Financial Peace Revisited by Dave Ramsey

Financial Peace Revisited by Dave Ramsey

Author:Dave Ramsey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-03-02T00:00:00+00:00


Dessert Before Dinner

As a people we have forgotten how to delay pleasure. We are living in a society that microwaves everything. We must have it, and we must have it now! As Brian Tracy, a well-known motivational speaker, says, “We are being taught by everything around us to have dessert before dinner.” Now we are paying for our lack of knowledge and discipline.

The statistics of financial failure show clearly that this decline is a fact. These statistics do not reveal cycles but rather, more alarmingly, show steady decline. These statistics do not show any attributable correlation with inflation, unemployment, recession, or any national trend except the rise in personal debt. Larry Burkett of Christian Financial Concepts says that in 1929 only 2 percent of American homes had a mortgage and by 1962 only 2 percent didn’t have mortgages. 1

We must not be misled into believing that these problems are faced only by large companies or deadbeats. On the contrary, these are typical American families with two kids, a dog, and dinner every night. I have met with these families and they are just regular folks. Their situation just got out of control.

The Consumer Reports Money Book states that the typical household has $38,000 in debt and that total consumer debt has almost tripled just since 1980. In 1980 the total consumer debt was $1.3 trillion, and now it is beyond the incredible figure of $3.3 trillion—in just a few short years. 2 A recent survey conducted by Consolidated Credit Counseling Services found that 71 percent of Americans say debts are making their home lives unhappy. 3 A recent study in The Wall Street Journal states that 70 percent of the American public lives from paycheck to paycheck. 4 Interestingly, a Marist Institute poll published right after that Wall Street Journal article stated that 55 percent of Americans “always” or “sometimes” worry about their money. 5 If 70 percent are broke and only 55 percent are worried, I guess the other 15 percent are asleep.

The Federal Reserve says mortgage debt has more than doubled since the early nineties. 6 Foreclosure has become a way of life in America with tall grass and hanging gutters in virtually every neighborhood. Foreclosures have increased 200 percent since 1980 with more than 600,000 homes lost in 2001 alone. 7 The American Bankruptcy Institute says that in 1980 there were just more than 500,000 bankruptcies filed and by last year almost 1,500,000 were filed with new records set almost every year in between. 8 It is getting ugly. Seventy-one percent of the bankruptcies are Chapter 7, which is the “total” bankruptcy where you lose everything, but 95 percent of those cases were “no asset” cases. 9 That means they had no assets to lose by the time they got to bankruptcy.

As a matter of fact, a recent study done on the typical bankruptcy by the University of Texas in conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania confirms this. Published in the Wall Street Journal the study noted



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