Soldier of Finance (20 page)

Jeff Rose is a Certified Financial Planner™ professional who has founded his own investment advisory firm, Alliance Wealth Management, LLC. He is the founder and chief editor of GoodFinancial
Cents.com
, a top 20 personal finance blog according to Wise
bread.com
.

Jeff is also the mastermind behind The Debt Movement—the goal of which is to help people pay off $10 million of debt. You can follow their progress at
DebtMovement.com
.

He currently writes for
U.S. News and World Report
(
www.USNews.com
), Equifax, and
Market Watch
(owned by the
Wall Street Journal).
He has been featured in major media sites such as Huffington Post, Forbes, Reuters, Kiplingers, and Fox Business.

A nine-year veteran of the Army National Guard, his unit was called up in January 2005 to support Operation Iraqi Freedom. Acquiring the rank Staff Sergeant, he served as Squad Leader while conducting military police maneuvers in central Baghdad. He returned home safely to his beautiful wife, Mandy, in April 2006.

When he's not corralling his three boys, Parker, Bentley, and Sloane, you'll find him on the floor of his local Crossfit box gasping from another torturous WOD (workout of the day).

Besides Crossfitting, his passions include blogging, spending time with his family, cheering on the St. Louis Cardinals, or fantasizing about the next time he can sink his teeth into an In-N-Out Burger.

 

 

May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

—G
ALATIANS
6:14

Related AMACOM titles available in ebook format:

“Nagler offers practical strategies for people who find their debts troubling or overwhelming, but who continue to buy on credit…. Those concerned with tackling debt in the immediate present would do well to work toward Nagler's goals.” —
Publishers Weekly

“…clearly written for anyone who has ever said: ‘It's impossible for me to save or invest. I can't even pay my bills.'” —
The New York Times

Written in accessible language by an expert in real estate, law, and finance,
Financial Fresh Start
helps you make sense of the new economic realities of the bubble, bailout, and Great Recession, and delivers a five-step action plan for making your own fresh start: (1) adapt your banking and borrowing, (2) fix your credit and debt, (3) protect your savings, investments, and retirement, (4) decide if home ownership is right for you, (5) earn more and spend less. You'll learn specific tips for correcting missteps, avoiding common blunders, and practicing sound strategies.

“As Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme made painfully clear, investment fraud can strike almost anyone. Which is what makes
The Vigilant Investor
a fascinating and valuable read.” —
Wall Street Journal

“Another excellent book is
The Vigilant Investor
…Take some time to read and protect yourself. You won't regret it.” —Elliot Raphaelson, The
Money Game
column

For more information, please visit
www.amacombooks.org

About AMACOM

Who We Are:
AMACOM is the book publishing division of the American Management Association. AMACOM's broad range of offerings spans not only the critical business topics and leadership challenges of today and tomorrow, but also the issues that affect our lives, our work, and our world.

What We Publish:
AMACOM publishes nonfiction books on business, management, leadership, HR, training, communications, career growth, personal development, marketing, sales, customer service, project management, and finance.

About Our Authors:
AMACOM authors are experts in their fields, unrivaled in their knowledge, experience, and reputation. They are world-class educators, successful executives, business owners, trainers, consultants, and journalists—all eager to share their insights and techniques with a broad audience.

Free Sample Excerpt From

by Joanneh Nagler

For additional insights on how to improve your financial future, be sure to read Joanneh Nagler's
Debt-Free Spending Plan
[ISBN 978-08144-32440; $12.00 (retail); also available as an e-book]. It gives you a simple plan that you can apply immediately to get a handle on things, like how to downsize expenses without feeling deprived; allocate money as it comes in; craft an easy-to-manage bill-paying plan; adjust in the event you overspend, which often happens; pay off debt without gouging expenses; and believe it or not, start saving! Whether you make $14,000 or $14 million, you get straightforward daily spending strategies and effortless expense-tracking tools that will put you on the road to financial freedom.

Here's a free sample from the book…

I WAS 42 YEARS
old, standing in the grocery-store line with an overfilled basket of food that I was going to pay for with a credit card that had over $28,000 on it. After shopping, I'd go get a cash advance of another $3,000 to pay my rent and bills. My small writing business was tanking. I had seven other cards that I was juggling, for a grand total of about $80,000—and it would be another few months before I racked up $10,000 more in fees and cash advances. I had hives. I had nightmares. Just looking at the groceries in my basket made me nauseous. I had run up more than $55,000 of my debt publishing a music CD and waiting for a miracle to happen. I had run up the rest in living expenses, ignoring my business. I had no idea what I was spending—I just put it all on the cards.

I'd been in debt before—most of my life, actually—but it had never gotten this bad. I couldn't believe I'd let my debt get so out of hand. I couldn't believe I'd become so irresponsible with my money. Standing in the grocery-store line, I started to hyperventilate.
What the hell had I been thinking?
I couldn't breathe. I had to stop debting—I had to find a way to stop my hideous cycle of running up credit card debt—but I didn't know how. And I didn't have a clue where to begin.

Sound familiar?

Debt is a killer. It's a drag on our hearts and minds, an energy hog, and a full-time guilt-making machine. It leads us in only one direction: Down, into lives of worry, fear, and desperation. Even a little bit of debt can cause us enough grief to agonize over, our heads swirling in sleeplessness when we should be resting, our stomachs tied in knots whenever we think about our finances.

We know—as anyone who has ever been in debt knows—the downside of being in over our heads financially. It's uncomfortable. It's painful. We can feel it right now, in our gut, and we don't even have to conjure up the details of it. Most likely it's caused us to stay up nights, grind our teeth, sweat bullets, overeat, have indigestion, break out in hives, or some other version of physical or spiritual discomfort.

We know what it's doing to us. But the worst part about debting is that it's not just exacting psychological and physical payments for what we've done in the past. The horrendous worry comes from the fact that
we are still doing it.
We are in debt, we keep debting, and we don't see a way out.
Our expenses are greater than our income
, we say. So what else can we do?

We can even argue that we feel okay about it—“it's just a board game,” “what's the big deal?” “I front myself money, then I pay it back later….” But we all know that being in debt does not produce feelings of peace and well-being. If we've dug ourselves a hole, debting against our home-equity line, running up credit cards or project debting (as I did), these rationalizations just make our guilt and self-loathing worse.

We can get philosophical and argue that the debting machine of
credit
produces income for our economy—that it's “just the way things get done” in our cultural timeline, and we're just a cog in the wheel. We
have
to use credit cards. We
have
to be part of the machine. And even while we vent such justifications, we take no pleasure in being in debt, and we surely do not feel industrious for having accrued it. And most of the time, we have no idea how we're going to pay all that money back.

So instead of feeling engaged and a part of our lives, we find ourselves yearning for the proverbial “one day” when we might (1) make twice as much money as we're making now, (2) get bailed out by an inheritance, (3) get a big pay-off from a “minor” car accident, (4) find a bag of cash by the side of the road, or, depending on the magnitude of the amount we owe, (5) escape to Bogotá for a lifelong visit. “One day” makes us feel trapped today, and a lot of the joy we could be experiencing in daily life vaporizes into worry over debt.

We may have tried credit consolidators, borrowing from parents or friends, or getting an extra job to pay off creditors, and even when we have been able to zero those balances out, a year, two years, four years later we're in debt again. “How did this happen?” we lament.

This is how it happened.

We got ourselves into debt for one simple reason:
We have no spending plan.
We have no idea how much it
really
costs us to live, what we're able to live on, and what “wants” and “needs” we can afford. We think budgets are constricting and want no part of them, but our lack of spending clarity causes us even greater grief. We're afraid that if we look deeply into our finances we'll never have another luxury or fulfilled want for the rest of our lives.

The Debt-Free Spending Plan
will help you end all of that. It will help you take simple steps to stop running up debt, live within your means, and start building something that's meaningful to you. It will offer you guideposts to funding what you
want
, as well as what you need. It's easy to use and specifically designed for people who tune out when it comes to their money.

It does not require that you learn a special computer program. It does not require that you live on noodles and toast. It does not require any special skills besides the use of a calculator and basic addition and subtraction. And it doesn't matter whether you make $14,000 or $14 million. If you can add, you can use the Debt-Free Spending Plan to live free from debt for the rest of your life. I'm not kidding. If you've had enough of the pain that comes from living in debt, then read on. If you want to live free of worry over money and start
choosing
where you spend your cash, then read on.

This book is for everyone, everywhere, who has believed that money wisdom belongs to a special class of people with a special class of skills. It doesn't. It's yours for the taking right here in
The Debt-Free Spending Plan.