Money Makeover

Many weeks ago I won my first blog giveaway ever!  Laura, who writes Life Happens, was giving away a copy of Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover, and I won!  I almost never participate in blog giveaways, mostly because I don't need to acquire random, useless stuff just for the sake of winning, and because I hate how with most giveaways there are all of these requirements to enter such as "Post a comment and then a Tweet linking back to my blog and refer at least 3 friends and then you're entered!"  Yeah, that's way to much work.

From www.daveramsey.com

But this giveaway was right up my alley.  All I had to do was comment, AND it was for something that I was actually really interested in receiving.  I probably would have borrowed the book from the library eventually, since I have been hearing so much about it the past few months.  But I WON! And now that I have it, I'm excited that I don't have to return it to the library because I've been marking it with post-its so that later on I can go back and refer to various sections when I get to that part of the plan.

Because - as I should have assumed - doing a "total money makeover" is a long-term plan.  It's really not the sort of thing where you can just read the book and then "BAM!" your financial problems are all over.  For most people, the TMM takes months and ever years (and in our case it will probably be years.)

So, I've been thoroughly enjoying the book, and although there are some parts that I think get a little preachy, it's still highly motivational and DH and I are planning on implementing many aspects of the TMM to our lives.

I plan on doing a series of posts over the next couple of weeks called the TMM posts.  I'm plan to discuss some of the "dos and don'ts" that Dave Ramsey discusses in the books, and which ones we follow and which ones we just have to ignore based on our personal situation.  I'm going to talk a little about our debt, and about how we got to where we are today, and finally, our current plan for tackling it all over the next couple of years. 

I learned a lot from reading this book, and I really do think that it will help us and hopefully some of you as well!  If you have any tips or other information to share after these posts, please do!