How I learned to love Dave Ramsey

My wife and I were stupid with money for a long time. It didn’t necessarily have to be that way. Or at least for that long.

We weren’t completely oblivious to our problems with money when we were younger. We just knew that we didn’t have any, and instead of taking a hard look at what we were doing with the money we had, we just continued along our merry way, buying this and that. It’s not that we were completely horrible with our money. We didn’t buy the latest and greatest of anything, but we could have been smarter.

Over a decade ago my wife told me someone had mentioned to her that she ought to listen to some guy named Dave Ramsey. They told her this Dave Ramsey guy talks about money and “how to become wealthy”! I like money, so I figured I’d give him a shot. Now, I wasn’t one that was known to read a book, so I fired up our 2000 Dell Gateway, downloaded a copy of the audio book, burned it to a CD, and listened to it while I was driving the next day at work. To be honest, I couldn’t stand him and didn’t give it a second listen.

Listening to The Total Money Makeover now, it makes sense, and it is close to how we’ve lived (once we started using common sense), but listening to it back then, all I heard was some angry redneck talking about buying and selling real estate and saying “If you live like no one else…someday…you will live like no one else.” over and over and over again. That phrase still gets on my nerves, probably because it reminds me of how irritated I was with it the day I listened to it, but I obviously didn’t listen to the message he was preaching because, although we got better with money as we got older and wiser, we still used debt at every turn.

Now, after our experience with my credit card company refusing to lower my interest rate back down after they jacked it up due to the looming legislation, we did get fed up, cut my credit card up, and put everything we had toward paying off our credit cards, vowing to never be in that situation with thousands of dollars in credit card debt again. But that by no means kept us from using debt. We still used credit cards and financed things we wanted and needed. We just didn’t carry a balance and only bought things on financing that we could pay off before the due date to avoid the interest. I’m sure we were, and are, like a lot of people that think they are being responsible with debt. Heck, we still have credit cards to this day.

I’ll admit, when he started showing up in my YouTube feed after I ordered the payoff statement for our mortgage, I was a little reluctant, but it was so prevalent in my feed, I gave him another shot. This time, he caught me at the right point in my life and mindset. After all, everything he was saying was pretty spot on to how we lived the last few years (because it’s all just common sense) with the exception of that we haven’t been investing and we still use credit cards, but never carry a balance. He was singing the praises that “smart” people lived this way. Who me? (blush). And after all, who doesn’t like to be told they are smart?

Although, he would say we were not smart because we still used debt. It’s not that we want to use credit cards. We just don’t want to use our debit card online, have our information stolen, and fight to get OUR money back. I know debit cards have the same protections as credit cards, but if there are fraudulent charges on my credit card I can just not pay it until they take them off. If it’s my debit card, that’s OUR hard earned money that is gone until the charges get reversed. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have enough money to where I don’t have to worry about every dollar in my bank account.

Regardless of not living exactly as he says you should, I can’t stop listening. Since the summer, I haven’t missed an episode of his podcast. I might not always be fully listening when I’m working, but he’s on. I’m actually obsessed with finances in general now, which drives my wife crazy. Every decade I find a cause or belief and I sink my teeth into it with everything I have and don’t let go. For awhile at least. I mellow out after a time. On the plus side, at least this is an obsession that has positive effects and will stay with me for the rest of my life, because with a wife and 5 children to provide for, being financially sound is pretty damn important. Not to mention, instilling financial soundness in our children so that they can do better with money than we did. Christy and I never had any positive role models in dealing with finances. No one ever even talked about it with us.

I try to not dwell on woulda, coulda, shouldas, but I do wish I would have been able to absorb what he was saying that day all those years ago. It might not have changed our direction and where we are now drastically, but it couldn’t have hurt.