Dave Ramsey - The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness

The
TOTAL MONEY
MAKEOVER

Other Books from Dave Ramsey

The Total Money Makeover Workbook

The Total Money Makeover Spanish Edition
(La Transformacin Total de su Dinero)

Financial Peace Revisited

Financial Peace Planner

Financial Peace for the Next Generation
(High-school Curriculum)

Tranquilidad Financiera
(Spanish edition of Financial Peace)

More Than Enough

More Than Enough Planner

Life Lessons with Junior
(Childrens Series)

2003, 2007 by Dave Ramsey

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Thomas Nelson, Inc. titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

Scripture quotations noted NKJV are from THE NEW KING JAMES VERSION, Copyright 1979, 1980, 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc., Publishers.

Scripture quotations noted CEV are from THE CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH VERSION, 1995 by the American Bible Society. Used by permission.

ISBN 978-1-59555-216-7 (SE)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ramsey, Dave.
The total money makeover : a proven plan for financial fitness / Dave Ramsey.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-7852-8908-1 (2007 edition)
1. Finance, Personal. 2. Debt. I. Title.
HG179.R31563 2003
332.024'02dc21

2003014115

Printed in the United States of America

09 10 11 12 13 QW 5 4 3 2 1

To my beautiful wife, Sharon, who walked arm in arm with me through a Total Money MakeoverI love you, honey.

To the superstars all across America who have had the courage to face the person in the mirror, the culture, their family, and even their coworkers as they lived like no one else so later they could live like no one else. You who have courageously had a Total Money Makeover of the heart and wallet are the real superstars.

To the Dave Ramsey team and the Thomas Nelson team for tireless hours on this project to make this material available to everyone across this great land.

Contents

Read the stories of the lives changed by this book! As a matter of fact, I recommend you skip through the book reading all the stories first. They will inspire you to read all the way through and actually do the Proven Plan to Financial Fitness.

Many years ago I was given a calling: to show people the truth about debt and money and to give them the hope and tools necessary to set themselves free financially. First, I did that with a few speaking engage-ments and a small self-published book titled Financial Peace. Later Financial Peace was published by a New York publisher and became our first New York Times bestseller. I began doing a small local radio show that has now grown to almost three hundred stations and three million listeners. We started teaching a thirteen-week class called Financial Peace University, which will have over 200,000 families attend this year. Then came The Total Money Makeover.

I am positive that personal finance is 80 percent behavior and only 20 percent head knowledge. Our concentration on behaviorrealizing that most folks have a good idea of what to do with money but not how to do ithas led us to a different view of personal finance. Most financial people make the mistake of trying to show you the numbers, thinking that you just dont get the math. I am sure that the problem with my money is the guy in my mirror. If he will behave, he can make the money thing work. The math of wealth building is not rocket science; it is simplebut you have to DO IT!

So the proven Total Money Makeover plan I teach has become very successful not because I have found the secrets of the rich. Not because I have some revelation that no one else has ever had about credit cards. Not because I am the only one with a Debt Snowball plan. Instead, this proven plan is having a national impact because I have realized that to change your money thing, you have to change. You have to change your life. When you change your life, you will get out of debt, give, and invest at an unbelievable rate. When you read the stories in this book, you will read not about mathematics, or magic systems, but about changed lives. You will read about transformed marriages and relationships. You will even read about people losing weight! Really. Because when you change your life, you really change your life.

So when Mike Hyatt, the president and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, brought me the concept for a Total Money Makeover book, I became very excited. I became excited because I knew this book would inspire readers to take immediate action through a simple, step-by-step process that could only lead to life-changing results. Hopethe light at the end of the tunnel, that is, and not an oncoming trainis a very pow-erful force. The Total Money Makeover has given HOPE to hundreds of thousands of families. This book has given them hope to win, and that hope has caused them to take action and claim ultimate victory over their financial struggles and worriesand to actually win! The number of people that I meet across this nation who tell me this is the first book of any kind they have read in ten years is staggering. The Total MoneyMakeover is a book for everyone. It is for high-income earners, as I am. And it is for someone beginning at the bottom, which is where I once was.

You are about to read about a process, a proven plan, to win. You will find the plan to be very simple yet very inspiring. The principles are not mine. I stole them all from God and your grandmother. The principles are common sense, which isnt so common anymore. The plan is mineand Im no geniuscreated by simply observing literally millions of lives with whom I have interacted through radio, books, classes, the Internet, e-mail, podcasts, and our Live Events. I have successfully bottled common sense about money into a plan that anyone can do. And millions are!

A couple of decades ago, when I first started talking about these principles, I knew they had helped my wife, Sharon, and me survive going broke and begin to prosper. The first hundred times I spoke on money, I wasnt as confident of the principles as I am now. Nowadays I look into the eyes of a gazillion people who have followed this plan and experienced, as we did, excitement, hope, and gratitude. I am so thankful that I have not only given them a proven plan but have also inspired them to change their family tree.

I am so confident in The Total Money Makeover principles and this process that I cannot stand it when someone doesnt get it. Because I am so convinced my plan will work for everyone, my answers to the same questions will never change. By recognizing and identifying some basic truths and everyday common sense, I have convinced millions of people to change their livesto have a Total Money Makeover. Are you next?