{"id":146,"date":"2011-09-05T13:22:36","date_gmt":"2011-09-05T18:22:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gunscarstech.com\/?p=146"},"modified":"2011-09-05T13:22:36","modified_gmt":"2011-09-05T18:22:36","slug":"on-being-debt-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gunscarstech.com\/?p=146","title":{"rendered":"On being debt free"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been doing the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.daveramsey.com\/home\/\">Dave Ramsey Thing<\/a> for almost 7 years now. I became debt free in 2007. A year later, I paid cash for my wedding and honeymoon and by 2010 we had paid off Mrs wizardpc&#8217;s credit cards and student loans, and had also purchased a house with a 20% down payment. We have been debt free except the house since October of 2010. We&#8217;ve had 6 months of expenses in the bank since this past spring. We were about to start paying off the house early the day we found out lilwizard would be joining us.<\/p>\n<p>At every point in my journey, there have been people who have said &#8220;Well, that&#8217;s great in theory, but just wait until X! You&#8217;ll <em>have to<\/em> borrow money then!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So far, the values for X have been:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>When you get a girlfriend.<\/li>\n<li>When you get engaged.<\/li>\n<li>When you get married.<\/li>\n<li>When you get a house.*<\/li>\n<li>When you have kids.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And I have a few ideas about what the next ones will be. At every point, I&#8217;ve just trucked along without any problems.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve done this single. I&#8217;ve done this while trying to convince a girl I was worth marrying. I&#8217;ve done this while keeping the wife happy and increasing her standard of living. I&#8217;ve done this as a renter. I&#8217;ve done it as a homeowner. I&#8217;m about to do it as a parent.<\/p>\n<p>No matter where you are in your life, you can do this. Just like quitting smoking, though, quitting debt is <em>hard<\/em>. You have to <em>want it<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I want $17,000,000 at retirement more than I want a new $35,000 truck instead of a $2,700 Cherokee. I want to be able to buy my kids <em>houses<\/em> as wedding presents more than I want to live in a $400,000 house 5 minutes from work. I want my wife to be able to be a stay at home mom if she wants to more than I want all the cable channels.<\/p>\n<p>Life is about trade-offs.<\/p>\n<p>*Yes, I got a mortgage, but that&#8217;s not what I&#8217;m referring to. People kept telling me I&#8217;d need to build my credit. <em>We<\/em> bought a house, but <em>I<\/em> got a mortgage. With a 15 year fixed rate conventional mortgage and 20% down, I was able to get a 4.375% mortgage during a time where 4.5-5.25% mortgages were the norm, despite not having any consumer debt since 2005 or any debt at all since 2007. I didn&#8217;t have to go out and &#8220;build my credit&#8221; like so many people told me I was going to have to do. The wife had a much more recent credit history but adding her to the mortgage would have negatively affected our rate. Think about that. <strong>ETA:<\/strong> mrswizardpc reminded me last night (and in comments today) that the problems we had adding her to the mortgage were related to her <em>just having graduated college<\/em> and therefor having less than a year of professional work history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been doing the Dave Ramsey Thing for almost 7 years now. I became debt free in 2007. A year later, I paid cash for my wedding and honeymoon and by 2010 we had paid off Mrs wizardpc&#8217;s credit cards and student loans, and had also purchased a house with a 20% down payment. We [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-debt-free-living"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunscarstech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunscarstech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunscarstech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunscarstech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunscarstech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gunscarstech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunscarstech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunscarstech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunscarstech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}