paid about $750k cash for a weekend ranch (30 acres with a house plus a guest house). my financial situation is below

- Net worth $3.5 mil ( $1.8 mil in 3 real estate, one of which is rental, $1.25 mil in retirement accounts, $650k in cash and other investment accounts)
- zero debt

- $750k conservative annual income. It could be over 1mil depending on bonuses.

I want to get some work done on the ranch so I can rent it out occasionally. it’s a want more than a need. I’m panicking a bit that I may be a bit cash/house poor with the new addition. I’m thinking to downsize by getting rid of some toys (specifically a car and a motorcycle ~ $100k worth in total) just to feel “safe” and be ready for worse case scenarios. Use some of it for the repairs and invest the rest is my plan. Both wife and I have relatively stable jobs.

Am I panicking for no reason? I know I have taken a huge responsibility with the ranch purchase. Just trying to make things better.

Thanks

Just what it says (this language is directly from the Total Money Makeover book). She looked at me like a loon and I find out from my sister that she is checking on me because I'm following cult practices. Lol! Anyway, I'm debt-free and happy!

Does your family think you've lost your mind too?

I showed her book and I received a big *eye roll*. Good grief.

My wife and I are on baby steps 5, 6, and 7, or at least we will be next month when we close on our house. Other than our 15 year mortgage, we’re completely debt free with a kid on the way. For context I work a relatively stable government job and usually make somewhere in the $80k range, which fluctuates a bit depending on overtime. We used “gazelle intensity” to pay off any of our debt and to save up the emergency fund and downpayment on our house, now I’m struggling with changing my mindset.

At what point do y’all feel like it’s okay to splurge, assuming we’re actively working towards baby steps 5, 6, and 7, and splurging in cash saved for that purpose? I’d like to eventually buy the four wheeler I’ve been wanting for a long time. I promise it’s not a midlife crisis ;)

How do you deal with seeing everyone around you spending money so freely?

I’m struggling to see others have “all the fancy things” while I know we are paying off debt and building a better future, it’s so damn hard to see others brag about things. Also wondering how the heck they really have that money to spend?

DONE : $1000

Working on debt pay off

DONE: we have also saved that emergency fund due to my husband’s health issues. We already had to use it this year. (3-4 months saved)

I've been a Dave Ramsay fan and been using his methods to get out of debt. this week i applied the debt snowball method on something which i found interesting.

i'm a freelancer who usually deals with 2 or 3 projects at a time. i found I'm effective when I'm focusing on a few tasks only.

at the beginning of this week though when i listed the number of projects i needed to work on i found i had about 11 projects i needed to do. so on Monday i made the decision I'm gonna list all my projects with the task i needed to do for each project with the amount of time i needed for each task. and i listed them smallest to largest (best 1 hour spent)

then i went gazelle intense on the smallest task. (one task was responding to a lengthy email to address some questions the client had)

then after a few days now I'm left with only 2 projects i need to work on.

i don't know if anyone has ever tried to apply this before but i think it's a game changer for me.

Hey!

Long-time lurker. First-time poster!

While researching personal finance, I found Dave Ramsey. My parents are immigrants who did their best, but money management simply wasn't something they could teach me.

I willed my way to a six-figure tech job and was miserable. At my worst, I weighed 400 lbs, was in therapy twice a week, and my therapist was pushing for more intense care and medication. It was bad.

I dropped to 250 and joined the army to work in military mental health. I enjoy it. So much so that I am:

• living on a written budget
• paid off my student loan debt
• have an emergency fund
• doing my masters in public policy (MPP) and will do another masters in Spanish linguistics for free using my state benefits. Team no student loans lol!
• maxing out my TSP/IRA

I spoke with a medical recruiter and don't qualify for the Army's social work program, but I can use my federal benefits to earn my MSW and commission later. My plan is to serve a contract or two, then transition to the VA. A provider at work even recommended I do a doctorate since I like school so much and it is free.

All of this comes from just listening to Dave Ramsey and "live like no one else."

Despite this, my family is negative and hard to communicate with — they think I need to "live more" and say things like "you don't even know if you'll retire." Last night I was talking to my sister, a teacher, who didn't know whether she had a pension, asked me why an IRA mattered, and then asked me for gas money.

I guess despite what the media says I still have "hope" for the future and I am just doing things I enjoy.

Quick run down, ive posted here a few times and always get help. Thanks.

Mid 2023 i got mentally stable as a 25 year old after Covid depressed me deeply, bought a used decent car with cash, built an amazing life with therapy and got a girlfriend who i loved all in about 3 months, from zero to hero. I had like 12,000 thousand saved from the previous 9 months tho living with family and working my first real adult job (i spent $6,000 of that on the car). I didnt take my mood medicine correctly tho, which didnt help me long term. Classic case of “i dont need the help”, but I was stable for the next 18 months.

Then in late 2023 i found out about dave ramsey (and caleb hammer) at the same time and quickly got obsessed with the idea of retirement. I tried to introduce the love of my life to these ideas. She was 23 and wasnt on board to watch, thought he was boring and didnt like how i wanted to be intense. She wanted to move at her own, slow slow pace, a pace which she hadn’t even really developed. Her words “i didnt think i would even make it to 50, so who knows about 65.” But i loved her, truly, so i was hoping to teach her things, and i thought actions were the best way. Go make money and save and invest and show her the way, i mean i wanted to spend my life with her, i realized that about 6 months i to our relationship.

Early in 2024 i was peaking in life, and wanted to take the next step and wanted to make more money and save and make our dreams come true, so i got my CDL (quick, cheap, easy to quit if i didnt like it). If the cdl didnt work out, i would pivot maybe to school, or start a business or something, but cdl made sense money wise: live cheap, save big. I couldn’t think of any other job that would do that for me.

So life was amazing, but i shortly realized i would have to sacrifice much of it to become a trucker since you have to be away from home for so long. (Aka Gazelle intensity - sacrifice for what you need. I took it to the truly extreme level, which fulfilled me in a way, oh how, I wanted to be able to tell my story on the show one day). I didnt consider this when i first started (i thought you could quickly get a local job - you cant if you wanna make big bucks) but i didnt want to quit the cdl plan, i wanted to give it a chance and get some driving experience, so I decided to go drive over the road.

It took me three months before I finally started my truck driving job after getting my license (now its mid 2024), I was very apprehensive to start because I didn’t want to lose a lot of the things that I came to know and enjoy. But during the three month break I started getting rid of everything and replacing it mentally with the new life i would have longterm. “ can’t wait to get a new car. Can’t wait to meet my new trucker friends. Can’t wait to start new hobbies because I won’t be able to play basketball every week anymore. Can’t wait to get a new girlfriend because I’ll meet someone who actually wants to believe in Dave Ramsey.” (My girlfriend at the time worked at Starbucks, had an art degree but was very money conscious and was a big saver, and on top of that everything else about her was amazing, but since she wasn’t gazelle intense, I decided I could live without her).

So I move in with her, but in the background I had a sex addiction (that I told no one else on the planet about) that I kept in check for the most part since we met, but combining that with the fact that she wasn’t gazelle intense and thus wasn’t going to be a partner for my biggest goal of my entire life, which was to become a millionaire by the time I was 40, I cheated. I cheated because of the sex addiction, and that was inevitable, but it was certainly something that was brought on by the lifestyle changes that would come too, and i blamed the cheating on “we were growing apart anyway”. Obviously i was a pos, but it was hard to process in the moment because i was so driven to get my goal, i didnt want to let potential depression and loss get in my way.

For a few months after I cheated, we broke up and we talked, but it was never the same. Meanwhile, I was around the country driving a truck saving up money just like I want to. After a few months of me starting, she met someone new and me and her didn’t talk anymore and I got extremely depressed. I still wanted to be with her tho. I was finally on the path to my goal, I wanted to tell her about it. I wanted to show her about it. I wanted to explain to her how much she means to me. I wanted to spend money on her. I wanted to improve her life and show her how retirement is possible even in today’s day and age I want to show her the math and the Dave Ramsey videos. I didn’t really enjoy trucking at all, but I enjoyed chasing the goal in a lot of ways. I would sit there while driving and just obsess about what ways I can cut spending in what ways I can do to increase my income.

But I got depressed and didn’t have any other pillars in my life to lean on at this point, I didn’t have my friends anymore because I hadn’t talk to them or seen them in person for almost 9 months I didn’t have my hobbies because I was always on the road, I didn’t have the new living place that I has just began sharing with her back home because we broke up and I moved out, i didnt get to see my family much, etc etc. after about nine months I quit trucking Because I could not focus enough to drive the truck safely, I needed professional mental help that point. I had saved up a total of $12,000 in nine months (at this point i had $15,000 total to my name, the most i ever had). During those nine months, I did not eat out one time I bought cheap, but healthy groceries and I didn’t do anything to spend money. I had no rent to pay. I had no car payment. I just wasn’t making money as a truck driver the way that I thought I would, so unfortunately, I only ended up with a $12,000 increase.

During this whole nine months of trucking, I was extremely depressed after I came off the road in early 2025 I blew all my money trying to cope. I got medicated and went to therapy after working a very low paying Uber routine. I did this for 6 months while i job searched. But at this point, I was living off credit cards and paying rent now and wasn’t making a lot of money and what not.

I blamed a lot of my problems on the fact that I got so obsessed with making money and a lot of that came from the ideas that I learned from watching Dave Ramsey. Obviously the sex addiction caused my break up, which was the biggest loss I’ve ever felt in my life, but i still resent the ideas of those videos because it felt like that mindset took a lot of my self away from myself.

So for the last year I have been living not very financially conscious, depression took its toll and job opportunities are scarce. However, I have been mentally stable for at least nine months and the last few I have been on a great medication that is having me operate at the highest level. So I feel like I do when I was in 2023 right when I was healthy, except I don’t have the love of my life I no longer have a car because it broke down, I’m in credit card debt now from the last 12 months just trying to survive from blowing my $15,000 (i spent it all on paying bills for random women, because i wanted long term to pay the bills for my ex but as we were together forever kind of thing, dumb so dumb), and I am broke as hell now and i actually make slightly less money than i did in 2023 at my low paying job i had before trucking.

I’m scared to get back into the world of Dave Ramsey because I’m too scared that I’m going to get more obsessed with money and lose some of the things I still value today because that’s what happened last time. Thanks.

Hi all,

I’m looking for thoughts. I’m trying to build an emergency fund of 20k. Right now I have a universal life insurance policy valued at 100k.

I know, I know. It was purchased on my behalf thirty years ago. I can’t liquidate it because I can’t qualify for a term life policy for a few more years due to cancer remission timelines.

I think it’s important to build my savings muscle, so I want to save up my own emergency fund but at the same time I don’t want to waste time and money.

I guess my question is how comfortable would you personally be with splitting the baby in this case? Maybe saving 10 to 15k myself as a first line of emergency fund in a normal savings account and then treating a portion of that life policy as a second line super duper emergency fund?

Eager to hear your thoughts.

1 yr post chapter 7 bankruptcy and have been building credit sensibly.
Reaffirmed car loan for a great deal with a partial write off of the loan due to value depreciation.

I have an old 401k worth $19k - which would pay off my entire car loan where I could use the car payment as a savings avenue.

Would this be a good idea to be completely debt free?

I am technically on baby step 4/6 and i have been following Dave Ramsey for years, since i graduated college and started listening to personal finance content.

I followed Dave Ramsey’s baby steps and got out of debt (student loans and car) and i was living debt free for like 2 years. I was saving for a house in the meantime.

Now i have a house with a mortgage and for some reason the feeling of having a mortgage which i only see it as debt, gives me major anxiety. It makes me want to do anything possible to pay off my house and i feel like i can’t relax. My mortgage payment is reasonable and i can still put money in retirement, hsa, save, invest and spend.

But having a debt has really almost ruined my mental health. It’s like following Dave for so long has put me off a debt lifestyle for years and now i have a mortgage and it makes me feel so wrong. Debt free life feels so much less risky.

And I’m a single homeowner so paying off my mortgage gazelle intense won’t be my plan. However it has pushed me to want to get a second job and do side hustle just to get rid of my mortgage and I’m wondering if im just doing too much just to get rid of the mortgage so i can feel free again. Was this Dave’s intention or do i need therapy 🥲