Today’s Guest Poster is Sunny!
She blogs about living on a budget and getting out of debt with the help of Dave Ramsey* at http://www.debteliminationexperiment.blogspot.com/.
My husband and I have been on the Dave Ramsey plan since the summer of 2012, we got married in April of 2012 and were doing well budgeting but wanted some insight into paying off our loans quickly. If we had not taken student loans we wouldn’t have any debt because otherwise we live very frugally. On the flip side, if we hadn’t taken out student loans we would probably be working minimum wage jobs for the rest of our lives. We are from a small mining town in Missouri where there are more people than jobs.
He moved to Chicago to study Computer Programming and Design, I moved to Tennessee to study Sign Language and Theatre. We now reside in Knoxville, TN.
We bought into the notion that “student loan is good debt, it’s an investment in your future.” Which I guess is partly true but we “did stupid” in that we chose to go to private (very expensive) colleges. We both worked a few hours a week while in college but not nearly enough to offset our student loans.
We are now living like no one else, in a tiny ugly apartment, driving 2 cars that are old enough to be in high school, and throwing 45% of our monthly income towards our debt. That is unless Murphy comes knocking!
Sometimes we don’t follow the program exactly, we did go on vacation this year. It’s going to take us 3 years to get these loans paid off so we budgeted one of our snowballs to go to the beach. Since we have such a long time to go we don’t want to get burnt out and just give up entirely.
Overall on the program we’ve learned a lot and still have a lot of learning to do I suppose! Our families think we are weird, I bring my lunch to work in my Doctor Who lunchbox almost every day. I’d say we’re moving in the right direction!
Like this post? Sunny blogs at: http://www.debteliminationexperiment.blogspot.com/
*Dave Ramsey is the national talk show host who talks about “Common Sense for your Dollars and Cents-
Want to know more about him or getting out of debt?
Haston Helping Hands 