Our church recently started a group that is going through Dave Ramsey's "Total Money Makeover". Now that we have the student loans paid off, it seemed like a good idea to spend some time focused on money and what our next steps are. So we decided to see what Dave Ramsey is all about.
Dave basically has seven steps that he encourages people to take: 1) Build a $1000 emergency fund, 2) Pay off all debts, 3) build 3-6 months worth of savings for if you lose your job, 4)start building retirement fund, 5) college fund for kids, 6) pay off house, 7) build wealth and give.
It was encouraging that somehow we had started doing the first 3 steps on our own without any of Dave's advice. It just seemed like regular common sense. In fact, that's one thing I've found pretty funny about Dave's books and advice: pure common sense. Dave keeps saying that what he says is advice "your grandma would give". The only difference I've found between him and my grandma is that Dave managed to market the advice and make money off it. I need to figure out a way to market common sense advice like that....hmmm....
His other big thing is creating a budget and then sticking to it. That's still one thing I'm so grateful that we started doing from the beginning of our marriage. So for all you soon to be married people out there...make a budget from the beginning!!! You'll be grateful after 3 or 4 months. So right now we're re-viewing our budget and trying to get a better handle on our problematic "miscellaneous" category. For some reason that category has a mind of it's own.
We need to get a better handle on our Grocery budget too. One woman in the group said that she actually takes a calculator to the grocery store and adds things up as she goes through the store. As silly as that sounds, I might actually give that one a try.
Larry Burkett actually started all of this back in then 70s. Then Crown Minstries came along and others.
ReplyDeleteOne way to tackle the MISC catagory is with envelopes...(yeah those white paper things).
Lable an envelope with the item you are saving for....like that new book about saving money. And every month stick in $ from the MISC catagory. In time you will have saved enough...and the price of the item may have actually come down. The real Madison Ave urge that you have to ignore, is having to have the "latest". That just is not true. Buying something slighty out of date can save you a lot...usually with very little consequence...except bragging
rights..and those will only last until the next edition comes out.
I have done this with computers for many years...and it has saved me lots of money.