Financial Peace by Dave Ramsey

I can't help it. I love personal finance books. There's a reason I love them, though. They make me feel strong, motivated, and inspired. Ramsey is really good at this. While reading his books, I feel like I can take on the world and really accomplish my dreams.

I read Total Money Makeover about a year and a half ago and I got a similar boost from that. After reading, I built up an emergency fund and paid off my car a year early. However, I then bought a house. That is not part of the plan. After my offer was accepted on the house one of my cats was hit by a car and I had to pay tons of vet bills. Then I sunk $1700 into my car. Then I put a new roof on my house. Then I got to fix my car again after an accident.

This is life. Dave doesn't pretend that things like this don't happen. He acknowledges that not everything is your fault. Even better, he is constantly encouraging and annoyingly challenging. At the end of this book he asks, "Are you a man or a mouse? A woman or a wimp?" and my first thought was, "Well, I'm not a wimp!" I am excited to get started again, to get things under control. That is what Dave does. He gives you a simple plan and a reason for each step. If you're like me, you aren't going to work hard for anything that you don't understand. This is all very basic advice but sometimes we need to hear it.

My one warning here is that this book seems a bit more religious than I remember TMM being. It wasn't off-putting but because both books share basically the same information, that may be the deciding factor in which one you read.