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1. Does this figure include taking out a mortgage to buy a home? If that's the case, then this is a misleading statistic.

5. This stat which involves trading off one use for the money (paying a car note) for another use (investing the money for retirement) is nonsense unless the person in question compares buying a car vs. not buying a car. Assuming the person will be buying a car and decides to pay cash instead of financing it, then its a matter of saving the $378 a month beforehand (or slightly less, since no interest will be paid to a financing company) vs. paying a monthly car payment of $378 after the purchase. The $378/month is not available for investing. Instead, let's see how much the person could have at retirement if the interest that was going to be paid to the financing company was invested instead. Not millions of dollars, but a tidy sum nonetheless.

1. I don't believe it does. If you borrow for a home that you can (reasonably) afford, why would it?

5. Or consider saving $378 a month for seven years or so and what that money is earning while you're saving it. Again, not millions, but a good amount. It all adds up to a chunk of change.

I've seen Dave Ramsey's car buying plan. It's not bad. You basically save up money every month, then buy a car for much less than you've saved, to keep that principle accumulating while you buy cheap cars. Eventually you'll have enough to just buy a decent car from the 5 years of interest that the principle generates for you.

I always pay my credit cards off every month (except this month as I wrote in my blog, I accidentally paid $7 less than I owed!) but I had read elsewhere several times that only 35% or so didn't pay their cc bills in full every month. I'm curious to see where the stats came from.

Define standard of living in retirement? If you count not working every day, then put me in the group that agree that my standard of living will go up.

At my current pace (which is hard to project since I'm 31 with no children) of putting 19K for me (my fiancee doing the same) in Roth and 401K combined we should do okay. She's military too, so she's on track to get a reliable pension (as opposed to the other kinds) and nicely priced health care.

Add it up and if Dave Ramsey asked me about my retirement, I'd be in that 80%, but I don't think I'd be mistaken about it.

I am not in any category above. But I can say 70% of Americans, handle money that way.

For as a car, I had financied one for 2 1/2 yrs. I just paid extra to get rid of the debt quicker.

The answer to fix all of that is to avoid consumer debt and live below your wage.

Those are quite shocking numbers. Last one was definitely something new for me..19% !!

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