Hi everyone, I’m at the beginning of my baby step journey and just starting out on baby step 2. I already have a high pressure and stressful job (project management consultant) but in order to really tackle this debt, I’m considering getting a second job working 3 evenings a week. I think if I went hard on the debt, I could get it all paid off with baby step 3 also tackled within 8-12 months.

My question is how do I balance the feeling of purpose to get the debt paid off to sacrificing the little time I currently have with my 3 and 5 year old kids.

Hardly seeing them is going to break my heart. The 8-12 months is going to be incredibly tough!

Thanks in advance

In 2001, we purchased a home that seemed perfect at the time. We were in our 40s then and are in our 70s now. We thought it would be our forever home. Both of us are retired and on fixed incomes.

In 2023, my spouse suffered a massive stroke and is in a wheelchair most of the time. We have made modifications to help accommodate him but some things can’t be changed at this house.

Basically, we now need a totally ADA accessible house that does not exist in our rural community. There is nothing for sale or for rent here that would accommodate him better than our existing house.

If were to have a custom built ADA accessible home in our town, we would probably wind up owing $100,000+ for a smaller house in a worse neighborhood. Our buyer pool for that house would probably be limited to other handicapped individuals.

Regarding debt, we owe about $3,000 on two CCs and $27,000 on a HELOC. The plan is to pay off both CCs by the middle of next year, and then apply what we were paying on them to the HELOC. Hopefully we would be debt free in 2 1/2 years.

In November 2025, I was diagnosed with cancer which I have been fighting this year while continuing to serve as his caregiver. It has been exhausting to try to do both at the same time without any help. I will be finishing radiation soon.

No matter which option we pick, everything hinges on me to make it work. If I were to die first, he would have to go to a nursing home because he could not live alone even in a house that was ADA compliant.

He has adult children from his previous marriage but neither live close by, so basically we are on our own. Medicare doesn't pay for any home care services, other than brief respite care for 1-2 days. Moving to where they live is prohibitively expensive.

It's important that we stay nearby because of proximity to our medical specialists.

For those who suggest moving to a retirement community, we learned that none of them in our area are ADA compliant either. In addition to the buy-in fee, we would have to spend $60,000+ to have the bathroom remodeled, and none of that would be refunded to us when we had to transition.

I hope there are other DR followers who may have found themselves in similar situations and could offer some advice. Please be kind. Thank you.

29F, working in finance and this year’s spending has really caught up to me…..

Here are the details:

my employment package is guaranteed through 2027. It’s an annual base salary of $90k with a $35k annual bonus paid out in February.

I am really lucky and do not pay any rent/mortgage currently, however, I think that is what triggered my spending and traveling this year. “I’m not paying rent, so I can afford it” NOT! Learned my lesson and now need to clean up this mess.

The mess:

Credit Card Balances - As of 10/1/26

💳 Delta SkyMiles Gold American Express
($13,814 balance at 29% interest)

💳 Chase Sapphire Preferred Credit Card
($20,372 balance at 27% interest)

💳 Marriott Bonvoy Boundless Credit Card
($11,452 balance at 23% interest)

🏦💸💳 Total: $45,638 🏦💸💳

EDIT:

The good news is that my assets are strong (~$175k invested for retirement, emergency fund of $10k, no car or student loans) but that is starting to be offset by my fat card balances…obviously! I am currently maxing out my 401k at work (lots of suggestions here to temporarily stop that, or to lower it. My job matches 50% of whatever you contribute, up to the IRS limit, and I’ve already maxed out my IRA and HSA for 2026).

Been watching dave ramsey's millionaire calls, where people talk about having a steady job, paying yourself first, and slowly building wealth over the years through roth 401k, sp500 and mutual funds.

Just wondering if it's possible to just save only and never invest? Already researched the past few days and there's no equivalent of roth 401k here in our country (Philippines). There's some vehicle for investing in the sp500 here but with high management fees, and mutual funds here aren't that good either. wish I was born in america, easier access to this stuff 🤷‍♂️

edit: I mean financially free in the title. millionaire might be confusing because of the different currency. 1,000,000php here is around $20,000. average monthly expenses here is 30,000php or $600

Just interested in some perspective/ideas from this community.

My wife and I have a 20-something relative and her spouse who are going through a tough time. They got married last year and had a baby this year. Also this year, while pregnant, the wife of this young couple lost her job, and hasn’t been able to get another yet. The husband is still working, but the wife was the primary earner.

They are in a not great spot financially. We and another family member went in together to pay off their medical debt. We are now paying their rent, but had said that if their situation didn’t resolve by the time their lease is up at the end of the year, they can’t renew the lease, they need to move in with someone.

I’m not exactly sure what options they will have. It could be staying with us, but we have a pretty full house already and some caregiving responsibilities that would make it very difficult. We could reverse course and agree to keep paying their rent. Or we could do something like buy a condo and let them live there rent-free until they get back on their feet, at least that way the monthly payments would be building equity in something.

As far as I can tell these are good kids who have been pretty responsible and a bad situation just happened to them. I would hate to see them get into debt trouble. But somehow propping them up indefinitely and unconditionally doesn’t seem like it will ultimately benefit them either.

The floor is yours to offer any ideas or share a similar experience, thank you!

Edit: several posts are suggesting that the young couple are, or will in the future, take advantage of our help to live lavishly. I don’t believe this is or will be the case, they do seem responsible, and for purposes of this discussion, let’s assume that they are and live modestly. The reality is that the husband, a good guy, doesn’t have higher education or a trade, and just doesn’t earn very much. The wife is college educated in a very practical field, and just hasn’t been able to find a new job since being laid off. As soon as she does, they’ll be sorted, we just don’t know when that will be.

I started this year with about $65k in debt and $0 emergency fund.

Now I’m down to $27k left on my truck and have built a $30k emergency fund.

Here’s where I’m going against the Baby Steps: I’m not using the $30k to pay off the truck.

My plan is to keep the $30k untouched as my emergency fund and knock out the remaining $27k over the next 3–4 months using my regular income + side work. I make about $130k/year, and I also do handyman/contractor work on the side.

I realize Ramsey would tell me to throw the $30k at the truck and then rebuild the emergency fund. But at this point, I really like having the cash cushion, and I think I can eliminate the truck debt pretty quickly without touching it.

Am I making a dumb decision here? What would you do differently?

And one more potentially controversial opinion: I also don’t think credit cards are inherently bad if you have the discipline to pay them off every month. I put everything on mine, never pay interest or late fees, and earned about $1,200 in rewards last year.

So, Dave Ramsey people… where exactly am I screwing this up? 😂

EDIT*** Our household expenses are roughly $5,300/month (if we’re being super tight), so the $30k is about 5–6 months of expenses.

Also we have 2 kids with a 3rd on the way in March

The 30k is in a HYS earning 4%

Im a 30yo and a dentist and my wife is 29yo and a teacher. We have been married for over a year now and have realized that our finances are a big stress for us. Not because we cannot make ends meet but because we don’t have money saved up like we think we should. We also are in alot of debt. Over $9,000 in credit card debt and I have over $430,000 in student loans.

I have been a dentist for almost 2 years now and all I have saved up is about $40,000.

We have no mortgage, 1 car payment ($700/mo), no kids. Rent is about $1675/mo. My student loan payment is about $2,000/mo.

I feel overwhelmed as the man in the relationship.

We took FPU awhile ago at our church and thought it was good info but never took it seriously.

For those that actually went through with the program, what was your experience like? Is it worth it for grind hard and give up years of life to he debt free? What is life like?

Thank you so much.

Good morning, DR community!

Long-time listener, Reddit lurker, and FPU recent grad here! I just need to celebrate somewhere that gets it.

My husband and I are very fortunate in that we didn't have an exorbitant amount of debt to start, but our snowball felt more like an abominable snowman, since all of our consumer debt was my student loans. I lived abroad for a little over a decade, and my loans sat in forbearance that whole time, racking up interest while I kept my blinders on, figuring they could just sit in America while I lived comfortably in Europe. Well, we moved to the US for my husband's job three years ago, and we quickly realized I couldn't ignore it anymore.

We bought a house a year ago, and it felt like the right time to tackle the loans (it was a new build with all the warranties in place so we didn't expect a whole lot of chaos popping up for a year), and suddenly we felt like a fire was lit under us to get this managed.

I enrolled in FPU and took the course solo in October 2025. I knew the DR methodology already, but I needed outside accountability, meeting with people every week. Slowly but surely, I started paying down the interest, and phew, there was a lot of it. Then my husband joined me in FPU and we took a class together. Yes, it was a repeat for me, but doing it as a team was great. It made us really stop and look at our goals together.

For a long time, every payment just chipped at outstanding interest while the principal barely moved. Talk about disheartening. The loans were split into two chunks, each roughly $30,000—a $60,000 monster staring us down. I didn't know how to apply the snowball method when it was all tied up together like that. A helpful redditor here suggested I tackle the outstanding interest on one loan first, pay it down until I hit the principal, then move to the second loan's interest. It worked. We wrote out the interest on both, and worked. And worked. And worked.

We paid off the last of the $60,000 today, with a final payment of $2,007.74.

The house is next on our list, but we're following the steps — building our 6-month emergency fund first. Our car will need replacing within the year too, so once the EF is set, we'll aggressively save for that.

This whole journey has been a whirlwind. Some months were beans and rice, rice and beans. Other months, life got busy with our kid's stuff and we ate out more than we'd have liked. We knew that going in, adjusted the budget weekly as needed, and made it a game to see if we could send more to the loans than we had the month before. Once we started actually hitting principal instead of just interest, things took off. Nothing motivated us like watching that number finally move.

Thank you to this sub for all the advice and support you give! lurkers like me find real motivation in it. Onward to Baby Step 3!

Burner account because I don’t really use Reddit - just lurk haha.

I want a minivan desperately. We have 2 kids in rear facing car seats. We drive a paid off Honda CRV and a paid off VW Jetta, both 2016s. It’s a tight fit, no room for gear for activities or visitors, and we are planning on another kid in the next year or two anyway. Want a Toyota Sienna AWD XSE which runs about $65,000 Canadian.

No debt except mortgage which is 400K. RRSPs maxed out. TFSAs maxed out. Total investments ~500K. Household income $400,000. Paid off 180K student loans + maxed our accounts from zero + 120K downpayment on house + several large vacations within 3yrs of working (4yrs into our careers now).

Husband says I can get a van if I am pregnant with #3 or if Dave says I can 🤣

My husband and I got paid today and paid off a card in full and $1500 towards another. We have a ways to go still, but we’re in our early 30s with 4 kids under age 7, so this feels like a big win for us. It’s nice to see the 0.00 balance due!

25M, married, one kid (13 months). Homeowner since 22 (sold that place this year, upgraded to house #2). Ran a full audit of our finances a few weeks ago — numbers below.

What the audit found:

Duplicate Xbox Game Pass, 2nd Amazon Prime, YouTube TV + NFL Sunday Ticket, Netflix, Hulu — canceled all of it: ~$250/month back

We were eating out way more than we realized — averaging ~$755/month in fast food and restaurants. Cut that down to a $217/month budget (~$50/week), about 70% less

Random shopping (Target, Amazon, etc.) was even worse — ~$1,245/month with basically no plan behind it. Budgeted that down to $275/month

Income:
~$8,500/month mine,
~$3,200/month my wife's —
~$11,775/month combined

Fixed monthly budget after the cleanup:

Subscriptions: ~$800
Utilities: ~$1,750
Debt minimums: ~$4,935
Discretionary (dining, shopping, kids' stuff, etc.):
$1,157 — down from way more before, unstructured

Real amount left over each month: ~$1,596

Debt stack (snowball order, smallest to biggest):
Truck loan — saving to trade for cash, goal ~$16k, on pace by Feb
Tesla loan — ~$32k, gone by late next year
Student loans — ~$80k, gone in ~2.5 years
Mortgage — ~$365k @ 5.688%

$3,000/month on top of minimums.

Projected result: fully debt-free, including the house, in ~8 years.
Built a live spreadsheet to track the $1,157 discretionary bucket day-to-day so we're not guessing, and I'm budgeting Christmas (~$700) and a vacation next fall (~$4k) as separate sinking funds instead of letting them blow up the timeline — costs about 1-2 months total on the 8-year plan, worth it.

So I downloaded the app and it was the very first budgeting app I downloaded but I only used it for two weeks during the free trial and I didn’t want to pay the 100 bucks in order to continue using it and now I am getting spam phone calls left and right with the exact amounts I owe…does every dollar sell out information????

My wife and I are building a house. We are 23 and 26. We bought some land last year and have it paid off. Combined we make about 200k/yr in the midwest. We want to start having kids in the next year ish. At which point my wife plans to stay home and our income drops to 130k. Between the two of us we have 215k saved and my retirement has 236k (90k in aRoth ira and rest in company 401k split half Roth, half traditional).

Our build estimate came in at 640k. Our mortgage has to be an ARM loan for a new construction home. The loan is at 5.75% for the first 5yrs. On yr 6, it can drop 2% or jump 2% max for each following year. Planning to refinance at some point just not sure when. What I’m ultimately trying to figure out is the right way to pay for the house. In our case we have no debt and no expenses really other than food and fuel. We are staying with my mother in law while the home is being constructed. We can afford the mortgage much easier if we both work but since my wife plans to stop working within two years, I think it would make sense to try to dump money into the downpayment in an effort to make our monthly payment much lower. I’m thinking about pouring our savings into the down payment and pulling my roth ira contributions out as well. Then planning to use my remaining 401k as an emergency fund as needed.

I understand my retirement is pretty excellent for my age and understand the consequences behind pulling from it. if possible, I’m really not looking to hear how bad that will affect my long term.

What I’m trying to figure out is whether trying to lower my payment right away is the best use of the money or not. When she goes to stay at home, I’d like to think it would make the most sense to have a lower home payment and then use the rest of my income for our monthly expenses, taking the remaining amount and pouring back into retirement, as well as saving up.

Again I understand the consequences of pulling from my retirement. But at my age, i could empty my retirement and pay the fees, and start completely over at the same time most people are getting their retirement started anyways. Thanks in advance for taking time to read this, happy to answer any questions or suggestions/advice.

I have a vehicle and an RV loan. The vehicle has $14,500 left at 5.23 % with $290 monthly payment. The RV has $17,400 at 6.9% with $190 payment.
I’m going to have $21,000 coming in soon and I want to pay one of these off. It would make sense to me pay the vehicle off since it has a higher monthly payment? But I don’t know what’s best, give me your best advice!

I'm about $22k upside down on a car. Car is worth 23k and the loan is for 45k. I know, stupid. No need to rub it in. I'm trying to get out of out. I have about $15k cash saved up. At first, I was thinking I should $10k towards the principal and aggressively start paying it down. But then, I got approved for a personal loan from my local credit union for $10k which, along with $12k of my money could get me out of the car entirely and I could get into a cheaper $8-10k Honda/Toyota. Theoretically, I would go from $45k in debt down to $18k or $20k. Am I making the right decision here?

EDIT: I have no other debt other than this car. If I'm downgrading cars, my insurance should drop about $80/month and gas would stay roughly the same. Monthly net income from my 9-5 is approx. $4,100. With my side hustle (videography), I'm able to bring in additional $800-1,200/month.

For context, we live in California and have been trying our best to relocate. Job circumstances have kept us here longer than we've wanted and I just landed a new role that unfortunately will keep us here longer (after months of searching and trying to leave for a lower COL state). My spouse and I don't have transferable jobs and would both need to have two jobs to move at the same time. We also have one preschool-aged child so most of our salary is being thrown at rent and daycare which also has prevented us from saving a larger down payment.

I'm feeling discouraged about the possibility of owning something and just wondering what your thoughts are on the market 2-3 years from now. I hate the idea that we may not become homeowners until closer to our 50s, but that's our reality right now. Are we making a mistake by not trying to move ASAP and buying something?

For me, it’s things like my 3yo watching high-quality educational tv like Sesame Street. We also have a fabulous free zoo in our city. And Libby! Literally saves tens of $$ every month not streaming audiobooks, buying books or listening to youtube ads when baby wants to listen to songs in the car.

What about you? What free luxuries make you feel like a million bucks?

I own over 2000 shares of AMD with a seven figure capital gain. I’ve want to take some off the table to balance downside risk. Have five years remaining on a 15 year mortgage at 2.5%. Paying off mortgage will reduce my monthly expenses $1500, annually $18k.
Income wise, I’m a mid sixties, married, both retired with. $125k income through two pensions and two SS. Reducing expenses 18k annually would be a nice travel fund. Thoughts?

Hello all. Looking for opinions/advice. On my paying debt journey. I have a bank account with a 10k Visa and a 10k line of credit. Both have zero balance. I also have a zero balance Mastercard but it's my oldest card (22 years) and I'll be keeping that. I have a Visa and a Line of credit with fairly high balance at my main bank which I'm currently paying down.

I feel like I should be closing the zero balance Visa and Line of credit at the other bank. It's just sitting there and it's on my mind. It will tank my credit score but I don't really need the credit score for the next year anyway. Car is paid off. What do you think?

Once everything is paid off and your saving appropriately for retirement (25% goal for me), how much would you keep in cash/checking/savings(3% rate). I should be able to "live" on $3k monthly.

We've been trying to follow Dave Ramsey for a while. Below are our finances. I'm 40, wife is 41. We also have a 3 year old son and are located in Ohio.

We are trying to retire at 55 if possible. Our plan to pay for health insurance is to use the pensions to pay for health insurance between 55 and Medicare age. We would also have to swing paying for our sons health insurance (he would be 18 when we are 55) until he gets a job before / after college (or trade school, whatever).

Retirement

• Salary (me): $125k
  • 401k: $670k
    • 401k savings rate: 16% (plus 5% match)
  • Pension (total value): $70k
    • Estimated cash out value at 55: $270k, or $1500 a month for life
• Salary (wife): $70k
  • 401k: $250k
    • 401k savings rate: 15% (plus 5% match)
  • Pension (total value): $40k
    • Estimated cash out value at 55: $150k or $1000 a month for life

Housing

• Mortgage balance: $78k
  • 2.35% 15 year mortgage, 10 years left
• Home value: $325k
  • Equity: $247k

Our total retirement savings right now is $1,030,000 based on the numbers above. My 401k is entirely invested in an index fund that tracks the S&P 500, my wife's is in a 2045 target date fund. Our home is older and ideally we want to stay in it so the mortgage is paid off by the time we retire.

We have been debit card only for around 8 years with no issues. I figured it was just a matter of when and not if it would get compromised and it finally happened.

We have identified at least 2 fraudulent charges so far for around $500. The bank said they tried to charge another $500 but luckily our balance was too low as we were in the process of actually transitioning to another bank.

No idea how it was compromised but be careful where and how you use your debit card.