The other night we were flipping through the channels trying to see if they found the missing football players on the ocean and found a really interesting guy on TV. Dave Ramsey has a show on Fox Business each week night at 7:00 pm central time. This guy is really smart. He has books, CD's, radio shows and TV. Truly has a way of making things seem so clear and easy and it's kind of fun to watch him give people hope.
He is a faith based money expert but doesn't cramm his faith down anyones's necks but instead gives no nonsense, common sense approaches to how to handle your money. People call in or write letters asking for help with their finances. Sometimes it's a quesion about how to get out of a financial mess. Other times it's a question of how to build on wealth, what investments are wisest, how to save for retirement, pay for college, etc.
Like anyone, his advice is his opinion. I agree totally with some of the advice and not so much with a few things. For example, he says that you should not worry about your credit score because that is just someone's invention to keep us all in debt. Pay for everything with cash.
Well, though I agree that FICO scores are based on your willingness to continually finance things (and I think that is so stupid), the fact of the matter is that the world still revolves around your credit score. Unless you want to throw your money around for the rest of your life renting, at some point you more than likely will have to take out a home loan. In this world, it would be really difficult to never finance anything. And then when you have to finance, if you don't have a steady history of repaying debt on time, you will pay through the nose or never get the loan to begin with. So I don't agree that you should never finance and just say to hell with your FICO. That's not realistic. But I do agree that you should be very careful about credit cards and what you do finance. Just because you can finance, doesn't mean you should.
No matter what financial stage of life you are in, check out his show or his website. There are lots of really great tips and ideas.
We've been doing the Dave Ramsey thing for about 3 years now and it works well. We do the whole envelope thing and we've been able to save more than ever. The hardest part is that we each have a specific amount of spending money each month and that's it. Denny liked to die! He's good w/ it now when he sees that money going in savings each month.
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