Debt photos

brij2006 · June 2015

short+sassy said:

brij2006 said:

I wish they would do one for the opposite scenario. Photo's of people living without debt. So you could compare.

As someone who is very close to being 100% debt free (including mortgage), we treat our things so much differently now. We always took care of our "stuff," but I've really noticed that we have a whole new appreciation for them. Our cars are always hand washed and clean, our lawn is being cared for a lot more, we have the means to repair things immediately and be proactive about repairs, and there's just a much different sense of pride in our jobs now that they aren't needed to make payments.

Dave Ramsey has a saying that your lawn feels different when it's paid for. I never understood that, but I get it now. You really do live differently when you don't have debt, and it's a good different.

I was actually mulling over your post yesterday and thought it was an interesting take. I tried to envision those photos and really kept coming back to the same conclusion. I think the photos of people with no or little debt would look largely the same. If anything, I suspect most of the photos would have modest surroundings. Generally speaking, no McMansions or flashy new cars in the driveway. McMansions and new cars might mean a healthy income, but they don't necessarily mean no debt.
Thanks for your verbal description of what no/little debt looks and feels like. My analogy is my DH and I had been living together for 10+ years when we got married and I really didn't think that getting married would make our lives feel any different. But it did. It was a better different.
I look forward to someday knowing the "better different" of no debt, including mortgages, and congrats to you all for saving/working hard to achieve that!

That is exactly what it's like. My H and I lived together for 4 years before getting married, and were together for 8. We didn't think things would be different after having that piece of paper tying us together, but it was. Not a bad different, but an amazing different.
Being debt free (or very close to it), is that same thing. It's just so different. Our marriage is 10x stronger, we dream together a lot more and our dreams are different, and we look at our family life in a completely different light than we did 2 years ago with $130k in debt.

It's so hard to explain, but I look at the pictures of those people in debt and try to compare it to a picture taken in our life. It would be different. We would have asked them to take a picture of us with our house in the background. Because we're proud of our paid for home that we bought as a foreclosure for $49k, and have cash flowed $20k of repairs, and now it's worth $100k. Rather than a picture inside the house in our living room on the couch we bought 2nd hand.
That's where I think the pictures would be entirely different.

MommyLiberty5013 · June 2015

short+sassy said:

brij2006 said:

I wish they would do one for the opposite scenario. Photo's of people living without debt. So you could compare.

As someone who is very close to being 100% debt free (including mortgage), we treat our things so much differently now. We always took care of our "stuff," but I've really noticed that we have a whole new appreciation for them. Our cars are always hand washed and clean, our lawn is being cared for a lot more, we have the means to repair things immediately and be proactive about repairs, and there's just a much different sense of pride in our jobs now that they aren't needed to make payments.

Dave Ramsey has a saying that your lawn feels different when it's paid for. I never understood that, but I get it now. You really do live differently when you don't have debt, and it's a good different.

I was actually mulling over your post yesterday and thought it was an interesting take. I tried to envision those photos and really kept coming back to the same conclusion. I think the photos of people with no or little debt would look largely the same. If anything, I suspect most of the photos would have modest surroundings. Generally speaking, no McMansions or flashy new cars in the driveway. McMansions and new cars might mean a healthy income, but they don't necessarily mean no debt.
Thanks for your verbal description of what no/little debt looks and feels like. My analogy is my DH and I had been living together for 10+ years when we got married and I really didn't think that getting married would make our lives feel any different. But it did. It was a better different.
I look forward to someday knowing the "better different" of no debt, including mortgages, and congrats to you all for saving/working hard to achieve that!

Maybe the whole point is that people with debt just look "normal" and "average." To be honest, I don't see anything very significant or enlightening about these photos. They just capture average Janes and Joes in their home worlds - messy, neat, decorated, not decorated, modern, contemporary, traditional....just very normal.

Debt photos

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