Tonight, at the 'worldwide' headquarters of the Mosaic A2 Church offices, I sat down with some friends and some yet-to-be friends and listened to Dave Ramsey, the celebrated Financial Guru talk about how I need to seek the hard road to financial freedom.
It all starts with savings.
It is heartbreaking to see the charts of compound interests and how to effectively use them, knowing that if I would've started in the darker years of my life (19-27) just saving a measley 2,000 a year how much of my life would be different right now. Of course, if I had that kind of financial responsibility back then, life would indeed be so much different right now. Ramsey has learned from his mistakes that took him from a 4 million dollar empire and left him with a wife, a home and the clothes on their backs when he was 30.
For the next ninety-one days, one night a week, I will sit down with my cohorts in this endeavour and face the realities of financial bondage as we learn how to be realistic about finances. "Money is not the root of evil," Ramsey reminds us, "It is the LOVE of money that is." Not only is Ramsey going to show us how to 'beat debt' but actually turn the tables and make some wealth to be debt-free for the rest of our lives.
A wise and important process to learn, especially in a college town where many of the very future of this country are already indebted by heavy expenses for the education they are pursuing.
I don't know if Ramsey's process of focusing on the hard road to financial freedom is going to be able to transform my life; I have no unemployment to rely on and am laid off of my temporary position for at least the next three months with only enough to keep the family in a home and with electricity for this month alone. Back in the search for employment, even if it makes me nothing more than the 'working poor.'
The fantastic idea of having an emergency fund AND six months worth of living expenses is a fantasy that I might be able to fool myself enough to get to sleep tonight but not a realistic way to face the scary future to come. These are ideals that I never even thought of when I was young.
Ramsey might be a genius on the financial market but he isn't a miracle worker.
But looking at the effect that 'credit' has had on my life and the destruction of living beyond the average 'paycheck-to-paycheck' mentality that afflicts most Americans, I have to do my best because it is not me I hope to save from the hardships that are ahead, but my children....one of whom is coming up closely on that 'magical' 19 year old mark. Amid the fact that I won't have a car in a month (its dying) and am behind the proverbial 'eight-ball' with too much needed to even start off at the basement level of living, I have three children that are looking at our situation and wondering how they can do any better.
This is what I believe Dave Ramsey can teach them and through the process of attending and struggling through the classes, this is what I hope to teach them; something as valuable and freeing as anything else I can bring to them....biblical principles of money management in a practical format for the realities of this world.
You can go to the daveramsey.com website and look up other classes that are beginning or underway in the Ann Arbor Area and begin the adventure of reclaiming your financial freedom from this life through the realistic teaching of Dave Ramsey. You can do this as a single person, as a married couple or a family......but until we, as the American citizen, reclaim this area of our lives, we will always be victims of the ill-advised "American Dream" of stuff.
And if we start teaching a generation to live financially free maybe, just maybe, we will create a generation that will become those statesmen and women of the Federal Government who will reclaim for the country its own financial freedom from the debts that we have allowed to be incurred in the name of democracy.
Maybe in this process, you'll learn to reclaim your lives from the financial bondage that has gripped many American families in the declined economic market and then we can, as a country, reclaim our government from those who have indebted generations to come.
One 'baby step', as Dave Ramsey would say..........
Begins the journey towards its reality.
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