Dear Past Me: Surviving The Ramsey Baby Steps With Kids

Dear Sarah from last October,

It's 11:42 PM on a Tuesday and you're sitting on the sticky kitchen linoleum right in front of the dishwasher. You're wearing those black yoga pants with the dried yogurt stain on the left knee, nursing a lukewarm mug of dark roast coffee because you gave up on sleep hours ago. Maya just asked for water for the fourth time in twenty minutes, Leo is somehow sleeping horizontally across the dog's bed instead of his own, and you're staring intensely at that coffee-stained dave ramsey baby steps pdf you aggressively printed out at work because our credit card bill made you hyperventilate in the Target parking lot.

I know you're panicked right now. I know you think the whole dave ramsey baby steps thing is going to magically fix our bank account overnight if you just yell at your husband enough about selling his golf clubs.

But please, for the love of god, put down the highlighter and take a breath. I'm writing this to you six months from the future to tell you that trying to follow a strict financial framework when you've a four-year-old and a seven-year-old is basically like trying to fold a fitted sheet during a hurricane. It's messy. It's frustrating. You're going to cry a lot.

Those little baby steps sound so incredibly straightforward when a millionaire is yelling them at you through a podcast, but real life with a baby and a chaotic elementary schooler doesn't fit neatly into a spreadsheet. So here's what you actually need to know about surviving this whole budgeting phase without totally losing your mind or filing for divorce.

That thousand dollar emergency fund is a literal joke

Okay, let's talk about Step 1. You're supposed to save a thousand bucks as a starter emergency fund and then throw every other penny at your debt. Which, like, fine. The psychology of it makes sense, I guess. You get a quick win.

But let me tell you what happens next month. Leo is going to shove a plastic crafting bead so far up his left nostril that you've to rush him to the pediatric urgent care at 8 PM on a Sunday. My doctor looked at it, grabbed these weird glowing tweezers, and vaguely mumbled something about the nasal cavity wall or the sinus pressure—honestly I wasn't really listening because I was doing the mental math on our high-deductible insurance plan while trying to keep Leo from thrashing around.

The bill for that little fifteen-minute bead extraction? Seven hundred dollars. Poof. Most of your starter emergency fund, gone. Because a thousand dollars when you've kids is nothing. It's basically the cost of looking at a doctor and replacing a set of tires.

If you stubbornly stick to just a thousand dollars because a book told you to, you're going to end up putting groceries on the credit card again the second the water heater breaks, which totally defeats the purpose. Anyhow, the point is, my husband and I decided we needed at least three grand in the bank to actually feel safe before we started aggressively paying off the student loans. Trust your gut on this. You know your kids are walking disasters who break things. Buffer the account.

Pausing your 401k match will make your husband's eye twitch

When you get to Step 2—the debt snowball phase where you list everything from smallest to largest—the rules say you've to stop ALL retirement investing. Even the employer match.

I remember sitting at the dining room table, surrounded by unpaid medical bills, telling my husband we had to pause his 401k contributions. He looked at me like I had just suggested we roast the family dog for dinner. He grabbed a napkin and started aggressively drawing this bar chart about compound interest and employer matching funds, and I think he said something about it being literally free money that grows exponentially? Look, math makes me want to curl into a ball and die, and wrapping my head around market returns versus interest rates is not my strong suit.

But he was right. Walking away from a 100% employer match is financially bananas. We ended up compromising—we kept his match going because throwing away free money felt dumber than having a car loan, and then we threw everything else at the debt. You have to figure out what lets you sleep at night instead of just blindly following rules that stress you out more.

Stop buying cheap garbage because it actually makes you poorer

This is the part of the journey where you're going to get hyper-obsessive about the budget. You're going to try to save money by buying the absolute cheapest versions of everything for the kids. Please stop doing this immediately.

It's the classic trap. You buy a five-dollar pack of baby pants from some fast-fashion website, and after two washes they shrink to the size of Barbie clothes and the elastic completely disintegrates. Then you've to go buy more. You end up spending triple what you'd have if you just bought one good thing in the first place.

When I finally realized this, I started looking for stuff that seriously lasts. Like those Baby Pants in Organic Cotton with the Soft Ribbed Drawstring from Kianao. I bought a pair for my sister's new baby last week because I was remembering how awful cheap baby clothes were when Leo was little. These ribbed pants are brilliant because they've this adjustable drawstring waist instead of that terrible fixed elastic that digs into chubby little baby tummies.

They seriously grow with the kid. The organic cotton stretches, you can roll the cuffs, and they hold up in the wash without turning into stiff cardboard. The harem style means they fit over massive cloth diapers without making the poor kid look like a stuffed sausage. Buying one pair of high-quality, sustainable pants that lasts through three growth spurts is so much smarter for your budget than buying ten pairs of cheap crap that fall apart.

Now, I'll say, not every eco-friendly purchase is a massive game-changer. I also bought the Bamboo Baby Spoon and Fork Set trying to be all sustainable and minimalist. And like, they're perfectly fine. The silicone tips are soft and the bamboo handles are cute. But honestly, Leo still used the fork to catapult mashed sweet potatoes directly onto the kitchen ceiling. They're great utensils, but they aren't going to magically teach your toddler table manners, so don't think you need to overhaul your entire kitchen drawer to be a good mom.

Just focus on the heavy hitters. Buy clothes that last. Speaking of which, you should really check out Kianao's organic baby clothes collection when you genuinely need to replace things, because the cost-per-wear is infinitely better for the budget.

Please stop crying over their college funds

Okay, the sequence of Step 4 (saving 15% for your own retirement) and Step 5 (saving for the kids' college) is going to bring up so much ridiculous mom guilt.

You're going to sit there and think, "What kind of selfish monster funds their own 401k while their children's 529 college accounts sit there completely empty?" I literally cried over this. I felt like I was failing Maya and Leo because I wasn't aggressively saving for their university tuition right this very second.

But my husband practically shook me by the shoulders and reminded me of reality. You can get a student loan to go to college. You can get scholarships, grants, or work a terrible job at the dining hall serving soggy French fries. You CANNOT get a loan to fund your retirement.

If we don't save for our own old age, we're going to become massive financial burdens to Maya and Leo when they're adults trying to raise their own kids. Moving into our kids' basements because we're broke is way worse than them having to take out a modest student loan for a state school. Secure your own oxygen mask first, Sarah. Stop feeling guilty about it.

Cash-flowing the cute stuff

Oh, and Step 6 is paying off your house early. Yeah, right. We live in the real world where childcare costs as much as a luxury car lease, so just completely ignore that step for the next decade. Moving on.

The biggest shift you're going to make is using "sinking funds" for the things the kids genuinely need, instead of swiping the credit card and panicking later. A sinking fund is just a fancy term for saving a tiny bit of cash every month for an upcoming expense.

Like, you know Leo is going to need shoes soon. So instead of being "shocked" when he suddenly needs them, you throw ten bucks a month into an envelope. That's how we finally bought him those Baby Sneakers Non-Slip Soft Sole First Shoes. I absolutely love these things. They look like tiny little adult boat shoes, but they've these incredibly soft, pliable soles so his little feet can really feel the ground when he's practicing walking. Rigid baby shoes are the absolute worst for foot development—my sister's doctor mumbled something about arch formation and muscle development once, which basically means babies need to be barefoot or in soft soles.

Because we cash-flowed the sneakers with our little sinking fund, there was zero guilt when buying them. It's a completely different feeling buying high-quality things when you know the money is already sitting there waiting.

So, past Sarah, get up off the linoleum floor. Put the spreadsheets away for tonight. Go pour that cold coffee down the sink and get some sleep. You don't have to follow every single rule perfectly to get your financial life together. You just have to make slightly better choices tomorrow than you did today.

You've got this.

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Messy FAQs about the whole baby steps thing

Do you really have to use cash envelopes for everything?

Oh god, no. I tried the cash envelope system for exactly two weeks. I was standing in line at the grocery store with a screaming toddler, holding up a line of annoyed people while trying to count out crinkled one-dollar bills from an envelope labeled "Groceries." It was humiliating and stressful. We just use a budgeting app now and track our debit card spending. If cash makes you crazy, don't use it. The point is just to track the money, not torture yourself.

How do you budget for baby stuff when you've no idea what you'll need?

You guess, honestly. And you keep it minimal. First-time parents think they need bottle warmers and wipe warmers and a million sensory toys. You don't. Babies literally want to play with the cardboard box the diapers came in. Set a modest monthly sinking fund for "kid stuff" and only buy things when it becomes an absolute glaring necessity, not just because an Instagram ad told you to.

Are sustainable baby clothes really worth the extra money when you're in debt?

Yeah, but you've to buy fewer of them. If you buy a massive haul of sustainable clothes, you're going to go broke. But buying three or four extremely well-made, organic cotton basics (like those ribbed Kianao pants I won't shut up about) that last through multiple seasons is way cheaper than replacing a 20-piece cheap wardrobe every three months when the zippers break and the fabric pills.

What if my spouse hates budgeting?

Welcome to my marriage six months ago! You can't force them to care by yelling at them or shoving a book in their face. We had to sit down with a beer and talk about what we honestly wanted our life to look like in five years—like taking a real vacation without putting it on a credit card. Once we agreed on the goal, the spreadsheet stuff got a lot less argumentative. But seriously, it takes time. Just keep talking.

Should I pause my kid's extracurriculars to pay off debt?

This is so personal, but for us? No. We cut cable, we stopped eating out, I started brewing my own coffee (even if it's always lukewarm), but we kept Maya in gymnastics. You have to cut the fat from your budget, but you don't have to cut the absolute joy out of your kids' childhoods. You just find the money somewhere else.