My husband is currently in veterinary school. Needless to say, with a family of 5, we have at least a million dollars in student loans. At least it feels that way sometimes. He will graduate soon and we have been seriously trying to figure out how we should budget our money when we get out of school. I have been researching different budgets and I have always liked Dave Ramsey’s approach. Here are his guidelines for a personal budget. It seems pretty straight forward and just ordered his book, Total Money Makeover. I get it tomorrow and am excited to one day be DEBT FREE! Hopefully sooner and not later! I like pretty things, so I make cute printables for myself. I might as well share them with you!
Any awesome budgeting advice? Any great books that have inspired you to pay off debt? What kind of budget do you and your family use? I would love any advice!
(To download, click on picture twice, then right click and save image as. Then open picture and print, or insert it into a word document and resize it to the size you want.)
The best advice I ever got was to put any extra money at all towards debt. We budget for it already and then right before pay day, we take any extra money and pay off a little bit more. We have a five month old and nursing, using cloth diapers and buying disposables with coupons have helped us save enough money to pay off some debt as well as start a college fund for our son. We try as hard as possible to live within our means. I want to read Total Money Makeover, but I haven’t picked it up yet.
I love that advice! I can’t wait to be done with debt, so I am willing to throw all my extra money at it! We are in the same stage, the diaper stage…they are so expensive. I need to look into cloth diapers, because I hear they are way more simple than they used to be. Thank you!
We love our cloth. We actually use ones that are pretty similar to the ones my grandmother used. We have mostly prefold, covers and snappis instead of pins. They have some that are exactly like disposables called all in one diapers, no folding or pinning and you just toss them in a wet bag until you do a load. We wash ours with regular powder tide detergent but there are some pretty affordable diy detergent recipes out there.
You are awesome! Thank you for the tips! I might give them a try…I have always been scared of them 🙂
And we also have never had a blowout in cloth but have them all the time in disposables.
You have the right approach. We started Dave Ramsey’s money makeover plan about a year ago . Even though we are only on step 2, it has not only made a difference in our finances but in our relationship and in our kids and grandkids lives. We feel we are changing our family tree. It totally changed our perspective on money for the better. Go online and find a class to attend at daveramsey.com you will find financial peace.
Thank you! Hopefully I can raise my children to be financially smart! Thanks for sharing!
Love this! We have been doing the envelope system for a year now. It makes all of the difference. I even started making my own envelopes and selling them on Etsy. https://www.etsy.com/shop/CraftySundays?ref=hdr_shop_menu
Check it out and let me know what you think. Best of luck to you in your debt-free journey!
I read some of the guidelines for Dave Ramsey’s bonnibudget plan. I got a good laugh. He really doesn’t know anything about near poverty-level income. Does he? And his percentages are rediculous! 7% for medical. Now tell me where one gets insurance and medication for $98.84/mo? My insurance alone is $225,and I see nothing for food or clothing in his budget! I found several other budget guidelines to be much more reasonable for low income budgets such as mine. And they seem to understand that we don’t control what our insurance and medications cost.
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