but don’t really keep pace with the highly inflated property values. The same thing works the other way. I remember talking to someone about living in Arizona once. He said it would be a GREAT place to live, assuming you already had a pile of money. The local salaries SUCKED. So since I don’t already have a pile of money, I’ll have to wait for a while. Either that, or sell all my worldly possessions and live in a trailer park…
As I’m reading that young woman’s posts about how expensive her rent is
I’m thinking of you living in the Malibu, CA area, Deborah living in the D.C. area and Betsy living in Boston. Those are just some high rent areas that came to the top of my head. San Francisco is expensive, granted, but it’s not the only expensive place in the U.S. to live. I think she’s yet to really understand what the whole Dave Ramsey thing is about, and is hoping that we’ll support her in her want to purchase a home and to purchase a new car. I think we’ve all learned that these are lovely things, but not always financially feasible no longer how much you try to justify the purchases. Sometimes one just has to learn the hard way, as most of us have. Just my thoughts.
Good job on paying off the CC debt
Have you figured out when you’ll have the student loan cheetah killed? Whatever money you were throwing at the CCs can now be thrown at the student loan. Do you have your BEF done? If not, you need to finish doing that first, THEN get the student loan knocked out…
About 5 years ago
I purchased the Total Money Makeove book r and was listening to Dave’s Radio show on a regular basis and totally following Dave’s plan and was able to pay off over $30,000 of credit card debt, and have been debt free for the past 7 years with the exception of a small student loan. Credit card addiction and massive debt had been a long standing problem for me for over 30 years. It has been great to get rid of this and not have to worry about it anymore.
I am however finding myself stuck right now and having a hard time moving forward with saving and investing and want to get back on track with Dave’s plan. I just ordered the Financial Peace book.
I am wanting to find out if there is an easy way to get archives of Dave’s radio show, television show and the podcasts. Please let me know. Thanks. Also, if there is anything else you can recommend that I do besides reading the Financial Peace book and listening/watching the shows, please let me know.
Records
We keep records for gas purchases, replacing tires, oil changes, any time it’s in the shop for repairs, etc. Not just because of selling it down the road, but it helps dh remember when it was done in case of issues with the vehicle.
Interesting
I have always been super careful with a rental car because I don’t want them to charge me for any damage or wear and tear. I never allow my kids to eat in the car and I tell them to be super careful as well. I’d never thought of them falsifying the care records. I just when on the experiences of my partner’s parents. They always bought previous rental cars and typically got at least 20 years out of them.
I guess it’d be good to look at the mileage as well. Those that drove long distances would not be as good of an option.
There was a list that came out a while ago about the most expensive places to live
California was not the most expensive. Maryland was lower, but not far behind. We live where we do because of my partners job. In 2005, we got 800 sf with 3 bedrooms in a lower middle class neighborhood for 250 thousand. There are plenty of places where that amount could have bought so much more. We expected to build equity and trade up, but the housing market turned upside down.
Back then , we were newly out of grad school. My partner scrimped and saved while I finished school a d she managed to save enough for 10 percent down in only 3 years. Once I started working, we could have saved more the next couple of years. Well, at least until the first child was born we could have stayed in our one bedroom for rent of 1000 instead of the higher mortgage and housing expeenses.
We fell into the lies that home ownership is so great. Honestly, at this point, we would be better off renting. Being underwater means that every dollar we send in is pretty much like rent. It will be years before we have any equity
I have never thought of rental cars as being taken care of
People drive them exactly opposite of their own and the wear and tear they have been subjected to is frightening. Maintenance records are sketchy. If they are due for an oil change it might be marked but no guarantee of an actual change depending on the rental city the car was returned. Many smaller cities rent those cars out when their destination is a larger city with a bigger maintenance facility etc.
We’ve had fantastic luck
with used cars when we knew the previous owners….if you know how they take care of things you know pretty well along with their records of maintenance what that car will be like.
Maybe
but my mother in law did this for years (before she died). My father in law still has the car that they purchased from one of the rental car companies in 1995.
I guess I just like the idea because you don’t have to haggle. I’m really bad at that and I’d be taken advantage of every time.
I can speak only for school systems
As a school psychologist, I would be paid more in California than I am here in Maryland. I’d be paid much less than this in Arizona and Utah (two areas where I previously worked). In fact, most school districts in California paid school psychologists two to three times what they were paying in Arizona. It has been many years since I lived in Arizona, but rent was much cheaper back then as well.
Plus, there are areas of California that are less expensive. I have 6 siblings and they all live in various parts of California. My sister and her husband bought a house in an area where it is much cheaper to live. Some of my siblings live with my parents. It’s a wide variety.
Car buying options
A used car doesn’t necessarily equal buying junk.
Consider buying a leased car which has been turned back. They are usually:
1. Half the price or better, than new
2. About 36-45,000 miles
3. In excellent condition
4. Still carry manufacturer warranty
5. Has been refurbished mechanically to “same as new” standards.
Getting in to a leased/return depending on brand, could mean getting into a sweet $8-10k deal which might be low enough to pay cash.
Scare tactics—same for disability checks
The law prevents them from not paying the “entitlements”. They always claim checks won’t go out to try and get the masses upset against the other side. I think it’s time the whole lot on Capitol Hill grew up and did the job they were “hired” to do. Guarantee you they aren’t going to miss their pay checks and can you imagine the uprising if they took their pay and cut out the entitlements? They aren’t going to chance it.
Now they can close the local offices and website to keep new folks from signing up, but that could hurt all of them politically too.
When I was a contractor for U.S. Customs
that subject(back pay) came up during a projected shutdown. The government workers were told they would get their back pay. That sounded dumb to me, because if that’s the case, where’s the savings? However, as a contractor, I would NOT have gotten that pay back…AND would have had to burn vacation days(out of my *10* per year) for the days I wasn’t working. 
Well, I still paid off my debt while I was unemployed
So if you can still make your payments, I don’t see anything wrong with continuing the snowball. I don’t expect the furlough to go very long anyway, and your partner will likely get that money back as well.
So, I was all set to put money aside for this government shutdown
but when I started adding up our various savings accounts, we do have more than 10 thousand in different places. This is joint and individual emergency funds from putting small amounts from each paycheck for several years.
We are only losing one paycheck and not both of them. We do live in an expensive area, but for the basics, with my paycheck and that in savings, we’d be good for at least a few months. So, I am inclined to continue with the snowball. Anyone think that I should do otherwise?
Even if we end up with another 20 percent furlough later in the year, we can live on that. It only impacts what we can put towards getting out of debt.
Looking at the original report on the story
gives his comment a bit more context… Maybe not the best comment to make, but it seems to be taken out of context and the topic he was addressing has been ignored.
He was trying to make the point that federal workers should not get a government subsidy to buy their insurance on the health insurance exchange. Taxpayers have to pay for their insurance out of pocket and are expected to pay for a subsidy for gov. workers to buy theirs. He was arguing against it. Sounds like an attempt to change the subject and make him look bad vs. having a real conversation on his concern.
Student loan
I am not really focused on paying off the student loan as I am getting ready to buy a house and the student loan is only 3% interest. I only have about 2K left on it so I should be able to pay it off pretty quick after I buy the house. I currently have a 6 month emergency fund but most of that will be wiped out because I will have to use it for the downpayment on the house so I’ll have to start over. I just got Dave’s book yesterday, The Complete Guide to Money and am excited to start reading it.
I get that it is expensive to live up
there because I have family and friends in that area–that’s where I’m from. I just think that perhaps he is looking in the most expensive area and wants the same type of living that he gets at a lower price where he is from. It’s doable to live on 172k in that area, my nephew is living off 75k and living in DC.
Payday loan help
Question: Hi. We are in the payday loan’s vicious cycle and are not sure how to get out. Have any of you been there and done that and lived to tell about it? Our income right now is about 2500 a month. That will increase to about 3100 for October and possibly to 3700 by November. We owe a total of about $2000 to 6 payday places. (I know..stupid!). Some of these loans are years old and just keep getting paid and taken back out. We must stop this, but we don’t know how without just not paying any other bills! We pay 575 for rent, about 400 total for car payments (and one of them is about a month behind), furniture payments of 200, plus all the normal utitilies and a handful of various other loans that are not payday loans but still are rather high interest. We both have just awful credit…probably couldn’t be any worse. And a large amount of student loans that are currently in forebearance. Plus we have 5 children. Also, we got about 900 behind on our natural gas bill last spring and so its been shut off and we have to come up with 1000 to get it back on!
Answer: Been there and done that. The trick is to take out less the following time and only from trusted companies such as cashnetusa.com, www.elcloans.com: payday loans online (my favorite) or www.lendup.com. Example: You owe $200.00. Pay it, then only take out a loan for $150.00. The next time pay the $150.00, then only take out $100.00. And so on. It’s hard. You keep paying their interest, but you can ween yourself slowly. Or bite the big one and don’t get out anymore that week. You might also want to consider talking to a financial counselor. They can help you see where to save money and where money should be spent.
I have to admit I didn’t read the article
but want to chime in as someone who lives in the DMV… it’s very expensive to live here and for someone in Congress it’s tough to find a sublet in DC proper to crash while also traveling back and forth to the home state.
Not justifying. Just trying to give another perspective. Here in the DMV the *average* family feels POOR if they make less than $400K. No, I’m not kidding. And yes, there are plenty of us who make less but that seems to be the baseline right now for comfort zone.
Just another perspective.
Never take for granted a repair is completed..
A couple of weeks ago dh created a “hatch” in our side deck to complete a repair on the clothes dryer ventilation system. I took for granted that once he finished the chore he had nailed all the boards back in place.
For those two weeks we (meaning all humans, dogs, cats, and barnyard fowl) have been walking on/over this hatch. Today when I went out to do feed and release of the critters I discovered quite by accident as I stepped around the oh so hungry Misty Georgia that the hatch was NOT nailed together.
I went through that hole like a hangman’s dummy. Ended up in a tangle of boards and thinking all at once “omgd, I hope there isn’t a snake under there” , “Not my bad knee!” “and “I’m going to kill dh and tell God he died if I can’t get out of this hole.”
Luckily I wasn’t “really” hurt, oh my pride is bruised and my bad knee took a couple of good whacks from the 2 x 6’s that make up the hatch. I’ll be bruised and sore for a couple of days, but that is good for dh because I can’t run after him to whoop that boy! LOL!
How does this tie to budgeting and money savings or cleaning? What if I hadn’t bounced? Who needs medical bills? A dozen or less nails put in the boards would have prevented the spill in the first place and we are all given to “putting off” a chore because we are tired, it’s unpleasant to do or some other excuse.
So here’s a challenge for this weekend. Identify a problem that could end up costing you money because you’ve neglected it. Whether it’s changing the oil in your vehicle, nailing a hatch shut (dh guarantees me ours will be done asap—like tonight), putting flea drops on your critters, cleaning up the spilled grape juice on your white counter top or anything. Then take care of the problem and let us know how you did.
Most Partners in the large accounting firms
make well over $400,000, but it is a hard, long journey for 13-15 years to make it to Partner. My wife is a Non-Equity Partner, basically they call it a Principle, but she manages 75 people and is pretty stressed out most of the time. She has very specific tax skills. Basically she does the taxes on Mortgage Backed Securities.
We could retire now if we wanted to
We are too young to actually retire, so we will just sock away the money and my wife will probably start to work part time after she turns 50. I need to work my gov’t job for 10 years to get my pension and other benefits, but that will only put me at 57. Our jobs aren’t horribly stressful, well, mine isn’t. My wife is ready to quit. Our goal is to have $4,000,000 in retirement when we quit. We just passed $2.1M this year.
We could probably live off of $60,000 a year. We will have IRAs, pensions, and SS to live off of. My wfie will get max SS and mine won’t be too bad. That might be $4,000 a month right there. It is hard to really determine what we will need since we won’t be travelling all the time, but we will start to really focus on expenses a few years out and see what we will be spending. Like I said, one car might go away, we will probably kill cable since we will probably be doing some volunteer work. We are close to living off of my $80K salary so I imagine we can do just fine with $40K-$50K a year. I don’t plan on getting inheritance from the parents, but if we were, it might be a few hundred thousand from her parents and mine.
We might end up selling our house and moving into my mom’s condo one day after she passes away. The maint. fees are about $700 a month now and might be higher, but that includes insurance and water, so we are already paying $5,300 a year in property taxes and $2,500 a year in homeowners insurance. Her condo is half as much as our house in size and cost and it is paid for. So could sell our house for $400,000 and just use that for a long time to pay for regular expenses. We have an HSA and hope we can build that to pay our LTHI premiums once we stop working.
I wouldn’t want to go that hard core
but a year or two before my wife quits her high powered job, I might have to try and really institute a real budget to keep her based in reality. We practically live off my salary now, but I will probably cut back on eating out at work and try and ride my bike more places. I told her to plan a really expensive vacation while she is still working. I am doing my 50th birthday in Munich in two years during Oktoberfest and won’t be skimping on much.
Anyone read Mr. Money Mustache or similar blogs?
The DR way of doing things is slow and steady, like a crockpot, not a microwave. But the Retirement Extreme crowd takes things a bit differently. They save 80-90% of their income for 5-7 years and “retire” early. They live off of around $35,000 a year, walk everywhere, live extremely fugally, hardly eat out or travel with a hotel. Yet, they live extremely full happy lives. They have everything they need or want. They can buy organic food if they want, travel (although with lots of discounts), buy real estate and generally save money.
I enjoy reading these blogs too, but it seems quite different from DR’s way. Anyone else read these types of blogs?
Any ? contact me off list
My area (in Huntington Beach) has an opportunity to buy O2 absorbers from the LDS Cannery.
You can only buy them in sealed packs of 100 ($10 a pack) which is cost.
If you want to buy some, you can order them from the site, and I will send them to you in the mail. You will have to pay add’l for shipping (I think probably $3.99 a pack, but I will have to weigh them out and send you an invoice for shipping when they arrive at my house.)
I am not making any money on this, but I know there is a strong interest in purchasing oxygen absorbers, so I am offering to help you get them.
The site also lets people from the HB area buy other metal “canning” items. Please don’t choose these….I seriously cannot ship an empty metal can to you.
Although I’m ok with shipping a bag clip if you feel strongly.
On one I do a daily money saving hint—sorry
for the duplicate for those guys who are on that list with me—and after I posted today’s tip I decided that with the holiday season coming up and everyone looking for fun things to do in the upcoming winter months I’d post the suggestion here too. Hopefully some of you can expound on it and come up with even more ways we can all be entertained for just a few dollars or free. Jan who loves live theater in OK
Saving on entertainment dollars. Just because you are striving to be debt free doesn’t mean you need to always sit at home in the dark. Get entertained! The time until you are debt free will go a lot faster. Have your date nights, take kids great places, but do it on a shoestring or FREE. My family loves live productions, plays, music, comedy acts etc. Anyone who has ever gone to such productions KNOWS they can cost a family nearly a house payment if you aren’t careful. We enjoy such productions for a very low cost and sometimes free. How? We go to local theater forum–not your big PAC productions, the small town productions, college campuses, high school events, improve nights in the middle of the week at comedy clubs and similar. One of the best productions we ever saw of Cabaret (one of my favorite musicals) was in a small room with only three props (a bed, a door frame and a set of table and chairs) at a local college. We paid $3 each to see the play and it was so well acted you didn’t notice the lack of props. One of the best comedy acts we ever saw was with complimentary tickets (free) to a local comedy club. I don’t even remember the comedian’s name but she was so funny we couldn’t breath from laughing so hard. Granted sometimes the actors aren’t polished, the sets are cheesy, but the spirit is there and quite often the shows are wonderful. So check with your local colleges (don’t forget the community ones) schools, theater forums, libraries and community calendars. You just might be amazed about how cheap a good date night (or special birthday/holiday treat) can be.