Living like no one else....it's freaking hard!

Living like no one else so later you can live like no one else…….I hear Dave say this all the time. The other day I heard a man, 63 years old, call the Dave Ramsey show with a question as to whether or not he should buy a house. He had $2.9M in his retirement account and wanted to see if it was ok for him to buy a $300K house. Dave was shocked/pleasantly surprised by the amount of money this guy had saved and said he was the typical “millionaire next door”. The man laughed out loud and said “yeah, driving a 10yr old car”.  Oh and the caller made an average of less than $100K but he had been funding his retirement for 36 years.

Can I just say WOW! This is living like no one else so later you can live like no one else. But the truth is, this is not easy! We started the Dave Ramsey plan 4 years ago and continue to work the plan but I have to be honest, there have been times we have fall off the bandwagon; times where I just want to say “screw it, let’s go on a cruise and forget about having a fully funded emergency fund….we can save for that later”. But the truth is we were not smart with our finances for many years so we are still cleaning up our mess.

Is it hard? Yes it is! Especially when you have children and want to give them everything you “think” they want: cool toys, nice trips, fancy clothes, etc. So how do we keep ourselves from living from paycheck to paycheck and not spend every penny on “stuff’…..we stop and think about the kind of legacy we want to leave. I think Gracie and any other children we have, 20 years down the road, will appreciate more if her parents have a good size retirement fund so that we are not a burden to them later in life; they will appreciate having a fully funded college fund at 18 rather than the latest toy at 2; they will appreciate having a family legacy that’s all about giving rather than a family that keeps up with the latest gadgets and takes the coolest trips (nothing wrong this) at the expense of spending every penny they get and more (everything wrong with this).

So…..one day I want to be that caller! But I know the path to that final destination is not easy.  What can I say , I’m human, I’m a girl, I’m a mom and I like STUFF…LOTS OF STUFF! It’s not easy but if we, as a family, can make the hard decisions now, we can do whatever the flip we want at 63 because we lived like no one else and now we can live like no one else.