book review – Jayzilla

Book Review: The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey

If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.
- Dave Ramsey

Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey review

When you listen to Dave Ramsey’s radio show, you will often hear that quote. When you read the book, it’s printed repetitively at the bottom of each page. I think Dave’s trying to tell us something.

Extreme Finance Makeover: Ramsey Edition

Once you start reading this book, you’ll realize two things very quickly:

Dave Ramsey ain’t messing around
This plan could really work!

Americans are broke, generally speaking. Oh, we have nice things and all, but that is precisely why we’re broke. The nice things are all on loan from a bank, and we’re all “slaves to the lender.” (Proverbs 22:7)

For a practical example, when I went to Paraguay I only had student loan debt left. Especially once I found Kathy, really the only thing that forced me to head back to the US that year was the debt I had to pay off. When I went back to get her this past January, I was really upset that our future is determined by my debt.
The Total Money Makeover is a handbook to your financial freedom. It’s not easy, and it’s not quick. Dave will tell you straight out: it’s gonna hurt. He says on his show all the time that the key is living off of beans and rice and rice and beans. He means it.

If you’re not ready to radically change your way of life, this book is not for you. It’s not a collection of hard-to-maintain tips on getting debt free. No, this book takes an extremely common sense approach to debt: don’t buy what you don’t have cash for, don’t buy stuff you don’t need, and use all the rest of your money to pay off your debt as quickly as possible.

Do it in baby steps

His whole philosophy is baby steps. At the start, you’re financially obese. You can’t do much, but you do what you can. First you get yourself an emergency cushion. Then you attack debt. Then you “fully fund” your emergency stash. Then you save for retirement. Then you pay off your house. Then you live like no one else.

But it starts with living like no one else.

You might have to say “no” to some things and some people. You may have to sell a car or boat. But he guarantees that if you follow the plan, you will become wealthy.

Don’t let it end with cash hoarding

Dave Ramsey gives a ton of money away. He says the most fun he has with his money is giving it to people who need it more than he does. He even had a contest around Christmas to see who could give away $5000 – of *his* money – the best.

I didn’t read this book to find out how to get rich. I read this book to see what this Total Money Makeover is all about. I have to say, I wasn’t even done with the debt-paying-off chapter before I wanted to jump to the computer and adjust the budget as tightly as I could.

We’ve already begun implementing some techniques in our budget. For example, food purchases have been more expensive than necessary in the past. So now food is a cash-only system. When the cash is done, we eat what we have left in the house. That’s the only way my debt will be gone soon.

Definitely recommended

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has any kind of debt. You don’t need the debt. You can get rid of it. You just have to be systematic about it, and this book will help. Break the old habits and start new ones. If you live like no one else now, you can live like no one else later!

Buy
The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness
by Dave Ramsey
on Amazon!

Other personal finance tools by Dave Ramsey

Cash Flow Planning
(DVD)

Total Money Makeover
Workbook

Financial Peace
University

Financial Peace

Ms. Mercer would be so proud

My 12th grade English teacher changed my life.

You’d think my math teacher or even my computer programming teacher would be the one I say had the most influence on my future. The reality is the one teacher I think about most often is Ms. Mercer. We were a small class of AP students, so we often sat in a circle to discuss the latest reading assignment or share our writing assignments. I had never done critical reading until her class, and I realized that I loved it. She started me on a path of great books and literary analysis. To this day I wonder why I didn’t become an English teacher.

As a result of loving the language, I enjoy using it well. I feel clever when I can string words and phrases together in a melody of prose (I’m not that great a poet), and being able to use a semicolon correctly is just icing on the cake.

This book was a recommendation to all of the web developers in our group by the one person in the area who had any type of English training. I picked it up, and I’ve had a hard time putting it down.

**It’s very persnickety**

Truss comes right out and says it at the beginning of the book. Referring to a sign she saw that said “Come inside for CD’s, VIDEO’S, DVD’s, and BOOK’s” she advises:

“If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of pulse, you should probably put down this book at once.”

The book is full of uses and misuses of almost every kind of punctuation we use in English, even down to emoticons at the end (she’s not a fan). It’s quite clever in presentation and delivery (the British, I think, pride themselves on being clever), and you can’t help but learn some things along the way.

She starts with a history of the apostrophe, comma, and “full stop” and moves through other pieces of punctuation such as colons, semicolons, dashes, and exclamation points. Did you know that punctuation was originally used to show the reader where to breath? In essence, it was used to annotate the rhythm of speech. I didn’t know that old-school Greek didn’t even use spaces! Look how far we’ve come!

But it’s also very fun to read

Truss teaches us about grammar with a whole ton of wit tossed in with a bunch of sass mixed together with some word-nerdy jokes. I laugh at least once per page, whether it’s at a poor example she’d found somewhere or just the example she uses to show how to use a certain form of punctuation.

“Dangling expectations caused by incorrect pluralisation:
Pansy’s ready (is she?)
Cyclist’s only (his only what?)
Please replace the trolley’s (replace the trolley’s what?)”

I told you: persnickety and Britishly humorous! If you sometimes feel snarky when you see poor grammar or punctuation, read this book. It won’t judge you as you recall moments you just knew you spotted poor English but didn’t want to be “that guy” and correct it.