One of the things that we heard over and over again taking the Dave Ramsey Financial Freedom course was that we needed to “Live like no one else so we could live like no one else.” In fact, I think this was the slogan for the course.
What this means is that we have to be prepared to not only live frugally, but to make sacrifices in many areas and manage our money well, things that most of us, as Americans don’t tend to do. By sacrificing now, we could then live without debt later and be in a position to do things that others can’t, such as sending out kids to college debt free or working only as much as we want to work.
We’ve been living with the attitude that we should be able to do what we want with our money. I won’t get into that debate, but what I will talk about is how clear it was to us that just living frugally really wasn’t enough, if we wanted to be able to pay off of our debt. We really needed to step things up a notch.
We have been hit with so many temptations this week for spending money, from the small to the large. My husband’s family wants to all go on vacation together to celebrate an anniversary and a birthday, and we feel guilty and deprived at the thought of not going and instead using the money for debt.
There was the dress that I tried on just for fun, which tempted me not only because it was pretty, and it was on sale for one day at 25% off, but because for that particular store I was a size four! Talk about good marketing. (Like the way I plugged that size in there?)
The was the somewhat extravagant (for us) birthday gift that I wanted to get my hardworking husband, who instead is going to settle for an older, refurbished model instead of new and is in no rush to get it now but may wait until it goes even lower in price.
There were the books I wanted to buy, always books, and the school night at the local Chick-Fil-A. There was the lunch out with a buddy that my husband wanted to attend, and the hair care item I wanted for my new cut. There was the extra orange juice that wasn’t on sale, the hot dog dinners when we wanted gourmet and so many other things in our path. But we resisted them all, amazingly, because we have to live like no one else to reach our goals.
We know that this is the only way to get out of debt and then move on to building wealth, so we could then do whatever we want–to live like no one else.
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