March 1, 2011 (The Dave Ramsey Show)

“One of the things folks when you’re working your way out of debt that you’re always looking at is, and you can do the quick and dirty math that I do here on the air [round numbers], you just look at the big things that we’ve got that have debt attached to them, a big car payment, a big mortgage or whatever, and [ask yourself] do I need to move out of one of those to get traction? Then the other set of numbers you look at is what we call the shovel-to-hole ratio, which is how big a shovel do you have, how much income do you have, versus how big a hole that you’re in” Dave Ramsey