Doing the Dave Ramsey Dance
A while back I challenged both of my readers to do something hard this year and mentioned that there were some important, hard things we were going to do this year. Well, I’m fessin’ up. One of the hard things we’re going to do this year is get out of debt once and for all.
Well, mostly. Hopefully.
A few months ago a friend of mine mentioned that he and his wife were reading this book by some guy named Dave Ramsey. I’ve read a lot of finance books and maybe I’ll even recommend some here one day. The book sounded interesting so I went and picked it up. Amber and I have been reading it together.
Then I had that epiphany a couple of months ago. I realized that I would thank myself for the rest of my life for being willing to tackle such a difficult challenge this year. I actually started getting excited about getting out of debt, thinking how awesome it would be to overcome this massive challenge and to have so much free cash every month. I put together a two-page spreadsheet, one containing a budget plan with a leftover total at the bottom, the other containing a list of our debts, the interest rates of each, balances of each, and a debt snowball. This way I could tweak the budget and see how it would affect the debt snowball.
With a little work and some sacrifice I could see how we could have every one of our debts, except our home, paid off in a year. Or so. And, I could even keep the Z. (Insert big sigh of relief here – whew!)
So we’re doing it. All in. We’ll have our first debt paid off within a week or so, and we’ll be moving on already to the next one.
It is really hard. That’s how I know it will be totally worth it.
Congrats! The desire to do something hard must be contagious. Reading this makes me want to do something similar.
Awesome! Thanks for the inspiration.