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I
have an unusual way of looking at the world. My wife, Sharon,
says I’m weird and truthfully – I am weird. But there’s
a reason. Starting from nothing, by the time I was 26 I had a
net worth of a little over a million dollars. I was making
$250,000 a year – that’s more than 20,000 a month net
taxable income. I was really having fun. But 98 percent truth
is a lie and that two percent can cause big problems
especially with
$4 million in real estate. I had a lot of debt – a lot of
short term
debt – and I’m the idiot that signed up for the
trip.
The short version of the story
is that debt caused us over the course of two and a half years
of fighting it to lose everything. We didn’t tell anyone
what was going on but if we had to do it again we would learn
from the wisdom of others who have been through it. We soon
learned that we were not the only ones at the bottom. Barbie
and Ken (you know, the couple who appear to be
perfect – perfect clothes, perfect car, perfect house) are
broke and I don’t take financial advice from broke people
anymore.
After losing everything, I
went on a quest to find out how money really works, how I
could get control of it and how I could have confidence in
handling it. I read everything I could get my hands on. I
interviewed older rich people, people who made money and kept
it. That quest lead me to a really, really uncomfortable place
– my mirror. I came to realize that my money problems,
worries, and shortages largely began and ended with the person
in my mirror. I realized also that if I could learn to manage
the character I shaved with every morning, I would win with
money.
I went back to my first love,
real estate, to eat and to get out of debt. Along the way I
began another path – the path of helping others, literally
millions of others, take the same quest to the mirror.
I formed The Lampo Group in
1988 to counsel folks hurting from the results of financial
stress. I’ve paid the “stupid tax” (mistakes with dollar
signs on the end) so hopefully some of you won’t have to. I
wrote the book Financial Peace, based on all that
Sharon and I had learned, and began selling it out of my car.
With a friend of mine, I started a local radio call-in show
called “The Money Game” now nationally syndicated as
“The Dave Ramsey Show.” |
