Personal Finance

I followed Dave Ramsey's plan and paid off over $200k in just a little over 2 years

Christy Bieber

Published: January 29, 2025 1:51 pm

Dave Ramsey is well-known for his advice on debt payoff. The financial guru encourages people to complete a series of baby steps to develop financial peace. These steps start with saving up a small emergency fund, then shifting your focus to paying off debt ASAP using a method called the snowball method which begins with paying off your lowest balance first to stay motivated. 

One caller to the Ramsey show was very successful in her debt payoff efforts using this approach, leaving Ramsey very impressed. Here’s how she did it — and some tips on how you can do the same. 

This Ramsey follower paid off an incredible amount of debt in a short period of time

The caller to the Ramsey show explained that she had paid off a shocking $234,000 in debt over a period of just 31 months. She was able to achieve this amazing feat for one big reason: she dramatically increased her income. While she started out making $75,000, she was ultimately making $275K during her debt payoff journey.

She was able to make this big income leap as a nurse practitioner because she worked multiple jobs. In fact, she told Ramsey that at one point she was working 96 hours per week. Ramsey encourages people to get Gazelle-intense, which means being focused, being intense, and making sacrifices to become debt-free ASAP. Obviously, this caller lived his words to a tee and she left Ramsey very impressed with the efforts that she made. 

While working 96 hours a week is a hard thing to do, and not sustainable over the long term, this caller was able to make it work when she needed to, and her efforts were well-rewarded as she can now grow her wealth debt-free. 

How can you tackle your own debt?

If you owe money and want to pay it off ASAP, there are a few approaches you can take to do it. One option is to follow this caller’s lead and increase your income. The upside to this approach is that there’s theoretically no limit to how much you can increase your earning power. There are practical limits, like your skills and how many hours you are willing to work. However, if you can push yourself to improve your employment options or if you can find more hours in the week to work, you can make a big impact. 

Cutting spending is another approach to finding extra money to make big debt payments. The downside of this option is that there is a hard limit. You can only cut your spending so much. Obviously, you still need someplace to live and something to eat and you need to keep the utilities connected so you can never cut spending to zero. Making drastic cuts to discretionary spending can also be hard to sustain. 

For many people, it makes sense to do a mix of both cutting spending and increasing income. Try out some side gigs or do overtime at work, improve your job skills, and try to reduce your cash outflows. Once you have found extra money to pay toward debt you can follow Ramsey’s advice and do the snowball method if you are worried about staying on track. This would mean making all your extra payments to the debt with the lowest balance and then rolling that money over to pay on the debt with the next lowest balance once you have paid off one debt in full. 

This approach can cost you more in interest over time if your low-balance debt is at a lower interest rate, but Ramsey believes it is best to score quick wins. If you prefer to pay the least possible amount, though, you’d likely want to try the Debt Avalanche instead and start with the highest-interest debt first.

Whatever you decide, making an effort to pay off debt comes with big rewards, and it is well worth your effort. Hopefully, you can find a way to become debt-free like Ramsey’s caller, so you too can enjoy the freedom of doing whatever you want with your money instead of sending it to creditors each month.