Suggestions on the best financial planning/debt consolidation books/workbooks

Re: Suggestions on the best financial planning/debt consolidation books/workbooks

• anssett member

  

  September 2013

  Dave Ramsey's Total Money Make-over is a great starter book for personal finance and basic planning. He likes envelope budgets, which I haven't tried yet. There a other books more focused on spending philosophy and mindset that I'm going to read next. Both by Thomas J. Stanley: Millionaire Mind and Millionaire Next Door.

  
  

  Here's a website focused on paying down multiple debts: http://unbury.me/

  
  

  I am a HUGE fan of Mint which lets me track my spending and see goals, budgets, etc. It does most of the work to categorize my transactions. LOVE. https://www.mint.com/

  
  

  Good Luck! This is a long hard road for most people but I'm on it and it's totally worth it for me.

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• vlagrl29 member

  

  September 2013

  I have not read any of the dave ramsey books but I have read "smart couples finish rich" by david bach.  It made me realize that we need to pay ourselves first and set goals towards things that are important to us such as Emergency Fund and a fund for home improvements.  I want wood floors so dang bad!  I don't want to go in debt for them so I would like a quote from a flooring company so I know how much we need to save for it.

  
  

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• LS45 member

  

  September 2013

  I found Suze Orman helpful, especially when I was just starting out. Plus, they had most of her books available for free at the library.
  

  

  @MrNibbles

  
  

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• hoffse member

  

  September 2013

  Try Mint and see if you like it - I'm not a huge fan because it miscategorizes things all the time for me and H.  We tend to budget in our heads, mostly, so it's also not something as helpful for us.  But a lot of people really like it if they want to see everything in one place.

  
  

  I'm a partial fan of Dave Ramsey - a lot of people follow what he says very strictly, and I don't agree with everything he preaches... but his methods DO work for a lot of people who feel just completely overwhelmed by debt.  If that's you, try his methods.  His debt snowball, for instance, isn't the best way to get rid of debt from a strictly financial standpoint (he has you snowball from the smallest debt to the largest, regardless of interest rates)... but psychologically it's a method that makes a lot of people feel successful while they are doing it, and that makes them more likely to pay it off eventually (even if they do spend more than they have to in interest).  He actually went bankrupt himself, and I suspect that's why his methods are a little more touchy-feely and a little less bottom-line than others.  I mean that in the best way possible, because bottom-line methods can just overwhelm a lot of folks trying to get out of debt.  H and I have never had credit card debt.  Out of curiosity I actually estimated prepaying our student loans last night using a debt snowball vs. consolidation.... and we save a lot more in interest and can pay our loans off faster by consolidating (student debt consolidation isn't the same as CC debt consolidation, by the way).  So for us he's not that useful.  But I respect the feeling of financial success that he has given a lot of people who are just completely underwater and don't feel like they will ever resurface.

  
  

  Me?  I use an excel sheet, when I bother to track it.  Most months H and I just set a budget we call "spending," and then we put everything on credit cards so we can see where we are in our budget.  It also makes us honest with each other because we aren't frittering away cash without telling the other person.  We each check the credit cards every couple of days to make sure we aren't over.  I don't like being too strict with my categories because it can vary a lot for us from one month to the next... H is a law student who lives in a different city than me (he graduates in May), so we buy double of a lot of things during the school year.  He also has things like textbooks that pop up twice a year, and he spends more in gas coming to visit me early in the semester than later in the semester around exam time.  I tried the categories thing with mint, but it changed so much from month to month that I couldn't find a monthly budget that we could almost always meet... that made us feel like we were failing, even though we were always meeting our bottom line savings goals.  I might try it again when he's graduated and the spending doesn't fluctuate as much, but for now we just have a large spending category that's pretty fluid.  Cash is fungible anyway - and for now we're satisfied with what we're saving.  That's not the approach 90% of the people on these boards take, by the way (so I don't necessarily recommend it to you), but it's what works for us.

  

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• hoffse member

  

  September 2013

  I should add... I do add a separate "gifts" category September through December for birthday and holiday gifts.  That's separate from our "spending" category.  We do that separately to make sure we aren't blowing huge amounts of money on our relatives.  We have a tendency to want to do that, particularly around christmas, so the extra category helps us be more reasonable in the types of gifts we buy people.  We also don't want to start gift wars with his siblings, etc. (where each year you spend more to "match" the gift the other person is giving you).  Keeping it on the smaller side is really best for everybody.

  

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• sarahtrg member

  

  October 2013

  I've heard a lot about Dave Ramsey and think I might give one of his books a go...But he has one just released this September called "The Total Money Makeover: Classic Edition: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness" and then one released in 2009 called "The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness".  Has anyone read both? I'm trying to decide which would be best for starting out...

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