So a few years back my wife, Amy, was concerned about our financial position. She had actually been concerned for a quite a while but I never tuned into this. After all, we were doing ok. We had a little bit of credit card debt, but certainly nothing like the average American. We had one car payment that was reasonable, our mortgage, and my student loans for my MBA. Nothing too outrageous, but we were still running out of money each month. It wasn’t a lot but it still happened and it added up.

So she read Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover and was convinced that that was the way we needed to head. She asked me to read, and I did. I felt his tone was a little too salesmany, but what he said made perfect sense. So we set off to follow down that path towards financial freedom.

For me, the crux of the whole book was the way he did his budgeting. Previous attempts at a budget in our house used monthly averages. This caused problems whenever things like our twice-a-year car insurance came up since the price of it was amortized over a period of months. It shouldn’t have been a problem if we had squirrled away that amount each month, but somehow it never happened.

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Posted: April 23rd, 2008 under Financial.
Comments: 2