finance, rental cars

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.


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.




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.

finance, 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 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.


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.


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?