I just read a book review of Dave Ramsey’s “The Total Money Makeover” and his ideas about paying off your mortgage impress me as the greatest saving money tips ever.  He talks about all of the trade-offs that we make when we sign up for a mortgage, and all of the mistaken beliefs that people have about so-called advantages with a mortgage, like tax deductions from interest payments.  His observations have always made perfect sense to me, and I could never understand why people fell for those.  If you have a $1000 house payment, and $850 of it is going to interest, that’s just like flushing money down the toilet, at the rate of $10,200 a year.  So if you get to deduct part of that from your taxes, it might just sound great, but you’re still throwing money away in interest.  He has some other great points about risk with mortgages and borrowing money.  He offered some other saving money tips having to do with being willing to live in an apartment longer so that you could save money for your house.  He also talks about setting up a fifteen year mortgage instead of a thirty year mortgage.  And as I observed, one of the best saving money tips is to pay cash for your home.  And he talks about how to go about it in this book.

Until next time.