Financial Peace Revisited by Dave Ramsey – Book Review Conclusion
Every week here at Ask Mr. Credit Card.com I review a personal finance book. This week I continue the review of “Financial Peace Revisited” by Dave Ramsey. If you missed the beginning of the review, you can read it here.
Chapter Four: Understand The Spiritual Aspects of Money
Ramsey offers a lot of good, common sense advice on how to be debt free, but these passages from Chapter four really hit home with me. I believe they contain some wisdom that will not only help us all to grow wealthier, but also to attain true success in anything that we work for:
The author of this passage is unknown, but the advice is pretty timeless.
I am your constant companion,
I am your greatest helper or your heaviest burden.
I will push you onward or drag your down to failure.
I am at your command.
Half of the tasks that you do you might just as well
turn over to me and I will do them quickly and correctly.I am easily managed,
you must merely be firm with me.
Show me exactly how you want something done;
after a few lessons I will do it automatically.
I am the servant of all great people and
alas of all failures as well.
Those who are great I have made great,
those who are failures I have made failures.I am not a machine, but I work with all the precision
of a machine, plus the intelligence of a person.
Now, you may run me for profit or
you may run me for ruin.
It makes no difference to me.
Take me, train me, be firm with me,
and I will lay the world at your feet.
Be easy with me and I will destroy you.Who am I? I am called Habit.
You know, the older I get the more I realize that habits literally “make you” or “break you.” If there is something lacking in your life, whether it is money, or time, or literally anything at all, take a close look at your habits.
The truth is, human beings are completely creatures of habits. And there is not always a distinction made between time-wasting or negative habits, and positive, productive habits. This really is some of the best advice I have seen in a book in a long time, personal finance related or not.
I think it’s the reason why so many New Year’s resolutions fail too – we create the goal but not the plan, and then we do not work at it long enough to make the plan a habit. Once things are a habit, they happen even when you don’t consciously think about them. It’s an “auto-pilot”.
How much wealthier would we all be if we sat down, and decided what we needed to do to fix our finances, and then worked hard – really hard – until those things became a habit?
One thing we often don’t recognize is that over time, those small negative habits really add up.
Smoking is a negative habit, overeating is a negative habit. Change the habit and you will drastically change your body’s state of health. The same happens when we continuously overspend or take on too much credit. It becomes a habit to “just charge something and pay it later” and before we know it, we are deep in debt.
In the case of my bankruptcy, “dealing with the medical bills later” became a habit. It even became such a pronounced habit that bankruptcy seemed like a real relief by the time I finally filed. No more worrying about the looming debt! If I had taken a proactive approach, done more negotiation, and raised my income, I could have avoided the pain of bankruptcy.
If I had known that I just needed to establish new habits, and have a little self control, then that entire process would have been much less painful. It sounds stupid, I know, but that is the deceptively simple power of habit.
Combining Habit With Education:
When you combine regular changes in habit with regular doses of knowledge, you can spring forward quickly. If you want to lose weight, you can combine the habit of eating right with the knowledge of what eating “right” actually is.
When you want to invest, you can combine the habit of investing with the knowledge of how investments really work.
It really does take both – the learned habits, and the applied knowledge.
Don’t sell yourself short. If you have any sort of a goal, please make sure that you include both parts of the “secret formula”. Learn what you need to learn, work to make it a habit.
That’s when things will begin to look effortless. And if you’ve really got the formula down, you may begin to hear people say things like “Wow, they are so lucky!!!”
But, you will know, success was never based on luck. It comes from habit, and applied knowledge.
This concludes my review of Financial Peace Revisited. Most of the advice in this book is very common sense, very basic. But it is presented in a friendly manner, and it’s an entertaining read. If you want to read the entire book, you can check it out from your local library, or a cheap used copy off of Amazon for under $5. It definitely gets my vote. Basic as it is, it’s thought provoking, and I’ll be keeping it in my financial library.
Have you read this book? What did you think of it? Leave me a comment below!
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