This advice isn’t for rich people. It’s for people who are living beyond their means. Some people appear rich but they are actually, as one of my favorite ads of recent years said, in debt up to their eyeballs, so not rich at all. Most of us don’t take a hard look at how we are spending our money until we’re in trouble. Our priorities and our pride are usually to blame.

We all have our “no matter whats” but for some folks, that is stuff like, “no matter what, my kids will never go to bed hungry” and for others it’s “no matter what, I will never fly coach.” Dave Ramsey’s book and podcast helped me a lot. I don’t agree with everything he espouses by a long shot, but the basics were enormously helpful to me.

My husband and I entered retirement debt-free and our stress levels are way down. Dave can keep his politics, religion, and lucrative “wealth-building” side hustles, but the basic old-fashioned advice part can work wonders. He didn’t invent it, which he freely admits, but it helped me to have him beat those concepts into my consciousness and it worked for us.