Read this before you click through: the book on this listing is in Spanish.
It is La transformación total de su dinero, Actualizada y Ampliada, the updated and expanded Spanish edition of Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover. The previous version of this page reviewed it in English, under an English title, without once mentioning that the book itself is not in English. If you do not read Spanish, this is not the edition you want. Search for The Total Money Makeover by name and buy the English one instead.
If you do read Spanish, or you are buying for someone who does, this is a good edition of a book worth owning, and the rest of this review is for you.
What the book is
Ramsey’s argument has not changed since the first edition in 2003. Personal finance, he says, is about eighty percent behaviour and twenty percent knowledge, so the plan is deliberately simple enough to follow when you are frightened and tired. That plan is the Baby Steps: a small starter emergency fund, then every debt except the house paid off smallest balance first, then three to six months of expenses saved, then retirement, then the mortgage.
The debt snowball is the famous piece and the one economists argue about, because paying the smallest balance first rather than the highest interest rate costs you money on paper. Ramsey knows this and says so. His position is that the point is momentum, and that a plan people finish beats an optimal plan they abandon. That is a defensible claim and most of the counterargument misses it.
How Christian is it, really
Less than this page used to claim. The old review said each chapter reinforces a spiritual grounding for financial practice. That is not accurate.
Ramsey is an outspoken Christian, and the book carries a handful of proverbs, an emphasis on generosity, and a strong current of the borrower being slave to the lender. But this is a mainstream personal finance book that reached millions of people who are not Christians, and it does not teach stewardship theologically. Do not hand it to a man expecting a Bible study on money. Hand it to him expecting a plan.
Where it is weak
The tone is loud. Ramsey preaches, and readers who do not enjoy being shouted at motivationally will find it wearing over 250 pages.
The advice is also calibrated to a middle-class American household with an income problem it can budget its way out of. If your issue is that you do not earn enough rather than that you spend too much, the Baby Steps have less to say to you, and the book does not really acknowledge that case.
His investment guidance, growth stock mutual funds and a twelve percent expected return, is the most criticised part and the criticism is fair. Treat the debt chapters as the strong half.
Who it is for
A Spanish-speaking reader carrying consumer debt who needs a sequence to follow rather than a philosophy to consider. It works, it is clear, and millions of people have used it.
La transformación total de su dinero on Amazon (Spanish edition)