52 Personal Finance Books In 52 Weeks

It does a wonderful job of dispelling common debt and money myths. And more than that, it lays out a plan for making you financially successful.

  • The Total Money Makeover is essentially a step-by-step guide for how to go about your own personal money makeover journey.
  • These steps are based on Dave Ramsey’s key money philosophies.
  • He believes that our society today is too dependent on credit and that true financial freedom only comes when you live a completely debt free life.
  • Dave Ramsey has strict beliefs about not ever using debt, loans, or credit cards.
  • We have been doing the Total Money Makeover since Jan 1 of this year (we started after reading Dave’s book „Financial Peace“) and we are already seeing plenty of success with our baby steps.
  • So the first steps in his plan are all about helping you get out of debt, and then setting you up to never get into debt again.

Fortunately, Dave Ramsey’s book, The Total Money Makeover, is packed full of helpful information on that exact subject. Another downside is the fact that you have to READ a book and I know that is a turnoff to many people. A way around this is to get your partner/mother/sister/friend who hopefully DOES like to read to read it first and give you the bullet points, or you can also get it as an audiobook. If you believe that what you have been doing to date has not been working for you, maybe it’s time to try a different approach?

It’s another great book by Dave Ramsey that gets you thinking about the way you treat your money, and worth revisiting from time to time. I’ve compiled a list of personal finance books I’ve read and found helpful here. However, if you are a seasoned investor and an expert in managing your own finances, you will find it almost https://forexarena.net/ too basic. The Total Money Makeover plan is as simple as it gets, but with some interesting examples and testimonials. You get to see how people from different walks of life benefit from every step of the financial makeover. If you have credit card debts, student debts, personal loan debts, Dave says you must pay them off.

I think that Dave Ramsey serves a purpose but he’s personal finance with training wheels. A whole lot of people need those training wheels. However, too many people stick with his advice come hell or high water and it can definitely stunt their financial growth. Ultimately I think Dave’s advice makes people not trust themselves at all with money and put up all types of safeguards whether or not they’re needed. I read the Total Money Makeover in 2007 and followed each step 1 to 7. I became debt free at 31 after paying $104,616 off.

Can You Imagine How Relaxed You Would Feel, With No Debt Payments Apart From Your Home?

This book is a great step by step plan to help you get control of your finances by walking you through the 7 baby steps. Recently, a good friend of mine who knew that I had read this book asked me whether or not I found it helpful. This Retail foreign exchange trading friend has struggled with managing her personal finances and is drowning in credit card debt. She was feeling pretty hopeless and was worried that she’d never be able to take care of her bills and set enough aside for retirement.

I’ve always paid off our balance in full every month and I’m diligent about sticking to our budget. Plus, I can pull up our statement and see where we spent our money. We have one credit card that we use for everything and we pay it off in full each month. Personal finance is personal and this is what works best for us. The Total Money Makeover is all about making over your financial situation. This is all based around Dave Ramsey’s baby steps that will help you get out of debt, stay out of debt, and do great things with your money. My husband and I began working the baby steps in September 2005.

The Total Money Makeover Review

They hadn’t been… but he is an excellent starting point for so many. It also goes those the seven baby steps, and gives you a few exercises to work on for that baby step. It’s almost like helping you plan each baby step as you go along. I’ve also read Financial Peace Revisited by Dave Ramsey.

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This gives you enough motivations to stay on course and complete the step successfully. The main event of this self-help read are the baby steps the reader can take to reach financial peace and freedom. You can read a more detailed article about each of the 7 baby steps that Dave Ramsey will go through in this book, but we’ll go over a quick outline of those steps here too. The Total Money Makeover is written as a self-help book. It’s even been compared to popular self-help books like, Your Best Life Now and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People because of the reader-friendly way it is written. It’s an engaging book with lots of real-world examples and stories from real people who have actually gone through Dave Ramsey’s baby steps and seen results.

The Total Money Makeover Review

As Dave says in his book “you can wander your way into debt, you can’t wander your way out. You have to get really mad, really intense, and really focused to get out of debt”. Also, when you get to Baby Step Six we have a bigger mountain to climb here in NZ, our house prices and the attached mortgage are just so much higher these days. If you listen to his podcast people are in a race to pay off a home which is worth $150,000. So, you need to brace yourself and realise that following his plan to become debt-free (or ANY plan to become debt-free) will work, BUT IT TAKES TIME, years and years of time. If you are struggling financially and just can’t seem to find your feet and are always living paycheque to paycheque, when you stumble upon Dave Ramsey it’s a real “ah-ha” moment for many. I have spoken to countless people who reference him as one of their first steps in the right direction.

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Oh, except for your mortgage, you can pay that off as you have planned. But we don’t go about this without a strategy though. Dave advocates the “snowball” method, where you list down your debts from lowest to highest balance, and focus on the smaller ones first and staying current with the larger ones.

These short anecdotal stories throughout the book help all of Dave Ramsey’s concepts ZuluTrade Forex Broker Review make clear common sense. Credit card debt has never been a problem for us.

The Total Money Makeover Review

The Total Money Makeover takes the same plan and breaks it down into more detailed babysteps. We’ve had our $1000 emergency saving account for years now and have hardly had to dip into it because we really think through what an emergency is. Most of the time we have been able to wait a few weeks until the „extra paycheck,“ tax return or a bonus comes through instead of using our savings.

I was amazed when I saw how much money is going toward our last debt! It will only be a few more months to get it paid off. Yes, we did stop retirement for the past year–it was a simple form to fill out at work and only took a couple minutes. The money that was previously in our IRA is still growing, but we’re not adding to it right now. When that debt is gone and we have our 3-6 month savings we’ll start it up again. What doesn’t make sense is having debt when you retire and using your money from your 401K/IRA to pay off the debt.

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Trent Hamm founded The Simple Dollar in 2006 and still writes a daily column on personal finance. The biggest reason is that so many useful year-long series complete themselves just after Christmas, meaning that the reader has no time to use the set of reviews for gift-giving purposes. There is a buffet of personal finance books to satisfy your hunger, and I’m glad I started with this one for perspective. The irony of The Total Money Makeover for me was that the money makeover didn’t feel total. After a bountiful debt diet covering a near half-dozen chapters, the meal left me wanting a dessert. To be fair, I did finish the book hungrier than when I started, and maybe the point was to increase my hunger for more money-knowledge not satisfy it in one sitting. Dave favorably addresses tailoring your emergency fund to your security needs and job security.

It took us 22 long months of discipline and sacrifice to become completely debt-free. We don’t own a home yet, so yes, we really are living the debt-free life. We paid off more than $36,000 and our income jumped up dramatically during that period of time using Ramsey’s baby steps. We called the talk radio show on July 13, 2007 to proclaim our debt freedom to all of America. Dave does something he calls „Debt Free Fridays“ where callers who’ve paid off all their debts can call in and scream. This is a pretty decent plan for getting out of debt and starting to invest. In the time-honored tradition of such self-help books as How To Win Friends and Influence People, Ramsey uses personal stories from other people to drive his points home.

The Total Money Makeover Review

I recommend the book to anyone because it is a simple read and the plan is easy to customize. I highly recommend this book for anyone about to enter college, especially if they’re considering paying for it using student loans, or for any first-time credit card users. Most of what I’ve learned about debt has been through trial, error, and ignorance. That is not a path I would recommend for anyone else. If people find themselves in serious debt, they may want to take out an Unsecured Debt consolidation loan to help restore their finances. I strongly feel that anyone interested in bettering their financial situation should read this book.

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Even if you choose not to follow the plan exactly, seeing the thought process and reasoning behind the plan can get you thinking about your own plan. And in the end, I think that can help you make much more informed decisions. If there’s one thing I’ve never been accused of, it’s frivolous spending. I recently bought a membership to yoga , but haven’t stepped foot in the studio in my three months of membership. However, I have worked very hard over time to be smarter about my spending, what some people call financial prioritization. Still, I’ll be the first to admit that there’s still so much to learn about managing my finances—specifically, about budgeting.