We Just Thought We Were “Gazelle Intense”
Dave Ramsey talks about being “gazelle intense” like live-or-die, about-to-be-lion-food crazy about getting out of debt.
Six months ago, I thought we’d seen that. Sure, we’d had garage sales and sold nearly everything that we didn’t need around the house. We paid extra on everything and applied “windfall money” to our baby steps, but now, it’s getting out of hand. Here’s how I know we’re figuring out how to get crazy.
We’re literally living the beans-and-rice diet. We’ve actually grown to really like it. Black beans, rice and bananas make a great lunch plate. Very Cuban I’m told. (Exotic cooking, baby!)
We went from wine drinkers to cheap wine drinkers to tea and ice water drinkers. (Egads!) I still get an occasional bottle of merlot, but we don’t see luxuries like that nearly so frequently now. (It’s gonna be fine champagne the day we’re debt-free, let me tell you!)
We’re rolling coins. We’re both using envelopes but hate change—so we toss it into a bucket every day. The bucket is building fast in an all-cash house. These coins are very shortly going to add up to another pretty hefty payment on a debt.
We’re taking extra work. My husband has added a sixth day to his workweek and takes all the overtime he can get. Most winters we don’t have him work extra because sometimes the year-end overtime has thrown us into a higher tax bracket than we planned for and ended up costing us. Because we still have a tax credit balance from last year, we’ll get all of our tax withholdings back this year, so he’s pounding out the overtime hours like nobody’s business. I calculated my breakevens on all lines of my two small businesses and can discern profitable work from not-so-profitable work better. I cut loose some clients and picked up some more that better fit my business model.
The kids stopped asking. (Jealous much?) They don’t ask for anything anymore. If they want it, they say “sometime can we put X in the budget.” I tell them what month that might fit and the date to remind me. If they want the item bad enough, they’ll write it on the calendar to get it in to me before that month’s budget. Nice.
Have you experienced gazelle intensity? If not, what’s holding you back? If you have, what does it look like at your house. I’m looking for even more ways to accelerate our program.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Gazelle is my middle name!!! My partner and I took Dave Ramsey’s FPU 2 years ago in January 2008. We never looked back and are now 4000.00 away from paying off our mortgage (should be paid off by January 2010). A 30 year mortgage paid off in 5 years and 7 months! Gazelle baby!!! The budget is KING in our home. I went so far as to sell my car and take the bus to work. We have another car and really did not need 2 vechicles. The bus stop is right across the street from my house and I get to work earlier than if I drove. Some people call me crazy. I say crazy like a fox. A wealth building fox.
You are on the right track! Keep up the good work!!!!!
Toni–that’s inspiring! You guys are amazing! That’s gonna feel great when you get the house paid off. Please post back and tell us when it’s done–we’d love to celebrate that with you.
Are you doing the Dave Ramsey thing where your’e saving while you pay off your mortgage or did you put the mortgage in with the other debts to pay off and save after it’s paid off (savings goes way faster with no bills!).
Congrats and ROCK ON!
We saved a LARGE emergency fund while paying off all the debt , and then we attacked the mortgage this year…..we were rewatching the Dave FPU DVD’s and realized that we had double what we needed in the emergcy fund, so we got to add 1/2 of the emergency fund to the mortgage!!
Keep at it Jessica, it’s sooo worth it! We just finished baby step 6 (paid off the house) a few months ago and it is amazing. We were more than tripling the (15yr) mortgage payment every month for the last year, and now all of that extra money is going into OUR bank account.
My wife and I were actually excited every month when the mortgage bill arrived so we could see how much we SLASHED the principal with the last payment. When all of the snowball money is going at the payment it is powerful stuff.
I’m curious how going into a higher tax bracket costs you guys? It’s a marginal tax so the extra will be taxed but you are still making money.
Sure, we still make money, but it means we set our withholdings wrong, because we set our withholdings every year based on what we expect our annual income will be (with both of us on fairly regular salaries this used to be really easy). The time that this happened we didn’t budget enough for taxes because we accidentally hit a “milestone” income amount that we didn’t think we’d reach. We hadn’t been paying attention at the end of the year to what our combined income was so we couldn’t come up with a deduction (charitable donation, etc to put our effective tax rate back where it usually is) before year end to keep us within the bracket we’d planned for (and we just BARELY went over, so it wouldn’t have taken much).
So yes, we had money, but all the extra money was going to debt repayment (mostly my college loans) we just didn’t plan on the increased income tax burden of being in a higher bracket.
That hasn’t happened to us in a couple years, but last time we got a surprise tax bill of several thousand dollars more than we’d expect, because ALL of our income was taxable at the higher rate–not the rate we’d planned on. If we’d made just a few hundred less, we would have withheld/saved the proper amount, and saved ourselves the tax hassle.
I’ve got no problem paying our fair share of our taxes, but the reason that it was so frustrating is that the amount of the deficit that we had to pay when we filed our taxes was FAR more than the amount of income over the milestone amount. It was literally one or two too many overtime shifts too many that messed up our tax planning.
This year, with my income reduced, we’re not a worried about it–also, another child has joined the family since then (tax deduction) and we have a carryover credit from last year, so my hubby is taking all the extra shifts he can get.
Wow, great! I love stories like this. I think it’s a great thought exercise to look at where you were, and then look at where the next level of ferocious gazelle intensity is. I thought I was being intense when I . . . but now I”m intense when I . . .
I might cue this up as a blog post. Thanks again for posting.
I went similarly all out when accumulating my retirement portfolio. The methods also work on the other side of the balance sheet. And I’ll take rice and beans over a slap of red meat any day. (One thing I noted is that if you go all out, you don’t really need a budget.)