David,

I just don’t know where to start. I read your books “Start Late, Finish Rich” and “ The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner” and they both really opened my eyes. Although we don’t follow your teachings to a tee, we take what we feel will work best for us and use it to its fullest. After reading your book, I set up a bi-weekly payment for our mortgage. It would have been just as easy to make one extra payment a year, but this way we make it automatic. We paid off my wife’s car, and we reinvested the money into a mutual fund. We wanted to “pay ourselves first”. Our hope is to be able to buy a nice used car for cash in a few years and never have a car payment again. Instead of borrowing from a bank, we will “borrow” from ourselves. We have been living a debt free life for the past 3 yrs now. If we could not pay cash for it, then we did not buy it (except real estate). We took your advice and got pre-approved for our dream house; we then took the first step and purchased some land out in the Hill Country. Everywhere we looked they wanted us to purchase and build right away. It was my wife’s idea to look at a place that would let us buy and build on our own timeline. We won’t be building our dream house for another 18-24 months. Since we are debt free, we hope to be able to save a majority of our income to put toward our new house. Our hope is to be able to save enough on our own and have enough equity in our current house to be able to put a big enough down payment so our new house does not cost us too much more then our current mortgage. Something else that we do is using an envelope system. Every week we get paid we put a certain amount in different envelopes (vacation, clothing, etc). By doing this we have been able to pay for our last 2 vacations for cash. One was to Jamaica and the other was on a 7-day cruise to St. Thomas, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas. This picture is from that cruise. Becoming rich is not hard, but it does require some discipline and being able to say no when the kids in us want to say yes.

Alex & Monique Pugh