Review of Financial Peace University: Get Out of Debt!

Turn on the television any early morning, flip through the infomercials and you're bound to find a handful of them touting ways to get out of debt, get rich quick, and make all your wildest dreams come true. Know how to get rich quick? Convince a bunch of other people that you have the magic key to wealth and you'll share it with them for only 2 payments of $39.99. You may not sleep well at night knowing you've taken a lot of good people for a ride, though.

Based on this, my initial thoughts when I heard about Financial Peace University were not entirely positive. "What could possibly be different about this program?" I thought. Probably the one thing that swayed my reserve was the fact that the Financial Peace University course was being offered by a local church. I'm a Christian. I know that the general consensus of Christian churches is not to take advantage of others or to sell scams. So, I was a bit surprised that a church was involved in a financial help program. I was intrigued enough to attend the information night sponsored by the church.

What I found there were real live people from my own small town who said they had turned their financial lives around after participating in Financial Peace University. Some of these people I knew personally, so I was fairly certain they weren't part of some elaborate marketing scheme. "It's practical advice," they told me. "Anybody can do it," they said. "It will change your life," they said.

"It will change your family tree," is what Dave Ramsey says. After taking the plunge and signing up for the course, I would have to say he is right. My husband and I didn't consider ourselves in bad financial shape when we started the course, but we are in much better financial shape now, two years later. As we prepare to kick to the curb the enormous student loan that has been hanging over my head for years, we are comforted in the knowledge that our own children won't be faced with that massive debt in their futures. We have taken care of that. We are comforted in the knowledge that we are no longer slaves to car payments, loan payments, and credit cards.