The water was so hot, it was almost burning my face—but I could barely feel it. All I really felt were the tears that wouldn’t stop coming as I stood in the shower, crying like a baby. One thought kept repeating itself over and over in my head: How in the world did I end up here? Maybe that’s a ques- tion you’ve asked yourself a time or two. At that time, I was coming off a winning streak. I was the wonder kid of real estate. Still in my twenties, I had built up a $4 million portfolio in just a few years. My wife, Sharon, and I had been having all kinds of fun. Fancy jewelry. Luxury cars. Exotic vacations. We had it all. And then we lost it. My success was a lie. It was propped up on a mountain of debt, and one day, one bank decided to knock me off that moun- tain. Over the next few years, that mountain of debt turned into an avalanche that just about wiped out me and my family. We lost everything, and I stood in the shower every morning with tears and dread knowing what I was going to have to face that day. I had played the money game, and I had lost. For me, hitting rock bottom was the wake-up call I needed to get my financial act together.
I’ve been on a crusade to spread the news about what I found. Money really isn’t that complicated, but most of what we hear in the media and from the “highbrow financial geniuses” is just plain wrong. If you really want to win with money, you just need to get your arms around a handful of simple, repeatable concepts. The concepts are simple, but that doesn’t mean the process is easy. It’s not. That’s because money is not just about math; it’s about behavior. Personal finance is only 20 percent head knowl- edge. The other 80 percent—the bulk of the issue—is behavior. And it’s our behaviors with money that can get us into the big- gest trouble or lead us into the biggest successes. Behavior is the key to the whole deal, and we’ll unpack how that plays out through all these different areas as we work through this book. For years, I have taught people a process for getting out of debt and building wealth that I call the Baby Steps. I talk about the Baby Steps on my radio show, in my live events, all through our Financial Peace University class, and I’ve even written a book, The Total Money Makeover, that walks you step by step through the seven-step process.
The book you’re holding right now, though, is different. We’ll talk about the Baby Steps a lot, and we’ll check each step off the list as we work through this information, but this book is more of a practical, hands-on guide for navigating your way through some of the details like savings, investing, mutual funds, insurance, real estate, and all the other important parts of your financial plan that a lot of people either forget or ignore. I’m not going to repeat everything you may have already read in The Total Money Makeover, but we are going to stick to the Baby Steps as “home base.” Like I said, I’ve been teaching Basically, the Baby Steps are your road map to win with money. Having a goal is great, but you need to know more than just where you want to end up; you need to know how to get from Point A to Point B. You might say, “I know my target. I want to have $1 million in my retirement account by the time I turn fifty.”
That’s a great goal, but if you’re sitting at age twenty-five with two car loans, no savings, maxed-out credit cards, a dead- end job, and no real plan, you’re not going to make it. You need some step-by-step directions to get where you want to go. So, let’s take a quick look at the seven Baby Steps. You’ll see these markers come up as we work through this book and the Financial Peace University class.
We need to deal with something before we get too far into the issue of saving money. I want you to have a big pile of money in the bank. I want you to be able to buy nice things, cover emer- gencies without stress and panic, and have some cash on hand to bless other people. But every time I talk about saving and build- ing wealth, someone always comes up to me and says, “But if I save money and do the stuff you teach, I’ll become one of those evil rich people.” That’s a total disconnect about how God wants us to handle our money. Some people have a broken mind-set when it comes to wealth. They think that having money is somehow evil or wrong. That’s a huge misreading of Scripture. The Bible doesn’t say that money is the root of all evil; it says that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.² Money is amoral. It doesn’t have morals. It’s not good and it’s not bad. It’s the love of money that’s the prob- lem—and that’s a human problem, not a money problem.