E498 Dave Ramsey

This episode features Theo Von interviewing financial advisor Dave Ramsey, discussing personal finance management, overcoming financial mistakes, and strategies for wealth building.

1. Financial Discipline: Dave Ramsey emphasizes the importance of living below one's means and avoiding debt as fundamental to financial health.
2. Value of Hard Work: Ramsey recounts how his early work experiences shaped his understanding of money and business.
3. Learning from Failure: Ramsey shares how his bankruptcy was a pivotal moment, leading him to reevaluate and improve his financial strategies.
4. Investment Strategies: Ramsey discusses the merits of diversifying investments between real estate and mutual funds to minimize risks and maximize returns.
5. Empowerment through Education: Ramsey advocates for financial education as a tool for empowerment, helping individuals make informed decisions about their finances.

1. Introduction

Theo Von introduces Dave Ramsey and briefly outlines the episode's focus on personal finance and overcoming financial challenges. He sets the stage for an in-depth discussion on learning from financial mistakes. Theo Von: "Today's guest is a financial advisor and a radio host. You know him from the Ramsey show, where he gives advice to callers who have questions about their finances."

2. Ramsey's Financial Philosophy

Dave Ramsey explains his philosophy on debt, savings, and financial planning, emphasizing the importance of budgeting and living within one's means. Dave Ramsey: "Work, get paid; don't work, don't get paid."

3. Overcoming Financial Mistakes

Ramsey shares his personal story of financial loss and recovery, highlighting the lessons he learned from declaring bankruptcy and rebuilding his financial life. Dave Ramsey: "I had to course correct and adjust. And so, yeah, I think our faith, our new faith, at that point, it was very young and tender."

4. Practical Financial Advice

Ramsey provides practical advice on how to manage finances effectively, including tips on saving, investing, and avoiding common financial pitfalls. Dave Ramsey: "Just live on less than you make. Have a plan, get out of debt."

5. Q&A with Theo Von

In a Q&A session, Ramsey answers questions from Theo Von and the audience, offering direct advice on specific financial issues and scenarios. Dave Ramsey: "It's more of a splat. So we hit order and ladders. We sat around, whined and moaned and blamed everybody else for about a year."

1. Budget Wisely: Track your expenses and create a budget to manage your finances effectively.
2. Avoid Debt: Stay away from debt whenever possible, especially high-interest consumer debt.
3. Emergency Fund: Build an emergency fund to cover unexpected expenses without having to rely on credit.
4. Invest Regularly: Start investing early, even small amounts, to take advantage of compound interest.
5. Seek Financial Education: Continuously educate yourself on financial matters to make informed decisions.

Dave Ramsey is a personal finance expert, best-selling author, broadcaster, and host of “The Ramsey Show” where he lends advice to people calling in with financial questions.

Dave Ramsey joins Theo to chat about his journey in the world of money, how he overcame bankruptcy to start a successful company, the biggest lessons he learned as a business owner over the years, what traits make a smart investor, the thing most millionaires have in common, the truth about today’s inflation and housing market, how to spot a scheme, and much more.

People

Dave Ramsey, Theo Von

Companies

None

Books

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Guest Name(s):

Dave Ramsey

Content Warnings:

None

Theo Von
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You know him from the Ramsey show, where he gives advice to callers who have questions about their finances. He has a two day livestream event coming up later this month, which we'll talk a little bit about. I'm grateful to spend time with him today. Mister Dave Ramsey. Shout that light on me I'll sit and tell you my story shine on me and I will find a song I will sing it.

Can't believe you guys made my studio here. Dave, we just want you to be. We want you to be home and come back again. Well, yeah, I'll come stay. Anytime.

I'll stay. Apparently it's no big deal. I didn't know you guys had an air. You guys run into airbnbs here? Yeah, we.

We totally replicated my studio here in your ramsey. Is this a campus? Pretty much, yeah, I guess that's what we call it, yeah. And is it. So you have investment, like what's on the campus?

Cause this is. It's beautiful. Well, thank you. Thank you. We've got two office buildings and, of course, the main lobby area where we broadcast the shows on the glass.

Dave Ramsey
So the area for the public to come in and hang out while we're doing the shows. And then we've got a 2500 seat auditorium up on the hill up there that we do events in the event center. So it's been quite a, quite an adventure. Like what type of events will you do up there? Well, we do our Ramsey events.

I mean, we've got number one, we've got 1100 team members. So we do staff meeting up there and devotional on Wednesday up there and then. But we'll do weekend long events. We've got a money and marriage event with Rachel Cruz, my daughter, and doctor John Deloney, two of our Ramsay personalities. In the fall.

It'll be mammoth. We'll have it sold out here in a couple of weeks for a total money make over weekend. So it's public coming in for public events to learn something that we're doing usually around the money subject or the leadership subject. We use it for our entree leadership stuff. So it stays pretty busy.

Wow. Yeah, it's remarkable. Dave Ramsey, man. Yeah, thanks so much, man. So you, so just for.

Theo Von
A lot of our viewers will know you, but some who wouldn't. So you started out in finance. Like how did you get in? Like what made you care about money out of the gate? Like did you have a, did you guys have allowance issues in the home?

Dave Ramsey
Yeah, we did. You did? Yeah, we were not on allowance. We were on commission. Work, get paid, don't work, don't get paid.

So, yeah, I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood, so daddy believed in work. Like real work. Like I was twelve years old and I came in and said, I need some money to go to the quicksack and get an icy. And he said, no, you need a job. He said, what could you do?

And I said, well, I guess I could cut grass. And he took me down here on Nolensville Road and printed up 500 business cards that said, dave's lawns go knock on the closest 50 doors and ask the opportunity to provide their lawn care needs. So at twelve, I ended up with 27 yards to cut. So I think they call that child abuse now. Yeah, look, yeah, well, yeah, I think if you have, if you force a kid to get a job nowadays, I think the protective services will come and get you.

That's exactly right. You know, it's pretty, sometimes it can be like that. It can be kind of alarming. There wasn't a protective service that would have protected them from my parents, but, yeah, so anyway, we grew up doing that and then I started buying and selling real estate in my twenties and got rich, starting from nothing. And I had at least where I came from.

I mean, I had a million dollar net worth, and I was making $20,000 a month in 1983. Oh, yeah. But then, that's rich. Where were you? Driving a Jag.

That's what I always. Because none of my friends could spell Jaguar, so I needed a jaguar. But I'd done stupid stuff and too much debt. The bank got sold, called our notes, and spent the next three years of our life losing everything. And that's what made me care about.

About money, to answer your question. Wow. Cause. Yeah. Cause if you go out, if you go to a high pretty early, that's wild.

Yeah. So did you think at that point you thought, oh, this is it. Life's just gonna be a. Yeah, I. Thought I had it.

I thought I had it all dialed in. And I had nothing dialed in. Dang, I was stupid on steroids. Yeah. And so we.

Yeah. With a brand new baby and a toddler and a marriage hanging on by a thread, we got the opportunity to start again in 1988. September 23. Well, you remember it like that? Yeah.

Well, I mean, that's the day we filed bankruptcy. That's like. That's hell day, you know? Do you have to go to the bank to file it, or how do you do it? No, it's a federal court.

It's a nice little procedure that you go through that's pretty intimidating. But. And what were you still, like? Was your dad still, like, a mentor at that point for business or anything? Was that like.

No, no, they had moved away by then. And I had guys around here that were. That were family, friends and stuff that we'd grown up with. But I had started a faith journey. I'd met God.

And so as an adult. Cause I was pretty much a wild character in my youth. And so I started finding out that the Bible said something about money. And then I started talking to old rich people. And both of these things said, just common sense.

Just live on less than you make. Have a plan, get out of debt. And, you know, I've got all these degrees and letters and licenses and crap after my name that says I'm supposed to know something about money. But I was broke, and so I needed a new set of information, so I found common sense and started using it. And then people started asking us, okay, how did you turn your life around after all that garbage?

And this is what we did. And they went, can we do it? I'm like, yeah, and we start showing people, and then, you know, 35 years later, here we are showing people millions of them. Yeah. No, it's unbelievable.

Theo Von
I mean, everybody knows Dave Ramsey, and everybody's had, you know, has used you for financial guidance and stuff over the years or gone to you with certain questions. I know you guys take so many questions on your show, and with that turnaround moment, was there, like, did it lead you to be like, I need more than just believing that finances are gonna take care of me? Or like, yeah, I think that's probably part of the journey there. I mean, somebody said, how'd you bounce back? And I'm like, dude, when you fall that far, you don't really bounce.

Dave Ramsey
It's more of a splat. So we hit order and ladders. We sat around, whined and moaned and blamed everybody else for about a year, and, you know, figured out finally it wasn't everybody else's fault. It was my fault. I caused it.

I'm the idiot. Signed up for the trip and got to take it. So I had to course correct and adjust. And so, yeah, I think our faith, our new faith, at that point, it was very young and tender and not a lot of knowledge or anything, but anyway, we're just trying to figure out, how do you navigate with two little babies and sitting here broke and my wife's from the hills, east Tennessee, frying pan throwing. There's an Olympic event, you know, I mean, it's like, it's a hillbilly woman, so.

Oh, yeah, it was rough. And so we about killed each other. And I think she would have left, but she didn't have a car, so. But, yeah, so, I mean, that's the stuff that we did. But again, gradually, we just sat down with the yellow pad and said, okay, here's what we have coming in.

We can't spend more than that. And we're always going to give some, we're always going to save some, and we're gonna feed ourselves, and then what do we do next? And then the next week, and then the next week and, okay, now we gotta get a little bit better. And started gradually getting our income back up. And it was not a bounce back.

It was years. It feels like. But then, you know, the thing about this stuff, this common sense thing, it's not a microwave, it's a crock pot. Yeah, it cooks up good, but it takes a while. It takes a long while.

Theo Von
Yeah. And then sometimes you realize, you look in the thing and you're like, I don't even have this thing plugged in either. There's that too. Yeah, there's that problem. You're just sitting there watching a bowl of cold meat water for 8 hours.

Dave Ramsey
So sometimes sounds like it's from experience. Might have just happened. Yeah, I've been through some things. Yeah. Well, if you don't have a wife, you have a crock pot.

This is true. I mean, it's definitely, and it's a sad day for a man when you realize you're like, oh, damn, this is, you know, when you go in to get your crock pot, you know, that's. Signing up for it right there. It is. Really, you name or some people name it after a woman.

Theo Von
And I'm like, well, this is getting a little crazy. I feel like. But when you look at, like, yeah, like, when I think back on jobs that I had, like, I was, you know, I sold, I used to sell hamsters outside of raves when I was young. I've sold, I worked in dairy. I sold mexican food door to door.

I used to clean out wish and wells in our town. We had a plethora of wells in our parish. What else? Collecting cans and taking them over to the scales. I sold italian or semi italian food, just all types of things.

And I try to offer suggestions to people that were like me growing up. Like, how do you find a job that could start to change, like, if you don't have much? And I often go to, like, pressure washing. That's what I'll tell people. You buy a pressure wash going for about $600, and then you can start a business.

You can make your dave's lawn care cards, and next, you know, two weeks later, you're a dang business owner, you know, are there suggestions, like, you have like, that for people that are like, you know, like. And it can be a first job even, like, what do I start? I mean, lawn care is a great one. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing to me what people will pay you to do if you're just willing to go do it and you show up on time.

Dave Ramsey
And then I think the piece that goes with that is okay. You don't want to start pressure washing and go, hey, I want to be 63 years old, which is what I am, and still be pressure washing. That's not a plan. But to get you through this week, you can do a lot of pressure washer. You're right.

Turn it into a car detail company and then turn it into something else and then sell that and do something else. And what I figured out was these wealthy people, they don't think, thank God it's Friday. Oh, God, it's Monday. They're not living for the weekend. Right?

Yeah. Every move they make is a step towards where I want to be in ten years, who I want to become. And so, okay, I might be pressure washing so I can get the money to go to code school, pay $10,000, and go to code school. Oh, then you can make 150 a year coding. And so what's the step?

What's the method to get there? What's the path to get there? And so the problem, I think, sometimes, is if you take a feel like you're taking a job like that, and I've done all that. Not the exact same thing, but I've done a bunch of crappy jobs, too, and entrepreneurial things. And I buy an old car at a repo lot and come home, fix it up, put it back on the market.

Back in those days, there were classified ads in the newspaper. Oh, yeah. And so we'd turn around and sell the car or buy a bunch of junk at some auction. I was there. Buy the house, but I'd buy half the estate and then put it in turn into a garage sale next week.

Theo Von
Oh, yeah, you got an candelabras or. Something driving all through them. You get some deals on stuff. And so it was a lot of fun. Horse trading, we called it, growing up, but no horses involved.

Dave Ramsey
But there was, you know, somebody knew how to buy something and flip it. Over or go to the police auction. That was always a big. That's a lot of fun. There's some weird stuff there, man.

Theo Von
Is there? But, yeah, and the. All that stuff. And so. But it needs to be that.

Dave Ramsey
That's not where you're staying. It's a path of where you're going, and, you know, that changes everything. It's like, you know, even yourself, you know, this meteoric, fabulous, famous career that you've done. I mean, you're just, man, amazing. Congratulations and thanks, man.

But, I mean, there's a lot of bad comedy clubs in the lineup with wrong people in the audience. Before you get to be the Theo Vaughan of today, you know, there's a price to be paid to win. You don't win. You know, you're an overnight success. Yeah, I worked my butt off for 30 years being overnight success.

You've worked your butt off for a decade plus to be an overnight success. And just cause somebody found you on Netflix last week, that doesn't mean you just started on that. I don't know how it happened. Right. Yeah.

Theo Von
I mean, even when I think back, like, I used to get all these comments, I would get all the email cards and go before the shows and put them on all the tables so I could get back in touch with people. I would buy, like, the CD or DVD burner and burn a DVD and then sell it after the show. I'd burn, like, and I remember when I got a three disc burner, so I could burn three at a time. Wow. And what'd those sell for, man?

They were probably $300, $400. Wow. But you could get that little. No, I'm not talking about the burner. What were you selling the CDs for?

Oh, the CDs for probably ten, but. I'd take eight and volume discount, too. If you want ten of them to give for Christmas presents, I'll set you up. Oh, I sold one to a lady one time. This was in Mishawaka, Indiana.

She bought one, she drove 3 hours home. She said it didn't work, and she drove back the next day to come and change it. I was like, it's just a dang eight dollar. She spent more in gas. But I guess it was just the point of making sure she got what she paid for, which I understand, but, yeah, when I think about all the different things or missing certain, like, events in people's lives or something at work, like, sometimes I wish I'd had a little bit better balance, but also liked working, you know, I think I really liked it, but, yeah, I don't think it's as easy as having, like, things evolve though, too.

Like, one thing I'm thinking, say if you started pressure washing, right, you're gonna start to learn how to do business. That's something you don't realize. You're gonna learn by starting a business sometimes is that you're gonna learn how to do business, and next thing you know, you might have an employee, and then you're like, oh, wow, now I'm an employer. I've never been an employer. What's that like?

And you just learn, like, you'll do taxes and business, that you'll file for LLC, you'll do all these things, and then you're just building up knowledge. And then part of you, or for me, I notice, will start to bloom a little bit and be like, well, now, what else do I want to do? Because you've seen one thing that you tried and started with, you've seen it work or not work, even. You've learned that, hey, it didn't work out. But, yeah, the more, like, kind of steps you take into doing business, the more that you become somebody who walks like a business guy in some ways.

Dave Ramsey
You change your identity, you change who you are. I mean, I'm not the little redneck hillbilly kid hell raising that I was when I was in high school. I got a lot less hair, for one thing. But I'm also not that guy anymore from that matter. I've been married 43 years.

My wife's not married. The same guy she married 43 years ago. Thank God, because he wasn't much. Yeah. What kind of hair do you have?

Theo Von
Something good? Not as good as yours. Yeah, I never got that, but I had that seventies thing going with the little feathers on the side. You remember those? Yeah.

Dave Ramsey
You don't remember them, but you've seen pictures. Oh, yeah. Problem with the part down the middle is the part gets wide if you're not careful.

Theo Von
Dude, what would you say to, like, somebody who's going into business with a friend? That's one thing I think about a lot of times. What are things like a partnership with a friend? Right. Or starting a partnership with just a new business person.

It could even be a spouse. Like, what do you say? Like what are pitfalls that people can look out for in advance of that kind of stuff? Well, I mean, the biggest thing we run into, we coach about 10,000 businesses with the entre leadership brand, small businesses. And they're anywhere from five to 200 team member size.

Dave Ramsey
And so what I tell those guys, and I'll be speaking to them, you know, we do an event with about 3000 of them once a year. I'll be speaking to them in the next couple weeks here. And so one of the things we tell them is really your beer drinking buddy and you sitting around talking about opening a business. This is a bad idea. One of y'all needs to open it and the other one needs to work there.

And you can pay him out of the profits if you want. You can be generous. But somebody, anything with two heads is a monster. And the only ship on sale is a partnership. So generally speaking, don't do a partnership generally.

Now, if you're going to have friends, work on your team, which, I mean, I got a bunch of them. A bunch of my team is friends. And they either became friends while they're here or they were friends and then they came here. I've got family in the building. My kids work here in their thirties.

And so how do you navigate that? Well, we had to learn from a family business perspective. And it works for friends as well to separate the hat that we wear. And so my hat that I wear with my buddy, you know, it's friend. And, you know, we're having a cigar together or playing golf or we're doing whatever.

It says friend on it, right? Fantasy football. Yeah, whatever. But when we're at work, my hat says CEO, right? And his says, you know, technology or whatever.

And so you do your job, I'll do my job. And I'm gonna treat you like I would treat the other team members. Cause I treat them all nice and good with dignity. I don't yell and scream and cuss at people. So, I mean, we treat them right.

And you're gonna treat me with the same respect that you would if you worked place when the CEO walked in the room. Not that you bow or something like that, but you don't, you don't roll your eyes and go, you don't use friend talk at your CEO. And so you choose, you can't run. Up and tickle them or whatever. Well, that's strange.

But. Yeah, but the, but the idea being that, like my kids, you know, my daughter, Rachel Cruz, is huge personality. Three, four number one bestsellers and, you know, speaks all over America, is constantly on the network tv and stuff. And we've got eight of those people that are personalities that do different things. And so she gets paid not as my daughter, but based on the work that she does there.

And then when she's got three of my grandkids. So when I got Papa Dave hat on when I'm with the grandbabies at Thanksgiving dinner, but when we're here, I'm dealing with her. Everybody in the room knows she's my daughter, but I treat her the same way I would treat Doctor John Deloney or Ken Coleman, the other personalities as well. So you just got to separate that and wear different hats when you're wearing your friend hat, then act that way. And when you're at work, you're wearing this hat and you've got to perform.

I got to perform. And so family doesn't get a pass and friend doesn't get a pass for incompetence or just, I'm not going to come to work today. No, that's not how we, we're all coming to work today. Yeah. If you are going into business with a friend, what are something that people can, like, what discussions need to be had up front?

Theo Von
Say you're going into a partnership with a buddy, you know, so you don't run into lawsuits down the line. Yeah, well, you may. Nothing you do keeps you from, I mean, people can file a lawsuit for anything, even if it's not true. They can just make up something. So it's.

Dave Ramsey
And they do. We've run into that. But what we tell folks, if you're going to do a partnership, make sure you got really good documentation. And the best thing you can do is talk through and have in the document all the bad things that can happen. And a lot of them are D's, divorce, drug use, disinterest.

I don't want work anymore. Disability, death. You know what happens when these things happen? Cause you may be just great working with your buddy, and he owns half the company, but his wife's cuckoo and he dies. Now you're partnered with cuckoo.

That's a bad plan. So you need to have this laid out. What's gonna happen in these situations? You know, I had a guy working here that was one of our top leaders many years ago, got miss, he was driving home, 6 miles home, got lost on the way home, brain lesions. And so he obviously became disabled.

So what happens to that guy? He was one of my top guys. He was, you know, he's paid off the bottom line like he was a partner and just a wonderful man. He's passed away now and, you know, how do you treat him? How do you treat his family in the worst case scenario?

And how you gonna take care of them? Cause you wanna take care of your buddy. Yeah. You don't want your buddy's kids to be homeless cause something happened to him if he's your partner in this case, this guy was one of my right arms, you know? So you just gotta think that stuff through because it's gonna come.

Something's gonna come at you. And if you haven't anticipated it. Cause everybody goes into this stuff like, oh, it's all gonna work. Nothing works like it's supposed to work ever. It never works.

It's never as easy as it sounds when you're sitting and talking about it the first time. Yeah. Did you find yourself having unrealistic expectations about going into business spaces? That's some things that I've struggled with in my life, especially recently. It's like just unrealistic expectations that things are going to work or that they should be a certain way, like not leaving space for anything, really trying to just really have a lot of my own will.

Theo Von
I guess in some ways it is. But also it's just, you know, observing you from the outside, I think you probably suffer from this intense desire to be excellent. Yeah. And all that means is you're excellent and so if you demand that of yourself, it's okay to demand that of the situation of the project, any of the people, I work my tail off. And so I don't hesitate if somebody's not to go, hey, come on, pick it up.

Dave Ramsey
Right. You know, it's not like I'm kicking back and asking you to go down. No, I'm going. So keep up. Right.

And same thing with a project. We get on these projects now. So I do. I have. I still have unrealistic expectations.

I do have a reality perception after 30 freaking years of doing stupid stuff. Yeah. I mean, I'm convinced we've survived about 90% of our ideas. Everything that good that's happened, happened on about 10% of them. But when you're starting it, I mean, you're going for a walk in the morning and, you know, or you're sitting on the dock having a cup of coffee at the lake, and you had this idea, they're all good then, but when you're half a million dollars in and you go, oh, this sucks, this is awful.

And so you've come to the realization that even though we demanded excellence, even though we drove the lane, put the ball in the hoop, even though we didn't have product market fit, something's off, pricing's off, something's off. I mean, but if you're. If you're not trying stuff, you're not growing, so you gotta try stuff, but you're gonna screw up a lot of it even though you demand excellence. But I don't have a hesitation at all expecting excellence and expecting it, you know, why would you enter something you didn't think was gonna work? Of course we think it's gonna work.

Theo Von
Yeah. You know, like a stupid reporter the other day is like, did you ever have any idea it would be this big? And I'm like, well, of course I did. I'm getting people out of debt. There's like, everybody is my market.

Dave Ramsey
You know? Of course I thought it, but what I didn't know is how much work it was gonna be. I didn't have any idea I was gonna have $100 million in payroll. You know, I didn't have any idea that it was going to take that to do it, but I knew there was a lot of need. I knew that it could be big, but I didn't know how bad it was going to be, how hard it was going to be.

Theo Von
Yeah, I think that's the thing that. You know what? That's funny when I hear you say that, because. Yeah, as I like, I started to get busier with stuff that was business. I just wanted to be a comedian, you know, and then got into podcasting.

And then you have an employee, then you have employees, and then people, they have feelings, and, yeah, and you have relationships with them, you know, and so, and so it's like all these things. Next thing you know, it's like, I spend a lot of my day, most of your time gets gone, kind of, because you have, there's another responsibility. And so then I'm just like, man, I'm just, I never, I didn't expect this much more work to come out of, I think just having some goals, you know? Yeah, yeah. I thought I was going to be on the radio and sell some books on getting out of debt, and, I mean, who knew I needed 400 people in a tech department, you know?

Dave Ramsey
And so it's the same thing. You're exactly right. And, but the good news is that, like you said earlier, it's an opportunity to learn, opportunity to grow. That way. You don't just stay in the pressure washing business.

And so I, I still enjoy the stage. I still enjoy the, being on the radio, on the podcast, the YouTube every day. We still do that show every day, 3 hours a day. I still enjoy all that stuff. But I also enjoy running this place.

I'm running it with my son. He's the president now, and he, you know, we had breakfast this morning, and we're having, we're having a lot of fun working on the problems and, you know, looking at the new opportunities and all that. So it's, the entrepreneurial side is fun. Yeah. Elevate every morning with Tommy John second skin underwear.

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See site for details. You know, when we started selling a t shirt online, my friend Kevin made it in his basement, and he would ship it out, and then, and then it grew and people wanted a different shirt, and we put up something else, and then a hoodie, and then we had sometimes to have more, and sometimes we had too much. And all along the way there to help us was ship station. That's right. If you run an e commerce business, you can relate to the amount of work it takes to put it all together.

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That's shipstation.com. And use code t h e o. What do you say to, like, employees who want to talk to their employer about getting a raise or getting, like, what is a good way to approach an employer about that kind of stuff? Like, you know, a lot of stuff in business like that are relationship things. If you'll just switch the moccasins a minute where they're moccasins.

Dave Ramsey
So if you were, if you were the supervisor, are you the owner of the business? How would you want someone to talk to you about it? And so, I mean, I really appreciate when our folks come in and go, hey, you know, I'm making this. And, you know, here's two or three positions in the marketplace that are more for the same position. And so, you know, what I'm curious about is what I can do to be worth what those people are doing, because I want to be worth more to the business.

And if they say it that way, oh, man, I'm like, yeah, okay, here. Yeah, matter of fact, you know, we probably have overlooked that. We probably just need to give you a raise. But maybe, yeah, maybe there's three things you need to do to level up, to be ready to do that. And so it's an opportunity for growth and those kinds of things.

Cause really, if you're an employer, your team has to make you more or save you more than they cost. Or by definition, you go out of business mathematically. And so if you'll look at that as a team member. It's like, how can I add more value than I cost or save more money? And depending on what they're working on, but then I cost, then, you know, it's kind of a no brainer, unless the employer's a jerk and greedy or whatever.

But most employers are just trying to figure it out too. We're just trying to go, especially small business people. I mean, we love our people. They're family to us, and, you know, we want to help them win. We want their kids to go to college.

We want to be with them 20 years and watch them grow up. You know, we want all that. We want good stuff for you, but we also don't want to close because we overpaid everybody and didn't make any stinking money. So then everybody loses. So you've got this balance.

Employers got that stress they're carrying. So if you'll keep that in mind when you're asking, how can I add value that's more than I cost or save you more than I cost, then, like, I've got a lady in logistics. I mean, she saved us several hundred thousand dollars with contract negotiations with our logistics people on the shipping, more than she cost. Well, it's easy to say, yeah, you're worth it. That's a no brainer.

I like sharing with her. I mean, we always tell people around here, if you kill it and drag it home, you know, go out there, kill it, drag it to the cave, I'll share it with you. Let's figure it out. You know, you bring in a million dollars in revenue, we can probably do that up. We can probably figure out something to do with that.

I don't need to take it all home, but also, I don't need to give it all to one person either. So we figured this out, and you can do that when you're adding value. And so just look at it that way. Not like, on the other hand, I had a guy come in years ago, long time ago, and he'd been to school half his life, he had more degrees than a thermometer. And he just, you know, he said, hey, man, you know, at these big companies, people that got this many degrees, they make a certain amount of money.

And he said, I'm not making that here. We need to adjust my income. And I said, well, dude, I'm sorry, this is a small business. You're raised as effective when you are. We don't pay you for degrees.

We pay you for bringing in more than you cost. And right now you're not. So he left and went and worked for corporate America, where they'll pay him for those degrees and they can get away with that, but small business can't do that. Yeah, yeah. What do you say?

Theo Von
Like, what is some of the. Or even just like, to get a little bit more minute with it? Like, what are. Just say, somebody's out there listening. Like, man, I.

I feel like I want to talk to my boss about a raise, or I want to. How do they. What are some. Should they tell themselves certain things to prep themselves to go in there if they. Should it just be comfortable?

Cause it's just a space where a lot of people get really uncomfortable, I think, you know. Yeah. You know, anytime I'm in a situation like that, where I'm uncomfortable, where there's conflict or a negotiation, if you want to call it that, I found that the more options I have, the calmer I am. And so if there's only one thing, I mean, if I don't get this, I'm dead. But if you got, like, six people wanting to hire you and, you know, you want to go in and go, hey, you know, I'd like to stay, and I like it here, and I like, you want it work, but I got all this other stuff.

Dave Ramsey
Your body language changes, you know. Yeah. You're not. You don't have to be cocky about it. You don't have to swagger in or something, but you can come in with a lot of confidence if you've got options, but if you've got it all dialed in, it's just one thing.

And if I don't get this one thing, the whole thing's over. You add this drama, then you tighten up. You can feel that energy in there. And it changes the conversation. Your vocal cords change, even.

Yeah, yeah. And there can be things, even if it's not financial, you could get. Well, is there a possibility that my car could be paid or insurance? I think there's always different possibilities of things you can ask for even that. Yeah.

Theo Von
You know? Yeah. I mean, depending on how the business is structured and what's going on, there's a lot of different things you can do and to help people and do different things. And sometimes we've had situations where someone was just in a financial situation, you know, they got in trouble, and they come in, we sit down, we go over their budget, and we go, okay, number one, we're going to get you in a situation so you're never here again with your budget, how you're handling your money. But then, number two, you know, your house is four payments behind, so we're going to catch the house up.

Dave Ramsey
And so that's just, like, a one time thing. That's not a permanent raise, because the raise wasn't the problem. Their mismanagement at home was the problem. You know, we help them fix the mismanagement, and then we catch them up. Now they're at even now they can run.

Theo Von
Yeah. Would you buy it? Do you still think it's good to buy a house? I'm a homeowner. Right?

Like, for the first time, like, last year or two years ago. And sometimes I'm like, is this the best thing to do? Like, it's tougher to have, like, freedom to just go where you want, you know, you can't just go. And then sometimes it feels like there's so many expenses with a home. Sometimes it feels like.

I'm not saying it's true, but it feels like I'm not really building up any equity or saving money. What do you think about it, Dave? Well, again, the scope over the scope of time, you're making money, without a. Doubt, by owning a home. Absolutely.

Dave Ramsey
I mean, again, I'm old, so I've gotten to see this thing happen. I got my real estate license three weeks after I turned 18 years old in 1978, and the first house I sold was to a buddy of mine from high school, which means he wasn't smart, because he let me sell him a house, and I'm stupid. And you're like, now I'm gonna live in one of the rooms. Buddy, I just want you to know. Straight up, how's this going?

But, yeah. Anyway, I sold him that house for $42,500, and it's on East Ridge over in Antioch, and that house today would be probably 800. Wow. So, you know, and if you bought a house four years ago, you've gotten in Nashville. I mean, you made serious money on it in four years in terms of value increase.

But, yeah, the nickel dime expenses, the messing with the repairs. I mean, crap, the more stuff you own, the more repairmen you have to know. I mean, it doesn't matter whether it's what it is, whether it's got a motor in it or it's cars or houses or boats or all this stuff. Something's always freaking breaking. There's always something screwed up.

Does get the feeling of just the hassle and the aggravation. There's no simplicity to it at all. Your life gets more complicated, so be careful what you wish for. But home ownership in general? Absolutely.

We did the largest study of millionaires ever done in North America. I saw that. And the typical millionaire that we found, 89% of them were first generation, meaning they did not inherit their money. It's not how they became millionaires. So nine out of ten, that's good news for everybody.

We all got a shot, right? And then. But the two things that got them there was simply putting money in their four hundred one k and buying a house and paying it off. And so I'd meet a guy, you know, he's 42 and he pays, he owes, you know, he had a house of six or $700,000 and he had like six or $800,000 in his four hundred one k. And he's 42 years old, so he's worth over a million dollars and he paid off his house.

So home ownership is a key part of the first, you know, one to $10 million of net worth that somebody builds. And so, yeah, I'm huge believer in homeownership. Don't do it stupid, because buying a house you can't afford makes you broker. That's why they call them brokers. But it's a problem.

Theo Von
Yeah, yeah. This is your study right here. How did you come upon these millionaires? You know, we did a detailed study and sent out, not just from us, but we just went to the population and found them. Research firm in New York City looking over our shoulder to make sure our research methodology was tight because we knew we'd get a ton of pushback from, you know, people who think that America's dead and there's no chance for anybody to win.

Dave Ramsey
You can't get up off the bottom. Little man can't get ahead. That whole thing. And so you're saying that's not true. The problem is little man gets ahead every day in America.

We see it right here. And I've met them for 30, 40 years doing this. I run into them and some of them did it because they did our stuff, but some of them just said, you know, I'm going to live on less than I make. And, you know, it was an interesting result. So these are the top five careers of the millionaires that you guys looked at?

Yep. Engineer. What we found was what occurred most often. Okay. Engineer was number one.

The most often occurring among the people we surveyed that were millionaires was engineer. Number two was accountant. Number three was teacher, which is surprising. Number three, management business. Number five is attorney.

Medical doctor didn't even make top five. And we always think of doctors and lawyers, you know. Yeah, but they're actually number six, but they're notoriously bad with money. They make a lot of money, but they're not like. They're like music stars or something.

They're notoriously bad with money. And so that was interesting. We couldn't figure out at first what these things had in common, because they don't seem to have anything in common. What we finally figured out is all five of these are processed people. You follow a process, a set of rules, and you learn the rules, and you follow the rules.

You know, if you. You're an engineer. Yeah. There's only one way to build that building, and it doesn't fall. Right.

If you're an accountant. There's not. You don't. It's not art. It's not art.

You don't get to make up how you do accounting. There's one way to do it. Teachers have a lesson plan. They have to follow. Business has always a set of best practices.

Attorneys. You know, there's the law, and you can only conduct yourself in court a certain way, or the judge will smack you backwards. Right. And so all of these are process people. So they discovered, because of the way the brain worked, that led them into these careers, they discovered the process of living, unless they make living on a budget, starting to invest, being generous, paying off their house, that kind of stuff.

And they follow that process, and that's what got them there. It was not that. The interesting thing is, one third of them, 33%, made less than 100,000 a year. Wow. They were not making bank.

They were not earning their way into it. Really? Yeah, because you would think teachers, you always hear, we got to pay these teachers more, you know? And we do. I mean, that wouldn't be bad at all.

But there's the way the teachers brains work. They do process, and that's the secret sauce. And all of those, I guess you have to have an education for. Well, that's true. We have to go to college.

Theo Von
You have to go to college to be a teacher. I don't know if you have to. You do, definitely. Sorry, teachers. I didn't.

Some of mine didn't go. Some of mine. Some of yours didn't go to class. Some of mine didn't either. Some of mine would be in classes with me.

I was like, what? It's like Ric flair came on here one time, and he said he was in a rehab facility for drugs and alcohol, and he looks over one day at lunch, and one of the doctors is also in the facility. That's not good. Yeah, it's like, well, that's definitely. You're at a hooters, bro.

I'm like, you're just at a hooters? Yeah. That's what the people say a lot of times is. It does feel like that now. There's a lot of energy in the air.

It feels like the american dream isn't possible, that it doesn't exist. Where do you think a lot of that energy comes from? That is the. It feels like that's the consensus these days. Would you agree with that?

It feels like that. There's a lot allowed people that have that. I don't know that it's necessarily a consensus among Americans. Cause consensus means that most people agree with it. Right.

Dave Ramsey
Okay. I'm not sure of that, but there's enough people that are making noise in that regard. But there kind of always has been. I mean, if you go back to the, you know, the seventies with the hippie movement, it was the same kind of thing. Right.

And so there's always been a, you know, my group, the baby boomers, and so there's always been somebody in the group that felt like the system was rigged. Man, we gotta get the system, you know. Yeah, yeah. We can't beat the system. The little man can't get ahead.

And so the neighborhood I grew up in, people say that, you know, and they never said it with, like, enthusiasm. It's like the little man can't get ahead. Like Eeyore's their spirit animal. Oh, yeah, where's my tail? Yeah, that's it.

And I'm stuck. And life's bad, and, you know. No, you're not. Get up off your butt and go get a pressure washer. I mean, there's stuff to do, you know, so.

And most of these people, again, these millionaires, and a million dollars is not. That's not a billion dollars. That's a million. There's a lot of difference. Millionaires don't have jets.

Millionaires don't have seven cars and four houses. No, they've just got a paid for house and some money in their retirement. That's what it amounts to. And so people kind of have a different mindset there, and they think, okay, I can't be like this rock star. Well, you might not be.

There's not as many billionaires as there are millionaires. Yeah. So. But anyway, can it be done? Yes, it can be done.

And there's a lot of loud noises out there. I don't know where that comes from. I think it starts with. And one of the reasons I pushed back and did this study, and then we ended up doing a number one best selling book on it, baby steps. Millionaires pushing back in the marketplaces against those voices is because they're not.

It's not true that you can't get ahead. And when you convince someone that it's true, you're stealing their hope. And you shouldn't steal people's hope, man. That's evil. And so you ought to encourage people to go do stuff now.

You should not encourage them to go on American Idol if they can't sing, okay? But you should. So stop their nightmares, but also encourage their dreams. So this hopelessness that goes with that, I feel stuck. I'll never get a house.

Gen Z. I'm a millennial. I can't get ahead in today's world. You boomers bought your house for two baskets of strawberries, and so now I'm stuck. And you don't understand.

And housing is so expensive. Honey. It's always been expensive. I was doing an interview on NPR the other day, and the lady said, you know, I was riding with the Uber driver, and the Uber driver said his daughter is a dancer and a barista, and she couldn't get a house. And I went, that's been true in every generation.

Theo Von
Yeah. If you serve coffee and you're in Nashville and you're a dancer. Yeah. I think that's. That's just gonna.

Dave Ramsey
That's not. Those are not, you know, career fields that you're gonna make enough to be able to afford a house. That's not. That's not a new thing. That doesn't mean the system has failed.

Theo Von
Yeah. And who's buying Java off a stripper, either, you know, to be honest, I'm not saying. I didn't say what kind of dancer. I didn't. I didn't have any idea there, but, yeah.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I thought. Yeah, I didn't know, but, yeah. Like, who? Also, I guess it would be nice, though, if a stripper just shows up as a nice cup of coffee.

Actually, that's probably not a bad deal. Don't they have that nude barista drive through or something? Where's that at? You know, that is a thing. That's right.

Dave Ramsey
I saw that a while back. That's old news. Yeah, it's old news, but it definitely still. I think some people pretend like it's new news every day when they roll up there. Like, let me see the headlines.

Theo Von
Huh? Not sure exactly how we got there, but. Okay. Well, yeah, but I'm just saying that's a unique business right there. That's kind of wild, you know?

Definitely. But back to your thing. The thing is, hope is a decision, and it's got to be based on you've had the actual reality in your life of going from collecting cans to sitting here. I've had the reality in my life of going from mowing grass to millionaire in my twenties to losing it all. I'm so dumb.

Dave Ramsey
I had to do it twice. So, you know, I've got that reality. And so when someone says it can't be done, I went, wait a minute. Hello. And I don't really.

I'm fairly smart, but I'm not a rocket surgeon. I mean, I don't really know how to do stuff. I just. I'm figuring it out as I go. Right.

And so I think anybody can do it. No, it's good to hear. Yeah, I think people having a hope like that is important, you know? And I think that's. Yeah, it's just really important to hear that.

Theo Von
That, yeah, if you take away somebody's hope. Cause I guess that's what a lot of this, these loud voices are doing, right? I never thought about that that much. They're just trying to take away your hope. Cause once they have your hope, they can kinda keep you there.

Dave Ramsey
I feel like if they're running us, if they're running a game, you know, and they're manipulating, that's one thing, and that's particularly evil, but the other one is just, they really have lost hope. And so they're angry and they don't want, and they want to loudly proclaim that it's not possible, which makes them feel okay, that they're not winning, that they haven't gone and done something yet. And. Because winning is hard, man. It's hard.

Theo Von
Yeah, it takes a lot of work, man. Yeah. I was talking to head Kid Rock was on a couple weeks ago, and he was talking about how, yeah, if you want to, if you want to have success, you're going to have to probably work 60 hours a week. 60 to 80 hours a week. He was saying for a period of.

Dave Ramsey
Time, not your whole life, right? I mean, we started this thing, man. I was 16 hours. My wife had, you know, and she's like, I was a single mom for two years, you know, you were gone. I was on the road doing book tours.

I was out speaking everywhere. I was going crazy, going to cities, trying to get radio stations to carry the show back when talk radio was the thing. And that's how we all got started, was in talk radio. Oh, yeah. Do you ever meet Paul Harvey?

No, I didn't. No, I didn't. That was a so cool. I know y'all's timeline iconic is off. Yeah.

Yeah. I knew all the guys that are current Rush and Sean Hannity and all those guys are all contemporaries, and they're all friends and, you know, people that have been around the business like that, but. And a lot of the new guys that are doing really good work, too. But, yeah, but anyway, that, you know, we're just out there hustling, man, and you gotta leave the cave, kill it, drag it home. And my wife grew up on a farm, so she's like, yeah, hard work's how you do this, so get after it.

Now. You can't maintain that it was two years. It wasn't 2020. I would have lost my family. You know, you can't maintain relationships.

My kids would have been messed up. And so by the time my kids got on up, you know, I didn't miss a prom. I didn't miss a hockey game. You know, I didn't miss whatever, the big games. I mean, little stuff.

I'd be gone during the week, but, you know, but we started putting these dates on the calendar, and we would book our events around them. You couldn't book on top of that. And I still do that. Yeah. When people talk about.

Theo Von
When people talk, like, you hear a lot of discussion these days about how inflation is going, is getting so. Is growing so fast. I guess, that it's not that the minimum wage isn't keeping up with it. It feels, like, detrimental. Like, if you, like, it feels sometimes impossible.

If you look at the minimum wage, you're like, how is this going to. It would feel impossible almost. I feel like if you were trying to take care of a family or something on that, you know. Well, truthfully, minimum wage has never, I don't think, since even it was formed in the seventies. I don't think any time in history minimum wage has been enough to take care of a family.

Dave Ramsey
So you've always had to think beyond minimum wage. If you wanted to excel, if you wanted to have, you know, a, build some wealth or b, just take care of a family, those kinds of things. So minimum wage is not designed. Entry level jobs are. That's not designed.

What's more disturbing than minimum wage is that wages in general, average household incomes have not kept up with inflation. And so that's alarming. That's more alarming because that's the whole population. It's not just this segment that enters entry level stuff at minimum wage. Because, you know, if we go all the way back to minimum wage, I'm cutting grass for $3 a yard in 1972, okay, a thousand.

There were dinosaurs in the yard. We had to get them out of the yard. But you know, I mean, 1972, $3 a yard, but minimum wage was a buck 65. My buddy's working at, you know, Burger King, flopping whoppers, and he's making a buck 65. If I can cut that three dollar yard in an hour, I'm making double minimum wage at twelve years old.

And that's how my little math brain was working. So I'm running that mower, you know, I'm going, and so you can even. Cut somebody's yard and just go to the door and be like, hey, just cut your yard. No, I mean, it was my job. They were one of my clients.

I had to go cut their grass. Some people, I bet if you rolled up to my door and knocked on my door and said, hey, man, I just cut your yard, will you give me $10 for it or whatever? Except for that other guy you hired to do it that's coming next week. Yeah, there's a problem with him, but, yeah, but, yeah, but yeah. I mean that you've never, you've always had the opportunity to beat minimum wage.

Theo Von
I see. So you don't want to sit and say, okay, minimum wage is my gauge of whether I can go win. Cause I can go do something that beats minimum wage. Right? So that's kind of a, sometimes that's kind of a political football that gets kicked around a lot, I guess then, you know, it is.

Dave Ramsey
And it enters into this discussion falsely. It's a false narrative where I think the real narrative that is a little bit scary is that wages have not kept up with inflation. And because we've had this unusual surge in inflation and it's blamed on Biden politically, but some of it's his fault, his policy issues, but most of it is just the lingering results of the pandemic. And so the shortage. Shortages of things always drive prices up on anything.

Anything. There's a shortage of prices go up, and there was a shortage of freaking everything. Remember supply chain and all that stuff people talking about? And so everything shot up. Real estate shot up because people sat around in their houses during the pandemic.

And then, you know, when the sun came out and the curve was flattened and all, whatever, you know, and we're all back out. Well, these people all wanted new houses. I mean, they came out of their house like a Baptist after a casserole. They were going for it. They were getting it, you know, so, and house prices, you know, 2021, wow.

That was an artificial thing, though, that was created by the market being dormant and people being trapped. And then this idea of looking around at their house going, this, my house sucks, I need a new house. Boom. They hit the market hard and it's still not recovered from that. It's still got the ripple of that.

And some of the other things are hit that way too. But there's some things, again, policy issues, but most of it is just the smoothing out of that. And Trump nor Biden should get the credit nor the blame. It was more how the marketplace was functioning. So you think that inflation will come down?

Theo Von
Is that the right term to talk about inflation? I do. I don't think it's permanent. Again, to the extent that the politicians leave their hands off of stuff, but both parties. But the, as the marketplace will smooth out again, demand, prices go up.

Dave Ramsey
Number of people want to pay that? No. So now demand goes down, which brings prices down, you know, so the thing smooths out. Eventually you find this equilibrium, this balance. And the problem is the shortage drove the prices up and the shortage remained.

And then people's appetite, they just kept coming, man, like freaking piranha. And that the marketplace surges is what drove the pricing as much as anything. Now, that's not true in oil and gas at the pump, that's a whole different subject. That's not true on a few other things, but housing for sure, you know, bread, grocery store cart. Yeah, all that for sure.

Theo Von
You always hear about the national debt, right? People talk about that all the time and it just keeps going up, apparently. Is that a real thing that affects. It almost seems so fictional now that it's like, is it a real thing that could cause something to happen in our lives? Or like, is it like, what is it?

You know what I'm saying? Cause everybody's like, you know, it's gazillions. They're making up amounts of money now. Yeah, it's a whole. Some kid told me yesterday it was 65 zillions.

And I'm like, that's how much it is. I mean, right now it's 34. It's a number that I don't even know. How can you teach kids numbers in school, but you can't even teach them a number that would let them explain the national debt. Yeah.

Dave Ramsey
You know, I went through a period of time in my twenties when I was first starting to do this stuff, late twenties, that I was worried that the hockey stick of this thing, the growth of the debt, was going to cripple the economy and even cause a complete collapse. And, you know, so I've observed people in my world write books on the end of the world. You know, here's the economic end of the world coming economic into the world. Here's the. And they keep being wrong.

So I don't want to write that book. So is it concerning? Yeah, it's concerning because anytime a group of people, us keep spending more than we make and we keep electing people that don't have any ability to curb their appetite for our money, it's, phew, man, that philosophically, spiritually is scary. Mathematically is scary. Is it going to cause a crash?

Apparently not, because, I mean, I've been doing this a long, I've been watching this thinking when, but it's not, and obviously what the national debt, what it does do factually is it robs money from the economy that could be producing something. And so, because what happens is the government issues a bond. That's how they finance the debts, treasury bonds, t bills and t bonds. And so they issue that bond and then an investor goes and buys that government bond because they're going to pay him interest on it. If that investor had done something else in the marketplace with that money to produce something rather than sit on this bunch of fat in DC, it would have jammed up the economy.

Theo Von
I see. So it's stealing money from the economy in that sense. And it's becoming a large, the interest only on it is becoming a larger and larger portion of the, quote, budget, unquote, as if they've got a budget.

Yeah, I put money into kind of t bills. I'm kind of a say, oh, it's you.

Dave Ramsey
It was you. Okay. Cause there's a lot of me, I don't trust the stock market that much. I feel like it's so manipulated these days. I feel like there's like darker forces that are like, you can use the media to control it and like can create articles to affect how the market goes.

Theo Von
So that's kind of like, so I prefer something like a t bill or something like that. That's just like a safe. I know what it's gonna be pretty much. Well, there's always been falsehood and manipulation in the market. There's always been, to a degree.

Do you think it's still a safe place for people to invest? I do. I've got millions and millions of dollars in mutual funds. So the way to offset that is number one. If you don't.

Dave Ramsey
I believe it's there. I believe it's a very small percentage, and I don't know where it is exactly. I can't point and say that guy, that one, that girl, that thing right there. I don't know exactly where it is. I mean, is there people that fluff the thing?

Absolutely. They fluff it. Absolutely. Is there people that you know that right before the news article goes out, they sell their stuff? Insider trading.

It happens all the time. Sometimes they get caught and go to jail. It's illegal. But does it happen? Oh, it's common practice.

Is it so widespread that it makes the investment improper or imprudent? No, I don't believe that. Otherwise I wouldn't be investing.

So I invest. So, if I'm in a mutual fund, I'm in 90 to 200 different stocks. And it's stuff that you drive by every day. It's McDonald's or Home Depot or Dell computer or Apple or Exxon or whatever, right? That's in that room or whatever.

All that. And so in those 90 to 200, is there some percentage of that problem going on? Yeah, there is some percentage, but not enough that it. In general, those 90 to 200 companies, I'm spread out wide enough, diversified. I'm spread out enough that I'm catching all the good.

And it's more than offsetting the falsehood that's out there, and it's more than offsetting that. So, as Home Depot makes more money, then I'm participating as whoever, Apple makes more money than, I'm participating because I'm one of the owners of the company. Tiny, tiny little bit, when I own, you know, in that 90 to 200 stocks. So that's how I don't buy single stocks, mainly because they're higher risk and much more volatile, and you're much more prey to. What if that was the company that was screwing around?

Then, boom, you know, you bet the whole dad gum farm on that one horse race and that guy fell out. No, we're not doing that. So I don't like that much risk. So I like the diversification of mutual funds. That's where my, all my retirement is.

It's what we recommend, what we teach. So I only do two kinds of investing. I buy real estate that I pay cash for, and I buy mutual funds. Call them what you want, baby. Them knee knockers, them little baby jugglers, them thigh slappers, them nuggets, whatever.

Theo Von
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Find your social sweet spot with better help. Visit betterhelp.com t h e o today to get 10% off your first month. That's better help. Betterhelp.com theo. If someone had like a, they have a, you know, some money, they're thinking about putting it into the market, or they're thinking about buying, like, maybe a small apartment building or something like that.

Do you feel like that's a good choice for people? Yeah, I don't get in partnerships on them like we discussed earlier. I just buy them. But, yeah, real estate makes more. If it's good income producing real estate, you'll make more on it than you will in mutual funds.

Dave Ramsey
Mutual funds average 1012 percent real estate, you ought to make 17 to 20, including the tax benefits. The appreciation is going up in value and the cash flow. Those three things do it. The problem with real estate is it's a pain in the butt. You got to deal with it.

The roof leaks. Whether it's commercial office building, whether it's house, doesn't matter. And so, and I've got a lot of both. And. But there's all, you know, there's a tenant that doesn't pay or does pay or it's empty, and I can't get a tenant.

You know, there's a lot of hassle. There's a hassle factor to dealing with. Even if you hired management. I mean, my son in law runs all the Ramsey real estate stuff, and he and I grew up in real estate, so I love working with him on it, but he handles the day to day to day. I don't screw with all that today, but, but it's a pain.

So this idea that I hear this stuff on social media stuff, real estate's passive income bull crap. Nothing passive about it. Your butt's active. I mean, you're right in the middle of it or you're getting screwed. One of the two.

Theo Von
Yeah. You get in? Oh, yeah. I got into some real estate, and it was a night, it was so much extra work that I didn't realize, you know, complaints. Somebody's Airbnb in, in the building.

Somebody's, um, you know, started a fire or something, you know, because they didn't want to use the heat in their unit or whatever. It's like, you can't just do a fire like you got a. Need a fireplace. Yeah. Yeah.

It's crazy. People just. Yeah, people just. Yeah. Doing fires.

Yeah. Just stuff like that. I think a lot of alarming stuff. But, yeah, there's no easy real. There's no easy way to it.

Dave Ramsey
Well, I mean, the T bill, you know what you're talking about? That's, you buy it and you forget it. They send you a check. It's not as big a check, but there's no hassle. Yeah.

You know, mutual funds, little more risk because you were in there with all these companies, there could be something going on. Even if you're in 90 to 200 and limited the risk by spreading it out, you still got more risk than you would in the t bill. But you're gonna make a little more. You want a little more hassle, go to real estate. You're gonna make a little more.

So you don't want to be, you know, I try to just say it's a risk return ratio. If I'm going to take some risk and have some hassle, I want some extra money for that. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's the stress it causes.

Theo Von
Like, do I want to be. Because I'll notice. Yeah. Like, some stocks is too much stress for me because I'll check them too much, and I don't like it. And then it's like, I've spent, you know, 30 minutes of my day, dang, checking stocks, and that's money time.

I could have just had him doing my work. Yeah. I buy mutual funds, set it, and forget it. I don't even know what the market has done this year. Wow.

Dave Ramsey
And I do this for a living. Wow. I don't keep up with it because I'm not betting on this week. I'm saying, okay, look at what the stock market has done since 1980, since 1990, since 2012. Look at what I would have made if I'd have put $10,000, what it would have made.

And that's how I'm playing. It is the long haul. The long play. Wow. God.

Well, there it is, 1992, $1,000 would have turned into $5,000. Was there ever a stock that you bought, Dave, where you were like, man, I wish I would have held onto that. You just remember, like, even when you were younger, was it one? No, I never bought single stocks ever. The only dumb thing I did is I bought gold one time.

This buddy of mine, again, you know, these buddies in my twenties, he was making money, and he had this gold guy that we could buy options on gold, which we don't even buy in the gold, just buying the right to buy the gold. And he said he put in $5,000, and if it goes up, the option goes from five k to my money. And 14 times in a row, this guy had hit you, put it in, and he had predicted, and he said, okay, we need to go in right now. Put 5000. I dropped $5,000 in there.

15th time he didn't hit. It's all or nothing. So I lost the whole 5000 and no sign of 50, right? No. So I'm done.

Theo Von
You think it was a pyramid scheme or not? No, no. It's an option. That's how options work. It's an Uber high risk situation.

Dave Ramsey
It's super crazy. It was just gambling. I mean, it's just gambling. You ever been in a pyramid scheme? No, I've been in a couple.

Are you talking about multi level or pyramid? I mean, I don't know what it was. Whatever level it was, I lost on it. I know that. You didn't get off the ride fast enough.

Theo Von
Oh, yeah, no, we had. Yeah. Oh, yeah. One. I was a child.

I got an involved. I'd saved up. I mean, probably most of the money I had. And I got into this thing and it was a scam, and. Oh, that was horrible.

God, that killed me. And then another time they had a dude when somebody was selling, like, glitter mining or something in our area, and they sold a bunch of shares of that shit and screwed everybody. I remember in the eighties, everybody decided that emus were gonna be the new meat.

Dave Ramsey
All these rednecks are buying up. This is unbelievable. All these rednecks are pulling are making emu farms. And so, like, it's like ostrich meat, right? And so they were.

Theo Von
Oh, come on, brother. So they were. It's. It was a big deal, and a lot of people decided they were gonna sell everything and open an emu farm. Really?

Dave Ramsey
And. Cause for the meat, it's like ostrich meat. It's like. I don't know. It's a big bird meat.

Big white meat. So just bring him a picture of an emu brother. I can't find a dang eat. You can't find one now, I guess. Yeah, you got the commercial right?

There he is. Scroll down a little bit. Let me see what we got. See, he's got a little meat on. Oh, gosh.

Yeah, yeah, I. Yeah, so, yeah, it's hilarious, though. These rednecks in around Tennessee, they were having emu farms. Have you ever had any of it? No, I managed to stay out of that scam.

That was a. One of those fad things that didn't work, so. Yeah, that's a damn beanie babies. Everybody's collecting beanie babies, dude, I remember Beanie babies. They were gonna get rich on beanie babies.

Theo Von
Oh, yeah. And now they have two garbage bag. Women fighting, like, cage match fighting in the airport gift shop to get the beanie bag. Remember the princess Diana Beanie bag? There it is.

Dave Ramsey
Yeah. Supposed to go for like $10,000. Never happened. Never once? Nope.

Sorry. Oh, my dog plays with them now. We had the whole freaking collection. Not because it was an investment, but because my wife was freaking obsessed and I was traveling, and she's every airport, she sends me in there. So, yeah, see?

$49,000 on ebay for the princess. Never sold, though. No, never sold thing. Never sold. Didn't I?

Theo Von
Never sold. Yeah, they had. My buddy won his family's football pool. It was like their NCAA. Their college football pool.

They did. Every year he won was like, $600. Dude, he was so excited. He could have changed his life. And instead, his mom convinced him to buy a Christmas village of, like, rare Christmas village houses.

Dave Ramsey
Oh, yeah. They're back. They're back. They're coming. They're happening right now.

Theo Von
My buddy, to this day, is. He's big into Christmas houses. No rent. Renting much. The tenants don't make much noise.

And the streetlights are always on. Electric bill's low. Running into a lot of issues. But, God, that just broke him, man. He never recovered from that.

Dude. I met a dude yesterday in Tennessee. He said he took out an $800 life insurance policy on his wife. I'm like, $800? That's pretty insulting.

Dave Ramsey
Well, yeah, that's what I felt like. Dude, do not tell her that. I was like, she's gonna be pissed off. He's like, well, my truck payment's $7.99. A month, so that solves it.

Theo Von
Yeah. Speaking of, like. Yeah, like, kind of traps, I guess. Like, what are, like. So a lot of things you've spoken out against crypto.

I know. I'm not a crypto fan. I lost $2,000 in crypto, just like every one of my friends did when it first came out. Right. Like, nfts, things like that.

That kind of pop up that really. They're almost. To me, some of them seem like the modern day pyramid scheme in a way. Emu farm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a lot of emu farms, baby. What do you. How do you. Why are more people falling susceptible to these types of things? Do you think we always have?

Dave Ramsey
It's human nature. We want. We're wired by God to look for the shortest path, to look for optimum, to look for the best, the quickest, the easiest. And there's nothing wrong with that. That makes our lives better, because we create inventions and things that make our lives better.

That very wiring created the automobile or created the. The iPhone or created things that make our lives better. And so that's a good wiring, but where it gets off track is where we think we can short circuit a proven process, and it causes you to jump from investor to speculator. An investor is always the crockpot. They're always the long play they're always saying, okay, I'm going to invest in mutual funds.

I don't care what stock market did this year, I'm thinking, what's it going to be in 20 years? What's it going to be in 15 years, and how am I going to be doing? And so I'm thinking, long term, the speculator needs a quick flip. And so bitcoin has never really been about investing. It's a speculation, it's a short term play.

No one bought that and said, you know, in 20 years, this is going to look brilliant. No one did. They all thought, quick money, easy money. No one flips houses with nothing down that they saw on TikTok. You know, quick flip, quick flip.

When you, when a builder even builds a home that does that, they're not custom building. They call it a spec house. It means speculation. They're speculating that they're going to sell that house. It's a short term play.

They're not building that house and that subdivision hoping to sit on it ten years, they're building it hoping to sit on ten days. Right? And so it's speculation. So where you get confused, where you mess up is where you can fall into scams and get rich quick and violate basic investing principles is when you move from investing, which is long term mentality, to speculation, which is quick hit. I want quick money, easy money, quick money, easy money.

And that's that wiring, that's positive wiring gone astray, become toxic. And so, in a sense, that's what happened to me when I went broken real estate, because I was buying houses. I was doing flip this house before Chip and Joanna were born. And so that's what we were, we were getting it. And I've owned like 2000 houses in my life.

So I was, I was churning them, man. But I was doing it on 90 day notes, short term notes, because I was not buying them as a long term play. I was buying them, fix them and flip them. And the bank got sold to another bank. They look up and they can call my notes in 90 days.

So they called a million too, in 90 days. And it crashed me and said, because I was a speculator, I wasn't an investor. Now, I would have told you I was a real estate investor, but the actual definition of the term investor means longer term horizon, long window. And so if it's, thank God, it's Friday, oh, God, it's Monday. If I got to move it this calendar year or in the next two calendar years to make money on it, then you're playing the roulette wheel.

You're playing Texas hold'em. That's speculation. You're gambling then, and that's a different thing. It's okay if you want to do some of that, but quit calling it investing, because then it causes you to put too deadgam much money in it because you lose your. But then, and that's where you get scammed is you're looking for something for nothing.

Quick, a quick turn, double my money fast. Cause I don't think I can get there long term. So I'm so desperate and so scared, so fearful, so greedy that I gotta get it right now. And that's what I was doing, and it worked. I got a million dollars worth of stuff, but I didn't keep it.

Cause I built a house of cards. Obviously, when you work, sometimes it's weird. Like, people ask me, like, what hobbies do I have and stuff. But the weird thing is, like, a lot of my hobbies became my jobs, you know? Is that kind of what happened for you?

Theo Von
Or do you still, like, have things that you like to do outside of? You know, as I got further down in the business in the last several decades, I actually do have things I do outside of here. But in the first few decades, it was just. You're right. I get great joy out of the stuff we do.

Dave Ramsey
Yeah, we help people. You know, a lot of people are scared. They're broken, they're about to lose their house. They've been through bankruptcy. Their marriage is on the rocks, whatever.

We're able to help them. And that's, you know, it's wonderful. I have a lot of fun doing the show still again. I mean, once you've been on stage with an audience, our gig's a different gig, but it's still, you know, it's fun to be with people. Yeah.

And it's fun to be people that want to be there, you know, and it's addicting in that regard. So I enjoy that whole thing. I enjoy that scene. I enjoy running the business, but also have picked up a few things away from here so that I. Distractions.

And I don't know if they're hobbies, I guess, but I end up collecting stuff or whatever, doing that kind of stuff and. Yeah, but there's nothing wrong with, especially in the first couple decades, with almost all your energy doing that other than family stuff. Yeah. What are some, like, obviously, you've learned a lot of financial lessons over the years. Like, what were some personal lessons that you had to learn along the way, too?

Theo Von
That like, kind of helped. Like, was there some things that have kind of stood out to you? You feel like, you know, I.

Dave Ramsey
Yeah, I didn't know how to lead. I mean, like you said earlier, we were talking about hiring an employee. I just. I was so dumb that I thought if you hired people, that they would, like, work. Yeah.

Theo Von
They knew what to do. Well, no, that they would just actually work. I thought they would just show up. I thought they'd be on time. I didn't think they'd steal.

Dave Ramsey
I was so dumb that I thought all that. And so I just, like, if you could fog up a mirror. Yeah. Let's go do this together, man. Come on.

Get in here. I'll put you on payroll. Let's go. And then I got all this crazy and all this drama and all this other stuff. I was horrible, and I was pretty much a boss.

Bosses push, leaders pull. And, man, when I was 32 years old, I didn't get that. And we hired our first person when I was 32. And so, you know, over the years, I've had to learn to not be behind, because, I mean, if you're a boss, you're just at the back of the cattle and cracking the whip, and it's like you're moving at the speed of the slowest cow, you know, like the slowest common denominator in the room. You know, it's like, get on.

If you're the leader, you're standing at the train going, we're leaving. Anybody want to get on? Because this thing's going right, you better keep up because we're going hard, and you better get it. And so I had to get around front of that and say, all right, I'm gonna lead. And then I went to this christian conference with a guy named John Maxwell, who's become a great friend.

He's one of the top leadership speakers in the world. Is he really? And he said, you know, you should be a servant leader. And I went, say what? I'm the one writing the check.

I ain't the servant. I'm confused here. And I thought he meant subservient. And what he meant was, you got to love your people, and you got to care what's best for them. And sometimes that means telling them hard truth that they don't want to hear.

Sometimes it means they can't work anymore because they can't behave, you know, that kind of stuff. And so I realized I had been serving my kids by making them brush their teeth against their will, you know, so they have some teeth later that's serving them. So that's a servant leader, right? And so, yeah, I'm good with servant leadership. And so I had to learn that.

Again, I sucked. I was a horrible boss because I just, I was going so hard. I thought everybody else was going hard, and I was pissed off because they weren't keeping up. And I'm like, well, you hired a bunch of donkeys and expect to win the dad gum Kentucky derby, and no donkey ever won, man. So we had to look for thoroughbreds and have a donkeyctomy, and it was a problem, man.

And so, yeah, I sucked. And I'm. I mean, I'm a world class leader today. It's one of the things I'm best at. I love our people, I love our team, the way this place functions and operates.

It's one of the best places in Nashville to work, probably the best places in the world to work. And it's not perfect. We screw up, but we treat people right. We care about them, and we expect high things out of them. We expect them to get it, and they do.

We got a great team. Wow. Yeah. I think that's something that I did have, solely, like, had to. Yeah, that's been a tough journey for me.

Theo Von
Like, even just having a few employees, it's like you're suddenly. Yeah, you're suddenly a boss. You didn't even want to be a boss. Like, some of that, too, I think just a realization, like, oh, I'm the boss, I guess, you know? And they're like, well, yeah, you are.

And I'm like, I was just trying. I was just trying to get crap done, you know? Who knew, you know? And I needed somebody to do that thing, and you brought you in to do that thing, and then you brought all your crap with you when you did that. Now I gotta deal with your crap.

Dave Ramsey
So, you know, and that's, that's been a 30 year journey, and so that's huge. Boss versus leader. That's. So that's really. It's such a good way to look at it.

Theo Von
And would you go to conferences and stuff to learn about that stuff, too? Cause I'm sure you had to evolve in that space. I did. I read like a maniac, and so I'm gonna read, you know, leadership books, business books. I still read like crazy.

Dave Ramsey
I love to get new information in this digital age. An old guy like me, I got, I get, I get. I'm sitting in these meetings with these studs, and I. I don't even know what they're saying, and they work for me, I'm like, what did you just say? So I have to keep up.

I mean, I gotta work hard, I gotta pedal hard just to stay on the bike. And so, yeah, I still do that stuff and I still hang out. And the good news is some of the guys that are the best writers and thinkers in the world have become friends over the years now. And so they're my running buddies. So we hang out, I get to talk offline with them, and they still teaching me stuff.

It's cool. What about, like, fiction? You read anything like that ever? Oh, yeah, always. All the Jack Carr stuff.

You read, Jack? Yeah, yeah, I read all that stuff. And Brad Thor is a friend. Read all his stuff. All those spy novels and stuff.

Fiction makes airplanes fly fast. Yeah, it does, huh? Yeah. Jack Carr. That's wild, dude.

Theo Von
Yeah, I was like, a big John Grisham fan when I was growing up. Yeah, I read all of his, every one of his. And Daniel Silva's the guy. Other guy, he writes like the character of the prognostic is an Israeli Mossad spy versus Jack Carr's is a former SEAL team. And Brad Thor's is all same stuff.

Dave Ramsey
They're all former delta, former seal, or whatever, that kind of stuff. So it's in the same genre. And I've read all of his stuff, too. But again, I do read fiction. Something you like?

Theo Von
Yeah. When people look at, like, there's an election this year, it's an election year. When people look at the election, do you feel like who they vote for could have an effect on their future finances? Sure. Sure.

Dave Ramsey
Not as much as the candidates would like you to believe, right? It turns out that I've done stupid stuff under every single white House, and I have done smart stuff under every single White House, and I've increased our size of our business under every single White House. None of them have been dumb enough to destroy my life, and none of them have ever sent me any money. Most of them don't even send me my money back. So what happens at your house is way more important than what happens at the White House.

But, yeah, policy does matter. It changes whether we've got three dollar gas or five dollar gas.

And that matters because if you're running a heat and air company and you got 30 trucks out there and you're trying to feed your family, trying to feed that guy who's on that truck's family, and the gas price doubles on that, running that truck down the road to fix somebody's heating air, it changes the whole p and L. On that company. And then that guy wants a raise, and it ain't there because some duber at the White House turned the faucet on or off on the oil. And that stuff matters. That shows up.

And so, you know, policy does matter in that regard because it affects things. And policy during stressful times matters because whether people feel Ronald Reagan didn't do anything special, but he made people feel like it was going to be prosperous. Whether you agree with him or not, he was a motivator. He was aspirational. And so.

Theo Von
That's a good point, huh? He didn't really have any magic wands that he waved at the Reaganomics or an art laugher that wrote the reaganomic stuff. Lives here in town. He's a friend of mine. He was on Reagan's cabinet at the time.

Dave Ramsey
He's in his eighties. Wonderful man, brilliant man. But Art Lafford did not turn America around. Ronald Reagan. But Ronald Reagan made people believe again.

And when you can believe instead of believe, everything's bad. It's horrible. It's divisive. We're not going to do anything. People sit at home and they don't do things.

And then the economy starts to. That stuff does have an effect, but you can win in any situation. So vote for who you want to vote for, but don't vote for them. Cause they're gonna fix your life. Cause they're not.

Theo Von
That's a great statement. Yeah. In the end, it really comes down to you, doesn't it? You still believe that? It really seems like that.

Dave Ramsey
Yeah, I really do. John Stossel wanted to interview me many years ago, back when he did 2020 and all that stuff. And he was a scary dude. Cause you know, if he's gonna come at your throat or whether he's gonna be a friend in an interview. And we went down there and we were sitting offstage our, on stage, I guess, doing the interview, and he said, you know, I've read all your stuff, and I'm.

And he goes, I think. I don't think you're as much of a conservative as you think you are. He said, I think you're a social conservative and an economic libertarian. Okay, I'll go with that. And so, yeah, the economic libertarian would say, you know, if it's to be, it's up to me.

Get up, go mow some grass, get you a pressure washer, get your butt in gear. And, you know, the government's just something you gotta overcome. They're in the way. They're not gonna lift me if I'm waiting on the government to lift me. All I can think about is the DMV line.

I mean, come on, you know? So I'm not so I'm that guy, but it comes out of my scotch irish redneck history, you know? I mean, the scotch Irish have always been fighting everything. They've always been independent. Yeah.

Think of Braveheart, you know, as independent. I have blood pressure, too. Yeah. Always looking for a fight, you know? Always looking to stir something up.

If there's no drama, just make some. And so that, you know, I made a good living doing it, though. Yeah. Where'd you meet your wife? At Dave College.

Theo Von
Oh, you did? Yeah. Marketing class. Nice. And you went to college in Tennessee or.

Dave Ramsey
No, I did. University of Tennessee. You did? We both graduated from UT. Yeah.

Theo Von
Nice. Dude, is there a better place to see a football game than Neyland? Wow, that's a religion. Yeah, it really is. It's.

Dave Ramsey
Wow. It's so sweet of it when they're winning, especially. Kind of nice lately. Yeah, it helps. The past two years has been definitely a good time to get on board.

Not good being with 110,000 people when you're losing because they are angry rednecks. But, yeah, me, I'm one of them. I'm like, I'm pissed, but, yeah. Do you go to some games ever? We had sweet seats for years when our kids were down there, and so we'd go down almost every game, and.

But the kids are grown and got grandkids, and we're traveling, doing other stuff, so we gave those up. But. So I'm not. I'm not mad about it. It just kind of.

That phase went away. Yeah. Watch it on the tv now, but better experience anyway, but, yeah. So where'd you meet your wife at. At school.

Do you remember where? At school? Yeah, yeah, in marketing class. Oh, in class. You saw her, huh?

Yeah. She was cheating off my paper. Was she really? But she was cute, so I thought it was a good idea. Let her look good.

Theo Von
It's your paper. It's your paper, honey, have you ever been approached by, like, I know you've had different, obviously, books and programs for people to achieve wealth and to save their money. Have you ever had a package or something you've taken to, like, a shark tank or to, like, something like that where they've tried to. No, because we kind of bootstrapped every bit of this. It was just like, we make a little money, we try something new with that money, we make a little more money, we try something new with that money.

Dave Ramsey
And again, we've lost a lot of money, done a lot of stupid stuff doing that, but we've also done some things right that have worked. And so, I mean, we're the second largest talk radio show in America, 680 stations, about 10 million listeners on talk radio alone. Hannity's number one. Rush was number one. Hannity was two.

We were three. Rush passed away. Not a good way to get to be number two. But it happened. I mean, he's Elvis.

He invented rock and roll. He invented talk radio. So it was. It was. And both of them did pills, too, I think, to be honest.

Theo Von
But that's. I have no idea. I've done them. But I'm just saying. I have no idea.

Dave Ramsey
But, yeah, anyway, so anyway, we started in that world when it grew and grew and grew and grew. And I remember the day a guy walked in my office and said, hey, we need a podcast. And I'm like, what the flip is a podcast? And he said, why do I need one? He goes, it's the thing.

And, man, it was a long time ago. So we were one of the first podcasts on Apple Way back. Wow. And because a lot of people on talk radio didn't want to put it on podcasts because it competed with their radio stations. Right.

Theo Von
So then you're competing with your own. Numbers and you're messing up everything. And, you know, now, I mean, Spotify Apple, we're number one, two, three on Apple. Right in there, hovering. Me and Rogan and some NPR murder mystery stuff or something, you know, like, always hanging out in the top ten there.

Dave Ramsey
So we're bouncing around in there, and we've had a billion and a half downloads now. And so. And I'm like, what's a podcast? So, yeah, you start, you know, you start new stuff. And then YouTube, good God, the numbers on YouTube are just cray crazy and so gone up into the right hockey stick.

And so now those two have now eclipsed the talk radio business. And so now I'm a podcaster, apparently. At least you evolved with it, though, you know? Well, yeah, I mean. Cause we're platform agnostic.

I mean, wherever the action is, that's where we're gonna be. And we didn't abandon. We didn't. We're still dancing with the girl that brought us, you know, so we're still with talk radio, still got 680 stations, still love talk radio, but. And, you know, we're on SiriusXM.

SiriusXM came on. It was two companies, Sirius and XM. We went on both of them, and everybody's mad. You can't be on both and be on talk radio. I'm like, yeah, I'm on everything.

I'm on podcast. And then we put on YouTube and then, you know, Facebook live. I mean, crap, we'll try anything. TikTok. Good.

God help us. We're on TikTok. We're all on. So, you know, working with the Chinese, they say that's it, man. Man, Tic Tac, here we go.

So. But the. But, hey, you know, and. Cause you never know which one of these things is going to become the next MySpace and just disappear. And you don't know which one of these other things.

So I don't want to bet this whole thing and all these 1100 people are counting on me on one single platform. So we're always innovating, always changing and moving. Yeah, it's because, yeah, you kind of don't know what the. Yeah, you don't know what the next thing can be that's really going to go well. There was something you said a second ago where, like, you made some money and then you put it back into the company, right?

Theo Von
Or you tried something new with it that I think is a big, like, one of the craziest things that ever happened to me was I was podcasting in my apartment, and a guy came along and he said, hey, man, I'm gonna give you some money. You can get you a studio, you know, and, oh, he bought some ads from me. He said, I'm gonna pay some ads for a pizza place. It was in my neighborhood. And he said, I'm gonna give you some money.

You should use it to get a studio. And my first thought was, I wanna keep that money. You know, I never had any money. I'm keeping this money. I'm not getting a studio.

I'll just do it in my apartment till it fades out, and then I'll have the money I made from the ads. But he was right. He just saw that thing that I couldn't see of putting the money back into getting myself a studio, which then, now I have a studio. It's a little bit of a different place when people come. It's more of a business.

And that, you know, it was so hard for me to see that, though. You know, well, and we get to see, I mean, those of us that are fanboys of your work, we get to see a whole nother side of you that, you know, their stand up and then these long form interviews that you're doing, and I hear us sit. Who knew that was gonna happen. But I mean, I've seen a bunch of these long forms that you've done and so it's a whole different thing. And it's where people start to recognize what those of us in the business of being on stage or in front of a microphone have known.

Dave Ramsey
We know for those of you out there, you don't know this necessarily, but most of the top flight comedians are very bright. You know, comedy's hard. It's one of the more hard art forms to do acting. You can be dumb as a rock and be an actor. Cause you just try to be somebody else.

That's all you're doing. It's a process. Sorry. You actors that are friends of mine, sorry. But I mean, comedy is, you're messing with people's lives.

You're messing with every part of things that mean something to them and you're twisting it at just the right way with the right hesitation, the right move of the sentence structure and everything. It's very difficult. We doing motivational speaking or teaching. I teach our guys, if our audiences, if we got 2000, 3000 people in the audience, if they don't laugh every seven minutes, we're gonna lose them. And we're not comedians, but we have to study what you guys do.

So getting to see you do this has brilliant, it's a smart thing to do. It's the same thing. Brogan did the same thing. I mean, he moved from, you know, comedy into those long forms. And what everybody loves about Joe is the fabulous interviews.

Yeah, and I'm a fanboy of his. I watch a lot of his. He's so good at learning information. He's so good at retaining information. He knows a lot about a lot of stuff.

Theo Von
Oh, if you stop. I had dinner with him the other night after the UFC fights and, yeah, you're just ready to learn, brother. You better, if you're gonna sit down with Joe Rogan, you better be ready to learn something. It doesn't matter if it's over a bowl of soup, a microphone. Yeah, he just loves learning, sharing information.

He really is kind of like a library, you know? But what is the mentality that people, it's more about like the mentality of, like, investing back in yourself, you know, because there's that scape, there's that fear that I want to just save this, you know? Well, that, yeah. If you realize that no matter what you try, some of it's not going to work, give yourself permission to fail, then you say, okay, we're going to put this money and we're going to take some home and enjoy it and be generous with it in the community and invest some of it. But we're also going to invest some of it in the best investment, which is, you know, the freaking goose that's laying the golden eggs.

Dave Ramsey
Let's have lots of these geese. Let's figure out different things we can do, different ways we can move this business around. Do we move to podcasting? Do we move to YouTube? Do we build a studio?

Do we build an event center? Do we to create an environment that is a whole different thing than when I rent a theater somewhere else, which we do both. And we'll always go to these other cities and always be on tour, always do these things. But the events on this campus feel way different to the customer when they come in here because we can control all the freaking variables. I mean, we're Nick Saban playing home game.

Yeah, I mean, we know who cuts the grass. We know who dialed the microphone in. I got a two decibels drop from the front of the stage to the back of that auditorium. Wow, 2500 seats. It's tight and it's dialed in.

And you know how that sound crap is. Sounds even worse in our world because we're voiced music. You can just turn it up if the sound's bad, you know. But man, you get in these auditoriums, you got bounce back, stinking hockey arenas, stinking, hitting the concrete wall, coming back at you. You can hear yourself three times and you can't even tell what your timing is on stuff.

Yeah, that's the word talking about. So we've got all that dialed in. That's a reinvestment back into something we know is going to work. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point, man. Yeah, I think that was a tough thing.

Theo Von
It was tough for me to, like, realize that one of my greatest assets can be myself, you know, and be like, what if I really want to invest in something, to invest in myself? How does generosity play? Like, there's a lot of fear around generosity sometimes, you know about, like, I have to made this, I have to keep it all for me. What has your journey been like with that in life? Or what have you learned about it?

Dave Ramsey
You're exactly right. There's fear around that. And fear is the motivator is if I give it away, I'm gonna have less, which mathematically, you know, if I take $1,000, I give away 100, I go with 900. So, yeah, I get less. But that's a short term mentality.

And what I finally figured out after studying this all these years and watching people who are generous, there's a real correlation between people that build wealth and people that are generous. Very few wealthy people are really super greedy and don't give. Most of them are very big givers. They're big tippers. They're not like tight.

They're not like, mean about money. They're very open handed because they know they can get some more. So what happens is generosity is not an action. It's a character quality, like integrity. Integrity is not an action.

There are actions that come out when you have integrity. There are actions that come out when you are generous. Generous people are the ones who hold the door open for you. Generous people help you pick up the groceries when the stupid bag, they fall out and they're rolling all over the parking lot in the grocery store and you're embarrassed. But the generous person runs over and joins the party and helps you pick up the canned goods and all that.

That's a generous person. The generous person is other centered instead of self centered. And here's what's weird. Think about who you want to work with. Think about who you want to work for.

Think about who you want on your team. Think about the vendor that you want to do business with, the next deal you want to do on an advertiser, you want to deal with a self issue person or a self less, other centered person. Self centered or other centered? Well, generosity makes people highly attractive. We want to be around generous people not because they're going to give us money, just because of who they are.

They're just open handed. They're thinking about other people. And so there's this huge correlation between generosity and prosperity. You tend to prosper because people want you around. They want you in the deal because you're not there for what you can get.

You're there for what you can give. And we're all going to win together. We don't have to kill each other to win, you know? And so that's how, like Rush or Sean and I in the old days, or other people in the talk radio business. Laura Ingram was doing a talk radio show in those days.

She's on Fox personality now. You know, we're all friends. Even though we were, we were competitors. We were head to head. If I knock Hannity off a station, I get that station.

So we're head to head. But we also know I don't have to kill him to win. I mean, I don't have to completely. So we don't, I never talk bad about my competitors in that world, because I want to be a generous person. I want to be a.

And I'll help them. I've actually helped every one of those people do different things over the time. And so it's just interesting that and then the giving of money is a natural result for someone who has the character, quality of generosity, you know? And I watch people. Okay, here's a stupid thing.

This guy I was watching the other day, he pulls up in front of me at the restaurant, the valet parking right here in Nashville. We have valet parkers everywhere. Yeah. And churches, even have them. Yeah, I mean, who's working valet?

Okay. The Lord is my valet, dude, I'm telling you, man. There's that. So I'm. But the guy that's working valet, he.

He's out there in the sun, he's out there in the rain. He's putting up people's garbage. They're not nice. This is who's working the valet. And this guy pulls up in a Mercedes.

And I know the car. It's a great car. It's about 100, 2130 thousand dollars car. And he hands the valet $5. Dude, that's just stupid.

So I pull it in my truck. You know, it's a nice truck. I hand the guy $20. I'm like, please take care of my baby. And you know where it was when I came out?

It was sitting right there, you know? So who prospered here? Everybody won. Everybody won. But you didn't give Ferris Bueller's day off the keys to your mercedes for $5.

I mean, what kind of moron. I mean, seriously, that's just short sighted. That lack of generosity is short sighted where it sounds like I'm some kind of big guy because I gave $20 or whatever to park my stupid truck. But I'm not. But there's a payoff there.

My truck didn't. There's nothing wrong with my truck. It's sitting right there. I don't have to wait on it when I come out. The kid had a good night, at least partly because of me.

So I think everybody came out on this transaction. So that's how generosity works. Yeah. That's interesting. It's been slow to learn for me.

Theo Von
Not slow, but I think it's just been. Yeah, I just came from such a fear mentality, you know, we just didn't have any money. So it was like, I remember I'd keep my money in a damn. I'd hide it. God, I would hide that money.

I would spend half my day hiding my damn money, boy. I met this guy digging up dirt and hiding. Oh, I understand. I met this guy's orthodox jewish rabbi, and we've become good friends. Rabbi Daniel Lapin.

Dave Ramsey
He wrote a book. Oh, he's hiding some. He wrote a book. No, no, he wrote a book called thou shall prosper. And he said, the problem is when you have that fear, is you think money is like cake.

Like, if I get a slice away, I got less cake. Money's not like cake. Money's like candles. When you light it, you still got your candle, and you light another one, you still got your candle. You light another one, you still got your candle.

That's how money works. Money will grow around you when you're doing the right stuff that you're supposed to be doing. That's a beautiful picture.

Theo Von
What role has faith played in your life? You mentioned it a little bit. How's that? What's that been like for you? It's central, because I.

As I said, you said other centered earlier, which I thought was a term you hear a lot of times. Yeah, I guess that's maybe a faith phrase. I don't know. But it's. Honestly, it's taught me how to be a better human being because I really wasn't a good one.

Dave Ramsey
I grew up. The crap we did, man, in the. The way I behaved in my early years of my life. Were you just a dang anarchist or whatever? Yeah, apparently I did all kinds of just redneck stupid stuff, but I needed to be a better person.

And it turns out, again, better people have better lives. So the whole character shift through the faith walk of meeting Jesus and changing that, it cleaned up my view of things. It cleaned up my actions and how I react and those kinds of things, because, I mean, again, I grew up where it was a scotch irish thing. It's like a temper thing going on. So you can't do that and win out there.

You can't be a jerk everywhere, and so you gotta go, and they don't want you back on the show if you're a butt in the green room. And so it turns out that all worked out for me. So the retransformation, the be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, romans says in the Bible. So the renewing of my mind over 45 years, and I'm not arrived, don't misunderstand, but like I said earlier, I'm a lot better husband than I was. I mean, even with my grandbabies, I'm playing my grandbabies.

My kids are like, who are you? I'm like, well, I can hand this one back. This one smells bad, it's broke. You can take that one home. But, yeah, who are you, papa Dave?

I mean, come on, man, you wouldn't let us get by with that crap. I'm like, yeah, I know, but I had to make you behave. But whatever, you can take this one home. You can teach it. But, yeah, it's central to everything.

I know who I am, I know where I'm going. It affects how I deal with kids, marriage, affects my money, affects how I lead in the business, affects our decisions in the marketplace. So, yeah, it's. I guess it's central to everything. If you want to look at it that way, it's changed my life.

Theo Von
Yeah, really? Yeah, absolutely. Completely. Wow, that's amazing, man. It's nice to hear.

Did you. When you look at your future now, like, what are things that you still want to do? You've had so much success and such, the opportunity to lead people to make financial choices. You helped. My stepdad paid off our house because of knowledge.

He learned from you. Wow. I remember that. And so it took him a little bit, but I remember one day he told me he'd heard it, and then probably eleven years later, eight years later or something, he said, house is paid off. Yeah.

Pretty cool. I love it. What are things that still excite you? You know, things that move the needle. And I get to see something move with a little bit of scale out there where we can affect someone's life.

Dave Ramsey
And then I run into them. I went in and, you know, this YouTube thing with a billion and a half downloads on that thing now it's a whole new market. That talk radio was old white guys, right? Listeners, right? But YouTube's youngsters.

And so Sharon and I were in Best Buy, and these two kids are like, 17 years old, run up like I'm some kind of freaking rock star or something. Like, man, I love your YouTube stuff. It's like, man, I just paid cash for my first car because of watching you. This tough stuff on TikTok. So funny.

And, man, thank you. And it was like, sharon's like, golly, they're 17 years old, man. It's great. Yeah, it's gotta make you feel good. That kind of stuff is worth.

That makes it worth coming down here every day and, you know, flipping on the switch on the microphone, coming up with something, figuring out a way to connect and be authentic. You gotta be real about it. You can't just. You can't manipulate these platforms. They're too nuanced.

And there's, people can see a fake a mile away. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's true. I think, well, it's interesting. Yeah.

Theo Von
I think especially now, there's so much stuff out there. It's like, yeah. You want to try and be as authentic you can to your own experience, you know? And you've had a lot of great experiences. And so you want to be able to share those, you know, in a way that feels comfortable to people.

And, and obviously, you guys have been doing that and doing it really well. Um, yeah. What do you say to somebody, like, right now? Like, what is some of your, just basic advice, Dave? If there's somebody who's, you know, uh, they feel like maybe they don't have a chance or something, what would you give a, just a, what's your kind of pep talk, your financial guidance for somebody like that?

Somebody's just like, you know, they don't know if they can figure it out. They don't know if they have a ton of hope for themselves. Um, you can't change everything about them. But what are some things you remind them of? Yeah.

Dave Ramsey
Doctor John Deloney, that's one of our Ramsey personalities on our team, has done a lot of trauma studies. He's got a PhD in counseling. And he says when you're in the middle of trauma, like he's done, been on police calls, when they go in and there's a murder or a suicide or something in the home, extreme trauma. And your body physically reacts to trauma. And he says, the way to walk through those things is facts are your friends, your feelings are not true.

And so when you feel stuck and hopeless, you gotta back out and start looking about, okay, here's what's really, here's the numbers, and here's the reality of the marketplace. Facts are your friends. And so oftentimes when someone calls on the Ramsay show, that's all we're doing. They call up, and they're overwhelmed, they're frozen, they're paralyzed. They don't know what to do.

And we're going now, wait a minute. How much you make a year? We'll make 100,000. Okay. And so, and we just, we're stuck.

We can't move. We can't, we can't figure out what to do. I'm like, okay, how much you own your car? 56,000. Okay.

All right. And how much, you know, do you have in retirement? Nothing. Okay. How old are you?

I'm 26. Okay. All right. And, you know, and. Okay, now, so the facts are that you really have plenty of money coming in and you bought a car you can't afford.

Sell. Stupid car. Yeah. He goes, oh, man, you're like a genius. It's like 6th grade math, you know?

It's like. So. But all we did was peel back the drama that our. All of us, our bodies just freeze up. We just get in hopeless freezing response.

Theo Von
To trauma and freezing up, and we. Don'T know what to do. And all we do is cut the dad gum trees down so you can see the forest, you know, and can't see the forest for the trees. And so, you know, okay, here's your reality. And it's like, you know, a lady called not long ago, and she was.

Dave Ramsey
She said, they're foreclosing on my house Friday. What am I gonna do? I said, I don't know. It was Monday. We have five days.

What are we gonna do? I don't know. I said, one thing you can do is just go get another house. She went, you can do that? I went, yeah, just go get something to rent.

People will rent to you. Yeah, people will rent to you. So you're not gonna be homeless. She made $120,000 a year. And I'm like, we'll just go get you another house.

But let's learn about the details of the foreclosure and see if we can stop it. We were able to actually figure out how to stop the foreclosure, but, you know, the reality was her whole life was coming to an end on Friday. And it's a house. There's one on every corner. Let's go get another one.

Yeah, you know, it's like. But we get just, you know, we get just hammered. We had another one that was really sad. A lady was being foreclosed on, a different one, and her husband, 36 years old, was a roofer. He fell through the roof and got killed.

And she's got two little kids, and the workers comp didn't pay out. They waited, like, forever. So the house got behind, and she's getting ready to be foreclosed on. And we're like, she owed $60,000 on a $300,000 house. No, you are not getting foreclosed on.

We are stopping this. This is not happening. You're a widow. Somebody's going to take care of you. And another roofing guy called our office while we're on the air and caught the house up.

So, I mean, we're going to take care of other people. Stepped in and heard the story, started taking care of us. And you're not getting foreclosed on. I'm 100% sure it's not going to happen. We're not losing this house.

$300,000 house for 60k. So. But she was completely overwhelmed. Other people had taken her power. The situation, the variables had taken her power.

She could not. She was frozen up. And all we did was we weren't there, and so we weren't frozen up. And we could see what everybody, everybody listening, everybody watching could see the same thing. Of course we're not gonna let that house get so, nothing else.

You sell it for 200,000 before Friday. You know you're not gonna give it away for 60, so we're gonna do something. But the fear. People get stuck. Yeah.

Theo Von
Yeah. And that's all we do, is unlock them. Yep. Help unlock them. Yep.

Dave Ramsey
With facts. With facts to somebody that's starting out right now. They're just starting out in the world. They got their first couple of jobs. They just got out of college.

Theo Von
How much money do they need to save if they want to have some freedom in the future? What do you tell them, Dave? Well, the first thing we tell them do is get out of debt everything but the house, and then have an emergency fund of three to six months of expenses. We call it the baby steps. There they are.

Dave Ramsey
And so once you're at baby step three and you have three to six months of expenses, you don't have any payments but a house payment. So you save three to six months. You have savings to pay off for three to six months in case something happens. Exactly. It's a rainy day fund.

You don't. It's not, I want a bass boat. It's a rainy day fund. It's not a I need a new couch. It's a rainy day fund.

You don't touch that. If you're going to buy something else, you save up and pay for it then. But to answer your question, baby step four is invest 15% of your income. When you don't have any payments except a house payment, you can save 15% of your income. And the average household income in America right now is 72,000 a year.

If you say 15% of 72,000 from 30 to 65, you're going to have about $5 million in mutual funds. So say that again. So if I'm like, five x wrong, you're still a millionaire. Shut up. So you really can't screw this up.

It's like. But you can screw it up. Cause you live in America. And you can get a $1200 car payment for a freaking car. You can't afford to impress people to stop lite who don't even care about you.

And that's what we do instead. Or I need another truck, you know, or I need another whatever. I mean, I'm the same guy, but yeah. So then we say for kids college, six is what your stepdad did. We pay off the house early in eleven years, by the way, oddly enough, eleven years is the average millionaire that paid off their houses in eleven years.

11.2 years in the study that we were talking about earlier. So that's one of the things that people did to become millionaires. They walked right. We call them baby steps millionaires. They walked right up this.

They get their house paid off in an average of eleven years. Some of them seven years, some of them 14, but an average of eleven. Wow. And then when you don't have a house payment, dude, I mean, that's two, $3,000 a month. Oh, yeah, you got bank to be generous with, bank to be investing.

Theo Von
And yeah, you can take a bath stack in cash, you can relax at your house and get in the back in cash. That's it. That's, that's what I want. I'll be buy a dang birdbath and sit in that thing. If I'm debt free, I sit in the front yard in there and dang, use some dang, just soap up Dave Ramsey.

Anything else that you want to share with that you think? We've covered a lot of neat stuff. I think. I feel like we've been through a lot of avenues. It was an honor to be with you.

Yeah, you too, man. I'm impressed with what you're doing. It's so good. Well, thanks, man. Watching your career and watching you clean up and get right and doing stuff.

Dave Ramsey
I watched your content shift. You're doing really good. You're doing great. I'm proud to know you. Thanks, man.

Theo Von
Yeah, it's so crazy. Yeah. That. I remember my stepdad said that and then like two years ago, I'll be like, man, wouldn't it be crazy if we got to have Dave Ramsey on and then here we get to. And then you could tell him you were underwhelmed.

But we didn't lose hope, man. Anyway, that's true. We didn't lose hope. That's true. So, yeah, thank you so much.

Thanks for the guidance. You guys can check out the Ramsey show. And then there's just so many YouTube clips. Like, if you want, I mean, there's probably a clip for almost everything these days, you know, for everything you want to find out about finances, how to take care of yourself, how to move forward. They can call into the show daily.

No, every day. They can call into. You can call into his show every day if you have a question. And there's some great videos of some of the best questions that they've had online as well. Dave Ramsey, thanks so much, man.

Dave Ramsey
Thank you, brother. Yeah, appreciate it. And best of luck, and I hope to see you around town sometime. Well, hang now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves I must be cornerstone oh, but when I reach that ground I'll share this peace of mind I found I can feel it in my bones but it's gonna take.

Theo Von
Well, hang now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves I must be cornerstone oh, but when I reach that ground I'll share this peace of mind I found I can feel it in my bones but it's gonna take.

Dave Ramsey
Well, hang now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves I must be cornerstone oh, but when I reach that ground I'll share this peace of mind I found I can feel it in my bones but it's gonna take.