Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University – Week 5

Unfortunately, this week I wasn’t able to help out at FPU due to family illness. However, I’ve heard the lesson before and I grabbed some notes, so you’re in luck!

This week’s lesson is called Buyer Beware and Dave talks about all of the ways we are marketed to. He’s taught the class to save money, pay off debt, and control where their money goes. This lesson is all about protecting yourself from the marketing gimmicks that can mess up your plan.

We’re  being bombarded on a daily basis with ads and marketing. It starts when your alarm clock wakes you up with your favorite radio station. Then you turn on your TV while eating breakfast and get hit with commercials. When you get to work and check your email, you’ve got a bunch of marketing emails waiting in your inbox. You might as well forget about browsing the internet without seeing an advertisement.

It’s important for us to recognize that this is happening to us so that we don’t get tricked into making a purchase and mess up our budget.

Dave then covers different ways that we can keep ourselves from making a bad purchase decision, such as waiting overnight since you may feel different in the morning. A couple other good ones are to consider why you want to buy the item, whether or not you understand what you’re buying, and to think about what else you could be using the money for (like saving or investing it).

There used to be an entire lesson on getting a deal when purchasing big items, but that is now condensed into a shorter part at the end. If I remember correctly, Jon Acuff is brought out to do this part. (For what it’s worth, Jon has decided to go out on his own and no longer works for Dave Ramsey’s organization.) I love these tips a lot. I remember after seeing the full lesson in the old version of FPU, I wanted to go out and negotiate on something, but I couldn’t think of what that something might be.

Anyhow, the tips (in my own language) are below:

  • Be completely honest.
  • Flash the cash (it’s hard for the other party to say no when they see the Benjamins in front of them).
  • Walk away when the time is right and you may be surprised by what can happen.
  • When negotiating, keep quiet. Silence is very powerful when negotiating.
  • Tell the other party “That’s not good enough.” (Ironically, that’s the name of the old lesson.)
  • Learn to recognize when there is a good guy, bad guy tactic being used against you. Car dealerships are notorious for this.
  • The final piece is the “If I Take Away” tool. This one is hard to explain, but I’ll do my best. Let’s say you’re going over to someone’s house to look at a used truck they’ve got. When you get there, you see that they’ve got a trailer that was obviously used with the truck but they’re not likely to want to part with. At this point, you would ask them to throw the trailer in as part of the deal. When they tell you they can’t, you then ask “if we take the trailer out, what kind of deal can you make me on the truck.” Sounds kind of tricky, but if it works it could save you some serious cash.

Featured Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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