UnBankingUnBelievable

The Marketing Department (all two of us) here at NWGACU happens to be big fans of personal finance education. We soak in as much as we can, we teach what we know, and we live out what we can remember. 

We all know that Tiffany gets her financial advice from her BFF, Dave Ramsey. And I’m a huge fan of Clark Howard, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t learn a thing or two from ‘The Total Money Makeover’ guy.

Dave (that’s what I like to call him as if we’re on a first name basis) picked up a whole lot of debt in short amount of time when he was in his 20s.  He took what he learned on his road out of debt to teach others how to be successful financially.

Here’s what I’ve learned from Dave:

• Emergency funds – you should always have one. Dave recommends $1,000 to be saved up for emergencies, others say you should keep a few months of your salary stashed for emergencies. Either way – you need an emergency fund.
• “Personal finance is 80% behavior and 20% head knowledge.” Keeping track of your finances is a discipline and being financially successful is not about making tons of money, it’s about using what you have well.
• The debt snowball. I would say this is Dave’s trademark. Whenever I hear someone talk about trying to get rid of debt, they are likely to bring up the debt snowball – paying off small balances first and working your way up to the larger ones.

There is plenty more personal finance to learn from Dave, but those are the tips that stand out to me. What about you? Who taught you about personal finance?

This entry was posted on September 8, 2010 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.