Finally enough talking about it, we finally did it — we cancelled our cable TV. As I wrote about before, it was strangely painful for me. My wife? No so much. She was ready for it to be gone. Really we didn’t watch much on the HD-Expanded-Basic-Digital-blah-blah-blah that we were paying an absurd amount for each month. We were afraid we’d miss Psych on USA and the NHL games on Versus. Well, we can catch Psych on Hulu and, well, I just miss hockey.When we have told our friends we were going to do this, it seemed like the guys were generally shocked and wondering what we would do for TV — the women were happy for us. It really was a strange dichotomy of results.
We have our home computer hooked into the TV now — in fact, that’s where I’m writing this post (and it’s a little hard on the eyes). Eventually I will want to get a “nettop” to replace the ginormous desktop computer sitting next to the TV, but it will take a while for the finances to allow it.
So why did we really cut out the cable?
(More after the jump)
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This would be a good photo for some Heath Ledger Joker makeup...
I don’t understand the true hostility for Dave Ramsey. Check out almost any of his youtube videos and you’ll see comments that are really just confusing to me. Maybe they don’t like that he’s a Christian (even though he doesn’t “throw it in anyone’s face”).
Disclosure: He’s really the only financial counselor we have paid attention to so maybe I’m biased. (I mentioned in my last post that we’ve gone through Ramsey’s Financial Peace class before and that we are starting the class again. ) I’ve tried to listen to the others: Suze Orman seems to be too condesending to her callers, Jim Cramer is just out of his damn mind.
I think part of the criticism against Ramsey is that his advice is so simple. At least, that’s what Wikipedia says. I agree, to a point. Like he says, he ’sells’ crock-pots not microwaves. There’s no get-rich-quick scheme, no sure-fire investments. He simply arms the average Joe with the basic financial knowledge that we should have gotten through school. Debt is dumb, check. Use cash to curtail spending, check. Save for large purchases, check. Keep an emergency fund, check. All these are obvious — so why weren’t we doing this on our own?
More after the jump
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Filed under Debt
Tagged as Dave Ramsey, Debt
Back in 2004, we started Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace Class. After a bit more than 2 years of skrimping and saving and cutting back, we paid off all of our debt. We were debt freeeeeee. We even called Dave’s radio show and screamed. We kept working on his baby steps and didn’t even get all the way through the next one before we “fell off the wagon.” The plan was supposed to work like this: we take all the money we had been putting towards our debts and save up 3 to 6 months of expenses.
It worked for a little while. We got our savings up over 5 digits! But, it got too easy to start sniping off some money from the monthly savings. Grab some of it here, throw some there. Then we started using our credit card a bit again. We had this money available in the budget for this and just paid off the credit card each month. The expenses were not planned each month. They weren’t necessarily impulse buys, but just not planned.
More after the Jump
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OK – so we are in the first month of working on our new debt and re-looking at our overall financial situation. Well, we started out with a bang. We knew we were getting into the ring with a formidable opponent that we had created. Our poor spending decisions, laziness, and vacations fed this beast. And he was looking to take out his pound of flesh with around an 8% interest rate. And really, in the world of credit cards, that definitely isn’t a usurious rate, but it’s still sucking money away from us.
So, while we’re putting our first opponent through boot camp, we were getting fat and living the high life.
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Here at The Door, we need to get out financial house in a little better order. We’ve gone through a lot of ups and down, paying attention and not, spending and scroogery when it comes to our finances. We’ve even gotten to the point were we could call the Dave Ramsey Show and scream WEEEEEEEEEE’REEEEEE DEEEEEEBT FREEEEEEE! After kicking it for a while and starting to save up a pretty good nest egg, we had our first child and got complacent. Now we find ourselves in credit card debt and having car payments. This is just really unacceptable and we are starting to get re-focused so we can try to get to some of our goals and maybe send our child to college in 16 years! Here’s what we are going to do.
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Finally enough talking about it, we finally did it — we cancelled our cable TV. As I wrote about before, it was strangely painful for me. My wife? No so much. She was ready for it to be gone. Really we didn’t watch much on the HD-Expanded-Basic-Digital-blah-blah-blah that we were paying an absurd amount for each month. We were afraid we’d miss Psych on USA and the NHL games on Versus. Well, we can catch Psych on Hulu and, well, I just miss hockey.When we have told our friends we were going to do this, it seemed like the guys were generally shocked and wondering what we would do for TV — the women were happy for us. It really was a strange dichotomy of results.
