BOBBYCAST: Dave Ramsey on Being $3 Million in Debt + Filing for Bankruptcy & Almost Getting Divorced + The Reason He Doesn't Give Listeners Money + Common Financial Advice that is WRONG + His Coolest Famous Friend

Summary

Podcast Summary: Bobbycast with Dave Ramsey (Episode 542)

Date: October 3, 2025
Host: Bobby Bones
Guest: Dave Ramsey
Main Theme: Dave Ramsey opens up about his journey from multimillionaire to bankrupt and back, his core financial philosophies, common misconceptions around money, and personal anecdotes about wealth, generosity, and relationships.

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Episode Overview

In this wide-ranging and candid interview, Bobby Bones sits down with personal finance icon Dave Ramsey. Together, they trace Dave's rise, fall, and resurgence, discussing his philosophies around debt, why he doesn’t give direct financial aid to listeners, and the human side of money. Key themes include reinvention, dealing with trauma from financial loss, the dangers of consumer debt, and the timelessness of solid financial principles.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Dave Ramsey’s Backstory: From Boom to Bust and Back

• Ramsey recounts his background in Antioch, Tennessee – “not Beverly Hills” – stressing his lower middle-class upbringing, work ethic, and entrepreneurial home life.
  “We put the fun in dysfunction…but they taught us hard work.” (07:20)
• By 26, he had amassed $4 million in real estate with $3 million in debt. Within two years, banks called the notes, leading to financial ruin and personal crisis.
  “We spent the next two and a half years of our life losing everything we owned...I filed bankruptcy after fighting it, and it crushed me psychologically, spiritually, everything.” (08:13)

2. Starting from Nothing in Broadcasting

• The Ramsey Show began on a bankrupt radio station—ironically, a bankruptcy expert launching on a bankrupt platform.
  “The Ramsey show starts on a bankrupt station.” (04:34)
• The early goal was simply exposure, with Dave never receiving pay from stations—he monetized via events and books instead.
  “The radio show itself as a business did not make money for 10 years...it was a lead magnet.” (14:43)

3. Why Dave Doesn’t Give Money to Listeners

• Dave maintains a strict rule against giving money directly to callers:
  “The first time you do that…you’ve changed the show into a telethon. People are going to start calling to get money instead of help and answers.” (10:35)
• Instead, he helps connect people to local resources or orchestrates solutions behind the scenes.
  “Money’s really not what they need… But in the end, the key is never violating that boundary, or the whole show changes.” (10:35)

4. Empathy and Connection with Listeners

• Dave draws on real-life struggle to relate:
  “When people call…I remember that instantly. I can feel it... My body still feels it.” (09:03)
• Live events, seeing the “humans in the room,” reinvigorate his sense of purpose.
  “We do a lot of live events…because it keeps us in tune with the humans.” (13:12)

5. Debt vs. Wealth: Challenging Financial Myths

• Bobby asks if being debt-free is ever disadvantageous. Dave is adamant:
  “No, the data says that you’ve done it the right way… Your most powerful wealth-building tool is your income.” (19:08)
• He labels common high-interest borrowing as “usurious,” arguing for financial literacy over regulation.
  “I prefer to teach so many people how not to get screwed that it puts the people screwing people out of business.” (17:24)
• On ‘good debt’:
  “The number of [millionaires] that said ‘I borrowed deeply in order to build wealth’ was very close to zero.” (21:06)

6. Advice for High Earners & Stories from Celebrity Wealth

• Many celebrities and athletes fall prey to bad advice, overconsumption, and supporting too many people. He warns heavily against the idea that infinite income lasts forever.
  “NFL stands for Not For Long. It's 3.8 years average...generally, you don’t come out of the NFL well unless you just decide you’re not going to be a stereotypical athlete.” (24:21)
• Even as Ramsey has “made it,” childhood trauma still influences his relationship to money and guilt over spending.
  “The trauma is, your body is tightening up, telling you, ‘you’re gonna die, you’re gonna die’... I have to use my mind.” (27:01)

7. Cars, Consumption, and Common Pitfalls

• Cars are “consumption, never investment.”
  “They go down in value like a rock…as long as they're a small percentage of your world, it doesn't kill you.” (30:26)
• Many callers’ biggest financial mistake is being upside down on car loans for the sake of image.
  “You bought a car that’s killing you, and that’s half my show. Sell the car.” (31:01)

8. Financial Generosity and Guilt

• Bobby expresses a compulsion to match big purchases with equivalent charitable giving, driven by guilt.
  Dave: “It’s a good practice if you’re doing it…but I don’t ever want to guilt anybody into doing stuff.” (34:15)
• Ramsey frames stewardship in terms of faith:
  “All of this we don’t own. We’re managing it for God. It’s easy to give away other people’s money.” (35:07)

9. The Timelessness of Financial Principles

• Dave emphasizes that the core of ‘The Total Money Makeover’ and his Baby Steps plan is principles, not products.
  “Live on less than you make. You don’t need to expand that…everything in that book is so principled.” (60:58)

10. Notable Opinions on Current Trends

• TikTok financial advice is mostly “garbage”—infomercial-level get-rich-quick schemes repackaged.
  “Most everything on TikTok [financial advice]…it’s all kind of get rich quick vibe.” (45:11)
• Crypto is grouped with commodities and gambling—all “volatility, no value creation.”
  “Crypto doesn't actually produce anything…it’s just a currency…nothing evil, but very volatile.” (47:04)
• On day trading:
  “97% of the people that day trade stocks lose money in a six month period of time.” (46:33)

11. How He Spends for Fun (and His Coolest Friend)

• These days, Dave and his wife are big on travel—recently: “Budapest, Vienna, up the Croatian coast.”
• Coolest famous friends? He lists new-generation podcasters like Theo Von and Sean Ryan, marveling at the company he now keeps.
  “Just the idea Dave Ramsey from Antioch gets to hang out in a room with fill-in-the-blank, I’m still blown away by that.” (65:22)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Rebuilding After Bankruptcy:
  “By the time I’m 30, we’re basically penniless again...But with having had the lights turned off…So when people call scared, yeah, I remember that instantly.” (08:13–09:04)

• On Why He Hasn’t Run for Office:
  “I think I get a lot more good done with what I do than any of those people could ever do. I detest a situation that’s full of a lack of authenticity. And that’s the definition of politics.” (41:49)

• On Generational Wisdom:
  “Getting out of the hood's easier than getting the hood out of you.” (26:38)

• Principles vs. Products:
  “Everything in that book is so principled…they’re evergreen.” (60:58)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:41] – Dave recounts his bankruptcy and its impact
• [04:16–05:48] – The start of the Ramsey Show on a bankrupt station
• [08:13–09:07] – Details on losing it all, empathy for callers
• [10:28–12:36] – Why Dave never gives callers money; notable story
• [14:43–15:39] – Monetizing the radio show through events/books
• [16:29–18:34] – Thoughts on credit card & payday loan rates
• [19:08–21:43] – Why being debt-free is always better, even for high earners
• [24:21–27:01] – NFL athletes and the commonality of financial ruin
• [29:43–32:46] – On tipping, cars as bad investments, and spending
• [34:10–35:58] – Guilt and generosity with money
• [36:41–41:23] – On travel, expanding horizons, learning from other cultures
• [45:04–47:04] – Bad advice on TikTok, timeshares, crypto
• [49:31–51:11] – Ramsey’s second passion: coaching small business and leadership
• [54:24–56:07] – How Financial Peace University has changed with technology
• [58:11–59:12] – Couples, money, and relationship dynamics
• [60:50–62:59] – Why “The Total Money Makeover” endures
• [64:16–65:22] – Coolest famous friends and the privilege of association

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Memorable and Human Moments

• Ramsey’s detailed empathy for listeners struggling, rooted in personal trauma.
• Anecdotes about tipping valets big, not out of image but to show generosity to young listeners.
• Remarks about “guilt blankets” and being haunted by fear of losing it all again, even decades later.
• Lively banter about cars, baseball cards, and the joys and dangers of new wealth.

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Tone and Language

The conversation is candid and self-deprecating, with Dave’s folksy wisdom, practical analogies, and charismatic warmth. He blends humor, tough love, and honesty, keeping the discussion real and relatable—true to his media persona.

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Conclusion

This episode delivers both a masterclass on Ramsey’s foundational financial principles and a vulnerable exploration of money, psychology, and relationships. Listeners leave with practical wisdom and a deeper sense of the man behind the Baby Steps—his scars, humor, and convictions alike.

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End of Summary.

Transcript

[Bobby Bones]

This is an I Heart Podcast.

[WebMD Health Discovered Host]

Hear insightful, entertaining discussions on today's important health and wellness topics on the Health discovered podcast from WebMD. Through in depth conversations with experts, Health Discovered covers everything from tips for healthier living to the latest on therapy and mental health. My goal is to really destigmatize mental health treatment and looking at it from a whole health perspective. Physical health and mental health can be intertwined. Listen to WebMD Health discovered on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Dave Ramsey]

We spent the next two and a half years of our life losing everything we owned. We had a brand new baby and a marriage hanging on by a thread. And I'm 28 years old and I filed bankruptcy after fighting it for two and a half years. It crushed me.

[Bobby Bones]

Welcome to episode 542 with Dave Ramsey. Who I've known Dave for a long time now and it was really good to sit with him for an hour. I don't know. I like Dave. I think if you're around Dave a little bit, you're drawn to him. There's a reason he's successful. His website's ramseysolutions.com which teaches you practical ways to handle your money, work and relationships so you can create the life that you want. Dave's the founder and CEO of Ramsey Solutions, where he's helped people take control of their money and their lives since 1992. He has written nine best selling books. He's a personal finance expert. He's host of the Ramsey Show. He was millions of dollars in debt. Also, he didn't grow up with money. So he got into debt because a lot of rich people go into debt because they're rich and they think they can bounce out of it. He's broke, then went into debt, then got out of it. We talk about that. Dave was born in Antioch, Tennessee in 1960. Bought his first rental property at 18 years old. By age 26, he had amassed a $4 million real estate portfolio. But then, dun dun, dun dun. Yeah, it didn't go so well. He's famous for his Baby Steps plan, which is a seven step system to help people get out of debt and build wealth. And here he is, Dave ramsey. Instagram @daveramsey and again, Ramsey solutions dot com. Here we go. I consider you a friend. If I saw you at the grocery store, I would go up and give you a hug.

[Dave Ramsey]

Absolutely.

[Bobby Bones]

Okay.

[Dave Ramsey]

Give you a hug when I walked in.

[Bobby Bones]

Yeah. And you know, and we've been friends a long time. Yes. So I would consider you.

[Dave Ramsey]

I Mean, you guys were just kind of getting started when we for sure hung out and. And then you just, like, blew up and became a. Like an icon or something. It's crazy.

[Bobby Bones]

I don't know that that's true, but it has been good.

[Dave Ramsey]

Been a good ride, for sure.

[Bobby Bones]

It's been a lot of revisionist history with me, and I was going to ask you about that with you where with me, it's like you moved to town. Wow, you're huge. But it was like the first couple years here, like, I had to sell my whole company that I had sort of syndicated myself with my. With my own money. And we started over and it was miserable and had to buy billboards against me. There was all this strategy, and it was really hard for two or three years where we almost didn't make it, but that's what actually made us really make it was being so different and then weathering all of. All of the already set in negativity of. I mean, that's really what it was. We were so different. Is that at all your story? Because now you're just super successful. Dave always been rich?

[Dave Ramsey]

Well, not always, obviously. What ended up, I think more than. We've had our waves of negativity, different things for different reasons at different times around the broadcast part. We've reinvented ourselves as the platforms changed. I mean, obviously, I started in talk radio. Talk radio was a big deal when I started. Russia had been on the air two years. And so talk radio evolved as we grew and ended up with 680 stations. Before he passed, we were the third largest. Now we're the second largest talk radio show in America, the only one that's independently syndicated. And today that doesn't matter. What matters now is podcasts. What matters now is YouTube. Our numbers on those things, on Spotify, on Apple, on those things, those downloads, it's just in the billions. And so that's. But that's a reinvention in that, you know, you have to conform to the new technology. And the wonderful thing is you get to reach a whole new group of people they didn't reach before.

[Bobby Bones]

Was there ever a moment where it almost didn't all happen early on, though? Like, before you started having success at talk radio, was there a decision you look back at as like, man, this almost didn't work out?

[Dave Ramsey]

Oh, a bunch of them. Especially in the early days. I started on WTN, which was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the time.

[Bobby Bones]

The station was.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yes, that's the irony. The Ramsey show starts on a bankruptcy station. Bankrupt station.

[Bobby Bones]

And I'm assuming they didn't pay you a bunch of money then.

[Dave Ramsey]

They didn't pay me any money, really. Matter of fact, I've never been paid by a radio station. I was working. I just took the thing and they said, we'll give you some ads that you can barter. There were $6 a spot at the time. And so we made nothing. We're doing it for fun, you know. And it just. And again, it blew up. And then Gaylord bought it out of bankruptcy, and we thought, oh, we're done. They're going to take a country and we're out of here. And they did some qualitative and quantitative research to their credit and found that we had a ton of phantom cum because no one ever told us to say the call letters. So no one was writing it down in those days. You wrote it down in the book, the ratings book. And we started saying the call letters. We went to a 7, from 0 to a. A 7 to a 14 in three books. And all of a sudden, everybody in Nashville's looking at talk radio. And talk radio was kind of in its zenith in those days. So everybody's talking about the water cooler. This is. Hey, have you listened to G. Gordon Liddy, George Plaster, you know, in Nashville? That was the deal.

[Bobby Bones]

What was it like for you, like, as a person? Like, kind of like the origin story of Dave. Because even I have read about you, and I know you grew up in Antioch, and Antioch is not Beverly Hills.

[Dave Ramsey]

No, no.

[Bobby Bones]

And again, my association with you is. I know the guy. I think a lot of people that watch you on TikTok is you're just the rich guy that's smart. So what's like before all that happened, you grew up in Antioch. What was home like?

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, Antioch in those days was rednecks, and now it's kind of international flavor. It's. The demographic has shifted and. But it was a 1000 square foot house with an unfinished basement, and we did not have living room furniture until I was 14. So it was just a big empty room, because then by the living room furniture. So I bought the house. Mom and dad bought the house for $12,250 in 1960. And dad was a serial entrepreneur, so we were either driving Cadillacs or having them towed. And so I learned a lot about entrepreneurism from just living through it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we, you know, one summer we got a nice boat to go skiing, and the next summer we got no boat. And so. And that, you know, that was part of the Life that we grew up with. And then I was going to go. They were in the real estate business. So I'm going to go in the real estate business. I got my real estate license when I turned 18. Three weeks later, sold my first house and I moved out of the house and took off and went to Knoxville and got a degree in real estate. Working down there 60 hours a week. They taught us work ethic and always worked hard.

[Bobby Bones]

Your parents did?

[Dave Ramsey]

Yes, always worked hard. Yeah. There's a lot of miscellaneous unpleasant in a house like that. Sometimes we put the fun in dysfunction. But other things were. They taught us entrepreneurism, they taught us hard work. They were charismatic people in terms of always telling a big tale, a big story, which has worked to my benefit. Now they're storytellers out of the mountains, you know, and that kind of stuff. So it's some wonderful attributes. There were some things that were wonderful about it, but you know, it was lower middle class neighborhood, I guess something like that. Pay cash for my first car, cutting grass. So met my wife Sharon. We got married. We had $1.16 in our checking account. Nothing. And I started buying and selling real estate in my early 20s. Talked some banker into loaning me money because I could talk somebody into doing anything. And I went deeply in debt. Went. Went broke.

[Bobby Bones]

How deep in debt?

[Dave Ramsey]

We had $4 million worth of real estate by the time I was 26 and $3 million worth of debt. And the banks called our notes and we spent the next two and a half years of our life losing everything we owned. We had a brand new baby and a toddler and a marriage hanging on by a thread. And I'm 28 years old and I filed bankruptcy after fighting it for two and a half years. It crushed me psychologically, spiritually, everything. I met God in that process on the way up, got to know him on the way down. And so we just, you know, by the time I'm 30 years old, we're basically penniless again and get the opportunity just to start over. But with having had the lights turned off, the water turned off at the house. So when people call me on the radio and they're scared. Yeah, I remember that instantly. I can feel it. It starts rising up in my throat.

[Bobby Bones]

There's empathy involved.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah. Thirty years later, I can still feel it. My body.

[Bobby Bones]

I watch a lot of clips because I think that's the way that I consume you most is the clips that go viral. And millions. You talk about millions, billions of downloads. But I like, I'll go look At a random clip of. Of somebody calling in, going, Where's 70 million? And you're like, what? And you have all these little anecdotes. Do you have, like a list of anecdotes that you can go to if somebody calls about certain things, or are they just firing off in your head?

[Dave Ramsey]

Well, I mean, some of them are joke lines you used 10 years ago, and they work, so you keep using them. Right. And people connect to those turn of phrase better than they do. Just solid information. And so if you can wrap it somehow and something makes them laugh or makes them go, oh, my God, he just said that out loud. Or, you know, a little bit of shock value, then it helps them remember. It helps them learn from the process rather than simply be entertained by other people's disasters.

[Bobby Bones]

I always want my doctor to not be emotionally invested because I think they work better if emotion is not getting in the way. If I have a surgeon now, I don't want him feeling sad for me. I want him to come to do what he was trying to do, like, go, abcd, Cool, we got it. Let's get out. Like, that is my hope. Whenever I go in and have to have somebody work on, I don't want them to care. I need them just to do their job. Because I feel like sometimes emotion gets in the way. Now, it can, and it can help in a good way as well. But whenever you're dealing with people that have sad stories, do you ever just want to be like, I will help you?

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, well, we do. I mean, we don't give them money.

[Bobby Bones]

But that's what I'm saying. Like, you could just be like, you ever want to do that? Just be like, let me just give you something.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah. Yeah. And you know what we had to do early when that first, you know, because what happens the first time you do that is you've changed the show into a telethon and people are going to start calling to get money instead of get help and answers. And money's really not what they need. But there's a couple times, I mean, we had a lady the other day, gosh, year and a half ago, call in and she owed $60,000 on her house. It's worth 400,000. Her husband had gotten killed in an accident on the job. 30 years old, and she's four payments behind, getting ready to lose a $400,000 house with a $60,000 mortgage. I can write that check and be done. And she's got no problem. Right. And he was in the roofing. He Fell through a roof. He's working on a roof. And I'm talking to her, and I said, Listen, 100% chance, you are not gonna lose this house, okay? And she started crying. I said, look, there's no possible way I'm gonna walk you through. I know how to deal with the mortgage company. We're gonna put them on hold. We're gonna set them on the sidelines, and we're gonna hook you up with some local churches, and we're gonna get you caught up. Some people are gonna help you. But I've got in the back of my head, that was one I was tempted to, but I'm not going to because I don't violate that rule. I never do it. But what happened was another guy in the roofing business in Murfreesboro called us five minutes later and paid off her house. Wow. You know, and so people do stuff, but I didn't. I didn't facilitate it. I didn't cause it. I didn't put out a GoFundMe. I didn't talk about it on the air. I just said, honey, you're going to be okay. We got this. You have too much equity to lose this house. We're not going to allow it to happen.

[Bobby Bones]

What do you do in a situation like that? When you say, put the mortgage company.

[Dave Ramsey]

On the side, we can just. They will. They're required to do what's called a forbearance, to attempt a forbearance, to do a workout plan. And we just know how to work the language with them. And our coaches can get on the phone with them. And if she's four payments, five behind, we can set up double payments for eight months or something like that. We'll help her get an extra job again. Local church will step in, maybe catch her up. Anyway, in this case, the guy just paid the stinking thing off.

[Bobby Bones]

Wow. That's wild.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, it's neat.

[Bobby Bones]

It has to make you feel good, too, about what you're doing. I feel at times like I'm so separated because, you know, I've got four or five podcasts. We got the radio show, but I'm in a room. I don't get to, like, see people. When I tour. It was awesome because I would get to see people.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, I like that.

[Bobby Bones]

And I would actually get to see the humans. And it would almost reinvigorate me because I know people are listening, and I can see the actions happening from things I talk about. But at times, that barrier is there.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yep.

[Bobby Bones]

But it. It's really Cool. Whenever you can do it and know there are humans out there that will act.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yep. Well, and you know, to the same point, we do a lot of live events and it's one of the reasons we do live events is for us, because it keeps us in tune with the humans. Because again, you're sitting on stage, you got two, three thousand people sitting there. You can judge quickly, you can feel the room. If you've been doing it a while, is this material working? Am I connecting? Am I helping? Are the light bulbs coming on over their heads or are they flipping me off in the back of their head? And the body language and the tone and you feel it in the air, what's happening in that room. And so it's a way to proof text the material. But also it just invigorates us because we get to see the humans and we go, yeah, dad gum, this is cool. And what's really cool these days is with YouTube and podcast, I've got the youngest audience I've ever had. So the 19 year old kid that's valeting my car at the steakhouse is like, you're Dave Ramsey. And that's never happened to me in my whole career. But it's awesome. Which the poor guy, he automatically gets a huge tip just because I'm so thrilled that he's listening, you know, I mean, if you're 19 and you get the stuff we teach, you're going to be so stinking rich.

[Bobby Bones]

Do you feel though that you have to tip also because you don't want people saying, Dave Ramsey didn't tip me.

[Dave Ramsey]

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. When it's, when it's bad service, everybody gets a tip, it doesn't matter. And a good one. Yeah, because we don't. I don't want to be on one of those lists of people that stiff people and that kind of stuff.

[Bobby Bones]

So when you started doing that radio show at one radio station, like what was the goal from that?

[Dave Ramsey]

To get leads to create. The radio show itself as a business did not make money for 10 years. It lost money. And so it was a lead magnet. We were gathering humans and they would come to live events. We made money on those. Later on we had a class called Financial Peace University that exploded and they would come to that and they buy books. We had multiple bestsellers over the years. And so it turned, you know, we were able to monetize the exposure from a business perspective, but all of that ended up being a brand mix, actually, that caused us to find different ways to help people because some people are More helped in live events. Some are more helped in a classroom setting. Some are more helped buy a book sitting in a corner. Some are more helped just listening on the show, those kinds of things. So we got all these different ways we can get at you to get you the information so you can change your life. And. And so it was all about serving them out there, but in different ways.

[Bobby Bones]

My best friend, who's also on my morning show, Eddie, like, he followed what you have taught for a long time is like, pay off your smallest first. Because he was like 40 or $50,000 in debt at a time when he didn't have that money. He says he doesn't have it now, and he does. He has four kids. I don't think he has anything. But he, like, it's what he did. Like, he paid off the $18, $142, and then it took him five or six years and he was able to clear $40,000 in credit card debt. I feel a bit that there should be a cap on credit card, like interest rates. Like, you coming from where I come from where people, they don't have money, they don't have resources, they don't. I didn't know about money. I grabbed a credit card and it was like 19%. This sounds awesome. I can actually buy stuff, clothes or food. And the next thing you know, it's out of control. Right?

[Dave Ramsey]

Yep.

[Bobby Bones]

How do you feel about interest rates on credit cards?

[Dave Ramsey]

Well, probably the worst offender in that whole space would be called the payday lender.

[Bobby Bones]

Yeah.

[Dave Ramsey]

Those rates run 400 to 800%. They make a 19% look.

[Bobby Bones]

And you get cash on, too. Like if we used to go into those and you. The great thing about those is you would actually get hard. Hard money.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yep.

[Bobby Bones]

Or a credit card. You got credit and maybe you can, you know, maybe not spend it all, but that cash, it goes quick because it's in your hand.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah. And oftentimes for the wrong things.

[Bobby Bones]

Yeah.

[Dave Ramsey]

So. And then you've got this ridiculous rate on this thing. So some states have now limited or outlawed those. The payday lenders. I prefer to teach so many people how not to get screwed that it puts the people screwing people out of business. Just marketplace pressure.

[Bobby Bones]

More so than regulate.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, more so than regulate. Because, you know, there's always people who want to mess up are always going to find a way. I would find a way. I'd find a way around whatever the regulation was to get screwed. And so. And the people that are going to mess you over, they're going to find A way around it, some way or another. But the credit card interest rates are horrendous, they're ridiculous. And old fashioned word we would use is called usurious. There used to be, in the old days there were usury laws in a lot of the states, like blue laws, you weren't allowed to open your business on Sunday. Old days in the 50s, in the 60s, that kind of thing. And there were usury laws. You couldn't charge more than a certain amount. And when credit cards first got on the scene in the 70s and started really becoming a thing, there were some states that the banks couldn't do business in because they could not charge that rate. And that's probably not a bad thing. But I would prefer to just make it to where it's so uncomfortable that everybody stays away from it. And when they stay away from it, then the people go out of business.

[Bobby Bones]

I'd like a little advice. So when I started buying anything, I only ever paid cash because I was so afraid of going in debt, had no money, so I had nothing. But anything I had, it was 400 bucks for an old crappy Subaru. It was always cash. I don't owe anything to anybody at all now. Even my house paid cash for it. I've always been so scared of debt because never had money, never wanted to owe at this point. And is there good debt that I should be involved in? Because I have none and that's great, but am I costing myself money?

[Dave Ramsey]

No, the data says that you've done it the right way. Everybody talks about that. The sophisticated person will use debt to their advantage. But we don't actually find that in rich people. What we find is they get out of debt and stay out of debt. Because your most powerful wealth building tool is your income and something happens to your income. Especially in a world like you and I are in where we're self employed and self employed and in the spotlight both. When I don't have any debt, I don't have to think about doing the right thing, I just do it. And if somebody doesn't like it, oh well. But if I have to make a payment over here, then I gotta think about that. And you take a guy in a regular job, he'll put up a toxic job because he's gotta pay a stupid car payment. But if he hadn't got a car payment, hadn't got any debt, then he just starts walking out the door and the guy's yelling at him, where are you going? He goes, I don't need any payments, I Don't put up with this and he'll go get a better job in a less toxic environment. So those of us that are self employed end up making more money because we're not. Our stomach's not in knots trying to worry about paying a payment and so we can go do what's the next cool thing and take a risk with cash and we can do the. And we can stand up when we need to stand up on something and, you know, whatever the consequences are, that's fine. But you're not going to get my house, you're not going to get my building and you're not going to get my business because it's all free. Nobody's coming at me.

[Bobby Bones]

It sounds like a version of FU money. Like no debt.

[Dave Ramsey]

Exactly.

[Bobby Bones]

It's kind of FU money. It's like, I don't believe in what you're saying, so f you and you can do that a bit without debt. I do feel like you said, I've been.

[Dave Ramsey]

You prosper when you do that.

[Bobby Bones]

Yeah. I agree. And I feel better. So then I perform better.

[Dave Ramsey]

Exactly.

[Bobby Bones]

Just generally speaking.

[Dave Ramsey]

Exactly.

[Bobby Bones]

But I do feel, like you said, I feel I've been conditioned to think that since I'm not using debt to my advantage, that I'm doing wrong and I'm making less because of that.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah. The interesting thing, though, the people that are teaching that are not people that have money, they're people that have studied finance. And the college professor told them that. But it's not, you know, like, we did the largest study a millionaires ever done, 10,167 of them. The number of them that said I borrowed deeply in order to build wealth was very close to zero. Out of 10,000 millionaires, almost none of them. The data does not support that. It's quote, unquote, sophisticated. And the proper path to build wealth. The people that have done the wealth building didn't do it.

[Bobby Bones]

Let's take a quick pause for a message from our sponsor. And we're back on the bobbycast. When someone super rich like Jennifer Lopez buys a $70 million house, do they get a mortgage on that? For the most part. Just generally speaking, do really rich people get mortgages?

[Dave Ramsey]

Most of the billionaire types don't. Some of the celebrity billionaire types would. If they've got someone, quote, I've got me a man that's managing my money, unquote, and some characters giving them advice and all that. Some of those people will take out a mortgage, but most of them, they're like, you know, I, you know, if you're at the top of your game in the golf world and you know, you don't want to think about a mortgage while you're standing over that putt, that putt might be a million dollar putt.

[Bobby Bones]

Same you're talking about even earlier.

[Dave Ramsey]

Exactly.

[Bobby Bones]

Like it's influencing your brain.

[Dave Ramsey]

And most of those guys understand that, you know, that I play ball differently, I stand over that putt differently, I take a different record deal or I don't. And because I got this stupid thing hanging around out there and you get into the things like, you know, Ed McMahon passed away bankrupt. You know, Johnny Carson's sidekick back in the day had $110 million in debt. And we spent a lot of time with Pam, and I have permission from her to say this, so I wouldn't. Otherwise I wouldn't have disclosed that. His wife, Pam, called me when Ed was on his deathbed and I got to know her and we hung out. Our coaches have coached her to try to bring their life back around. But he did that. I mean, there's financial people in air quotes giving him advice. Deeply in debt. And one of the most famous guys from the 1970s, Johnny Carson sidekick, no money.

[Bobby Bones]

A lot of athletes will go into debt, same thing. And a lot of the athletes, even that I know didn't come from much, therefore, when they get it. And I think there's also an idea of, well, if I'm getting at this level now, I'm going to get at this level forever. When you have a shelf life. But I know I have a shelf life doing this as well. Now I don't have to run. Thank God I'm using my brain, not my body. But I also know that when the sun's out, get it.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yep.

[Bobby Bones]

Because the sun ain't always going to be out.

[Dave Ramsey]

Amen.

[Bobby Bones]

How do these athletes lose that money? Is it bad advice? No advice.

[Dave Ramsey]

It's a little bit of everything. The I do a lot of NFL rookie camps and I'm standing in front of these kids going, hey, NFL stands for not for long. It's 3.8 years average. 78% of you will leave the league physically disabled for life. The divorce rates fourfold the national average, the bankruptcy rates tenfold the national average. So you generally don't come out of the NFL well, unless you just decide I'm not going to be a stereotypical athlete. Now, you know, some of them are brilliant and some of them come from a background. You know, one kid, he was a lineman that nobody ever knew his name, an offensive lineman which generally some of the smartest people on the team. But the, you know, he had an MBA from Michigan and his mom was an obstetrician and his dad was a lawyer. Well, this guy, you know, he didn't come out of the hood. He came out of that situation. So he's got, he grew up around money, had some acumen about it and you know, he banked everything he made pay cash for his house. And he came out, he'll come out of the league wounded physically, but with a lot of money. And I know several of those guys, but we don't know their names usually, but, but the ones that are really sad, it's like I'm sitting on stage and this kid's like, hey, Dave, what do you do on the 15th? I give my mom 10,000 bucks at the first of the month and she calls me on the 15th and needs another 10,000. What do you do? How do you tell your mama? No? I said, well, honey, your mom's got the same problem you got. This isn't going to last. And then what's she going to do? Because you can't do this for 20 years. And so you guys are consuming this money. It's going to go away. So when you get your mom into financial based university, when you get your mom on a budget where she can take advantage of this, if you want to help her, what, you teach her to fish, not just give her fish. And the same thing for you. Well, I mean, he had six, six cars and bought three of his buddies a car and thought he was Elvis Presley and all this stuff. And, you know, and a year and a half later he's out of the league. And you know, and it was a name that we would all know if I said it. And so. But it's just, it's. I guess it's just the background or the acumen and there's no knowledge base at all. And one of my buddies came out of that and he said, you know, getting Dave, getting out of the hood's easier than getting the hood out of you.

[Bobby Bones]

Yeah, I don't feel like it's all the way out of me yet. I have such trauma from.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah.

[Bobby Bones]

That I make decisions even my wife will have to say to me, hey, you're reacting from trauma. There'll be certain things. I'm just like, I don't. And she's like, you're okay. Be rational about this. Yeah, be rational about this spend. Even if it's a healthy spend or if it's something that's Going to be positive. I still. My. My stomach still gets in knots.

[Dave Ramsey]

Well, ours does, too, because of going broke. I mean, Sharon, my wife, was terrorized during that time. I mean, she. She. It's like. And. But what helps us is we. We measure it against our generosity if we're spending. And we also just use the ratio model, meaning we look and say, okay, we're going to buy a car that costs that. That's more than I used to make in a year. Now, how is that? Okay? Well, it's a very small percentage of our world, and we always ask ourselves the question. It helps us kind of process the trauma. Okay. If we take that much money right now in our current world, looking at the math that we have today, and. And burn that much in the middle of the floor, does it change our life? If it does, it's probably too big a thing. But if we're like, you know what? Really wouldn't even notice it. So we need to go on that trip. We need to buy that car, we need to make that gift, that generosity piece, because once that money's gone, it's okay. It's not a big enough part of our life anymore that it matters. Mathematically, we're not at risk, you know, but because the trauma is, your body is tightening up, telling you, you're gonna die, you're gonna die, you're gonna die. It's like, no, I'm not even gonna get a hangnail, you know? And I have to. I have to use my mind. Dr. John Deloney is one of our team members. He always says, when you're looking, when you're in trauma, facts are your friends. And so what are the facts? And that helps me process my momentary trauma in the middle of that.

[Bobby Bones]

Yeah, mine is back in the trailer park. Everything. Everything. Any. Even me getting sick and missing a show leads to streams or ratings going down, which leads to less revenue coming in, which leads to no job, which leads to no money, which leads to back in the trailer park or back in whatever many apartments we lived in, just like that.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah. And. But you and I have known each other a long time. I've watched you process that. It's kind of part of your story that you do process it and you process it in the open, like we're doing right now all the time. And what that's giving you the ability to do is as you're going down that chain, at some point, Bobby goes, wait a minute. That's not true. That's not actually a fact. That's a feeling. And Then you go, huh? Okay. I can probably get off the crazy cycle here. I can step off the crazy train because we're not going back to trailer park. I mean, there's. It's almost mathematically impossible for you to screw it up at that level.

[Bobby Bones]

Almost.

[Dave Ramsey]

It's really. It really is. I mean, me too. Me too. I'm not going back to Antioch. I mean, it's almost mathematically impossible at this stage.

[Bobby Bones]

Do you keep cash on you?

[Dave Ramsey]

Always.

[Bobby Bones]

Yeah, I keep cash on me, too, for tipping, for the most part. And I do feel like I have to tip big because I worked in businesses where I needed tipped. And secondly, I don't want to end up on a freaking TikTok.

[Dave Ramsey]

I'm not as worried about the TikTok thing. To me, it's a form of generosity. And so. And I've done most of those jobs, too, and they're hard jobs, and so I try to find unusual ways to do that. And my wife is like, you just give them way too much money. I'm like, he is parking $140,000 car. I don't need to give him $5. This is Ferris Bueller's day out. I mean, come on, Seriously, this is a valet. We need to love on a little bit here.

[Bobby Bones]

I agree. Are cars bad investments?

[Dave Ramsey]

Yes.

[Bobby Bones]

Are they an investment at all?

[Dave Ramsey]

No, they're not investment. They're in consumption. Yeah. Because they go down in value like a rock. I mean, that's where Chevy gets that. You know, it's just like they all go down in value. Right. And so. But. But we consume them. And again, boats, Same thing. I got boats, I got cars. All these things go down in value, but as long as they're a small percentage of your life, then they don't kill you. But if you make $50,000 a year and you have a $75,000 car, you can't. You can't absorb that mathematically. It's going to take you to your knees. And so you bought a car that's killing you, and that's half my show. Sell the car, Right.

[Bobby Bones]

Yeah, I do see a lot of clips.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah.

[Bobby Bones]

Where it's, hey, sell the car. Get a piece of crap and drive that for a while until you get yourself back on your feet.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah.

[Bobby Bones]

Repairs, though. Repairs on those pieces of crap.

[Dave Ramsey]

Nothing like the payments on the big ones.

[Bobby Bones]

Yeah, I agree. You feel like that's a lot of people, though, that their cars are number one flaw in their financial, like, portfolio.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, it's a lot. And it's gone way up in, like, the last decade.

[Bobby Bones]

Why do you think that is?

[Dave Ramsey]

It used to be like a 500 car payment was the average. Now it's like 800 is the average. And I get a lot of people calling me with two $1200 car payments. And, you know, that's. That's 2500. That's $30,000 a year in car payments. And you're. And you make a hundred. There's no way you can mathematically get on the other side of that. The stupid things are killing you to impress somebody, to stop light you will never meet.

[Bobby Bones]

I was going to ask if it was all to keep up with the Joneses.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah. Most of the time it is for me. I'm a redneck. It's a loud muffler, right? I mean, come on.

[Bobby Bones]

You do drive a big truck. Can I say that? I can say you drive a big truck.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, I do.

[Bobby Bones]

Got a Raptor R. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a big truck. That's cool. I can't drive that truck, guy. I got an SUV for the first time.

[Dave Ramsey]

All right.

[Bobby Bones]

Yeah.

[Dave Ramsey]

So what's your go to drive? What's your daily driver?

[Bobby Bones]

Well, I got two cars. One big shout out to Hyundai, and then two. I have a Lamborghini suv.

[Dave Ramsey]

Oh, wow.

[Bobby Bones]

Yeah.

[Dave Ramsey]

Very neat. That's a cool car.

[Bobby Bones]

I know nothing about cars.

[Dave Ramsey]

That's a cool car, though, that car. And. And people look at me, that will go, kart. That sucker will go. That's a quick boy.

[Bobby Bones]

Yes. It's loud, too.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah. I just.

[Bobby Bones]

If I had more, like, understanding of cars, and I think I would like it more. I just. I'm not a car guy.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah.

[Bobby Bones]

But my wife was like, hey, you should get an suv. You keep hitting potholes in cars. I don't see very well either.

[Dave Ramsey]

What's the. What's your guilty pleasure that you do know something about that you spend money on baseball cards. Oh, cool. All right.

[Bobby Bones]

Like, I've got some, like, vintage baseball tend to always go up in value.

[Dave Ramsey]

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[Bobby Bones]

New baseball tend to fluctuate. And so that, to me, is fun. And I treat it as fun hobby.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah.

[Bobby Bones]

But I do go heavier into vintage because I don't want the loss to be as much as it could be if everything goes wrong.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah.

[Bobby Bones]

Like, I've got some old, like, Mickey Mantles and like, oh, man. Yeah. And I've got. It is fun. To me. The greatest part about having resources now is getting to do all the things I didn't get to do as a kid, which is I didn't get to buy baseball cards. And now I just do it at a different level. But it feels like what it would have felt like, I think, when I was 12, getting to go and buy baseball cards at the baseball card shop.

[Dave Ramsey]

And you're doing it, you know, with a maturity level and an intellect so that you're actually going to make money on it. That's kind of cool, too.

[Bobby Bones]

I have a guilt that sets in, though. If I buy anything big, I have to give that amount.

[Dave Ramsey]

Okay.

[Bobby Bones]

And I don't. The guild is not that I give, but I think I'm guilted to give. And I. We give a. I think a fair, good amount anyway. But when I buy something that I feel like is a bit extra, there's an extra little monster in there going, hey, don't be a jerk. Like, you have. So whatever you just bought, you need to also give to something. Is that healthy?

[Dave Ramsey]

It's a good practice if you're doing it. If you're just constantly guilt tripping yourself.

[Bobby Bones]

Constantly. The utility I get.

[Dave Ramsey]

And it's that sound that sounds thing, but I mean, you ought to always be building your generosity muscle. And we do that. We do the same thing, but not from a guilt perspective. We just say, all right, if we're going to spend that on a car, are we doing good with our generosity? Cause if we're not, we probably are. Now we're getting over here to selfish rather than selfless. And so you want to be bigger on the generosity side because it's more fun. It's more rewarding from a positive perspective. But I don't ever want to guilt anybody into doing stuff.

[Bobby Bones]

I live completely guilt. It's just one big guilt blanket wrapped over me. I do. I have guilt for my success, but I also don't think my success happened by any way other than just grit. I don't think that anybody handed me anything.

[Dave Ramsey]

No.

[Bobby Bones]

So I can rationally go, I shouldn't have this guilt. But, man, it's tough to shake.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah. Well, you look at it and you go, is anybody worth this? Probably not. But we put ourselves in a position that we scaled something, and so now we've got this. And our faith walk helps us kind of navigate the emotions of that because we just go, okay, we wait a minute. All of this we don't own. We're managing it for God. All right, so, Lord, what do you want to do with your stuff? And he says, I love my kids. You love your kids. I love my kids. You know how to give your kids good things. Yeah, I give you some good things so you can enjoy some of it and, you know, take care of some of my hungry kids and don't give it to some of my stupid kids. And, you know, and God's got real specific things. And so that kind of feels like I'm managing it for somebody else. It's easy to give away other people's money.

[Bobby Bones]

The Bobby cast. We'll be right back. This is the Bobbycast. I'm gonna ask you that question you asked me, like, what do you do with your money that you've made? That's fun.

[Dave Ramsey]

At this stage of our life right now, Sharon and I, I have stepped back. I'm only operating about 20% of the business. My son, we're in the succession phase, and my son Daniel runs the business, 80% of it. So I'm still the CEO. I'm still there, and I'm still on the microphone. And I won't quit being on the microphone stuff. But what that's done is it's freed me up a bunch. And so Sharon and I are doing, like, ridiculous travel.

[Bobby Bones]

Where's the coolest place you've been?

[Dave Ramsey]

Just be like, you know. This summer we went to Budapest for three days and Vienna for three days and got a yacht and went up the coast of Croatia for a week, just the two of us. We were gone. We were gone for almost a month. And it was a blast. We had so much fun and beautiful everything and incredible food and my mouth's watering and the wines and the whole bit. And so we just, you know, just. And again, we. Those trips are expensive compared to anything we used to do, but they're a very, very small percentage of our current world. And so we don't feel irresponsible or unspiritual to enjoy something occasionally like that.

[Bobby Bones]

What's Budapest like?

[Dave Ramsey]

It's very neat. Very neat. Vienna's very neat. They're both. They're both very different.

[Bobby Bones]

Is my favorite city that I've ever been.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, the. I mean, Vienna's got this rich history in the arts and the whole German Germanic culture all the way back Bavaria and so forth. And Budapest has got more of a communist flavor from the old communist bloc, but still, I mean, they've got Michelin star restaurants all over the streets on both of them. The people are nice in both of them. We love the people. The Croatian people we fell in love with too. Just incredible folks, but just beauty. And very safe all three places. I felt a lot safer there than I do in a lot of US cities.

[Bobby Bones]

Yeah, that's been what's craziest to me, Vienna was cool to me because it wasn't bombed. Right. There's a lot of that culture that lasted through World War II because they didn't go and drop bombs on it. But yeah, I think to me, traveling is something I never did till I got older because I never left the state of Arkansas. Why would I? Everything I needed to survive was right close and it was going to cost me money to go anywhere else. But then once I started to travel, I think that was great for my outlook on life. To see other people in far away places, be actual humans. Like everything is not within reach that matters. There's things that matter that we don't even get to see in our life.

[Dave Ramsey]

Well, and it's really, really hard to hate people once you get to know them.

[Bobby Bones]

That's a good point.

[Dave Ramsey]

So any stereotypes or prejudices you might have about a people group or anything, just go hang out with them for a week. You find. Just very seldom find a bunch of jerks. I can't hardly name a country that's full of jerks. There's hardly one.

[Bobby Bones]

It's. To me, it was eye opening to talk to people in other countries and they see America. Kind of how I would see Mexico City, meaning guns everywhere. And it's probably unfair. I've never been Mexico City, but I just have what the television has showed me. But they're like, man, everywhere you go, you guys like guns unsafe. And I'm like, yeah, it's crazy that that's the association that you guys have with us. I mean, it's not wrong because again, I feel much safer in places in Europe than I do if I'm in the middle of a city here in the States. And so I think for me, that was a big part of it. And it's also like the loudest people at restaurants were always Americans.

[Dave Ramsey]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Bobby Bones]

Just the people that were just carrying on and loud. Always an American.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah. And you very seldom see and not always. I mean, Americans are. There's a lot of good ones too, for sure. But. But yeah, I'm often look across the room and some guy is ripping a waitress up and it's dad gum American. You know, instead of. It's not. Not doing it. There was an Italian guy that was absolute. But one of the things we went to. But you know, but again, that's all. That's just. Every culture's got their share. But yeah, it's Americans. I don't know what the deal is when we're traveling. But anyway, yeah, it's. I didn't get the gun thing from the folks on the. I don't get that much. What I do get often, and I come back very patriotic, is they all.

[Bobby Bones]

Want to be here for sure. Everybody wants to be an American. I say that. And the people that I've met look at America like, wow, look at all that you're able to do.

[Dave Ramsey]

You can do anything you want to.

[Bobby Bones]

Do anytime you want to do it, too.

[Dave Ramsey]

You walk into a grocery store, all the shelves are full of everything. 63 kinds of mustard. I mean, you don't have that in most communities.

[Bobby Bones]

They're blown away by Sam's Club. That was another thing. They're like, wow, you can get stuff that big. Because we would go, like, my wife and I would go to Italy and we would do these things. We go to people's houses and they teach you how to cook, like, better than, like, a class in a restaurant. Oh, yeah, we would go and like, a woman, a mom who cooks for her kids would offer these classes. And so we. It was just my wife and I, we would go in and learn how to make the noodles.

[Dave Ramsey]

I love it.

[Bobby Bones]

It's amazing. But that's really where the experiences were the best, because you can just talk to another person instead of having 17 people around.

[Dave Ramsey]

Right.

[Bobby Bones]

You know, managing a situation. And. Yeah. I come back thinking, everybody thinks America is so cool because of what. The ability. But we have what we can do.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah.

[Bobby Bones]

That is not everywhere else.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah. And they're very polarized on politics, our politics. They look over here and just like, we are in the whole thing. And so it's interesting on that. And some of the perspectives are. Are very, very interesting.

[Bobby Bones]

You ever think about doing that?

[Dave Ramsey]

Politics?

[Bobby Bones]

Yeah. Have you gotten close?

[Dave Ramsey]

No, never. I just don't feel. I think I get a lot more good done with what I do than any of those people could ever do. I don't think I would be as effective as a senator helping people as I am. And this is what I'm called to do. So I'm very comfortable in my skin, and I just don't have. I detest a situation that's full of a lack of authenticity. And that's the definition of politics.

[Bobby Bones]

Yeah, that's it. There was a time five, six years ago that I was approached to see if I would consider running for the governor of Arkansas. And it's mostly just asking for money. That's what I was blown away by. And my feeling now towards people in politics is that I hope people do it for the right reason, but a lot. That's the new rock star. Because you can get on the news, you can get on social media. Just be the loudest and it doesn't matter what state or if you have a D or an R, like just be the loudest and you're going to have some notoriety. Like it's going to come. And I don't need that because I already have that. Right. Like I can just yell stuff and be put on social media with my job, like I have a bit of a platform. So I found one. I didn't just want to get on the phone and ask for money all the time. And I felt like the same as you, I could do more for the things that I cared about because there's only like three issues that I upper tier care about. Like there's a lot of things that I care about. But food insecurity is such a massive one for me. Again, just based off how I grew up. That doesn't resonate when it, when it's time to run for office. Because I would talk and I would say, well, you know, here are the things that I care about. And I would list food insecurity as my number one. Like, listen, we'll get to that. And I'm like, no, no, you don't understand. Like that's what I want to get to. There's a difference. And we'll get to that. And what I want to get to.

[Dave Ramsey]

We're going to start with that.

[Bobby Bones]

Yes. And that wasn't, that wasn't sexy. No, that's not what gets you elected. And so that's why for now I was like, you know, I don't think it's for me, but I always want that about, wonder that about you because you're definitely so charismatic and that's 80% of it.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, I guess it is. I, I've got friends that are, you know, our elected officials, I'm the last two governors are friends of mine and I think a lot of them, they're good men and you know, and a lot of our local senators and congressmen are, I consider them friends but I don't want to be in that world. They even call me like, would you come up and testify about so and so about debt? And I'm like, no, I feel too.

[Bobby Bones]

With them because you talked earlier about.

[Dave Ramsey]

They just want to use my name is the only reason they want me up there.

[Bobby Bones]

Having no debt is the ability to make decisions based on where your heart takes you. And I feel like when you're a politician, you can't do that. It's almost like you have total debt to keep your job.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yep, yep. And it's just, it's a. Yeah, you got to try to keep too many people happy. And I, I'd prefer to just pick out if I, I want to very selectively, intentionally decide who I'm going to make mad.

[Bobby Bones]

There's a lot of advice out there now because social media, you have the ability to chase whatever you want. There is a niche for everything and it's awesome and awful and there are no gatekeepers and that's awesome and awful. You know, it's a pendulum, right?

[Dave Ramsey]

It's anarchy.

[Bobby Bones]

Yep. What's like common financial advice that's wrong?

[Dave Ramsey]

Most everything on TikTok. Yeah, TikTok is like, you know, in the. What years was that? Let me think. It was a. In the 80s and even up into the 90s there were these things on midnight on television, on cable TV at midnight, infomercials. And you would watch some guy sitting by the waves and he had done nothing. Down real estate and buy and sell real estate and flip this house and all that kind of thing. And you could buy his tape set for $3,000 and learn how to get rich in real estate and those kinds. Doing the stuff I did to go broke, you'd see exactly how you would do it.

[Bobby Bones]

What about timeshares?

[Dave Ramsey]

Are those that, oh, it's the legalized fraud, but the. It's horrible.

[Bobby Bones]

So there's no good to it.

[Dave Ramsey]

There's no good to timeshares. Timeshares are nasty and the whole. The people in the industry are unbelievably scummy. It is a nasty world. But anyway, so a lot of flip this house stuff on TikTok is all over the place. Or a lot of crypto stuff on TikTok. A lot of. Most of it's kind of get rich quick vibe. It's like, you know, I'm looking, you're looking for an easy button. I got an easy button. I'll show you an Easy button. For $3,422, if you follow my system, you can buy and sell stocks, day trade stocks, which 97% of the people that day trade stocks lose money in a six month period of time.

[Bobby Bones]

Really?

[Dave Ramsey]

Isn't that crazy?

[Bobby Bones]

That's exceptionally high. I thought it would be more than 50 for sure, but I didn't know.

[Dave Ramsey]

It would be up. It's just like it's 100% chance of losing money. It's like nuts. I mean, you have a better shot at the roulette wheel, mathematically, statistically. So it's crazy. And the difference is, in the roulette wheel, at least you know you're taking a chance. But on the day trading, they think they got the system. They bought the system off some guy on TikTok and he rented a jet and then filmed it like he owned the jet. And I got a jet. And I'm like, yeah, right. What you got is a bunch of crap.

[Bobby Bones]

How do you feel about crypto?

[Dave Ramsey]

I don't buy anything that is a commodity. And so I don't buy barrels of oil off of the commodities market. I don't buy. I don't buy gold. I don't buy soybeans. I don't buy the Deutsche Mart or the euro. Those are currencies. And crypto is a currency and it's a commodity. And so I buy things that generate money, and that way I can actually place a value on them. And that would be like a company that. An example that would be buying a stock. I don't buy single stocks, buy my mutual funds. But a company that's Home Depot's making money, you can look at the numbers. It's actually producing something. It's not just a thing. A commodity is just a thing. And the only reason that a thing goes up in value is shortages or perceived shortages. Greed and fear drive the markets. And that's why crypto, Crypto doesn't actually produce anything. It's just a currency. It's not a bad. It's nothing necessarily evil about it. It's a very young currency, doesn't have a long track record, and the track record that it does have is very volatile, so it's really scary. But all the cool kids are doing it, and so that's why everybody's in it. But I don't have anything and I don't put money and stuff like that because, you know, like we said earlier, kind of trauma. I don't like losing money. I don't like gambling. I don't. I don't play cards.

[Bobby Bones]

You don't gamble?

[Dave Ramsey]

I don't gamble. I don't do anything. My wife will put some quarters in a slot machine or something like that. But a lot of my buddies play poker and stuff. I get zero joy out of that. It makes my stomach go up into my throat and it is not entertaining for me. It's not fun. It reminds me of trauma. And I go down that crazy cycle that we're talking about, and so I don't do it. I don't get joy at losing money. I understand how people get a thrill out of the possibility of losing money. So like a Michael Jordan is known to do, you know, all that kind of stuff, that he's got the money to do it. That's fine. I'm not mad at Michael. It's just, I don't. It's not fun for me. So I don't. I don't do that. And crypto's right in that bucket. It's the same thing. And so I don't get joy out of being a cool kid. I don't get joy out of being on the cutting edge and whatever. I just want to buy something that's boring and has always gone up in value. Like vintage baseball cards versus brand new ones.

[Bobby Bones]

What do you love that you don't really get to talk about much? Because everybody wants to talk about money.

[Dave Ramsey]

I talk about anything I really want to. I don't really have any limitations. I really enjoy. We coach about 10,000 small businesses with our entree leadership brand. And I do a podcast called entree Leadership where I'm answering questions for small business people. And leadership questions come up a lot. And running a business questions. And I. I have thoroughly enjoyed the business part of growing our business over the years and taking care of our team and loving our team well. And the leadership. Leadership. So I do a lot of leadership conferences as a keynote speaker or as a business. Yeah, I love it. I love leadership.

[Bobby Bones]

You're still in then. So it's not to you. You're not just maintaining by doing what everybody expects of you because you do it well. You still love it.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, I thoroughly love it. Because leadership, the difference in that. And when I help somebody with their money, that's a one to one transaction. If I help a guy or a gal be a better leader that helps 50 people because he's leading 100 people that they're leading and they weren't doing as good a job and now they're doing a great job. So that's got a force multiplier to it. That's pretty cool.

[Bobby Bones]

Leadership is interesting, especially when you have to lead multiple people with different personalities.

[Dave Ramsey]

Oh yeah.

[Bobby Bones]

You know, I think one of the things because people in my industry in podcasting or radio will come to me and say, hey, how do you manage different personalities? And I say differently. Yeah, I think you it. There's not a one size fit all leadership method. Everybody must do this this way. No do. I was going to ask if you subscribe to that same theory.

[Dave Ramsey]

I Agree. Agree completely. Now, what you do have to have is some principles involved that apply to regardless of your personality. The principles are, we have to get our work done. Hello.

[Bobby Bones]

On time, good attitude.

[Dave Ramsey]

Principles are we have to. And from the leadership position, bosses push, leaders pull. And so regardless of personality style, my job is to sell them, to teach them. Hey, the train's going this way. The train's going to a shiny place. You want to be on the train? Here's the train. Get on the train instead of standing behind them with a whip. Because if your organization is being pushed rather than pulled, it's always moving at the speed of the slowest common denominator. And it grinds to a halt pretty quick because we're waiting on the doofus at the end that won't keep up. And we're, you know, that. That. That doesn't work.

[Bobby Bones]

I've always felt that hiring energy and attitude, massive for me, as far as, like, having successful hires, that maybe they didn't know as much in a certain area as someone else that I was talking to. But it's so much easier to have to slow somebody down than to push them faster.

[Dave Ramsey]

Absolutely that in character.

[Bobby Bones]

Yeah.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah. I gotta be a dependable human being.

[Bobby Bones]

On our show, the morning show. The hours are weird, still very hard. It sucks. And forever. And I wrote about it in my first book, if you were one minute late, you got sent home. And it wasn't because you had to be there at exactly that time. It was because everybody else got there before the deadline time. And by you not getting there, that shows that you feel like your time's a little more important than everybody else.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yep.

[Bobby Bones]

And that's an arrogance. That's when it starts to get toxic within the group.

[Dave Ramsey]

When I was in my 20s, I was very important, I thought. And I was going, I had nine. I was a plate spinner. I had plates spinning everywhere. All these different deals I was always doing had deals, deals, deals, deals, deals, deals. And I was perpetually late for everything because I was so important. And so I. But I ended up going, I was sitting down with this guy that was going to do an investment in one of our real estate projects, and very wealthy guy, CEO. And I come in 15 minutes late, and he goes, you're late? I said, yeah, I got all this going on. He goes, you're really important, aren't you? And I'm like, well, that. Yeah. I don't mean no, but I mean, he goes, no, you understand, when you come in here late, you are saying to me, I'm not as important as everything else you have going on. If you named a rock star or you named a world figure that you wanted to meet with and you had a meeting with them, you would be early, regardless of how all the other things you had going on. But you're late to meet with me, and it says to me that I'm not important. That's arrogance. He just chastised me. You know what? I don't think I've ever been late after that one conversation. It hurt my feelings so bad. He was so right. And this is arrogance. It is arrogance. This is exactly what it is. And so no around Ramsey, we just say, trains run on time. Trains run on time. And, you know, we're broadcasters, too, so we're looking at the clock. And, you know, you don't have to hit the clock. I was speaking at a church the other day, and they have like four services, and so they got to get the parking lot turned over. They got. And it's like he goes, guy goes, you got 34 minutes. You don't have 35. Put the clock up. And I'm in at 33. Give him an extra minute to get the parking lot, you know, and he's like, nobody comes in early. And I'm like, yeah, well, you said that, number one. Number two, it's how my brain works from 30 years after that conversation with that guy chastising me, I'm going to be early. I'm going to hit the clock.

[Bobby Bones]

I got like, three more questions for you, and I want to go to Financial Peace University. Has that modified itself? Has technology changes? Have you had to change elements of that?

[Dave Ramsey]

Absolutely, yeah. And the church world has changed. It was largely taught in churches. 50,000 churches have had 10 million people go through it. That's the size it was and is. But the number of churches that meet during the week, like a Tuesday night to do a marriage class or a money class, almost zero now. That has shifted. Pre Covid, it was already going down, but Covid just put a stake in it, ended it. And so the way people do church has changed dramatically in the last decade. And that was, you know, for better or for worse, was our distribution method for that thing. So, yeah, we went to digital. What is happening right now that is very exciting is we have woven the teaching pieces, do this, then do this, don't do this into the EveryDollar app. And so as people are running their budgets, they're getting prompts of videos, and we're teaching them the same material inside the thing digitally. And the success rate of that is crazy good. It's probably better than when we were doing an analog and it's just in the early stages, but all of our beta testing and stuff, we're doing a release in about three weeks, the next version of every dollar. And it's. But that's the methodology that we've shifted to, to go to digital with like.

[Bobby Bones]

Ramsey plus, because again, that is so technological. And I find myself, and I'm in my 40s starting to go like, whoa, I don't quite get that. Do you have to. Do you have a whole younger, like 20s and 30s that come in and go, hey, this is what we're going to do and this is how it's consumed?

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. Because who is it? My target audience is not me. I'm 65, I'm not the focus group, not even close. And so the Target audience is 34 year old with two kids and got student loan debt, they got credit card debt, they got car payment and they feel stuck. And the one thing they fight about most in their marriage is money. And so we've got the antidote for their life. We can fix it. We've just got to figure out a way to inject it. And to your point, the Gen Zs and millennials are two wonderful generations to have on your team. I've got about 600 of them in those two generations working for us out of 1100 and maybe 700 actually out of 1100. But they are abundance mentality because they grew up with this magic wand in their hand and they can just push a button and stuff shows up on their front porch and so why couldn't I just push a button and fix this? And so they believe almost anything's possible in the creation of a product, the delivery of product or the effect of a product, a digital product. And so to have those people in a room with that mentality and that spirit while you're building out something like this, you can't do it if you don't have them because it's native to their brain. It's not native to my brain. My brain's native to eight track tapes for God's sakes. But I can catch up if I force my intellect to do it it. But it's not my natural state, it's their natural state. The only downside they've got in the generation is because they've got this magic wand. They have no patience. They want it right now. They want everything microwaved, they don't want to crock pot Anything. And so if something doesn't work in about 20 minutes, they want to change it immediately. No, let's just, let's just stick with it a minute. Let's cook it a little bit. It probably, it could tender up. I think it's going to be okay. Let's, let's not give up on everything so fast. But iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate. Yeah, well, we're going to iterate, but, you know, so the old dog can drag them through that stuff and you end up with this wonderful working situation when you're creating products like that.

[Bobby Bones]

When couples are fighting about money, does like Amazon purchases, is that a big part of it? They're just like, one of them's ordering a lot of stuff to the house.

[Dave Ramsey]

You know, generally it's, they don't, they're not working together and there's not a lot of transparency. One of them's doing stuff, the other one they know about. They're not necessarily hiding it. Sometimes they are, but, but it's like the wife is handling the money and she just gives her husband an allowance or vice versa. And then all of a sudden they look up and they go, well, I want a new car. Well, honey, we don't have any money for a new car. We got all this credit card debt. Why we got credit card debt? Well, because you keep spending. Well, nobody said anything and there was just this. It's disorganized, it's chaotic and it's not a top down strategy for laying it all out together. We both agree to it, we both implement it, and there's tons of communication about our values while we do that. And that causes a couple to be knit together and unified. And the opposite of that is when you have all this chaos disorganization and there's money flying everywhere. It's inefficient for the money piece, but it's disastrous from the relationship standpoint.

[Bobby Bones]

What about shared checking accounts?

[Dave Ramsey]

100% I have to, yeah. And again, it's data based. Okay. This idea that you can have a roommate and be married to them and you have two separate lives and that causes success. There's no data to support that. Again, go back to the millionaire study we did with 10,167 of them, 89% said, I worked very closely with high communication with my spouse to get here. When you interview the public, 40% say that and they're broke. And so there's causation and correlation right there. There's statistical and that data is solid. And so the Couples that work together have higher quality marriage, higher happiness factor when they're doing marriage surveys, higher likelihood of staying together, and a much more efficient use of the money. So you build wealth faster. It's very simple. Instead of, I've got mine, you got yours and you can't, you can't, you know, you pay your car payment, it's like, what are you, this is, it's not your college roommate, this is your wife.

[Bobby Bones]

Let's take a quick pause for a message from our sponsor and we're back on the Bobbycast. One final question, and when I was asking earlier if like things change because things are changing, your book, the Total Money Makeover, which I'm assuming has sold so many. Because it's evergreen. It feels evergreen.

[Dave Ramsey]

It is still on the bestseller list.

[Bobby Bones]

But also it. Are you having to expand it because new elements are introduced?

[Dave Ramsey]

No, it was principle based. It wasn't product based. And so the they, you know, live on less than you make. You don't need to expand that. That doesn't change when the digital world takes over. You still gotta live on listening bank. So being on a written plan, a budget of some kind. Yeah, maybe you're doing it on an app versus a yellow pad, but you still have to have a freaking plan and stick to it. You don't get to Florida unless you have a map. Hello. And so you don't just take off driving and hope you get there. So everything in that book is so principled like that, based on principles. And they're evergreen. And that's why the book has been evergreen. We've updated it. We went back in and changed a few of the stories, updated the stats. I think we did a 20 year edition the other day or something. Anniversary edition. Yeah, because it's.

[Bobby Bones]

I saw that, that's why I asked.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, it's like 15 million copies or something.

[Bobby Bones]

That's crazy.

[Dave Ramsey]

That's nuts.

[Bobby Bones]

That book to me reminds me, and I'll end on this, of Dale Carnegie's book, which I've read many times because fundamentally, even though that book was written 100 plus years ago, that's all the same. Like you want to win friends, get people to like you, be successful. Like the same fundamentals. Some things have changed with technology, with different people, different abilities, different utilities, but it's the same. And I feel like that book is that.

[Dave Ramsey]

Exactly, exactly. It's principles of relationships, how to win friends and influence people. And I sat next to a lady at the, I was over at the ballpark watching my. One of my grandkids play ball the other night and this 22 year old sitting there reading that book.

[Bobby Bones]

You saw it? You just saw it randomly?

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, she was just sitting there in the stands reading that book. She was watching her. Her little brother or whatever it was out there and she's reading that book. I said, how old are you? And she said, I'm 22. And I said, it's very cool that you're reading that. That that book will change your life. And she's like, what? Thank you.

[Bobby Bones]

Did she know that was you saying that to her?

[Dave Ramsey]

I don't know. I have no idea.

[Bobby Bones]

You never said. Because I wrote that book.

[Dave Ramsey]

No, no, not mine. Dale Carnegie's.

[Bobby Bones]

Oh, I thought you were talking about.

[Dave Ramsey]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

[Bobby Bones]

Did you think he was talking about his. No, I knew what he meant. Oh, I thought he was talking about his. I was like, at least should have said I wrote that.

[Dave Ramsey]

No, my face would be on the front of that one. Yeah, that would be hard to. To get away from.

[Bobby Bones]

But the thing about books now is, what's weird is I read everything digitally. I never remember titles of books because there's no book cover to look at every time. So when I pick up my iPad and I'm on page 172, I don't see the COVID again and I just read the next page. And so someone will say, what are you reading? Oh, I don't remember the title of it. Let me go look at my bot books and see what it is. It's just a little.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, I'll do that. I do that with fiction. I do most of it digitally. I can't do audiobooks on fiction. It's not entertaining to me.

[Bobby Bones]

I don't do audiobooks.

[Dave Ramsey]

I do them on some self improvement things.

[Bobby Bones]

I have too many podcasts.

[Dave Ramsey]

I had read the book hardcover and the guy's a friend of mine, James Clear, that did Atomic Habits and it's an evergreen. It's a perennial bestseller. But his audiobook is better to me than the other. It's him reading it and he did a great job with it. The book is amazing. He did a great job. But the. But yeah, that stuff like that. I'll hit the audio on it because it's the same. I'm doing it the same time. I would consume a podcast or I would consume something else, like driving over here from my house this morning. What have I got on? Well, podcast, right. Or an audiobook. That'd be the timeframe that I would do it.

[Bobby Bones]

All right, final, final question. Because you've mentioned these people that you're like your friends. Who's, like, the coolest friend you have, that if you were to have told yourself 30 or 40 years ago that you'd have this friend, it'd be like.

[Dave Ramsey]

Wow, that's a good question. I don't know. I would more. I don't know if there's a single person. It's more of, like, the same privilege you've had. And I think it is a privilege that I get to actually meet and hang out with this person, and I like them. There's a whole bunch of those, you know, I mean, and lately it's been. These podcasters are blowing up and move to town. So, like, I mean, Theo Vaughn struck up a friendship with Theo. Who would think me and Theo would hang? I mean, that's. That's two weird people hanging out together. But. But I love the guy. And Sean Ryan. Same thing, you know? Same thing. Love the guy. And both right here in town. All within a stone's throw of your house. Right here in my house. And both young guys compared to me. But I, you know, they're the cool kids right now, some of them. And to get to do those things, hang out with them and some of these other guys, I got to be on a bunch of podcasts in the last year that were pretty neat.

[Bobby Bones]

Yeah, I watched on Theo. It was great.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, he's very thoughtful. Like most comed. Most comedians that I know are brilliant people. They're very smart because it's hard to do. Comedy's a really tough thing. And so. But anyway, yeah, I just bucket it with that. And then all the country music people and all those people I've gotten to meet over the years, you have, too. And hang out with some of them, smoke cigars, hang out, that kind of stuff. I really like them. I just enjoy people and. But just the idea that Dave Ramsey from Antioch gets to hang out in a room with Fill in the Blank, I'm still blown away by that.

[Bobby Bones]

That's how I feel. Because I mentioned before we started taping that John Fogerty was over here. Yeah.

[Dave Ramsey]

That's mind blowing right there.

[Bobby Bones]

I got to tell my stepdad. And that was his favorite band. And I was like, I had John Fogerty over, and he was. He doesn't care about anything. I do. Not that he doesn't care in his heart, but he has no interest.

[Dave Ramsey]

Right.

[Bobby Bones]

Because he's still in Mountain Pine, Arkansas, and doesn't really follow music or pop culture. And he's like, that's the coolest thing I've ever heard. That was cool to me. Have John Fogarty.

[Dave Ramsey]

Absolutely. That was cool to me when I heard it. That's very neat. Yeah.

[Bobby Bones]

Well, it's great to see.

[Dave Ramsey]

I appreciate you too, brother.

[Bobby Bones]

Giving your time to come over and hang out.

[Dave Ramsey]

So proud of you guys.

[Bobby Bones]

And to the girl that was reading your book, wasn't I? So thought you were watching somebody read your book. So thought that. And then you didn't say anything and I was like, that does not sound like Dave.

[Dave Ramsey]

Let me. That would be an ego play from now on. Yeah. Oh, that's a really good book. Look at the guy on the front.

[Bobby Bones]

Dave, thank you so much. And yeah, one day we should go to dinner and like, actually talk like humans. But I feel like your human talk is elevated above me because I tried to get you a human and you're like, no, my human thing is business.

[Dave Ramsey]

Oh, it's just leadership.

[Bobby Bones]

No, I. I know. I don't think I could keep up.

[Dave Ramsey]

Oh, boy. Yeah. Yeah. That. You keep playing that card.

[Bobby Bones]

Is that a couple.

[Dave Ramsey]

Keep playing that card the rest of your life. It's going. It's working well for you. Keep it up.

[Bobby Bones]

Okay. All right. There it is.

[Dave Ramsey]

Hey, Ye. And yeah, we. Let's the four of us go get a really nice dinner somewhere.

[Bobby Bones]

Do you always have to pay when you go out? The people expect. Because people expect me to pay everywhere we go. And I'm. Yes. And I'm good with it because I feel like I have it and. But I wonder if that's with you.

[Dave Ramsey]

No, no. I mean, our friends, we generally just. Everybody tosses my debit card and their credit cards in the middle of the table and I just took whatever's on there and we split it up.

[Bobby Bones]

Really?

[Dave Ramsey]

Sometimes I'm a. I'm a wine guy and so sometimes I'll bring some good wine that they might not have and that'd be like my extra thing. But. But that's just because I selfishly want to drink that.

[Bobby Bones]

What's the most expensive bottle of wine you've ever bought?

[Dave Ramsey]

I've ever bought five grand, probably.

[Bobby Bones]

Does it taste different?

[Dave Ramsey]

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I hang out with guys that drink twenty thousand dollar bottles and sophisticated palette.

[Bobby Bones]

Dave Ramsey.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yes. I'm learning. I'm learning with these guys. But yeah, it's you. You. You practice a little bit. You can get used to it.

[Bobby Bones]

Dave, thanks for the time, man. That's awesome.

[Dave Ramsey]

Thank you.

[Bobby Bones]

Bobby, thanks for listening to a Bobbycast production.

[WebMD Health Discovered Host]

Hear insightful, entertaining discussions on today's important health and wellness topics. On the Health discovered podcast from WebMD. Through in depth conversations with experts, Health Discovered covers everything from tips for healthier living to the latest on therapy and mental health. My goal is to really destigmatize mental health treatment and looking at it from a whole health perspective, physical health and mental health can be intertwined. Listen to WebMD Health discovered on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Bobby Bones]

This is an iHeart podcast.