My husband and I have been married for 35 years.
Throughout those years, financial freedom gurus have come and gone in the Christian world. When we were first married, everyone was jumping on the Larry Burkett bandwagon. Then it was the Ron Blue bandwagon. And now it’s the Dave Ramsey bandwagon.
In 1988, my husband and I had been married for 8 years, and we got the family involved in the sport of figure skating.
By 1990, we realized that it was impossible to try to be debt-free and pursue figure skating. So we deliberately climbed off the debt-free bandwagon and have never looked back. We are in debt today and it doesn’t really worry us.
If families followed any of the above gurus, no one except wealthy people would get involved with figure skating. For years, the sport was at least 25% or more of our income, and even today, it’s around 15% of my husband’s income.
This is so out-of-line with any of the “debt free gospel” guidelines. I can just hear Dave Ramsey condemning this. We’re not listening to him.
We simply believe that there are some things in life that are more important than being debt free. Figure skating is one of those things. We will get to the end of our life and probably be poor, but we will have decades of fantastic experiences to remember.
We are frugal with our figure skating budget. When the girls were growing up, they often shared competition dresses. We never bought the videos or photos, and we never bought the skating stuffed animals and jewelry and other doo-dads for sale at competitions. We drove almost everywhere instead of flying (except when the girls travelled overseas as part of Team U.S.A.).
And I would say that the sport paid off for the girls. Both of them coached through college and made much more money (around $35/hour) than they ever would have made working at the dorm cafeterias. And they had friends and a social network at the rinks that made the transition to college and new living locations easier.
My younger daughter has coached since she was 16, and is now 28. She is currently coaching one of the top synchronized skating teams in the United States. It took her and the other coaches 10 years to get the team to this point. What a great journey it’s been! Her goal is to be part of the coaching team that coaches Olympic synchronized skating teams someday. #whynotsynchro
My older daughter is still working on passing all her Ice Dance tests (she has three dances to go), and she earns her ice time (ice costs around $10/hour at most rinks) by coaching. She chooses to get ice, not money, for coaching. She’s a stage manager, and it’s nice for her to have coaching as an additional income, and if the theater world dried up, she could probably get more coaching work for money instead of ice.
Other than the figure skating, we live a pretty simple life. Figure skating families often say, “My new kitchen is down at the skating rink,” and that’s exactly how we have lived over the years–poor at home, moderate at the rink.
We personally do not think that “living debt free” is consistent with pursuing the sport of figure skating (unless you have a very high income, e.g., Gracie Gold’s father is a heart surgeon).
So we don’t listen to Ramsey or follow his teachings. I would challenge him to work with families involved with figure skating–I think he would probably throw up his hands in despair and give up. In his world, ordinary families with ordinary incomes would never get involved with figure skating or any of the activities that cost money (e.g., organ lessons and competitions). But that’s not an option. So I challenge him to come up with an option for regular-income figure skating families and other families who decide that they want to pursue an activity with passion. I don’t think it’s possible
