When Dave Ramsey speaks, I listen. Especially if he’s telling me how to become rich! And that’s exactly what he did during the beginning of his May 11th radio show. His premise– “Don’t be normal–be weird, as weird as you possibly can be.
On this particular show he reported the results of the 2009 Consumer Financial Literacy Survey done by Harris Interactive. What he described was fascinating and also quite a bit terrifying.
Here are some of the results of the 2009 survey:
- 41% of U.S. adults (more than 92 million people) gave themselves a grade of C, D, or F on their knowledge of personal finance, suggesting there is considerable room for improvement.
- 42% of adults keep close track of their spending. 57% do not have a budget. Of those who don’t have a budget, 1 in 5 say they don’t want to be restricted in their spending and 1 in 10 don’t think that a budget is useful.
- 7% (16 million people) have no idea how much money they are spending on food, housing and entertainment.
- 26% (58 million people) admit to not paying their bills on time.
- 32% (72 million people) do not have any savings!
- 33% of adults (74 million people) don’t put any part of their household income to retirement.
Here’s Dave’s takeaway message: Most people don’t do a budget. Most people don’t save money. Most people don’t order a credit report. Most people don’t save for retirement. Most people don’t save for emergencies.
Don’t. Be. Normal.
After listening to this show it definitely gave me the kick in the pants that I so deserved. Ryan and I started Financial Peace University (the online edition) back in February. And we had been doing great with making a budget at the beginning of each month and recording our expenses. But, then life got in the way and we slipped and we didn’t do a budget for May. I’m the one that makes the budget on the computer and I kept saying “Don’t worry…I’ll make the budget”. But then May went by and soon enough June passed us by too. I haven’t liked going without a budget for so long. I feel like we’re flying by the seat of our pants and ready to crash and burn at any given moment. And, because we haven’t been recording our expenses I have no idea how much we’re spending on groceries and going out to eat. Not good. I KNOW we’ve spent way more money than the months that we had a budget, so now we’ve got to get back on track.
We have goals we want to accomplish. Short term ones like saving a few thousand dollars more for our pending adoption (yep, our agency told us that the total cost of our Colombian adoption is going up…again!) and paying off our mortgage. And, then we also have longer term goals like making sure that we’ll have financial stability when I become a stay at home mom and our incomes go down from two to one. We certainly don’t want to be financially strapped when Ryan becomes the sole breadwinner. We need to make sure that we’re ready for the income reduction and at peace with it.
So, here’s to July 1st and getting back on track with our finances! I’m off to go whip out our budget with Excel to make sure that it gets done today. I don’t want to be normal. Gosh no. I want to be weird. In Dave Ramsey’s words…I want to be as weird as I possibly can be.