Why We Stopped Following Dave Ramsey

Fifteen to twenty years ago, my husband and I were newly married and living in a large city. I was working full-time but earning a low salary, and my husband was in graduate school. We lived in a basement apartment that flooded the second month we lived there. My husband’s parents had paid for his undergraduate education, but I had student loans from my undergraduate and graduate degrees. We were broke and drowning in debt. Then, one day I found Dave Ramsey on the radio. I loved his advice. . .until I didn’t. While we learned a lot from his techniques, we stopped following Dave Ramsey after a few years.

Dave Ramsey Provides a Blueprint to Get Out of Debt

At first, I loved Dave Ramsey. He got me fired up and motivated. He made the impossible feel possible, especially when I listened to people share their story and then scream they were debt free. My husband and I went on a strict beans and rice budget. I made all our food from scratch. We got side hustles, and slowly, oh so slowly, we started to decrease our debt.

These are the things that Dave Ramsey does well. He provides a strict, extreme path for getting out of debt as quickly as possible. However, within a few years, we found flaws in his advice and stopped following Dave Ramsey.

Why We Stopped Following Dave Ramsey

There were two main reasons why we stopped following his advice.

We Were Exhausted

Dave Ramsey argues that people should be “gazelle intense,” i.e., they should work as hard as possible to get out of debt as quickly as possible. I agree with this advice. . .to a point. We were tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and no matter how hard we worked, that debt wasn’t going away quickly. We were looking at years of working full-time and side hustling to get out of debt. Even the gazelle sprint with great intensity, but they don’t run that way continuously.

If you have a small amount of debt to pay off, gazelle intensity works. If you have more, you need to learn how to live and enjoy your life while paying off debt because the process will take a while. I look back and see that I spent almost all of my 30s hustling and missed a lot of living in my youth because I was too busy paying down debt.

We Kept Repeating the Debt Cycle

Dave Ramsey advocates saving $1,000 in an emergency fund and funneling all the rest of your money to pay down debt. We followed this advice, but then our vehicle needed a $2,500 repair. We only had $1,000 available, so we had to put the rest on credit card. Then, we had to work harder to pay off that extra $1,500. This kept happening, so we kept repeating the debt cycle.

Eventually, I decided to pause debt repayment and instead use our extra money to build an emergency fund. Only when I did that did we quit repeating the debt cycle.

Final Thoughts

Dave Ramsey is excellent at motivating his followers and providing a clear blueprint for getting out of debt. However, we didn’t become debt free until we stopped following Dave Ramsey. For us, years of gazelle intensity and a tiny emergency fund were not practical.

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