Saving money for the future is a good habit. To do it means exercising the virtue of delayed gratification. So it’s only natural that disciplined savers often feel a sense of satisfaction as month-by-month they see their nest egg grow.

If you were around for the Internet stock craze of the late 1990s or the real estate bubble of the late 2000s, you know it can be extremely tempting to jump into an investment that has a recent track record of skyrocketing to higher and higher values.

Ramsey says that these financially successful people are not necessarily high earners nor do they come across as being financial wizards. In fact, when he asks them about what they did to achieve their success, they invariably answer that they followed a small set of basic principles, but they followed them diligently.