I think that in general its true that if you’re in debt from overspending, the plan that will get you out of it isn’t the one that is the most logical, its the one that emotionally feels the best. The one with the small targets and the baby steps. The one that makes you feel like you are really getting somewhere.

It doesn’t matter which plan you follow – its the sticking to it that will get you out of debt.

If you have an emotional relationship with money, thats probably not great. But you can try to use it to your advantage. Maybe thats what the op is trying to say?

Aren’t the motivations you already have “spending lots”, “feeling good”, “living for today” (assuming we’re talking about so-called ‘bad debt’ here)..
How do you use those kind of motivations to get out of debt?

Also – honestly – I like DR’s plan. It’s easy to explain to someone who doesn’t do math. And what kind of advantage are we talking about here? A few hundred dollars on $20K worth of debt? Compared to the cost of in-action – it’s pretty minor.

One of my goals for this blog is to foster discussion of various topics. That’s why I usually phrase things the way I do.

The goal here is to get out of debt. How you or anyone else decides to do that is up to them. No matter which path is chosen, self-discipline will be the deciding factor into whether the goal is accomplished or not.

When a person is drowning deeply in debt — I mean the sort where you can’t even pay everything monthly, which is DR’s target audience — you really feel helpless. You don’t even know what to do to tackle the problem effectively. You can barely think straight, you feel so trapped and helpless. You may even have legal wolves howling at your door, demanding payment.

Then along comes DR (or somebody else I like, Mary Hunt), and he has a PLAN. It’s a plan that has a solution to your problem. It’s broken into little, manageable steps.

You still have to apply the discipline to make DR’s plan work. But it gives you the chance to fight your way out of the hole you are in. THAT is what is so powerful for the deeply indebted about paying off the smallest debts first. It gives them a reason to keep working the plan. Yes it’s a mental game. So what?

It really doesn’t matter what got you in the hole, or how long it takes you to dig out (or even if you could have saved a little by going a different way). What matters is that you found a way to get out.

For me, Ramsey’s methods have been a powerful revelation. Before I read his “permission” to pay the smallest balance first, I was swimming in debt and could not escape because the pool looked impossibly huge. I thought I would drown. But by concentrating on just a small part of the overall problem, I was able to succeed. This prompted me to try the next bigger debt. I succeeded there. Now I have just one debt left. It’s big, but it’s going to be gone in the next year. Without Dave Ramsey, this probably would never have happened.

It makes me cranky when people try to pinpoint a single “best way” to handle money or debt. There is no one best way. There are multiple paths to the same destination. The key is to do what works for you, and to ignore the people who preach there’s only one true way. (Note that this philosophy pretty much works for all areas of life.)

But that wasn’t really what this thread was supposed to be about either.

Would you begrudge a man that he’s made his own living and employed a lot of people at the same time as providing a service to people that helps them? Nobody forces anybody to buy a DR product. You can go to your library, and if you work it right, DR himself will GIVE YOU his products.

Otherwise, I find it interesting how black and white some people try to make this be. IF you are in debt you aren’t being logical, IF you aren’t in debt then obviously you are rational. I just don’t think life works that way. Maybe the debt-free person has better spending habits.

Maybe the debt-free person has never been able to get a credit card, and so therefore if they were to get one tomorrow would rack up a ton of debt.

Likewise maybe the debt-ridden person is a lousy, no-good slob who can’t keep a dime or balance a checkbook. Or maybe they had misfortune fall on them like big medical bills or a layoff, and ended up in debt.

Humans are emotional. Money is a subject that causes emotion. It’s not morally superior to act “logically” or “rationally” about your money. It’s not morally inferior to be in debt. The only thing that’s morally inferior is to be blind to your own weakness and do nothing about it — in the case of the debt-ridden that would be to do nothing about being in debt. In the case of somebody who thinks they are morally superior to somebody in debt, it’s to examine their own hubris.