The Total Money Makeover is a personal finance book. It is also a personal transformation book. Dave Ramsey refuses to separate financial improvement—the objective of the Total Money Makeover plan—from improvement of the whole person. His reason is that concerning good money management, behavior matters more than information: “[W]inning at money is 80 percent behavior and 20 percent knowledge. […] Most of us know what to do, but we just don’t do it” (4). Foolish behavior, not ignorance, is what Ramsey believes usually causes financial trouble. His second premise is that money behavior is intertwined with everything about a person: “[T]he emotional, the relational, the family history, the socio-economic impacts, and the spiritual. To ignore any of these while discussing behavior change about money is incomplete and very naïve” (xvii). His conclusion, expressed succinctly, is that money is about everything.

This conviction manifests in his discussions of topics that are not strictly financial yet impact financial wellbeing. Delaying gratification is an aspect of emotional maturity that involves more than resisting impulse buying—but it does involve resisting impulse buying, so Ramsey begins his discussion of debt, not by defining debt, explaining different academic theories of debt, or giving statistics about debt, but by connecting it to emotion: “It is human nature to want it and want it now; it is also a sign of immaturity” (17).