broken clock tho

All you need to know about Dave Ramsey: i worked on his Jaguar XK.

He's right for most people first beginning to improve their financial health. He has probably gotten more people out of debt than any other 'guru'. If that's a hack, so be it, it works.

Nah he’s alright. There is no nuance in his advice but for the majority of his listeners that’s probably a good thing.

Per month?! Wtf are you driving? (Late 40s here, paying around £400 per year for my electric mini insurance)

And then you add the inflation and you actually just owe money. Got to get that third job at 65

6% is very conservative though. Even at 7%, which is a widely accepted inflation adjusted number, it's over 2 mil.

I was once rear ended at a red light. I was knocked unconscious and the driver drove off. A few kind witnesses called police who took a report. They got half his plate imprinted on my bumper, but never tracked him down. I had State Farm, and I was even paying extra for the "uninsured driver coverage". They said they couldn't cover it because until they had another driver's information I was automatically at fault, even with the police report and witness accounts. They said it didn't count as uninsured driver because it's possible the guy had insurance. I was flabbergasted.

In the end I had a concussion and needed to take time off work for recovery and my short term disability insurance ended up suing State Farm because they didn't want to pay for my medical treatment. State Farm agreed to cover medical care but only if it was recorded as my fault and I paid my deductible. In anger I tried to switch insurance companies but found out they have a shared database and since it was recorded as a hit and run my fault, nobody else would take me. And State Farm jacked my rate up 30%...

You are not kidding!

I got a motorcycle and paid for insurance. When someone stole my bike and police caught the guy and put it in the impound, my scummy ass insurance called me to go see if it's okay? Like bro, that's your job.

Then they said if I was willing to sign a contract that the bike was fine without allowing me to see it. I said no.

Finally they gave up and wrote me a check for the cost of the bike.

here's me, a grown ass adult with a car i paid off like 4 years ago - nothing special, a smallish commuter POS that gets 40mpg that i literally use to drive 4 miles to work and back.

i was paying about $630/year because i pay for a year at a time, and it'd be almost double that to pay monthly, like what the actual fuck? anyways, a few months ago i get this email from the insurance company telling me "hey get ready your policy will renew in 3 months, be sure to double check your payment method" so i log into my account and they were gonna raise my premium to $970/yr and there was literally no obvious way to see that they were gonna do that. it was a case of logging in, going through multiple levels of menus to get to the future policy, download a pdf of that policy, then view it offline.

well, i'm pissed, so i call them to find out what the hell they're doing and why and they claimed it's because i had gotten a speeding ticket. of course, they had zero information to share with me about that speeding ticket - no ticket number, no date/time, no address, nothing. i sure as hell don't recall getting a speeding ticket, and in any case, with a spotless driving record, you'd think there'd be some kind of interfacing with me about it, but no. they claimed the ticket was real and i'd need to contact my DMV to find out more.

so i call them, the DMV, and after some hassle, find out they have ZERO record of any speeding ticket. so.... back on the phone with the insurance company and they just wanna give me the shaft and the runaround no exceptions. i mean, i'm pissed now because it's OBVIOUS fraud, right? Anyways, i get absolutely nowhere. so i tell them to cancel my policy and i woulda thought about contacting a lawyer about a possible case or something but, naw....

i still have the car, and it's parked being unused. I swapped to riding bikes to and from work, sometimes an ebike, sometimes a fixie, and i'm the only cyclist on the road around here that I've ever seen and it's sometimes really sketchy. but i plan to ride through the winter, dry or snowy, i don't care.

it can get complicated, because i'm a single father, but honestly, fuck auto insurance, fuck cars, fuck car brain. we gotta make a stand at some point and I lament that we can't really do it collectively.

$554 a month at 5% growth is $440k after 30 years. So yeah not millions.

and that’s not even getting into the ableism issue.

Infrastructure that requires people to drive is far more ableist than the inverse. As many people with a disability can't drive at all (or driving is a significant challenge).

And sure we could get into buying a cheaper, used car or whatever, but in the long term the maintenance costs, having to buy another car sooner, and other financial risks to cars outside of warrantee over a lifetime will add up similarly unless you’re really lucky or can repair your own cars.

Buying a low-mileage used car and even paying for a shop to do the maintenance is almost always cheaper than buying something with $500+ monthly payments. I don't actually agree for the most part with Dave Ramsey (even about the entirety of this post)...but he's correct that it is cheaper.

The whole, where do you live thing is super important. The last time we moved my wife and I were very adamant about a specific maximum commute length in car, or a length by transit. And getting somewhere to live that was easy to commute from. We compared the price including mass transit commute at the max distance to anything we were getting closer with the commute included from there too.

The differences were absolutely significant. Many places were cheaper to live an hour away, even with car payments, insurance, and gas. That's absolutely ridiculous and part of so many problems from climate change to motor vehicle deaths.

We need to enforce mixed development, the people who work in an area need to be able to afford living in that area. Pushing the workers out should not be acceptable.

Oh, you're one of those shills for the shoe-leather industry! 😜

Male under 25 with anything over 150hp will make you pay a fuck ton.

I thought the same. Also it's much higher for young males under age 25. Tbf testosterone is a bitch and that demographic causes a lot of the most extreme preventable accidents.

Which ironically encourages people to ride bikes! If only that were not nearly a suicidal activity in the USA in so many places... 😢