One Money Design

Are you into Baby Step’n or Money Map’n?

Dave Ramsey created the Baby Steps and Crown Financial Ministries created the Money Map for prioritizing and setting financial goals.  Both are widely used resources to help people shift from diluted efforts in achieving objectives to narrowing the focus on the most important goals based on one’s situation.

Is there a right or wrong answer or a better or worse solution?  You can see that both are clearly working towards the same objective of financial freedom or peace.  Both focus on savings and debt elimination which eventually positions one to build wealth and give more.  But more on that later.

Versus the right or wrong or better or worse question, it may be more appropriate to determine which approach works best for your situation. 

I invite you to follow along with me in this series as I walk you through both plans, discuss my observations, hopefully,stimulate your thinking and raise some questions.  I’ll round out the series with some summary thoughts.

I plan to do one post for each phase (this one includes phase 1), so there will be 7 posts in total (including the summary post).

Disclaimer:  I’m a Money Map coach so you might expect a bias towards the Money Map.  I’m going to do my best to take an objective view point.  I’m not necessarily for the Money Map.  I’m all about finding what works best for the situation.

Baby Step 1 – Money Map Destination 1

What does the Baby Step say?

• Baby Step:  $1000 in an emergency fund

What does the Money Map say?

• Begin using a spending plan & save $1000 for emergencies.

Observations and Questions

• Crown suggests creating a spending plan as part of destination 1.  I think Dave assumes you have one when starting The Baby Steps.  I haven’t gone through Financial Peace University (FPU), so I’m not sure.
• Is $1000 the magic number?  I’m just curious as to what is so special about $1000.  I’ve only heard this number from these two sources.  Why not $1500 or $2000?  One thought is that $1000 isn’t a small amount of money, but it’s not big savings either.  It can probably handle most small to medium emergencies. 
• Crown uses a scripture theme for each them which is pretty cool.  “The wise man saves for the future but the foolish man spends whatever he gets.” (Proverbs 21:20 TLB)
• Things to do sooner than later are also included on the Money Map.  I recently wrote an article on these suggestions.

What are your thoughts on this phase?

All the articles from the series:

• The Baby Step and Money Map Dance – Post #2
• The Baby Step and Money Map Dance – Post #3
• The Baby Step and Money Map Dance – Post #4
• The Baby Step and Money Map Dance – Post #5
• The Baby Step and Money Map Dance – Post #6
• The Baby Step and Money Map Dance Round Up