Mary Hunt vs Dave Ramsey?

[aja319se]

I have decided to start living debt free! I'm really excited to finally take the first steps. While doing research I have narrowed it down to 2 different styles either Mary Hunt or Dave Ramsey. I'd really appreciate anyone's opinions on these. If you have tried them was it successful? What did you like or not like about one?

Thanks DIS!!

 

[IleneF]

I'm a Mary Hunt advocate I've been using her plan for about 18mos.
She just makes so much sense and pretty easy to follow. I subscribe to her
free newsletter and took advantage of her free offer for the Debt Free Living site, got as much info downloaded to my computer as I could and let the free offer expire. I don't think I need to pay for the tools. Once I read about them I was able to proceed. I also took her book out of the library. Both hubby and I read it. The most important thing is to make both a short term savings account (I call it my Be Prepared Acct) to take care of household and car expenses that come up and a long term emergency fund able to pay several months of expenses if caught by surprise. I really like her savings formula. Probably the biggest obstacle is bringing in enough income to cover your base expenses plus the other accts that need to be funded. That is to say that if you aren't bringing in enough income and you can't find anyplace to reduce further you won't be able to make the plan work. One other thing we did was to automate the billpaying AND the
savings so you don't have to think about it..it's amazing how the savings accumulate. We did have to curtail the plan when my husband was unemployed for 6mos; we weren't able to add to either savings and couldn't even meet our base BUT since we had been on the plan for a few months there was THANKFULLY savings to pull from. Now we just start again. I've re-automated the savings to both accts and upped the mortage payment back to the repay in 15yr schedule (we had to go up to the 20yr schedule while hubby was unemployed). It's a great plan to give you some sense of security and increase your awareness of where your money is going.

 

[gillenkl]

We do a modified Dave Ramsey. Our only debt is our house.

 

[minnie1928]

I haven't read Mary Hunt, but I've read lots of other personal finance authors/books, including DR. Why not look at both programs and pull out the pieces that you think you'll benefit the most from? I've been doing a modified DR for 5+ years and it's got some DR, some David Bach, some Suze, etc all mixed into one program. I've found that many of the finance authors speak the same generic language so it's easy to mix them together and come up with something that will work for your particular situation.

 

[aja319se]

Thanks everyone for the advice. I think I'll be doing a modified plan using a lot of Mary and some of DR too. I will use Mary's rapdi debt reduction plan. I should be CC debt free in about 1 year while also building my emergency fund.

 

[palavra]

Take the best of what you find out there. We are on a modified budget program that fits our lifestyle. In 6 months we will only have our house and one car payment as debt.

 

[abmitch01]

never heard of Mary Hunt, thanks for posting about her, I'll check her out