Paid Off Debt with Dave Ramsey Stories

amother

Tue, May 02 2023, 2:42 pm

I’m a huge fan of Dave Ramsey. I love almost all of his principles although I wonder how it plays out with a frum lifestyle (I.e. kosher food, tuition, higher housing prices, etc.) I’d love to hear stories of people who paid off their debt using Dave’s philosophy while living a frum lifestyle. Please include the type of debt, amount of debt, where you live, and family size.

amother

Cobalt

Tue, May 02 2023, 5:27 pm

His method for tackling debt is possible being frum but his other stuff isn't.
Tackling debt from smallest to largest is the debt snowball is great. If you are paying down your debts then when you are finished those payments/part of the budget can go to savings. The challenge is that in a frum lifestyle your expenses usually increase with time and it doesn't quite match up.
He says your housing should be 20-25% of your income or you need to move, not super practical for a frum situation. Just another example.

amother

Azalea

Tue, May 02 2023, 5:27 pm

Kosher on a Budget has her story posted on her site.

amother

Dandelion

Tue, May 02 2023, 5:47 pm

Anon because I share this story publicly.

A lot of people say that he’s not accessible for frum people to an extent it may be true but really you just have to adapt to your lifestyle the same as anyone would.

He did a podcast with kosher money I believe and it’s very very interesting.

For myself and my husband, we had $30K cc debt. Roughly.

Yes it took us longer than most of his “success stories” to pay it off at the same time we didn’t want to completely cut ourselves off from everything that we needed for mental/emotional health (ie date nights visiting parents across the ocean and cleaning help).

We did the snowball effect paying off the debt. We had a super strict budget and made sure to add income to accommodate.
We still budget to this day. Every single month.

We also use credit cards. He is 100% against it but we felt that the points we gain allow us to visit parents in another country so we just really clamped down on how we used them. We sat down religiously every week to pay off the cc. We didn’t care about our credit score we cared about treating it like a debit card.

It took just under 3 years in total.

We are working really hard on our emergency fund now however just when we had it up to 5 months and ready to start a down payment fund we were kicked out of our apartment and had to move very last minute (=$$$$) and had some big medical bills.

What’s good is that we’re not in debt through it all at the same time we have to start our fund again.

Yes we live in a frum community so we can’t have the 20% of income for rent / mortgage expense and we probably never will.
But all that means is we don’t spend in other places.
We own our car (cheap old suv).
We only go away when we can use points.
We throw every extra penny we have to what we need to budget for such as bar mitzvah, sleepaway camp (and sadly we have no other choice because that is a huge expense but no one wants to hire my kidfor work and there is no day camp for their age anymore.).

It’s hard.
We live month to month and can’t save or anything of the like right now. BUT we are hopefully getting another form of income soon and that will help us.

Our goal is to live without any debt at all. And we do. BH.

bracing

Tue, May 02 2023, 5:53 pm

It's so nice to hear!
Kol hakoved

amother

Lightblue

Tue, May 02 2023, 6:05 pm

We bh paid of 88k in debt with this method. It took us 3 years. We went into debt after we brought a house and were hit with a huge tax bill. On top of that we used credit cards and the interest was rooting us. We have 3 kids bh. We finally started saving this year and building our emergency fund.

bigbird

Tue, May 02 2023, 6:16 pm

Here is an interview he did recently in mishpacha where he was specifically asked about it working for a frum lifestyle. I liked his answer.

https://mishpacha.com/money-ta.....es-2/