this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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Dave Ramsey is one of those guys where you have to eat the fish but leave the bones.
A lot of what he teaches is really great, practical advice--aimed at people who really might not understand financial basics.
Things like budgeting, saving, investing in mutual funds, and avoiding debt like the plague. That's all fantastic financial advice. The whole "borrower is servant to the lender stuff pulled right out of the Bible is stuff that most on here would agree with. Debt is a way to force people into financial serfdom.
But occasionally he says stupid shit like this. And maybe it's taken out of context, but probably not. He always has advocated busting your ass to get out of debt and start saving. He calls it getting "gazelle" intense about it(basically saying banks, lenders, etc are lions trying to kill you). Again, not too far off from whatost people agree with.
So, he's advocated getting multiple jobs if you need to until you can right your financial ship.
But he's also an proponent of advocating for yourself and getting better jobs and ditching the second job as soon as you can. So I dunno. He says dumb stuff but he's also pretty practical overall. Like I said eat the fish, leave the bones.
The second job thing is interesting, it's like he doesn't understand that the economic situation of a society as a whole (generally a country) dictates what % of people can afford to have nice things.
As a result of that, if your society is in a bad economic situation it may very well be the case that even if everybody was working the same number of multiple jobs, advocating for themselves, and busting their butts, most of those people are still going to be in a shitty situation due to things entirely out of their control. Furthermore, the ones that got out of the shitty situation, even though they're doing all of the same things, only did it due to dumb luck / being in the right place at the right time.
His "no debt" spiel is a decade out of date. The red queen paradox applies here, most people need to run as fast as they can, just to stay in the same place.
The average house here has gone up in value 55 euros a day for the past decade, and rent has risen faster Unless you're already doing very well, you cant budget your way into buying a house anymore. Saving 55 euros a day for a decade means you're standing still, you need to MORE to actually get closer to buying property.
Again, that's 55 bucks a DAY, or 1650 a month, just keep pace. Dave Ramsey can fuck right off when it takes 32 hours at minimum just to stay as poor as you always were.
No debt has worked for me. I don't care for him and any of his advice, but getting out of debt has been great for me.
Going by your comments, you're hardly a struggling gen-z though. When you or I run in place, we're already miles ahead of those who can barely get off the starting line.
But you were in debt, and the example given of a home mortgage is pretty definitively a debt worth taking on, as rent and increasing housing costs will easily outpace accrued interest.
You should pay that debt down quickly, unless you're mortgage rate is crazy good and investment returns are crazy high, but that's not usual. But taking on a mortgage is about the only way you can get into owning a house except for being a trust fund baby.
Some people may have to suck it up and tolerate a car payment, of they can't afford a 6 to 9 thousands dollar car, because they need transportation to get to work, and any car cheaper than that will be very expensive to repair.
Carrying over any balance on a credit card? Yeah, that's always a terrible idea.
His no debt spiel is really only get a mortgage once you have no other debt.