When Josh and I were first married a friend loaned us her copies of Financial Peace Revisited and The Total Money Makeover both by Dave Ramsey.  We read much of them in the car on the trip down to Arizona and then finished them up.  I would have highly recommended them then.  We didn’t grow up thinking the same things about money and reading through and talking about the books really helped put us on the same page.  And I’ll highly recommend them now.  We put some of the principles into practice.  We saved our $1000 Emergency Fund and we used the debt snowball.  But we missed some other big things, like actually creating a budget and telling our money what to do instead of relying on my income to “balance the budget” and save for fun things or needed things.  We didn’t realize that our spending habits still weren’t so good.  We didn’t realize how much we would have been helped by creating a budget and sticking to it—even for 3 months to establish a bit more discipline.  So…now we’re going through his materials again.  A friend has led some FPU classes and loaned us the videos and we’re hoping to really get serious about having our money work for us instead of just working for our money.  Neither of us is exceptionally disciplined when it comes to “the little things” like a coke or an humberto’s burrito.  We each have our strengths and weaknesses and hopefully this time around, we’ll get a little better hold of it.  Are you in control of your money or is it in control of you?  I’d highly recommend checking Dave Ramsey out.  You can listen to free podcasts online too.  Visit http://www.daveramsey.com, if you are interested.  I’ll post here shortly on a couple other financial books we are reading as we work through Financial Peace University again and pick up on some of the stuff we missed last time.




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