About six years ago, a family member and friend mentioned to me that she (thank you, Stacy!) was using the Dave Ramsey envelope system and it was really helping with their money situation. I was intrigued.
A few months before this conversation, my husband had just taken a new job. It was a dream job that we almost could not believe. He got a 20K raise by switching jobs. Sounds like the biggest blessing, right? Yes, it was, but we were totally mismanaging our money. We had significantly increased our household income, yet every month still seemed like a struggle. We weren’t saving any money and we kept spending outside of our means. After hearing about how Dave Ramsey was working for our family member, I started thinking a bit about taking a Dave Ramsey class. I ended up mentioning it to my Mom and asked her to let me know if she saw a class anywhere. Less than a month later she had found a local class, signed us up, paid for it as a gift, and offered to babysit our two young children.
Since graduating from Financial Peace University, we have followed his principles pretty closely (except that I have had a credit card from time to time) and it has worked for us. We started out slow with a budget and the debt snowball. Then we got excited as we saw our debts disappear. We sold things and made sacrifices and became debt-free about two years after starting Dave Ramsey. We even drove to Nashville to do our debt-free scream. When I am feeling brave, I’ll post the link for easy viewing.
Today, we save for retirement and college, tithe to further the Lord’s kingdom, pay mostly cash for expenses, even our vehicles, vacations, and Christmas.
The next step we are working on is chasing down the mortgage.
Is it easy? No. If it were easy, everyone would do it. But it’s doable. And it will change your life. All you have to do is, begin.
Next up, we’ll be talking about budgeting!
​Disclaimer: we are not financial experts. We are anything but and sometimes numbers confuse us. However, we can tell you what WE did. If you want real, tangible advice on investments, please visit your favorite financial adviser. We have two that we can recommend that keep us going in the right direction.