Welcome to Rudy Talks Money

Welcome friends and friends of friends. This is my newest attempt to help my friends, family, and clients get in better touch with their relationship with their money. This first post is nothing more than a quick introduction.

I come from a family that has always had a dysfunctional relationship with money. My parents took out a loan to help my grandparents out in the business in the 1960s from HFC and they were still paying on it in the 1980s. Crazy!

My brother in Cali and I are the only two of 6 siblings that have opened and run businesses that were profitable and we are the only two who seem to understand that putting off our immediate desires to plan for the future might just be the ticket if we don't want to work until we are in our nineties!

I started developing a healthier relationship to money while I was in the Army. The Army in the 70s and 80s frowned on its leaders getting into financial trouble and a bounced check for a NonCom was anathema (the death knell of a career). I had my problems after I retired and had a wife who thought credit cards were there for her to spend every penny on them in the shortest possible time. In just 11 short months she tried to prove her theory by spending over $70,000 of my credit line. The straw that broke the camel's back so to speak was when she changed the locks on the house, had one of her “friends” loosen all the lug nuts on my truck and took out $15,000 in cash advances on two cards in three days while simultaneously spending $5,000 at Wal-Mart and $4,000 at Target in the same week!

Needless to say, that whole experience really gave me a new way of looking at money and until I actually started my own business in 2006, my current wife Catherine and I did not carry a significant balance on any of our credit lines. The real estate business required some substantial investment and over the past three years we ran up a sizeable balance on a couple of cards but never more than 15% of all of our available authorizations. The remainder of that debt should be paid off by December of 2009.

Now here is the good news, in December of 2008 we made a conscious decision to become debt free. We are following the principles Dave Ramsey espouses and are 100% committed to being completely debt free within 5 years. Yes, I said completely debt free. No debt at all. None. Zero. Nada. Zip. How we are doing that and why, are the subject of many more posts to this blog. I welcome you to participate with us on this fantastic journey into financial peace and freedom.