And this guy's Gordon Ramsay.
Dave Ramsey.
Not Gordon Ramsey.
Dave Ramsey!
I remember the day that I went into my local Christian bookstore and there was my book.
You're not God! You're just a man!
The Total Money Makeover book which is sold almost completely.
The number one best-selling book.
No, because you gotta read the book.
You gotta read the book.
This is Bad Christian Books.
Welcome to Bad Christian Books, a podcast dumpster dive into the worst bestsellers evangelicalism has to offer.
I'm Mary Hall. I am a journalist and a current churchgoer.
I am Samuel Cooliato. I am a novelist and I will never go to church again.
Samuel, can you tell me what you know about Dave Ramsey in one sentence?
Dave Ramsey is the guy that you pay cash for your house. That is what I know about Dave Ramsey.
That's an interesting nugget and it is true.
I think in this episode people are gonna know that I'm the journalist and you're the novelist because I have so many citations.
You can tell me if it's too much.
This feels like a humble brag, Mary.
No, it's, I mean, I am who I am. You knew me in college. I am who I am.
But I was thinking I'll link a lot of these things in either like a show notes because I believe in citing your sources.
Dave Ramsey does not always.
So I sent you earlier a Google doc called Excerpt Samuel and at the top it had a YouTube video for you to watch.
And what's become famous around Ramsey was because many, many years ago, decades ago, people came to me and they said,
what do you do first? Do you do retirement first or do I do kids college first? That's very important.
Do I have an emergency fund first? That's really important. I need to get rid of this stupid credit card debt. It's 22%. That's very important.
Where do I start? And what we did at the time many years ago was we laid it out and then we adjusted it a couple of times in the early days.
We only adjusted it in 25 years.
But we laid out what to do first, what to do second, and we call them the baby steps because if you want to eat an elephant, you do it a bite at a time.
Oh, if you want to eat an elephant. So if you want to get control of your money, you do it a step at a time.
Baby steps. Baby step one is you save a thousand dollars quickly. Little starter emergency fund.
Once you've done that and some of you just have that money, you just name it that just now. You've already did baby step one.
You just reset that money in your mind over to the side. That's baby step one. Some of you just have a thousand dollars. Some people do.
Baby step two is you pay off all of your debt except your home using the debt snowball.
The debt snowball is where you list your debts, smallest to largest, pay minimum payments on everything but the little one.
You attack the little one with a vengeance. You're not going on vacation. You're in debt. You're broke.
I like this lady whose job it is just to nod. Yeah, she does say stuff later, but it's not important. We cut it.
He also just yelled at me and called me broke, but also implied I had a thousand dollars I could just put away. So I'm a little confused.
You're not going out to eat. You're in debt. You're broke. You work all the time. You're in debt. You're broke.
There's a great place to go when you're broke. To work. Okay. This is what you do.
And you bust your butt and it's scorched earth. No lifestyle. No nothing. You sell so much stuff the kids think they're next.
You name the dog eBay and the cat Craig's list. Everything's going out the door. We're getting this mess cleaned up.
You sell so much your kids think they're next. Okay. We're sick and tired of being sick and tired.
People that do it with that intensity get out of debt in an average of about 18 to 24 months.
Now average means that some of you have half a million dollars in student loan debt like Jay did took her seven years.
Okay. And then average means some of you have five thousand dollars in debt and ten thousand dollars in your bank account when you heard me rant.
And you just went and paid it off. Now you're debt free. Took you 13 seconds. Okay. But the average is 18 to 24 months.
Then when you finish that with the same level of intensity, you continue. We call this gazelle intensity the gazelle running from the cheetah for its life.
I don't like this guy. Are you done yet? No. Okay. He just screamed for its life. Oh yeah. He does.
When you get out of debt, you finish baby step three with the gazelle intensity and that's three to six months of expenses.
Then we turn off the intensity and we move from intensity to intentionality and we do baby steps four five and six simultaneously.
That's 15 percent of your income going into retirement. That's what's going to make you a baby steps millionaire in about 12 years following this plan.
You're going to put money into kids college if that's applicable and you didn't sell them off.
No baby step six is any other money we can find in the budget we're going to throw at the house and the average person paying off their house following these baby steps is doing it.
We've been doing this for 30 years is doing it in about 10 in about 10.2 years in our baby steps millionaires study we did of millionaires.
Some of them had followed our stuff. Some of them hadn't. They were doing it in about 11 years. Wow.
So but the point is there's an intensity for that first three steps to get out of debt and get your emergency fund in place because until you do that, you're broke.
And you're walking around in a culture strutting around like you've got some money. You've got no money. Shut up. You're broke.
Quit acting like you're something you're broke. OK. I have completed. I've watched Ramsey to completion.
Thoughts. Yes. Oh my gosh. OK.
First and foremost, I'm watching this guy and I'm like, what makes you any different than Gary Vaynerchuk or Grant Cardone?
You know, it's you can you can tell that he's the primary thing isn't that he's going to solve your problems.
It's to make you feel reassured like, oh, this guy knows what he's talking about.
He's trying to make you feel bad about yourself. And the idea is it's very similar to workout culture, I think, where it's like you need to get body dysmorphia to get the body you want.
I could see it being empowering because it is putting things that you might be actually can't control into a situation that feels like it's your fault and therefore under your control.
That's that was sort of my first blush. I could already feel him making little fine print statements like, oh, it's going to take you an average of 18 to 24 months to pay off all your debts.
And he's like, by average, of course, I mean that it's going to look different for everybody.
And I'm like, OK, IE, it's not going to look like that for you.
You know, and this is what like a lot of people, a lot of the critique about Dave Ramsey that is out there, which to be honest, there really isn't that much like I had to dig and go down some really deep Christian influencer rabbit holes.
Whether or not you agree with what he says, he is an incredible communicator and he knows how to like rile people up.
This is the other reaction I had. No wonder people just aren't having kids as much.
Like he keeps making jokes about how you should sell your kid, which is obviously him being funny in that kind of boomer way.
But there is a real reason that he's making that joke, which is it is not financially responsible to have children, which, of course, is a macro issue for the way the economy is structured.
And he simply has no solution for it. Samuel, you're getting way too ahead of yourself.
Dude, I love getting ahead of myself.
OK, so I know that clip was a little bit long, but I thought it would be better to have you listen to three minutes for him to sum up his thing, which are the basically the baby steps. There's seven of them.
Then to have me explain them, because really they are like not that different than like what any financial guru will tell you.
The first one is save a starter emergency fund of a thousand dollars. As you noted, some people already have a thousand dollars. But if you don't do whatever you have to do, he says, you know, have a garage sale, sell your painting, do artwork on Etsy.
I mean, he doesn't say that because this book was written in 2009. But if it was today, he would probably say that.
Do you feel like he's Etsy positive? He seems like somebody who would compare it to avocado toast.
I don't know. He is very pro gig economy. I will say that. So, yeah, you save your you save your starter fund and then step two, you pay off all of your debt, except your house using the snowball method.
You pay off your smallest debt to your largest set, no matter what the interest rate is. And that's to like motivate you and see like, oh, I'm making progress.
There's literally two ways that people tell you to pay off debt. This is one. The other one is like biggest interest rate to lowest. And, you know, it's kind of a toss up. It depends on the person.
Then you save three to six months for a fully funded emergency fund, which I don't know about you, but like three months is not going to keep me living in my house for very long.
Then you're saving for retirement. Then you save for your children's college. Then you pay off your house early. And then number seven is build wealth and give.
Because because in a in the Bible, people, Jesus praised the beggar woman for waiting until she had built up her nest egg before giving.
Oh, Samuel, now you're getting ahead of episode two. Come on. Stick with me.
OK, so yeah, he does like promise wealth that is inextricable from his content. He says that these seven steps work for you, whether you are 27 or 57 and they don't change. That is a quote. And he says that by the time you get to step seven, you will enter the top 2% of Americans.
I looked it up today. That is two point four million dollars to me. That feels like a very achievable number. But then I also live in a city where like a ranch house costs a million dollars.
And I should say, I don't actually think that's an achievable number. I just I think it's very it's very clever. It's a clever number. Right. Well, and I like started looking up like who is the top one percent.
I'm not remembering the exact numbers, but it's like 10 million. It's like a fairly low amount of millions to like Jeff Bezos. That's the top one percent of Americans. So like I was going to say, like, it's smart to say the top 2% because even even the top 3%, I imagine the golf between the top 1% and the top 2% is like you're saying. It's stupid.
One big elephant in the room, which I had forgotten that he uses the phrase eating like the elephant or whatever. So to eat to like not eat the elephant, but just pointed out, I am not a personal financial expert.
So in this podcast, I'm not going to tell anyone what kind of like mutual fund they should have or like what order they should pay off their debt. But what I did want to like dig into is that there is a larger worldview that he presents in his work around money around wealth that is
intertwined with faith and church. And it's a very specific, very American way of looking at money that like I think at best doesn't work for everyone. And at worst is contrary to the message of the Gospels.
And then just also the other caveat is that there's gonna be two parts. The first one, which is what we're doing today is just like talking about his money philosophy. Does it hold up to the world that Millennials and Gen Z inherited?
And then like even if it does work, is this the worldview Christian should have? And then the second one next time is kind of looking at the cult of personality and like what that is when you like create a Christian celebrity who's like one way of doing things becomes intertwined with this is God's way of doing things and kind of the dicey world of that.
That's just gonna be a huge theme for the show. I mean, totally, regardless of your religious views, I think we can and should find common ground on the problematic nature of Christian celebrity.
Well, and I thought Dave Ramsey was a good one to go there with because unlike a lot of Christian celebrities that are like attached to a certain type of church or a certain denomination, like he's attached to like a book.
Okay, I want you to just like glance through some of the comments below the video and read them out. Oh, I'm so excited about this. I love comment diving.
Dave Ramsey is like insanely popular. People follow him like he's Jesus. I don't mean that in any over the top way like people literally say he is like their financial savior. I mean, it's bonkers to me. But there are some comments under here.
Alrighty.
In the 40s, I was worth nothing. Now early 60s and debt free and worth about 1.6 million. If I can do it, anyone can do it. And then somebody responded anecdotal. I mean, the next the next line is that's what I've tried to tell people at my work. They don't listen or have discipline to change.
Oh, man. Dave Ramsey is starting a conversation. Can we just say? Let's see here. I liked for everyone thinking being a millionaire isn't enough these days. It's better than the alternative. Good luck, people. Well, that's a little false equivalency.
Let's see here. Wow, you guys are so amazing. Clappy hands. Also, it is true that one should follow these steps and see them as a must to have a better life for oneself and subsequently help others as well period and bottom line y'all thumbs up. I know I'm all in already for a new beginning heart.
Wow. Yeah, and there's one down. If you go down to sweet pea the bread tamer, she says, which I don't even know what that is. But Dave you motivate me every day for exclamation point, I speak about your parentheses, that snowball and emergency fund, and parentheses, often, I'm in the thick of it now keep trucking and beating down that debt, it will all be gone soon.
And so yeah, I mean, like we could go on and on and on but God bless sweet pea I just found her comment like good like if it's working for you keep keep going keep keep up the good fight.
Yes, and that is the essence of like, how I feel about Dave Ramsey right like if this was like a method and he was like, if it works for you great if it doesn't, you can still be like a Christian, that would be fine. This is a, this is a real side note, just based on the comments I'm seeing because one person said yes as Judge duty would say this is not going to be easy.
You thought this was going to be easy. This there's an interesting intersection here with the cult of personality around boomer inspirational figures like RuPaul Charles, who also was a huge Judge duty fan and I think similarly, likes to push this idea that it's all work and no privilege.
That's a more of a secular note. You think that's a secular note, but he has this phrase it's if you live like no one else. Later you can live like no one else the idea if you do the work now, then you will be wealthy beyond your dreams in the future.
And so I wanted to like kind of read you this little short story of how he came to this conclusion. And so he writes, I've actually twice become a millionaire from nothing. The first time I was in my 20s, the money was in real estate and I lost that due to my stupidity.
The second time I was not yet 40, but I did the money thing right that time, and I am debt free. And then I cut some stuff out because it was a lot. The sad thing is that you can be financially mediocre in this country, financially flabby and still be average.
And if the truth be known being average, normal, and financially flabby is pretty much okay by most folks standards. This, however, is not a book for the wimpy among us. This is a book about winning about really having something.
You want to have a country where you could just kind of not have to think about money like money is like a very earthly thing quote unquote. Basically his thing is like, if you follow my plan, you will be wealthy.
If you can't follow my plan, it's because you're stupid and you lack character discipline. If you don't follow my plan, it's because you're not following God. And that's the three sentence synopsis, which whether or not his plan works. That's not how the Christian God is supposed to be.
It's crazy though how many Christians I've met who would vehemently disagree with you on that point. Right. Completely anecdotally, because there is if most comments on wealth in scripture are not particularly wealth positive.
I think there's this viewpoint to because we believe in concepts like upward drift, i.e. Christians just naturally succeed and it's because God has their back essentially, we tend to look at all success as a sign of God's favor that anything that does well, God must be behind.
Yeah, by that measure, God has backed some pretty awful things and God has left some very faithful people who live in poverty. But they weren't faithful Mary because they were in poverty. So jot that down.
Wow, I want to talk about like who Dave Ramsey is. Like what are his creds? One of the things that will actually probably likely be very different than some of our other authors certainly than Josh Harris and like castating goodbye is he is undeniably successful in secular spaces.
That's so true. Harris is somebody that you know if you like had to be in the dating space in Christianity. Yes. And that is it.
He is an eight times New York Times bestseller. He was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame. He and I think probably what is his biggest biggest success that like I was not aware of our generation like younger millennials, they like love Dave, it's bizarre.
Even people outside of the church people who have like no connection to any Christian faith at all. In 2015, he had the top three radio show in the country. They estimate like, who?
This is my bad citations. I don't remember if this was daily or weekly but 23 million people listen to him across 600 stations every day week. One of those either one is huge.
In 2018, his app was the fifth most downloaded app on Apple devices. What does this app do? Does it does it make you rich?
It helps you budget things. He has 35 million views on YouTube and whoever his like SEO and social media team is like they know they understood the like short video format like well before a lot of other people did and I mean his personality has like going from like bored to shouty and it works right it works in that place.
And so he's generally reported at about $200 million, although some more recent media claims that the number is much higher in the last few years tied to the YouTube channel, but I had a really hard time like fact checking that.
Also, it's super hard to fact check anything about Dave Ramsey because he's really good at creating a persona around himself. Well, and net worth is such a hard thing to like you know it's it's basically mythical.
Well, and a lot of that is tied into real estate. It's tied into his personality. It's tied into his radio show, you know, I mean there's lots of things that affect that you're right. So yeah, he was born in 1960 contrary to what we read earlier where he says he built himself up to be a millionaire from nothing.
He is an appetism baby. While at university he worked for his parents real estate company and did real estate of missing. I'm not saying he was like Trump, but like he didn't come from nothing. And so by 26 he was married to his wife, Connie, and he was worth more than $4 million.
And this is where I really went on a deep dive because I was trying to figure out what made him file for bankruptcy. The story that he often tells us like he made some risky bets, a bank decided to call his loan, and he basically had over he had too much debt and he couldn't pay it back all at once.
And yeah, the details are pretty hazy. And, and actually way deep it found it seems like it was closed due to a loophole and baking, banking law that like also is very shady not saying he was shady but like it sounds like the banks were shady and he had too much debt.
It's also not clear if these were like personal loans business loans but anyway, this is the piece that's the crux of his story, it's that he was married, he was worth $4 million. And then he had to go into bankruptcy due to the banks calling these loans, then as he began to as his family began recovering.
And in that process, he wrote financial peace which was his first book targeted towards Christians with this idea that like God wants us to be at peace, and like finances are a part of that.
And it was out of that book that he got his radio show, which turned into a TV show.
And then it became video courses in the 90s which was like literally at the height of like the VCR, the height of the VCR was this era where it was like really easy to spread video content like into homes cheaply.
And it was published in 2009. So that's like a year after the Great Recession started right. That was a super challenging time for many many people in America and I think that's also a part of big reason why his total money makeover like did what it did is because he did have this message.
I've lived through really hard financial times where I lost everything. This is the way I got it back and became a millionaire. And so like on one hand, he does have the lived experience of losing his life savings due to like giant financial institutions behaving badly, which is what happened during the Great Recession.
And you would think that would give him empathy.
But we can see where he went with it. Empathy doesn't make you rich Mary, it doesn't get you out of debt and in 18 to 24 months, or perhaps more if you're lazy. Yeah.
So, I'm going to have you read the first excerpt from that doc, we are going to meet Travis and Mary Skinner, who are in their 30s, both have white collar jobs and this is their story of their money makeover that appears in the book.
Travis Skinner, age 33, AutoCAD draftsman and land surveying and Mary Skinner, age 35, registered nurse. I want to point out that Mary is spelled like the Hobbit from Lord of the Rings and I think that's really fun.
Yeah, it's not the better way but whatever. It's true, it's true. It's the inferior way to spell Mary. Let that be. That's canon on the show.
Two years ago, my wife and I were just an average family making the typical financial mistakes most scare quotes normal families do. We believed all the money myths people kept telling us.
However, once our mistakes started adding up, they began to really take their toll on us. It wasn't until we stumbled upon Dave's radio show and the total money makeover that we put a stop to our financial foolishness.
At one point, we were married with no kids, making more than $80,000 a year, and we did not have the cash to buy a washing machine.
We went along with too many scare quotes buy now pay later deals. 90 days same as cash sounded like a good idea at the time. Wrong!
We ended up paying much more than the items were worth. In 2006, we were still making minimum payments on student loans that we had for more than a decade. We bought into what all the normal people were telling us.
Student loans are good debt. Everyone has them. Again, all caps wrong. We knew we needed to kick Sally Mae to the curb once and for all. I can get behind that.
Now, instead of writing her a check every month, we are able to save in advance for our Children's College Fund. Fast forward through the Financial Peace University home study kit and 15 months of complete sacrifice.
We've paid off $27,000 in debt, saved an emergency fund, dumped the whole life insurance and purchased term life created wheels and saved cash for a two week freedom beach vacation to celebrate.
After a lot of hard work and gazelle intensity, we are finally living like no one else. This reminds me so much of Scientology, like the usage of buzzwords, the usage of pseudoscientific mystification, like the Financial Peace University home study kit.
How does that sound all that different from like the EV meter and Dianetics?
I mean, and why I had you read this at the beginning is because these, he says like in his book, he's like, I'm going to include little stories that demonstrate, you know, people, real people who've like done my method and have, you know, like, like this AutoCAD engineer.
Yes, like lived it out. But I like want to say the majority of his people who he says are like average, they're largely white, almost all of them are middle to upper class. Most of them have college educated, at least one partner has a high paying career.
Often they have kids, usually they go to church and often the wife has a stay at is a stay at home mom, which like I think is important to note, not dissing on stay at home moms, but just like saying like the family is able to survive on one income, and they have childcare, which I think people are realizing
is a huge driver of poverty, not having access to childcare. And like what we've talked about so far is basically the essence of the book. And so I'm not going to go like too deep in every single step.
But like the good part, he's really strong about like, don't be in debt and don't take on bad debt. He talks a lot about like banks and like credit lenders and pay loan lenders like how exploitative they are, they are and he explains it in a way that people can understand.
I would assume that there's a lot of truth to those claims. Right, exactly. Yeah. The challenge is that he makes a lot he takes those things that are fine. And then pretty often he just like takes a right turn into a problematic conclusion, or a problematic aside.
But yeah, so here's an example that I'm going to read to you. Like one of his like unsighted studies slash anecdotes. See, you know, Samuel, you get to be the journalist, see if you can find what is problematic about this paragraph.
Okay.
According to Brian Tracy, a study of Harvard graduates found that after two years, the 3% who had written goals achieved more financially than the other 97% combined of Harvard graduates.
So you may have been hard to like, realize when listening versus reading, but the citation is, according to Brian Tracy, a study of Harvard graduates found. Yeah, he didn't go look for the study of Harvard graduates.
It's according to his buddy. Right. His buddy has a study but he doesn't, he's only he's going after the word of his buddy for the study.
His buddy is a motivational speaker. This study has been like widely debunked all the debunkings. I mean, more than 10 years before date, this book was written there, you can find different versions of different authors, different schools where the study happened, different
years it happened. Tracy's original article, I found one that he wrote about this and it's been taken off of Google Scholar so I can't see what he wrote in it but for something to be taken off of Google Scholar is kind of like a, it's basically magical thinking, I mean it goes back into that whole the secret thing or maybe the prayer of Jbez which we might be covering.
Yeah, you're trying so hard for that to be one of the books we cover and I love it. Enlarge my border, I swear. So yeah, that's like, that's like an example of like how he's using these like anecdotes and unsighted studies, you know and I mean this is kind of silly right like the stakes aren't that high.
But like he's saying stuff like this attached to statements that have a lot more stakes attached to them. The mixed metaphors and non sequiturs are amazing.
I would love, I do love a mixed metaphor, and I would love for you to, this is the most obvious example of this, and it is because I was crying I was laughing so hard reading this. So please read the next excerpt that I sent you.
Gender in emergencies. Gender in emergencies.
Gender in emergencies for page 135.
Let's talk. God wired ladies better on the subject than he did us. Their nature causes them to gravitate toward the emergency fund. Somewhere down inside the typical lady. Oh my gosh, is a
is a security gland. I'm not making this up listeners. Somewhere down inside the typical lady is a security gland, and when financial stress enters the scene, that gland will spasm.
And Dave didn't put this down but most men they can't find it.
Anyway, this spasmodic gland will affect your wife in ways you can't always predict. Okay, this really. Okay, I'm gonna keep reading a spasmodic security gland can affect her emotions, of course, her concentration, and even her love life.
Apparently, the security gland is attached to her face. Can, can you see the financial stress on her face. Believe me guys, one of the best investments you will ever make is in an emergency fund I mean yeah it's going to satisfy your lady, a
fully funded emergency fund and a husband in the midst of a total money makeover will relax the security gland and make your life much better.
I already told you that Sharon and I lost everything went broke crashed, and we're at the bottom. So you can imagine that this subject is a little sensitive in my house.
One of the wounds in our relationship is this issue of security. Sharon's emotions can revisit the fear of looking at a brand new baby and a toddler, and not knowing how we were going to keep the heat on that is a sensitive place in her psyche, and with good
reason. We don't even use the emergency fund for emergencies. Part of the salve on that wound is that our emergency fund has an emergency fund. If I even walk near the drawer where the emergency fund money market checkbook is kept, Sharon's
security gland could tighten up. Being the highly trained investment mogul that I am, I could certainly find places to put that money where it would earn more, or would it? Remember, personal finance is personal. I have come to realize that Sharon's peace of mind bought with the oversized emergency fund is a great return on investment.
Guys, this could be a wonderful gift to your wife.
Let's unpack that.
Yeah, Samuel, have you ever found on a security gland?
I mean, if we were looking at the statement and it was bad both of our faces fell.
We were both like, this is bad.
So like, I was reading this, like I was reading that a friend was, we were just like hanging out, she was playing the guitar next to me and I just start like, like I say, I was laughing so hard I was crying. You know, she asked me why I was reading so I read this passage to her and then she like was like, does he mean the pituitary gland?
And I'm like, no, I think it's like a metaphorical gland. And she was like, but he says it's attached to her face. And oh my word, I've read this, I've read this like six people.
It's the medulla oblongata.
This is the example of like how he's like doing fine. And then he just like, takes the right turn and you're like, Dave, where are you?
It's interesting. I do want to make the observation here again. It's like he can't talk about empathy directly. He can't just be like, hey, it's really bad for your relationship. If you're not making moves that bring security, like a huge reason people get together is a sense of security.
So that security is not happening. It's going to cause a rift between you. There we go. I just saved you the whole security gland rant.
The thing I think he says that is right here or the like idea is that he's a proponent of both partners are equally in charge of the budget, equally making these changes, making these goals.
He's very against like one partner having the financial responsibility and the other person like not knowing anything. You need to be together, right?
Which is good. It's actually pretty good advice.
Right. And I think the piece that's really good here is that financial anxiety can be something that's like very difficult.
That can be something that's like deep in the heart of who a person is. That's right. Like there's so many things in this book where you're like, yeah, that's good.
And then you're like, have a question mark. And then you're like, oh, you just went to a place. I'm so confused.
So, yeah, besides things like that, you know, like the other critique that I do hear about Dave like is that a lot of his saving goals, you know, haven't kept up with like inflation or like how jobs are structured today.
That was one big thing I was going to ask because inflation is changing the game on how we think about money just in general.
And like he boasts in that clip that we watched at the beginning, like that clip was from three months ago and he says they have not had to update the baby step in 25 years.
You know, the steps don't allow for a lot of nuance and you're like, overall, like his financial advice is not horrible.
The piece that is really challenging for me is this like underlying worldview that equates godliness with being rich and poverty with stupidity.
And he intentionally rewrites history at times to like fit this narrative. And just so people know I'm not like cherry picking.
I'm going to read you a list of things I think just like really show this worldview. He writes, there's no excuse to retire without financial dignity in the US today.
He writes, only the strong can help the weak and that is true of money too.
If you are a good person, it is your spiritual duty to possess riches for the good of mankind.
And those like three lines are in addition to like numerous times where he said, if you're wealthy, you're successful.
He says, you're a king. You are winning. You have lived right.
And if you are poor, you are immature, wimpy, toddlers, deadbeat, drug infested, crime ridden.
It's like, I get it. You read Fight Club.
I'm going to sound like I'm going to sound political. But like what I want people to hear is like, this is actually about the lived experience of other people.
If you're a Christian, this is the lived experience of other Christians, which should like give you pause.
And it's this idea, this worldview that if you are poor, your fault, and if you're wealthy, you've earned it.
That specific worldview within the American church has been used to dismiss the generational impact of racism, of poverty.
It's been used as an excuse to turn a blind eye to like the extreme crises that are happening within the countries that are fueling immigration.
I've seen it during COVID where, you know, church boards cut programming out of like a scarcity mindset, like at the same time when like kids across the country were facing unprecedented hunger.
And you know, like, I think why it matters and why we can't just say like, oh, well, let whoever he helps help is because like this mindset has permeated faith communities.
And the solutions that he proposes only help people who look like him.
Personal finance alone cannot address these like deepening, widening wealth gap in the US.
It is also just extremely antithetical to the teachings of Christ.
Like, I guess the closest thing to dismissing the poor that Jesus says is you will always have the poor will always be with you.
But then he adds, so you should take care of them.
It's just such a toxic ideology. I mean, there's just no other way to say it.
There's a lot of fear involved. I think there's this fear of being left behind.
And if the conversation turns to if the spotlight is turned away from me, the middle class white guy, but it's like we need to start realizing that to help one person is to help everybody.
You can you can wean yourself into compassion by accepting that you benefit from being compassionate to others.
So just to last little bit of this episode, like Dave spends multiple chapters in his book before he even gets to the baby steps, talking about debt and money myths and debunking them.
And so I'm going to steal his format and I'm going to talk about three myths that I think this worldview believes that like data and life since the Great Recession has shown us if it ever was true, it's not true today.
So I mean, we're kind of talking about this by one get a little bit more into it.
The first myth is that like everyone can get out of poverty and become wealthy if they work hard enough.
You have another excerpt to read and it's another story, another example of a money makeover.
Rebecca Gonzalez, 28 single mom of two, HR assistant.
After my divorce, I found myself homeless, pregnant and raising my 18 month old son alone. Plus, I was stuck with all that debt from the failed marriage.
I went from two incomes and one child to one income and two children.
I started living off of credit cards out of necessity, racking up piles of debt as I went along.
I moved into public housing and lived there for two years, trying to take care of my kids and stay current on the bills.
It was tough feeling like I couldn't provide for my family. I wanted more for my children.
They have gone without birthday parties and other little things that kids their age have.
They have never had a place to call home and that's my strongest drive in getting out of debt.
I know firsthand the importance of an emergency fund.
For the first time in my life, I had money in the bank when my truck broke down.
I didn't have to go into debt and my income wasn't affected.
I just paid the mechanic and refilled my emergency fund as soon as possible.
Then I went right back to paying off my debts.
It was time consuming and tedious, but worth it to have the security that the emergency fund provided.
It hasn't been easy. Just about every time I've gotten within a few dollars of having my emergency fund back in place, something has happened and I've had to use it again.
But it is now standard practice to refill my emergency fund whenever I use it.
It has saved my family from a lot of hard times and from going further into debt.
I think you're supposed to read it as like, wow, even a single mom can do this.
But like, she hasn't done it.
Every time she even gets close to saving her emergency fund, she has to use it.
And she has a white colored, like traditional good job, even as a single mom.
I mean, she's in HR.
That is supposedly like a decent job that should allow her to live.
Right. Dave and I see the same problem, but have like different answers to it.
And he actually like right after this story, he says, a country financial security index survey found that 49 percent of Americans could cover less than one month's expenses if they lost their income.
Half of this culture has virtually no buffer between them and life.
And reminder, this is in 2009. He sees the problem.
Like they can't save. It's they don't have money between them and life.
But yet, like his answer is, we'll do these steps.
You know, it's, you know, really telling like one of the few single parent examples in this book.
She couldn't do it. She can't do it.
I mean, we don't see anywhere past like how far she is today.
So for this section, I actually ended up reading like the first half of a different book called Worked Over by Jamie McAllen.
It came out in 2020, but he had done like the majority of his research before the pandemic.
But basically, his whole book, the premise of his book is that economic inequality has escalated since the Great Recession.
And that is due to companies demanding more hours of white collar workers while making blue collar jobs more disjointed and their hours more unpredictable.
You have people on the lower end of the spectrum often having very weird schedules, not enough hours.
They may need more two or three jobs to like make it work.
But having this disjointed schedule makes it very hard for them to have multiple jobs and they're not getting like benefits like health care, 401Ks, like things that, you know, a full time job.
You know, really it takes a full time job to be able to afford life because of the ways that you need health care and retirement.
Well, I was going to comment on that.
Like, I feel like there's no feasible part time option the way they're like might have used to be.
Yeah, like there's the part time thing is I mean, it's not enough to say, oh, we'll just save. Right. Right.
Less than 25% of Americans today have a regular standard shift in their job.
And when you compare America to other similar like peer countries, other rich countries, we work significantly more than any other country.
Our productivity is the same and our workers make less.
Right. Since 1989, the top 1% has increased its total net worth 1%, not 2%, by an incomprehensible 21 trillion dollars.
During the same period, the bottom half experienced a loss in net worth of 900 billion.
It's this mass theft, essentially, where you're transferring all of that money into the pockets of the people who are making more than even Dave Ramsey can promise you.
Right. I mean, and then like the last little piece I had from his book is just that in the past 40 years, CEO pay has soared by an inconceivable 1070%.
But hourly wages of workers limped forward at just 12%.
From 2016 to 2017, the average CEO pay rose 18 million dollars, making the CEO to worker ratio 312 to 1.
Try to imagine someone working 312 times harder than someone else or being 312 times more deserving and the criminally disproportionate nature of our economy becomes clearer.
Well, and it's interesting too, because then the CEO's money is worth more than the workers money.
If you generate enough desperation, you can use your money to do anything. And you're seeing these news stories about that sort of thing.
Just working more, the answer of like, just work more. That's not that's not an answer.
Americans are working as hard as they can. Like, yeah, every American is working as hard as they can.
And I know, you know, maybe you think your nephew isn't or something. You can't use the straw man, an anecdotal straw man to justify the suffering of an entire country.
Right. My grandparents talk about like, I mean, they were dirt poor when they were first married.
She talks about the butcher knew how poor they were. And so he'd save her all the cuts of meat and she'd take the fat and make like soup with it.
I mean, but yet they have a very comfortable house. And like my grandma was, you know, she ran a business out of her home.
My grandpa worked, I don't remember, 40 years or whatever at a company that made cups. And he got a pension and they're very comfortable.
And it's like, I couldn't do that today. There's no way that they could do that today.
If they had that same lifestyle, we can like go around and around. But, um, myth two, which may be somewhat controversial.
We're going to dig into one of the areas that Dave Ramsey has started to harp on like a ton. And that is student loan debt.
So the myth, too, is that the solution to rising student loan debt is not to take loans out in the first place.
I sent you a link in there to a podcast episode he just launched. I forget when it published, but it was within the last couple of years.
This is their borrowed future series, which is about student loan debt. And you're going to hear from Anthony O'Neill.
I remember after that session, I went and asked my counselor, like, hey, I really do want to go off to college. What do I do?
She says, well, your grades right now are not lined up to get a scholarship, but there's also student loans.
What Anthony didn't know is that student loans would send him down a road that would take years to clean up.
Student loans are a problem impacting Anthony, you, our kids and our nation.
I go home and my parents are like, yo, you know, we have the GI bill and anything above the GI bill would just take out some loans.
That was the thought that myself, my counselor and my parents had.
If you do not get a scholarship, if you do not cover it all with the GI bill, we'll just take out some loans.
We'll just go talk to Sally Mae and ask Sally Mae, can I borrow some money? And we already know her answer.
It was going to be yes. I go off to college and as soon as I walk onto the college campus, I'm like, this is great.
So I had the NFL scholarship. Plus I had my father's GI bill and to keep it 100, you guys, I had all my school paid for.
When I had it all paid for, I still did a dumb thing.
I still borrowed money to go after the lifestyle, to get the clothes, to get the car, to buy the roses, to go to McDonald's.
I borrowed money just for the freaking lifestyle.
And studies are showing that a lot of our students college is paid for, but they're still borrowing money to live.
Live off of what? You're borrowing money and you're paying back so much.
But no one ever told me that. Not only did I take out $10,000 in student loans, but I also took out $15,000 in credit card debt.
I also borrowed $10,000 to get some furniture debt. Before I even turned 19, I'm $35,000 in debt.
And I wake up like, what in the heck is going on? No one told me.
This is the type of story that Dave loves. It's someone who got into debt for a stupid reason, quote unquote.
Then they got out of debt and they have the ability, charisma, passion to be one of his spokespeople.
This guy, Anthony, he wrote a book called Debt-Free Degree and he became one of Dave's personalities.
They're his disciples.
Right. Well, yeah, there's this whole network.
But I wanted to specifically look at this through student loan debt because student loan debt is a huge issue when millennials talk about building well.
And I wrote a story recently where I interviewed this woman who is like literally what she studies is like how student loans impact the economy.
What she pointed out is that student like the having access to student loans is what has enabled the American society to become better educated and move up economically on the world stage.
You can track how our economy was impacted by the ability of students who are very young, have no credit scores, many of them to access huge amounts of loans.
At least initially, student loans are what enabled really poor people in America to become middle class.
Someone with a four year degree even today earns more than a million over their lifetime than someone with a high school degree.
And kind of contrary to this like thing he says where I took out debt to have a lifestyle, even in like free degree programs, poor students are taking out loans to make up for the lack of wages that they would have if they chose to work instead of study.
And like tons of research and data shown that like if you do not provide loans or some kind of like living money for these students, they'll drop out.
They can't make it because many of them do not have a parent who could pay for their apartment.
And I think often it's not about the lifestyle, right? It's like, it's about living during an entire program when instead you could be working a low wage job and like paying for yourself.
Right, like, and I think too, there is just that natural advantage of people with rich parents where they don't need to be working during their semester and I remember, you know, the college we went to, there was not a whole lot of grace given to people who had jobs.
I felt like there was this kind of disdain almost, which it's like, okay, that's not their fault.
I so because of like a mix of family stuff, scholarships, and because my father was a pastor, like I had almost a free ride and my room and board paid for. My parents still had to give me, I think it was about $1,500 a month for me to live.
Like, you know what I mean? And my family is not wealthy, but we're, I would say we're in that like middle class, lower middle class range and like, there are lots of people who are much poorer than that who literally could not, even if they had everything paid for, could not make it to college without some kind of loan.
Like, where else are they going to get that? They're not.
When you look at the data actually met often loans, even when programs are significantly discounted or are free programs, students who are poor, they're often using these loans to not just like pay for their life to live but they're using loans to make up for a lack of wages.
You know, people like people in that range often you know their families like need them to contribute to you know the parents income, you know they they have to live on their own and they don't really have that support system.
And and I think often like something that I wasn't necessarily taught is that like there is a mental relief of having you know whether it's a parent or a family member or anyone really like to fall back on can totally attest to that.
There, there's a, there's an overlooking of like history here.
Okay, so we're going to move on to myth three. But first we're going to have you read like the last excerpt of this episode and this is from a section where he is debunking this myth.
If no one used that our economy would collapse.
Let's pretend for the fun of it. What if every single American stopped using debt of any kind over the next 50 years, a grand total money makeover.
What would people do if they didn't have any payments, they would save and they would spend, not support banks.
Debt free people would support and prosper the economy. The economy would be much more stable without the tidal waves caused by scare quotes consumer confidence, or the lack thereof consumer confidence is that thing economists use to measure how much you will
overspend due to your being giddy about how great the economy is. We could definitely circle back to that. Yeah, saving and investing would cause wealth to be built at an unprecedented level, which would create more stability and spending.
Giving would increase can circle back to that too, and many social problems will be privatized. Oh my gosh. Thus, the government could get out of the welfare business, then taxes could come down.
And we would have even more wealth. I'm reading ahead. As that great philosopher Austin Powers said capitalism. Yeah, baby.
Ah, capitalism is cool. Those who are worried about polarization, the widening gap between the haves and the have nots need not look to government to solve the problem.
Just call for a national total money makeover.
I've seen this movie that he's referencing Austin Powers and International Man of Mystery. When he's unfrozen, he thinks the communists won. So he's like, Hello comrades, I'm ready to live in this free world of socialism. Then he realizes they didn't and he goes capitalism baby.
Yeah, yeah, baby.
He's quoting Austin Powers and without context. I mean, talk about quoting the Bible without context. That's one thing. Quoting Austin Powers without context is deadly. Yeah.
Like we talked about earlier, I am not super financially minded. However, I do follow the finances of this country pretty closely. What we saw during COVID during the benefits that we got during COVID from the government was an increase in spending, which actually for a lot of people for the first time took them out of the red.
They people were able to live more comfortable lives. And obviously this is very generalized. But what I've noticed was just as soon as we had kind of gotten a hold of that situation.
Inflation happened. However, I've read several studies that have shown inflation in this current iteration of things is 100% driven by price gouging privatization, this sort of Randian paradise of total laws a fair deregulation.
It quite simply doesn't work because there is no incentive for any private business to benefit the welfare of the common person scarcity is what drives profit going to try to buy anything go to Taco Bell, and you will see that privatization does not benefit the common person.
So I read a lot of stuff from like across the political spectrum, and across the board, a lot of researchers showed like we learned how to solve poverty during COVID. We collected so much data on what happens when you give poor people money or middle class people money, or everyone money like what happens.
And like, all of the studies have shown from the poorest person to like the wealthiest person, people use that money to pay for food, toiletries and transportation.
And then like if people are if people are in a middle income where they can actually save, they save it. They put it towards buying a new car or buying a house you know like, well, this is, that's exactly what we did.
We needed that money desperately during that time. And we're, we were doing much better I'm sure than most Americans, but we invested it into, you know, and it's not like we were Dave Ramsey about it, we, we did buy some nice things for ourselves that stimulates the economy.
Right.
So now it's now appears the economy is overstimulated because last I read, the Fed is trying to trigger a recession which it seems like it might successfully be doing.
I will say like, there's a lot we don't know just like Dave writing in 2009 has money makeover like there's a lot he didn't know. I mean, the economy has changed in a way that no one in 2009 2010 could have even imagined in the last decade.
And it kind of ties into like the student loan debt right like people are using their debt to live versus like to have a lifestyle.
Americans have built their wealth through loans. And I think like the most egregious example of this is redlining. So redlining is a practice that like through huge parts of like kind of like the post, like, Great Depression era through like the 70s 80s.
Like really the civil rights movement era, and further.
It was basically a practice by banks, where they would mark certain neighborhoods as risky to give loans to.
And like, this is not a opinion, this is like thing that exists in documentation. The criteria was literally like percentage of person of color who lives there.
And so what happened is, like, if you look at a city like Chicago but like literally every city in our country from small to big, the poor areas of the cities. I mean, and often this was most heavily targeted towards black Americans but like the poor areas of the cities are where our majority black.
And the richest areas of the cities are majority white, there's such a disparity in like the number of black Americans who own homes compared to a number of white Americans who own homes which is like one of the main ways middle income people can like build wealth is due to redlining where the bank said this loan is risky so you either have to like pay us way higher, like, down payment on it.
You have to have way higher interest, or we're not going to give it to you at all. And I would say like also I heard well like that's history and it's better today.
I worked on a project in 2020, I believe it public either late 2020 early 2021 somewhere in there. And it literally looked at this in Chicago and in at that time for every dollar of wealth held by a white family, a black family had 25 cents.
And for every dollar a bank loaned in a white neighborhood and invested two cents in a black community. Oh my gosh, that was like the major banks in 2020.
You know I want to repeat like his worldview that I pulled out earlier that says like only the strong can help the weak.
That is true of money too. By the way, isn't Christian that's Darwinian. It's Darwinism. I was gonna say that's like the most like and like I'm pretty sure Jesus says the exact opposite.
Very early on in the Gospels. Also, Dave Ramsey didn't follow his own plan. Oh, twist time.
He made his money being a media personality. He did not make his money saving and investing. No, because everybody makes their money on income primarily.
There's this myth I think that if you just get enough money, it'll quote unquote work for you. At the end of the day, even if you're not going to a 95 job, you are either generating passive income or you are on some sort of contract.
There is nobody who gets rich without some kind of income, even the 1%. That's why they're so keen on hoarding it.
Right. All that being said, should we be following a Christian money guru who did not make his money the way he's telling other people to?
That is what we're gonna dive into next episode. What is the deal with Dave Ramsey? And we're gonna dig a little bit deeper into this like mythology he's created around himself and his story.
What are the spiritual ramifications and what does power do to someone as well?
If you want to talk to us about your experience with Dave Ramsey or any other bestseller, we have an email address. You can email us at badchristianbooks at gmail.com. We're on all the socials at badchristianpod.
Please reach out to us because we are going to follow up on these things. This is the outset of the journey for us. I talked about I Kissed Data Goodbye last week. I would love to hear more personal experiences with it because my research and my own experience only took me so far.
I would love to follow up on that if people have more they would like to share. I like the idea of this being a larger conversation.
If you guys like this kind of content and if you're looking to kind of deconstruct more or explore your feelings on the church, I write novels about, they are fictional novels.
Frank Peretti wrote Christian Horror. I write horror about being a Christian.
Koi Pond is a journey through the haunted house of the church and deconstruction. It's a bunch of short stories and a larger narrative and I think you'll enjoy it. I've been getting some good feedback from people who have grown up in the church. So definitely check that out.
Well, Mary, I am waiting with bated breath. This has been such a great intro to Dave Ramsey. I already feel like I'm in the process of having a total money makeover, but I know that that makeover won't be complete without part two of this discussion, which we will conclude next episode.
Until then, this has been Bad Christian Books and we'll catch you next time.