Gazette adds weekly column by financial talk radio host Dave Ramsey
STAFF REPORT
Monday, March 26, 2012, 8 p.m. — The Nelson County Gazette announced Monday it had signed an agreement with syndicated financial talk radio host Dave Ramsey to carry Ramsey’s weekly advice column, “Dave Says.”
DAVE RAMSEY
Dave Ramsey is a personal money management expert, popular national radio personality and the author of three New York Times bestsellers – The Total Money Makeover, Financial Peace Revisited and More Than Enough. In them, Ramsey exemplifies his life’s work of teaching others how to be financially responsible, so they can acquire enough wealth to take care of loved ones, live prosperously into old age, and give generously to others.
Ramsey knows first-hand what financial peace means in his own life, having lived living a true rags-to-riches to rags-to-riches story. By age 26 he had established a $4,000,000 real estate portfolio, only to lose it by age 30. He has since rebuilt his financial life and now devotes himself full-time to helping ordinary people understand the forces behind their financial distress and how to set things right financially, emotionally and spiritually.
Ramsey offers life-changing, financial advice as host of a nationally syndicated radio program, The Dave Ramsey Show, which is heard by 5 million listeners each week on 500 radio stations throughout the United States. His syndicated column, Dave Says, can be read in more than 300 print and online publications worldwide.
Ramsey is the creator of Financial Peace University (FPU), a 13-week program that helps people dump debt, get control of their money and learn new behaviors with money that are founded on commitment and accountability. More than 1,000,000 families have attended FPU classes at their workplace, church, military base, nonprofit organization or community group. The average family pays off $5,300 in debt and saves $2,700 in the first 91 days after beginning FPU, and is completely out of debt – except for their mortgage – in just 18 to 24 months.
Ramsey earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Finance and Real Estate from the University of Tennessee. A frequent speaker around the country at large-scale live events, Ramsey is a passionate and inspiring presenter who is at ease on both sides of the mic.
He and his wife, Sharon, have three children, Denise, Rachel and Daniel. They reside in Nashville, Tennessee.
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A Letter from Dave Ramsey
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, and I was really having fun. But 98 percent truth is a lie, and that other two percent can cause big problems – especially with $4,000,000 million in real estate. I had a lot of debt – a lot of short term debt – and I’m the idiot who 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, so I could eat and 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 our company 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.
Our company history is full of landmarks leading up to the release of our fourth best-selling book in 2011, EntreLeadership, and we’re not slowing down. We now have more than 300 team members, and a variety of products and services to help you reach your financial goals.
Many companies define success based on the dollars coming in, but at our company we define our success by the number of lives changed: listeners getting out of debt, readers taking their first Baby Step and saving $1,000 and FPU graduates investing for their future. We learned early on that if we help enough people, the money will come. Our mission statement isn’t just lip service, it’s our mantra:
The Lampo Group, Inc. is providing Biblically based, common sense education and empowerment which gives HOPE to everyone from the financially secure to the financially distressed.
So wherever you are in the process – making the quest to your mirror, struggling to get your budget to work, paying off that last debt or completely debt-free – let us know how we can help you in your total money makeover. That’s what we’re here for!
For more information on Dave Ramsey, visit his website, http://www.daveramsey.com.
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