I went to out of state public Us—U of OR and the UC Davis. No regrets and got generous need and merit aid.
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The guy down the street from me, the one in the big house, was arrested for hiring hitmen to murder his ex wife. He and his current wife both also received sentences for tax evasion.
I do not ask a lot of questions.
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Sounds like something Keith Morrison and Dateline would be all over!
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Food for thought:
**Edited to add: the comments of the article are interesting to consider, since we know how headlines can be misleading.
Funny - I just got finished reading this and was coming here to post it. I run hot and cold on Ramsey and the advice he gives but the story is more around the general stats of a survey that was done and there are some interesting data points from it.
The story also doesn’t parse teachers - just sort of pools them together saying an average salary of $66K. “Teachers” are a pretty large pool and certainly going to have some high salaried people in it.
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I have lots of thoughts about this article. Here are some.
One, my dh was a public-school teacher and never made near the $60s. I wonder whether that includes benefits.
Two, I’m not interested enough to dig into the methodology, but I do wonder whether all these teachers are single? My experience with teachers is that most are women whose salary is incidental to the well-paying jobs their husbands have.
Three, I like what he said about systems. I agree. I always say that money problems are rarely about money. They have to do with our psychology/emotions around money and spending.
I’ve told this story on here before. My financial adviser, at our first meeting, said, “Ooooh. You’re a Dave Ramsey type!” She didn’t mean it as a compliment.
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I was going to buy a kilowatt floor speaker set with an oversized subwoofer that would cause the neighbors to call the police on me. Then I read about the Hollywood strike and I realized that movies are going to suck for a while. The wife says the sound bar is fine. 
I guess that’s money saved, right?
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I probably was that parent asking about CMU. I made sure my kids applied to places that would give good merit. Sometimes that meant places that were out of the norm for the kids in our HS. So many scholarships you don’t know the full result until Feb or March so you have to apply to many and hope you get one or two to hit.
We are heading up there in a week to drop off D23. Then we will be empty nesters.
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You’re dropping off at Central Michigan University, not CMU? Hope your drop off goes well and all the best!
To me this was the central take-away from the story.
And it can’t be hammered enough that starting saving early - even a small amount - is more important than waiting until you’re in a higher income bracket that might allow you to save more in absolute terms.
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She should have.
Dave Ramsey’s advice boils down to three main components and then provides a game plan to achieve them.
- Get out of debt and then stay out of debt.
- Create an emergency fund. Then use it when needed and build it back up. The amount varies as to your life stage.
- After 1 and 2 are completed, then invest. His main investment advice is long term stable investments. His simple wealth building is based on compound interest. You have to put your money to work for you. And of course the more money you make or what stage of life you are in allows for riskier investments and branching out. But a credit card is not an emergency fund and a lottery ticket is not an investment.
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I’m with you on those aspects of Ramsey, but I can understand the hesitation around some of his advice. He often seems to demonize credit cards. I understand why he is against them for people who are having serious money issues. He is preaching to a certain audience. But most of us, who treat credit cards as a tool and not a toy, don’t need his sometimes heavy-handed austerity measures.
In my case with the FA, she was talking about some of my old-fashioned thinking around money. I am just fine with some of my old-fashioned thinking around money, than you very much.
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Living below your means is good and accumulating investments is a practical way of growing wealth, slowly & steadily.
I agree as well that the hidden benefits of good medical insurance and pensions are underrated when working but can be so very helpful as one ages, especially if relatively small salaries don’t allow for as robust retirement savings as one hopes.
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I don’t think any of the “experts” financial advice is inherently bad. Even if I quibble with some of the details-- the advice is generally solid.
What gets people into trouble are two elements in my experience-
1- Picking and choosing. Listening to four different podcasts/radio personalities, and picking the “easy” elements from each of them. So instead of a coherent plan (budget, get out of debt, invest in no-load or low-fee funds instead of churning your account every month) you end up with a byzantine mess which has high fees, using your house as an ATM, being over-insured for minor losses and no insurance for the big one (i.e. dying and leaving your family in debt with no bread-winner). No single plan is bad. But trying to pick and choose from a bunch is usually a disaster.
2- Following the fun parts- investing! Watching your portfolio go up! Buying the cheapest house on the block and watching your home increase in value after you add a full bathroom! But ignoring the ones you can’t bear to live with- cutting out all recurring expenses (yes, the gym you never go to AND the TV subscription service you never watch) until you’ve created a ground-up budget, going to your HR rep at work and making sure your beneficiaries, number of dependents, type of health insurance, etc. is still appropriate. I know people who pay for vision care every month- they don’t wear glasses! This is insanity- but I get it- it’s not the fun part.
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It really depends on where you teach. MA/NY/CT make high salaries but face a high cost of living. In the south, teachers make much less. Then again, for what my modest home in the north is worth, I could buy a palace in the south.
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Conceptually I understand the premise of this but it over-simplifies things and strict adherence to it can result in not taking advantage of certain opportunities. If our household has as stable income (minimal risk of loss of job) and I have a 30 year fixed mortgage at 3% why am I going to prioritize paying off that debt over long term retirement savings when relatively conservative portfolio’s are 6% return?
Or a car loan at 0% for X months. Provided you’re buying a vehicle that’s within your normal means and not leveraging cheap financing to over-extend yourself why wouldn’t I take advantage of that.
Not that such cheap debt is an option anymore. 
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And are we talking public or private and elementary versus high school versus university (some university teachers can pull down big $$ that’s going to skew things).
Apologies for the sidebar, but my school district has some of the highest paid teachers in the state. Public high school teachers with PhDs make 120k+/yr. That’s more money than entry-level district attorneys make here. It’s also quite common for dual-PhD couples to teach at the same school and take on extra duty (i.e. coaching a sport) thereby increasing their HHI. Teaching is a tough profession, no doubt about it, but here it provides a comfortable lifestyle that comes with the amazing perk of eight weeks of summer vacation.
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Right - sort of my point - that the original story is a little misleading with the suggestion that teachers at the average salary are becoming millionaires. Maybe some are but the bulk are likely in different situations like the one you outline or the one that someone above suggested that many might be spouses in a dual income family where the other spouse might make dramatically more.
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Plus great health care benefits in many states due to incredible unions.
This is not true in every state.
And in many states, teachers pay into a state government retirement plan instead of social security. They receive that but it has limits on the social security benefits they can receive.
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