Total Money Makeover book review

Why is money so complicated? Why? I don't know, but I found someone who can make it really, really simple. Keep reading to find out what book I'm talking about today. 

Hey, y'all. It's Kyla Denanyoh, and today I'm talking about the book Total Money Makeover. All right? The author of the book is Dave Ramsey. The genre of the book is nonfiction. The theme of the book is finances, discipline, and self-improvement. 

If you will live like no one else for a short amount of time, you can live like no one else almost forever. That is what Dave Ramsey says in the book repeatedly. He won't talk about beating a dead horse, but I needed that repetition. It was really, really powerful for me. 

So let's talk about a couple of things that I love from the book. So I stumbled across Dave Ramsey maybe three or four years ago when I first really started trying to take care of my money. I never really cared about money. I just kind of always had enough, or I would go get a part-time job to earn some more money or whatever. 

And so I was like, okay, let's make sense of this all. And I started watching him on YouTube, and he was hilarious. I love the direct conversation. I love how he would cut through the BS, right? He loves Jesus and all of that, but he will be like, That's a lie, that's a this. He can call the BS quick. I really enjoyed that, but it works. So I was like, okay, let me read the book. 

So I'm reading the book. And then there were a couple of things that jumped out at me. First of all, you need to talk to your spouse about money. My spouse and I don't really talk about money. I bring in this amount of money, and these are the bills I have. You bring in this amount of money and these are your bills, these are our joint bills. If we got a joint account and covered those, we're good. Until we're not. And then I'm like, can I have a hundred dollars for something, can I borrow this? Or he's like Hey, I need to move that. 

We had combined our lives without combining our finances, which meant we weren't talking about our finances together. Dave says you need to have combined finances if you're not planning to get divorced. Why? Well, we decided to combine them and discuss it all, right? I like to get down to the minute details. What's happening here? What's that? My husband wants an overhead, high-level explanation. How do we merge those? We started to talk about it, and it took a lot of time. Now, it's so much easier for us to discuss everything. 

The way that Dave explains it, he says that when you have that savings there, when you have that money, your rainy day fund, if you want to call it, you just notice that a lot less dramatic, drastic things happen. And we've definitely noticed that. And I feel like just knowing that we have that cushion there just makes things a lot less hectic, too. So psychologically, it works.

So the last thing that was so important to me about the total money makeover is to get out of debt and to stay out of debt. So now I'm obsessed with getting out of debt. I've been doing the snowball method for paying off my credit cards, which is fun. It didn't use to be fun. I even made this little graphic, which has like a little ball, and then it gradually gets bigger, and it has all my debts on there. And I'm like, we're paying them all off, and it's so exciting. And you do see the momentum, you do get the energy from it going. 

Dave's thing is that if you decided you were going to lose weight and for six weeks you didn't lose any weight, you would stop, you would quit, there were no successes. When you pay off one bill and use that money to pay off the next one, you see those little tiny successes. It gets the ball rolling and gets you excited. Simple, basic, elementary. It works. 

Money is so complicated. None of us is born with an abacus. None of us knows how to do all of this stuff immediately. You learn it somewhere. You watch them when you learn it. You learn it through the School of Hard Knocks. You learn it from somewhere. And even if you are at my big age and you are just now learning it, you've got to learn it. And this is a good one to help you learn it. 

You gotta take the good and leave the rest. Maybe you don't care for his personality, so you can't watch his videos, but you might get the same idea through the book. Perhaps you don't care to sit down and read this big old book, but you might use his newsletter. Whatever you gotta do, you gotta figure it out, because money does not have to be complicated. It can be so simple, it's laughable, and it works.

Until the next book review, Kyla