I’ve seen clip of that financial advice show “The Ramsey show” on YouTube and the things that old man say are shocking to me. According to him I shouldn’t give a single cent to my parents… That’s so against my culture. I would be seen as downright evil if I do that.
Hell I’m unemployed for like a year by now and still sent 200 euro a few months ago to my father that still lives in my home country that I haven’t seen in 17 years.
Are you really Americans like that? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t see it as cold hearted but I see it as unnatural, and I’M a “socialess” cold person in essence.
I think I have an interesting perspective here, as someone who did kinda get their finances under control thanks to a Dave Ramsey course, and later had the unpleasant experience of discovering how much of a right-wing idiot he is during COVID.
Something I’ve noticed is that a lot of his advice seems targeted towards people who are crushingly bad at navigating debt. One of the most viral things they do is called “the debt free scream”, where people share their stories on his radio show after getting debt free, and just… do a victory scream, essentially. Kinda fun, not really a bad thing, but it shows how most of the people he deals with directly and the ones that make the best marketing are people with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of debt despite making very average money. Just absolutely no self-preservation instinct around available credit.
And for these people I think his advice makes sense. Absolutely no debt, debt is the enemy, it will crush you. And stuff like how he pushes you to chase paying debt with high intensity, get multiple jobs, etc. Because otherwise it’s impossible to even manage to put money on the principle of a debt that large.
For the average person though? His best advice is basic budgeting, focusing on paying your debts one by one so you can celebrate each victory quickly, and building an emergency fund so you don’t need to go backwards as soon as you have a car problem. Also, yeah, ditch the brand new truck, it’s burying you in debt you didn’t need.
But absolutely, I’d highly recommend modifying his recommendations for most people, and I don’t doubt someone out there is doing a better job of teaching this stuff than Ramsey is. My advised tweaks:
The best analysis I have to Dave Ramsey’s advice to debt is like talking to an alcoholic about alcohol. If you have known issues dealing with debt, especially credit card debt, his advice will probably prevent some serious harm. However, for someone starting to deal with finances, it may not be the best advice.
I think you give a fair explanation of Dave in this comment. I definitely think much of his “baby steps” needs to be updated. Just for example, $1000 in savings is just going to cause someone to get further into debt when an emergency comes up.
I like the 20/30/50 rule for budgeting (20% saving, 30% fun and 50% needs). If you have bad debt (consumer debt, bad auto loan, etc), then minimize your fun spending the most you can in order to wipe out that bad debt as quickly as possible. But of course also save up at least on month of needs or your largest deductible (whichever is greater). Then once the bad debt is gone save up a 3-6 month emergency fund (according to your personal risk/comfort level).
I also think it’s important to not be too hard on yourself. Some months you’ll be over budget and some months you will be under. That’s why I think it’s important, like you said, to leave some room in the budget and not get caught up in zero dollar budgeting.
Mmm, excellent addendum to my proposed changes. 1000$ is better than nothing, but it hasn’t really kept up with inflation, and circumstances really change things. For example, if you have a house, the potential opportunity and cost of an “emergency” goes up immensely.
But yeah, for us personally we pretty quickly went up to a 2000$ emergency fund, despite the relative stability of renting and driving a fairly new car. We’ll be working on our 3-6 month expense emergency fund soon. I definitely think it’s better to view the baby steps as flexible guidance on a starting point, rather than the concrete law they frame it as.
Congrats on making it that far! I’m sure you’ll have a fully funded emergency fund before you know it. I hope no emergencies come up while you build it, but if they do, don’t let that discourage you!
I’m not sure they need updating as much as there needs to be a second set for the absurdly in debt. The steps as written work well for 2-3 years at most, which if you follow them can pay off around 50k+ in that timeframe. If you have so much debt that it would take 5-7 years or more of that level of intensity, it’s probably worth relaxing it a little to be debt free and taking 6-9 years. Anything forecasting longer than 10 years to get debt free probably requires going back to an even more intense effort to escape debt.
I think one of his worst pieces of advice is to pay off debts before saving for an emergency fund (if I remember correctly)
Saving some kind of emergency fund first is more important than not having any debts. Having money on hand is worldly power in your hand basically. If you’re debt free but broke, then you can’t deal with an emergency that requires money.