Dave Ramsey: Trump v. Kamala’s Economic Plans, & the Diabolic Tricks Banks Use to Scam You

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You send me a rifle that I love? I don't care. You get busted for a drug-related murder spree and I will testify to your character.
Sorry. I'm actually fairly used to buy.
I didn't know that. Fairly cheap date.
I have a cheap date. It's like...
You know Jeffrey Dahmer, bad guy, but he sent me this rifle once that I love. Welcome to the Tucker Carlson Show.
We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else. And they're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers.
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Here's the episode. So I woke up this morning thinking about something you said at dinner last night.
You said, I've been telling people, I've been warning people for 30 years about debt and why it's bad. And there's more people in debt than ever.
And you sort of bitterly laughed, but I thought it was a really interesting point. This country is much deeper in debt, I think, than we appreciate on an individual level, not just national debt, but people.

How deep is the debt and why? It's bad. It's bad.
It's bad. Yeah, we're laughing about it because David and Goliath, in a sense, the credit card industry, for instance, spends more on advertising and marketing in a year than all professional sports put together, than any other single product line on the planet.
And they are excellent marketers. They're very good at what they do.
Just to sell a Visa and make it normalized and to make MasterCard a part of our lives. And so we're at $1.7 trillion in credit card debt right now.
We're at $1.9 trillion now in student loan debt. Car debt is in the mid-1 trillions as well.
All of those are the highest they've ever been right now. And I've been working to get people out of debt for 30 years, so I'm a complete abject failure.
You've been telling the truth, the truth which counts it counts but in terms of i helped that one and that one but as a whole the macro on it yeah we're running backwards uh they're better at selling it than i am than i am getting them out of it more on marketing the i just want to say this out loud make sure i got it the credit card companies spend more on marketing every year than all professional sports yep and then all in any other product line, an automotive line, put together Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, whatever. And there's a lot of television commercials with Chevy trucks running through the mud.
Oh, yeah. Nothing like Visa.
Nothing like Visa, MasterCard, Discover, Amex, because it's so stinking profitable. They just make so much money.
Do they really? So can you explain? I wish I knew more about this. Well, it's simple.
They charge 18 to 28% and people stay in debt. The average American right now is $37,000 in credit card debt.
So you run that out times $300 million and you've got some money coming into good old Chase and what's in your wallet? Their money. So it, so it's bad.
So, I mean, that's got to be one of the major profit centers in American banking. Oh, definitely.
Definitely. Banking exists based on debt in general.
Of course. Obviously.
They're borrowing money from you at the rate of your savings account, and then they're loaning it to your neighbor at the rate of a car loan or a credit card or a home equity loan. And obviously there's a spread there.
And that's why we've always known bankers were wealthy folks. They're not greedy.
They're not evil. They're just doing their thing and they're better at it than we are as consumers.
We're just kind of wandering along like pigs to the slaughter. So, okay.
They market to kids. and i know that because when i was in college um one of the few things i remember from college was getting free credit cards in the mail yeah yeah but they you know you weren't allowed to send me cigarettes or copenhagen chewing tobacco but you could send credit cards and that was no one ever said anything about it that seems wrong is, and nowadays it's more accidental just because of the level of aggressive.
You know, they're just chaotic and aggressive in their marketing. It's everywhere.
I mean, they send it to dead people, to dogs. You know, we've got great credit cards that customers have sent us that was issued to their Labrador retriever, you know, or to their poodle.
And so, Fru-Fru can, you know, get a line of credit, you know, just because they're just sending it everywhere. They're sending it everywhere.
And, you know, there's a whole movement probably 15 years ago where they were all over the college campuses, and they pretty well are off the college campuses now. They're just across the property line, you know, to next door to the college campus doing something.
But the thing of them shoving it down to college students at the behest of the college, a lot of that's gone just because there was so much consumer uprising against it. But they're still out there.
I mean, they're still just going. It's what they do.
None of the supposedly radical lefties out there calling for a revolution and a total overhaul of our society, they never go after the credit card companies. You know, they mentioned student loans or they mentioned, you know, the big companies or capitalism, but they never, I've never seen any Antifa person say, hey, don't pay your credit card bill.
Like for some reason, the left, even AOC and people like that, they seem like, are they bought off by the credit card companies. I never hear them attacking the credit card companies ever.
Well, I mean, we were taught, again, with the most repetitive, sophisticated marketing over the longest period of time in human history. I mean, the number of impressions before your eyes and across your mind, we've been taught don't leave home without it.
We've been taught that, you know, what would you do? I mean, we have people who have physical reactions when they cut up their credit cards. I mean, they're crying, they're shaking.
And what that means is that it's become something that is necessary for life. It's an altar that we worship at, right? And it's not.
I mean, Daniel Boone did leave home without it. I mean, this is a fairly recent phenomenon in human history.
It's not like it's something that's gone on forever. Really, back to the 1970s even, the credit card was 25% of Americans carrying a credit card in 1972.
I mean, it's fairly, that it's so pervasive that it's just necessary for life. And it's not.
I mean, I don't have credit cards. I haven't, you know, in 30 something years.
I have debit cards. Finally, they came out that made life a little better.
So travel and everything and the debit card will do everything the credit card will do except get you in debt because you actually have to have money in your freaking account in order to spend it. But so I've got, you know, debit cards on my business and debit cards on my personal account.
And I use it like most people use a credit card, I guess. What's wrong with having a credit card if you pay the balance every month? Most people don't.
Most people don't. That's the great lie.
78% of people don't. No way.
And they all talk about how everybody talks about this theoretical discipline that they just freaking don't have. And so, you know.
Wait, 78% do not pay them all over month to month. Just like 97% of the people don't pay a 30-year mortgage like a 15 so that it pays off in 15 because they promised themselves they would.
We're going to take out a 30 just in case we need to let up, but we're going to pay it like a 15. 97% do not systematically prepay.
And that's Federal Reserve statistics. I didn't make those numbers up.
And so it's just this idea that we have, we trust ourselves with this discipline that's really just simply not there. And so why? What's the purpose? What are you getting? Okay, if you're going to pay your credit card off every month and you're really going to do that, then a debit card will work.
Because there's money to pay the credit card off and just use that money through your debit card. It's the exact same freaking thing.
I mean, it's the exact same thing. Why don't people do that? Because they've been taught that they can't live without this and that if you don't get airline miles, then, you know, if you don't get 1% back on your Discover card, which this one tickles me.
I keep people with a master's degree in financing. I got 1% back on my Discover card.
So you're going to run $100,000 through your Discover card to get $1,000 back. On what planet does that build wealth? I mean, and under what math? I mean, did you get out of the sixth grade where you trade $100,000 for $1,000, and you call this a wealth-building mechanism? That's just asinine, you know, but people make, supposedly sophisticated people will make this argument at me, and they have for 30 years, so I've got a long career.
So is your argument that they're just too dangerous? You just like. There's no point.
There's no point. It's not even that it's that dangerous.
If you are paying it off every month, it's not going to bankrupt you. The other thing is this, and again, we're dealing with Joe and Susie Consumer.
Right. I'm not dealing with somebody with a master's in finance usually.
We're dealing with, you know, folks making 80 grand and, you know, he's a cop, she's a teacher. Okay.
And so, you know, what MIT study shows us is that when you swipe plastic, you spend 12 to 18% more than if you lay down actual cash. Because cash, when you see Benjamin looking at you, activates the pain centers of the brain.
And when you swipe it and go one further, just take your Apple phone and just use your wallet, and you never even see plastic. You just moved your phone around like you just returned an email or a text.
And now you're walking out of Home Depot with another tool, right? And that's even less friction. Less friction is your website, my website, where they just push a button, or Amazon, push a button, and the recognition in your brain that you're actually spending money goes down precipitously as you go along.
Oh, that's why they have chips in a casino. Exactly.
Exactly. Exactly.
They would never. And it's why they take taxes out of our check.
If you had a guy standing at the end of your office every Friday named Matthew, the tax collector from the Bible, and you had to hand him your tax money out of your check, there'd be a revolution in America. Because people would recognize emotionally with the pain centers of their brain what they're actually paying in taxes.
It's the same thing here. It's just friction in marketing, we call it.
You call it. I call it on our websites.
And we want to lower friction. We want to make it easy for the customer to buy where they don't feel any pain, and they buy more.
It's a simple arrangement. But if you have to actually lay down $100 bills, and, you know, Rachel, my daughter, teaches with us, and she brought up the point, which I had never thought of, that when you hand someone a piece of plastic at the store, they hand you the groceries or the shirt back with the plastic.
When you hand them money, they just hand you the shirt. That's more like a trade at the old trading post.
I'm trading you this for that. With plastic, I get the plastic back visually and the item.
And again, no recognition. We do, we intellectually grasp it, but I'm talking about emotional, psychological recognition that actual transaction has just occurred.
And so we spend more. That's what it comes down to.
And so we're spending more. Big picture, there's a weird incentive here because the forces of totalitarianism want to get rid of cash, of course, because cash cannot be controlled in the way that digital currency can be controlled.
All of our cash comes through the banks. The government gets us cash through banks, but banks have a massive incentive to get rid of cash also because they're profiting from credit cards.
And very labor intensive to screw with the cash. Well, exactly.
And dirty, by the way. Yeah.
So banks have, once again, every incentive to eliminate the use of cash in the United States. Well, and again, we go how far we want to go on how evil the intent is from the bottom up and how organized the evil is.
I don't know about it. I'm just saying, but the incentives are aligned.
The incentives are there. But what I'm saying is that I could go either way.
I can go real deep into that personally, or I can say, they're just not real good at it. But they are collecting our data.
And when you're operating cash, you're off the grid. Well, exactly.
One more place. I hadn't thought of that.
I can tell you exactly what is happening with Joe and Susie. And so it's gone so far as to the collections departments with some of the large credit card companies are so scummy.
They're very good at what they do. But if an area code comes in and someone's returning a call to a collector from the South, the person's calling from the South, they'll put someone on with a New York accent because that's abrasive to someone with the South and you want to create an abrasive situation with a collector.
If they're calling into customer service, they'll match them up with an accent that's pleasant to them and so on. Really? Yeah.
Oh, they're very good at what they— But indebted Southerners get Yankee collectors. And vice versa because you want to piss a Yankee off, bring a passive-aggressive Southerner in.
You know what I mean? It's like, right? So, you know, now, honey, you're right. I mean, that's not going to go well.
That's not good for a New Yorker. And so it's just they're very, very good at what they do.
And they collect data, and they use the data to sell us more. And, I mean, Google's doing that.

We know that.

We know Apple's doing that.

It's not rocket surgery.

We know this is going on.

So cash gets you off the grid.

Cash represents freedom.

So it is antithesis for totalitarianism.

Do people use cash?

I feel like people don't use cash anymore.

Not as much.

Not as much.

It's way down.

It's way down.

One of the last places I gave up using cash was at the pump, pumping gas, because I used to always walk in and pay cash. I had cash for my gas.
I had cash for our groceries. We still pay cash for our groceries at the Ramsey's.
Sharon still carries an envelope with cash in it in her purse. It says groceries on it.
And to this day, it's how we started our stuff years ago. It's what we teach but i i'm too lazy to walk into the stupid gas station and pay the bill now but here's the thing again one more time think about it when gas went 20 years ago gas moves up to five bucks for 10 minutes if you had to walk in the store and you're paying cash all of a sudden the cost of gasoline is a much more passionate political issue of course and when we're just sticking a card in crap it just i can't believe it's 100 bucks and you walk off and you'll think anything about it but if you walk to the store from the pump and you put down by the time you get back to the truck you're pissed oh for sure you know and so nowadays when gas goes up it's kind of like oh look gas went up and or did it i don't not sure how much was it under trump how much is it under biden you know and people that it doesn't again it doesn't register because the pain centers aren't activated and and now it becomes a political thing because it's not uh the cost of that is not waking you up.
So the cost of eggs, if you were paying cash in the grocery store in this last routine, eggs were the thing, remember? Yeah. Not long ago.
We were all done to die because eggs were too expensive. The Biden inflation, right? So – but if you were paying cash for it, there would have been egg wars.
I mean, it's like – so it's very interesting. So they're lolling us to sleep.
It's very interesting. Yeah, we're lazy.
So how much debt is the average American carrying on credit cards? $37,000. $37,000 per? Yeah.
That's the current averages. I mean, depending on who you read and who you believe.
We haven't done that research at Ramsey, but we've looked it up. $37,000? Yes.
At what interest rate? $18,000 to $28,000 is the range on cars. Well, that's just crazy town.
Yeah. If you had $37,000 in credit card debt, wouldn't you be scared? They are.
And so when the cost of bread goes up and supply chain screws with their grocery basket cost, it's a very real fear. Then why is not a single person? I never, I just, I can't get past this.
Of all the villains in public life, you've been attacked, I've noticed. And a lot of virtuous people have been attacked.
I never hear the credit card companies attacked by anyone ever. But they seem like one of the main causes of misery for Americans.
Yeah, we have. And we've attacked them for 30 years.
But mainly attacking the stuff like we're talking about right here is present people with ideas. And they go, oh, I'm getting screwed.
I'm going to stop this. And they make a change change and they cut up their cards.
We call it plastic surgery, right? They chop them up. They get out of debt and they'll never go back once they've had that emotional experience.
But there is a big deal. I mean, all debt is obviously, in my opinion, bad.
One of the reasons I'm so grateful for your role in our society, reminding people of that. But not all debt is the same.
If I'm paying 4% on a mortgage, that's very different from paying 25% on a credit card. Exactly.
Sure. I mean, that's just insane that people pay.
Well, and you've got one thing that's going up in value and the other is a steak you ate last night. It's pretty much gone.
Yeah. So we were in a meeting here at TCN the other day and I looked around the room and every other person had a kind of ruddy vitality, pink cheeks, alertness, bright eyes, full mental acuity, and a cheerfulness you could almost smell.
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We think it's important. But another reason everyone looks so good is because they'd all had a great night sleep.
I'm not making this up. Almost everybody here uses a new sleep technology from a company called Eat Sleep.
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It's a high-tech mattress cover effectively that you add to your existing bed. You don't need a new bed or anything like that.
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Tucker says it best. The credit card companies are ripping Americans off and enough is enough.
This is Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas. Our legislation, the Credit Card Competition Act, would help in the grip Visa and MasterCard have on us.
Every time you use your credit card, they charge you a hidden fee called a swipe fee and they've been raising it without even telling you. This hurts consumers and every small business owner.
In fact, American families are paying $1,100 in hidden swipe fees each year. The fees Visa and MasterCard charge Americans are the highest in the world, double candidates and eight times more than Europe's.

That's why I've taken action, but I need your help to help get this passed.

I'm asking you to call your senator today and demand they pass the Credit Card Competition Act.

Paid for by the Merchants Payments Coalition.

Not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee.

www.merchantspaymentscoalition.com

I don't understand. And so the states, the state of New York and the federal government, you know, spent decades, a century putting mafia figures in prison for loan sharking, loan sharking.
And that was lending money at high interest rates because it was against, it was unfair. It was considered, well, it was a crime.
I think it still is a crime. How is it not a crime when the credit card companies do it? I don't know.
I'm a free market guy. Yeah, yeah.
I would rather punish them by taking their customers than by providing regulation. I get it.
I'm not even calling for regulation, but I'm saying that it's regulated when the Genovese family does it, but not when Citibank does it. So how does that work? Yeah, and how does payday lending still open at 800% interest? 800? Yeah, 800% interest.
And these are poor people they're leaning on, so this is particularly bad. It's funny because someone like AOC, obviously protector of black people and the urban poor, I haven't heard her say one word.
I mean, it seems like everybody is kind of colluding against lower-income people. Yeah, and it's biblically unsound.
I mean, it's a bad idea. What does that mean? If you read in the scripture, you don't want to be on the list of the person who oppresses the poor, the orphan, or the widow.
That's not a good list to be on if you have any idea that there might be a God.

Yes.

Because the things that happens to the people that oppress the poor, the orphan, and the widow are not good.

You're supposed to take care of the poor and take care of the widow and take care of the orphan. And it's quite the opposite.

And we don't see that kind of sanctified capitalism as much as we should. I don't see really any of it.
It's out there. There's lots of good companies that do take care of their team.
They take care of their employees. They take care of their customers.
The customer comes in and they go, this lady, her husband just passed away. She's got little kids and she can't eat.
And they'll take care of her. I mean, companies do that everywhere.
Americans are unbelievably generous. Yes, they are.
The most generous culture in the history of the world. And that comes through small business.
It comes through even big business sometimes. Americans are the best.
Their institutions are rotten. And it does seem like maybe that's the problem.
If you could just reform some of the big institutions, it would be a much happier country with fewer oppressed people. But 800% on a payday loan.
You write a $250 check for two weeks, advance on your paycheck coming in, and they hand you $200. And so it's a $50 charge.
It's loan sharking rates. And that's not that horrible, so to speak, because if that's all there is, but if you renew that all the way through one year, it's 864%.
And so, um, that, and that's the typical payday lender. Some States have outlawed payday lenders completely.
Others are, quote, unquote, regulating them.

But those people are feeding on the poor.

Because I've got to promise you,

the wealthy people are not going in there and doing a $200 to $250 transaction.

It's not.

Middle class people aren't even.

And so it's the same thing as the rent to own,

title pawning, same end of town.

Can you explain rent to own?

Rent to own is you take a $1,000 washer and dryer, and you pay for it six or eight times monthly because you're renting it, and then they let you own it at the end of it by the time it's almost worn out. But, again, you could have taken your monthly and gone to a garage sale and bought a good use set.
Yeah. And had zero debt, zero payments.
But again, no one that's middle class or upper class falls for that junk. You don't see those things in the rich end of town.
No, you don't. You see them when you go into the other side of town, the other side of the tracks.
I mean, credit cards are, I think, so embarrassing. It's almost like a drug habit.
You know, nobody wants to talk about credit card debt. If the average American who has a credit card is $37,000 in debt at over 20% interest, I mean, that's the craziest thing I've heard this week.
And that includes you and me, which have zero. And we're talking an average.
Yeah, I mean, I've had- Someone else has more in order to get to that average if you and I have zero, right? Yeah, I'm not good at math, and I'm not good at business. I'm not good at managing money.
I've definitely had money problems, big-time money problems, but I've never had credit card debt. Because even I, low IQ with numbers guy, could understand like 20% interest is a lot more than 6% interest.
I don't want that. So, huh.
What happens to a person who's $37,000 in debt, who makes $60,000 a year in credit card debt? Too many negative things to count, but number one cause of divorce in North America today, money fights, money stress. Seriously? Number one thing people fight about in their marriage, by far.
So we've got a socioeconomic impact. If you lose hope because you feel like a rat in a wheel, and it's I owe, I owe, so off to work, I go, thank God it's Friday it's Friday oh God it's Monday and I just look up 40 years later and I retire broke because I put nothing in my 401k because it's all gone out in payments every month all the money comes in all the money goes out then you have to retire and say gosh I hope the government which is well known for its ability to handle money will take care of me and now we're tearing social, which even according to the socialists that put it in place, called it a supplement, right? Not a retirement plan.
It's not a retirement plan. It's not designed to eat.
I mean, if you try to retire on Social Security, you're eating Alpo. I mean, it's rough.
And so you retire broke. You have a higher likelihood of divorce.
Hypertension goes up. Anxiety goes up.
So there's medical bills go up as a result because it's a constant stress in your life over a long period of time. And so we've had people, of course, over the 30 years of doing what we're doing, they often say, wow, when I got out of debt, I paid off my car, when I got rid of MasterCard, when I got rid of the student loan that had been around so long, I thought it was a pet.
Even when I had this week, I had a lady 34 years old paid off her house and zero debt, 34 years old, and 600,000 already in her 401k at 34 years old. I said, so how does that feel? She she said i feel like i sat down 300 pounds and i walked away from it she said there's this release physically she said my shoulders feel different and so you cannot completely go this is only a math thing because it's integrated into our lives right and um you know and uh so yeah we're starting to see now the implications of it on a society as a whole.
Medical bills, again, divorce rate. It's not the only sole cause of all those things.
Of course. But it's certainly a contributor.
And sometimes it works in reverse. Sometimes the medical causes the financial problem, right? Sometimes it's the other way.
Sometimes the marriage situation causes the financial problem. So there's not all correlation and causation directly.
But there's enough interaction with that that there's no reason to say, I'm going to live my whole life hopeless, working in a job I hate, just to pay the truck payment because somebody at a stoplight might go thumbs up

if they like my truck.

And I'm trying to impress other people that I don't even know with money I don't have.

And it's a sickening thing.

It's consumerism gone amok.

But the good news is people can decide we're going to change. And they turn the corner.
And man, it's beautiful when they do. There are a lot of impediments to doing that.
So one thing that you hear when you start lecturing people about credit cards, as I'll confess I have, is, well, you have to have a credit card because you have to build a credit rating. If you don't have a credit card, you don't get a credit rating, and for some reason you need a credit card rating.
I'm sure you've heard this. No, never.
Of course. Yeah.
Fair Isaac designed the FICO score. The FICO score, there's a mathematical algorithm by which your FICO score, your credit score is derived.
100% of the inputs to build your credit score have to do with debt. The type of debt, your ratio of debt, whether or not you're paying your debt on time, which is what we all think of when we think of a credit score.
It's 100% interaction with debt. Your FICO score has nothing to do with your financial well-being.
Nothing. It has nothing to do with your net worth.
So you can inherit a million dollars tomorrow from your rich uncle that died, and your credit score doesn't change one point. Your boss can walk in and say, I'm going to give you a million dollar a year raise on your income.
Your FICO does not change one point. It has 100% to do with borrowing money.

And so the whole premise of the thing is almost humorous when you look at it. So I need a FICO

score. So I'm going to go get a credit card, take out a car loan.
I'm 18 years old so I can build up

my FICO score. Why do I need a FICO score? Because that's the score they use to decide to loan me money.
So I need a FICO score so that I can get into debt. So I'm going to get into debt so that I can get a FICO score so that I can get into debt so that I can raise my FICO score so that I can get into debt so that I can raise my FICO score so that I can get into debt so that I can keep my FICO score up by paying my debt and getting into more debt.

Because if you quit paying all your accounts, they take them all to zero.

You pay them all off, and you close 100% of your accounts.

Within six to nine months, your FICO score will be zero.

So I've not had a FICO score in 38 years.

Mine's indeterminable, which means I'm probably not even real. Probably not.
You're a specter, a ghost. I mean, you would think.
And I own several hundred million dollars worth of real estate. So here's what's asinine about this whole thing.
I can go down to the local apartment complex in our little town of Franklin, Tennessee, that's managed by a 26-year-old who has a boss in Atlanta, Georgia, who's telling them how to lease an apartment. And they won't lease an apartment to me because I don't have a FICO score.
Now, I can write a check and buy the apartment complex, but I can't rent an apartment there. See, that shows you how inept this measure of wealth is

or of financial well-being.

And it is a dog chasing its tail.

Why am I going into debt?

So I can get a FICO score.

Well, so you're looking at it

because I think you're a more decent person than I am

as silly and not an accurate measurement.

I'm looking at it as a very sinister system intentionally

created to enslave people with debt. That's what it looks like to me.
It is. No, you're right.

It's just the ridiculous logic that we, the people, have fallen for that allowed them to do that.

Well, so here's a potentially non-ridiculous concern that I have heard as I've been lecturing. Some people may or may not be my children on this question.
Oh, because I hate credit cards. But they say, well, if I don't have a good credit rating, I won't be able to take a home loan out to buy a house.
And I'm not really sure how you get to a place where you can buy a house in cash at 30. Well, it has been done, and we've got lots of stories where it has been done.
But aside from that, again, just bad information. The truth is you can get a home mortgage with a zero credit score.
George Campbell, one of our Ramsey personalities, he and his wife bought a very, very nice home not long ago and got a small mortgage on it. They paid it off in about nine months, good for them.
But he went and got a mortgage with a zero credit score. It's called manual underwriting.
So when I got my real estate license in 1978, if you sold a house in those days, there was no FICO score. If you sold a house in those days, you went to the mortgage company or the savings and loan that was still open in those days, and you took the client over there, and the client filled out several pieces of paper, a VOD.
They gave permission for the bank to verify the deposits, verification of deposit. Do you have money in your bank for a down payment? You had to prove it.
A VOE, verification of employment. They sent it to your employer.
Employer sent it back, said, you have a job. You make this much money.
So you have your down payment. You make this much money.
A verification of payments. So you'd send that to the landlord.
And the landlord where they were renting would say, yes, Joe pays his rent. So now Joe can get.
And so it was called underwriting a mortgage. They actually looked at the human beings and said, are these human beings, is it good for them to have a mortgage? And are they going to be able to pay it? And they did math and research on the people.
And it took about 45 days to get a mortgage in those days. It took a while because this was all snail mail, back and forth.
But that's called underwriting a mortgage. Nowadays, you can do manual underwriting much faster than that, but all they're doing is checking the person, all these different elements of the personhood and see if the person is going to be able to pay their stinking mortgage.
It's that simple. So that's how George and many, many, many, many other Ramsey followers over the years, tens of thousands of them have gotten a a mortgage with a zero credit score.
So you just go to the bank and say, I'd like to take a loan. Well, you have to go to a mortgage lender that actually knows how to do a manual underwriting, because a lot of them don't.
And again, too many of them are lazy. Are the rates different? Nope.
Nope. Exactly the same.
Exactly the same. Oh.
And exactly the same down payment requirement. Exactly the same everything.
It's just more work for the mortgage company. Because basically the FICO score is a monkey can make this loan.
They can look at the number and identify, big number, loan done. Just like that.
Check. It's over.
That's the whole thing. And that's how you get a housing crisis in 2008, is they were approving these loans based exclusively on FICO, not actually looking at the human beings.
And in some cases, they were fraudulently putting up FICO and fraudulently putting values on it and so forth. We get a housing loan.
Wait, so you can game your credit score, the FICO score? No, I'm saying those people were putting down false credit scores in that case. Or they're walking in, I've got a high credit score, but nobody mentions I just lost my job.
Nobody mentions I bought five houses four weeks ago that are not yet showing up in all of this data, right? Because they're just handing this money out like it's candy if you've got the number. It's all about the number.
Have you got the number? No, you don't. It's that a monkey can run this business.
Good monkey sounds. These are good, yeah.
So very good. Have you spent time around monkeys, obviously? Yeah, you and I are having way too much fun last night.
I'm just saying. So here's the other.
So that's fascinating. I didn't know that.
Thank you. The second concern would be that if you're not carrying debt on your house, you're penalized by the tax code because you can write off the interest on your loan.
Yeah. And so when I went to pay off my mortgage, which was the very first thing I did when I made any money at all, I was criticized strongly by a friend of mine who's knowledgeable on financial matters.

She's gotten way richer than I'll ever be.

And he said, that's idiotic.

Why would you do that?

You've got a low rate, and the government is paying you to have that mortgage.

Not true.

Not true.

It's true for such a small percentage of the population.

So here's the thing.

The only person who can write off the interest on their home mortgage is someone who itemizes their deductions, particularly under Trump. And they're still in place.
Biden has not undone them. The standard deduction on a 1040 is so stinking high now that 92% of Americans do not itemize.
Your charitable deductions are of zero value if you don't itemize. Your interest deductions are of zero value on your tax return if you do not itemize.
And so only 8% of Americans does this apply to, okay? Which could be you. You've got complicated businesses.
You probably are itemizing. You're probably not doing a standard 1040 easy because you've got deductions in excess of the standard deductions, which would make you want to do the itemization.
Me too, by the way. And so now let's go to that case for the 8%.
We got rid of 92%, but let's go ahead and go with the 8. So let's say that you pay, I'll make up a number, $10,000 in interest in a year.
You give $10,000 to the bank in interest. If you are in a 30% tax bracket, you take a $10,000 tax deduction, that means you don't pay taxes on $10,000 of your income.
Follow me? Yes. So if you didn't have that deduction, you'd have to pay taxes on $10,000 more.
Taxes on $10,000 would be $3,200 if you're in a 32% tax bracket, right? So what your friend is suggesting is that it's a good idea to send the bank $10,000 to keep from sending the government 3,200.

Ah. Once again.
Does make sense. Cultural mythology.
So there is no downside in your view to paying off your mortgage. No, none whatsoever.
And here's the thing. It feels different.
Well, that's why I did it anyway.

You walk through your backyard with no shoes on, the grass is different, man.

I mean, we have a Fauci pandemic.

They're not taking my house.

Yeah, that's how I feel.

It's a whole different thing.

It's a liberty issue.

It's a freedom issue.

It's a math issue.

It's a spiritual issue.

The borrower is slave to the lender. It's tough to serve two masters, Jesus said.

I don't have two masters.

I don't know anybody. It's a completely different setting.
The number of times my wife and I have a discussion about a house payment is precisely zero because we haven't had one in 30 plus years. I mean, this is nuts.
I agree with that 100%. It's just so countercultural.
It i remember reading the culture's broke let's keep this in mind well and and also the the people who are profiting from this are absolutely in charge i i've always thought of you as the least controversial most mainstream wholesome person ever and i remember reading a piece on the daily beast just just attacking you and i was like why why attack d Ramsey? He's not even explicitly political or not. You know what I mean? Oh, I get it.
I get it. I don't get it quite as hot as you get it, but I get it.
But it's interesting. And that's clearly at the behest of people who are profiting from this system of financial enslavement.
They're mad. Yeah.
And sometimes it's just, if you put a message out there that makes someone feel like

what they're doing is dumb,

it's convicting,

and that makes that person rise up

and come after us.

It's not even like Visa wrote them a check

or something to come after Dave.

It's just like Dave said

that your whole life that you're living

and believe is stupid,

and instead of actually looking at that,

they get pissed off. How big is, what percentage of our economy is money lending? I, I'm not sure.
But huge. I'm not sure.
It's easily one-fifth. Yeah.
Energy, healthcare. Real estate.
Real estate, money lending. I mean, that's, it's got to be there.
That's the big ones, right? Yeah. Tech now, tech.
Yep. But I mean, there's about six buckets that probably make up the vast majority of our economy.
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So what happened?

Okay, so just back to the example of the person who makes 80 grand a year um and it's got 37 000 in credit card debt at over 20 interest how does that person get out of that like what happens to that person you said it puts enormous stress on the marriage on the body every part of your life but how do you can you get out of that much if you're? Oh, we have people pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. Every week they come on the show doing what we call a debt-free scream.
Wonderful, wonderful stories. There's like 2,000 of them posted on a YouTube channel of people doing debt-free screams over and over and over and over again.
And what they did, we asked them, what'd you do? What'd you do? How'd you do it? When we told you to get on, and first thing they do is they get on a budget. You know, they lay out a plan.
Because if you were taking over a company and the company was in trouble, you'd come in and look at their financials and you'd go, okay, what's going on here? Why is this thing failing? Why did I buy it at a nickel on the dollar? What's going on here? And so you'd immediately start doing a simple analysis. And really, here's the interesting thing.

You don't have to be a math genius.

As a matter of fact,

sometimes the people that aren't math geniuses

do a lot better at this stuff

because they just sit down and they look and go.

I had one old country boy,

he came into one of our small group discussions

in Financial Peace University one night.

And he said,

well, he discovered why we ain't got no retirement.

We've been eating it.

You know, he had $1,240 a month average on restaurants, and he couldn't figure out why he couldn't fund his kid college fund, and couldn't figure out why he had no retirement, and couldn't figure out why he couldn't get out of debt. Because they're living in a stinking restaurant, and they have no money, and they're spending money they don't have.
And, oh, got an $800 car payment on a truck. And I'm like, God, man, how much is your house payment? $700.
Dude, if your truck payment's bigger than your house payment, you might be a redneck. I mean, seriously.
So we get, you know, we've had a lot of fun discussions with people, but basically what we're saying, what we tell them is, you know, on a written plan, the two of you together, husband and wife have to be committed to this. And then you go on scorched earth.
No eating out. No going out.
No vacations. Take six extra jobs.
Sell so much stuff the kids think they're next. And let's get this thing moving in the right.
Sell so much the kids think they're next. I said, put the cat on Craigslist and the dog on eBay.
One morning on national television, PETA started picketing me the next day because they don't have a sense of humor. I was a joke.
I love my dog. I'm not putting it on eBay.
Anyway, so, yeah, you just change the numbers because usually they have enough money coming in to turn the corner. Usually.
Maybe they got to sell the truck to get rid of the $800 payment and get you a $4,000 truck. And maybe you're running Uber or delivering pizzas or mowing grass or the number of people that have college, four-year college degrees that have elected to become maids or open a commercial cleaning service and clean toilets because the money is really good for a short period of time to get their mess cleaned up so that they never have a payment again the rest of their lives.
People will fight to be free if they believe they can. Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when desire comes, it is the tree of life.
So when you believe, people will chase the gates of hell. Where's that quote from? Proverbs.
Can you say that again? Hope deferred makes the heart sick. Hopelessness.
But when desire comes, it is the tree of life. When you believe, then you'll charge the gates of hell with a water pistol.
You don't care suddenly what your broke friends are laughing at you for driving a hoopty because I'm getting out of debt because I'm going to change my family tree because my kids are not going to have to live the way I live because I'm going to pay a price to win. When you get that thing going, that, oh, I've had it going, you get the tunnel vision, and you and your wife, you and your husband are both doing that.
You work, and the thing is, you don't have to drive a junk car the rest of your life. You don't have to work an extra job the rest of your life.
It's 18 to 24 months, and most of these people are out, everything but their house. And so it's a period of time, and you're not going to die from hard work.
Right before you die from hard work, you pass out. It's okay.
You're not going to die from hard work. It's a short period of time.
It's a sprint. I don't want people to live their whole lives like that.
But instead, they're living their whole lives just kind of in this malaise, stuck. And so our whole thing is to shake them and say, you can do this, and show them, and give them hope, and make them believe they can do it.
And the neat thing is, is we've proven it millions of times now. So you don't think if I'm deep in credit card debt, it's not a good idea to get a couple more credit cards and use those to pay off the first one? Yeah.
The way we get out of a hole is we dig out the bottom. I know you've seen that though a lot.
Oh yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
The debt consolidation programs. So what about, okay.
So what about that? So people who are deep in credit card debt. You're moving your debt to a lower interest rate, but interest rate wasn't your problem.
Overspending was your problem and not living on a plan because no one plans to be stupid. No one plans to be broke to where they can't breathe, where their chest is tight, where there's a tear in their eye on Friday because they know for a work all week, this check's already gone.
No one planned. That's not a plan.
You fall backward into that. You don't walk into that with knowledge.
But when you start running a plan, it changes everything. It turns a corner.
And so people can do this stuff. Again, we've seen it so many millions and millions of times now.
But there are all these services that advertise to people who are in hopeless credit card debt, we will consolidate your debt. Well, what happens when they do that? You move your—I'm sorry, I got off track.
You move your debt over here, and you don't change your habits of spending more than you make. And so the debt grows back.
And so the people that do lending, there's two types of debt consolidation. There's these services you see on cable TV, right? And that's not lending.
All they do there is tell people not to pay their credit cards for six months, and they'll take over all these defaulted accounts and negotiate them for pennies on the dollar and try to walk you out that way. And meanwhile, destroying your credit worse than if you'd have filed a bankruptcy.
So that's a complete freaking con.

Is it really?

Oh, it's nasty.

It's a nasty business.

Why?

What's bad about it?

Well, because they're current on their credit cards.

They could have paid their debts off.

And instead, their method of becoming debt-free is quit paying payments,

destroy your reputation, your credit, as if you file bankruptcy, right? And then after your credit cards are six months behind, credit card companies will take 25, 30 cents on the dollar for that. And so these companies will go in and go, okay, we'll pay you payments at 25 or 30 cents on the dollar.
And they set up a new payment on the reduced amount and knock it out. And well, one third the time, right? And so, um, and it's, um, I mean, to me, if someone has the ability to pay their payment, they should pay their payment.
It's a moral thing to me, an ethical thing. I don't like that they got into debt.
I don't like that they got duped by an industry that's out to slit their throat. I don't like any of that.
But you signed up for this. You're like a grown-up, like student loans.
So you need to pay it. And we can show you how to pay the whole stinking thing.
If you can pay the current payments, I can get you out of debt. I don't have to destroy your reputation and put you in the deadbeat category, so to speak, in order to do that.
The other kind of consolidation loan is an actual loan where a bank will loan, say, a second mortgage or a home equity loan. And, you know, we'll take all the credit cards, $37,000 worth of them, make it a second mortgage on the home, and now I have a lower interest rate on the total $37,000, pay off all the credit cards with that loan, and now we're going to pay that second mortgage down, it's a lower interest rate.
So hypothetically, you would think you would get out of debt faster that way, but you don't change your habits. You just moved the debt, kept the habits.
So we keep going out to eat. We keep going out to fish.
No, I get it. I get it.
But just back two clicks to something you said, and I admire your integrity on the question of repaying loans that you signed up for. I get that.
On the other hand, if you can, if you can, but on the other hand, another way to look at it would be if someone's addicted to drugs and it's a voluntary thing, I'm buying fentanyl every week or every day. On the other hand, the person who's selling me fentanyl is also a criminal, you know? And so I've often thought if I, you know, if ever were to retire, maybe I would start a political movement, a new party in the country where the whole purpose is to bring the banks to their knees and shut them down, or just you encourage everyone who's deep in debt to stop payment.
Like, how about 100 million people stop paying their car loans, their mortgages, and their credit cards? And then in the same way that Donald Trump once said, if you take a big enough loan from the bank, it's their problem. You're kind of in charge of the bank at that point.
I would think it'd be kind of cool to do a crush the bank's political party where you just all of a sudden everyone stops payment at once. And then, you know, then you sit down with Jamie Dimon and renegotiate.
What about that? I kind of like that. Well, there's other implications to that.
I'm sure. Look, I know nothing.
I'm acting out of hostility in my head. I appreciate it.
But, I mean, again, I would rather punish them incrementally and just let the demand for their horrible product dry up over time. Yep.
and let that be reflected a little bit at a time in their stock price instead of one morning in their stock price. One morning in the stock price, all the banks are broke.
Feels a lot like 2008. And that's a pretty chaotic.
There are a lot of downstream effects. Pretty chaotic situation for the world.
No, I think it's a... If all the banks go belly up day one.
I don't mind the idea that they become less profitable over the next 20 years. No, I get it.
This is why you're a responsible person and I'm not. It's why I'm not in politics.
It's this revenge. No, I think you're taking the long view, which is you don't want to wreck your country just because there are some bad actors who live within its borders.
I completely agree and thank you for for being sensible. I'm not sensible.
I'm just mad. Just one more question on this dark little thought experiment.
That would bring the banks to their knees like day one, right? Oh, yeah. Well, that'd be kind of fun, wouldn't it? It'd be fun if you did it for 20 minutes just to get their attention and reset the American mindset.
Now, that might be cool. I think I'm going to do this.
If you did it one month, for two months, we don't pay payments. Now, that would not destroy the world economy.
But never we're going to pay them again, and you get 50% of the public to do that. Yeah, you could screw up the whole world economy with that one.
But, no, I don't want to do that one.

But for two months?

Yeah.

Again, though,

it's a little bit like

student loan forgiveness.

You know?

Student loans,

there's no question

that our federal government

and the banking industry

has duped

now the third generation into going deeply in debt. No question about it.
And their parents stood by and signed the note. I agree.
And these, quote, young adults who are old enough to do whatever else they can do. They can sign a contract legally in any state in America to do anything else.

We call them adults.

Whether they emotionally are or not, we can argue.

But they signed up for this.

I had a student loan.

I signed up for it.

It was not a little small one.

It was an old, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

But how much was your student loan?

$3,500.

Actually, yeah.

$3,522 when I paid it off, yeah. Wow.
Was it worth it? No, no, no. The only reason I did it is I could not figure out any other way because no one ever, and even in those days, and that was so long ago.
I mean, this was 40 years ago, 45 years ago. It was a different mindset then even that these things are dangerous.

And now it's like, well, you're not allowed to be a student without a student loan. Now it's completely come the other way to where you're some kind of, like paying off your mortgage or some kind of moron if you don't take out a student loan.
Of course you have to take out a student. It's assumed, and again, we've shifted the cultural belief system to where parents don't tell a kid, hey, maybe you should go to the local college that we can pay cash for instead of going across the state line and the family goes $125,000 in debt.
So you get a degree in sociology so you can make $38,000 as a caseworker with the state. This is not good ROI.
Maybe the parents need to step up and go. But I don't understand in the whole debate over student loans why the beneficiaries of these loans, which are not the students, are never discussed.
They have no skin in the game whatsoever. This whole system exists to benefit colleges and universities.
There's no question. And they exist not to benefit students, but to sustain these massive payrolls of administrators, DEI people, a lot of dumb people, and then the professors, most of whom are totally evil.
Yeah. And no one ever suggests they should pay some of the cost of this.
I don't disagree with that at all. So how does that work? Here's the thing.
I resent as a taxpayer that a politician says I should pay for the forgiveness of students.

How about Middlebury College?

I'd be fine if they did it.

I'd be fine if the endowments that are billions and billions and billions.

But they already pay high taxes on those endowments.

Oh, you're killing me.

Oh, wait.

They don't pay any taxes, right?

So Duke University, which is totally filthy, and it's actually colleges like that are one of the reasons our country's falling apart where do you think all these ideas come from anti-human anti-civilizational anti-american they're all coming from those campuses and they're not paying any taxes at all right we're subsidizing them and then when their scam gets exposed we have to clean it up yeah we does that work? So when a politician says, I'm going to forgive student loans, you know, I have sympathy and empathy both for the student loan borrower that's in up over their head because they got duped. And they're an adult, and they signed up for it.
And so the same thing's true of our bank discussion. I get it.
You signed up for that car payment. You know, I walked in there one time in my 20s and impulsed a car.
You know, that's just. Is that a verb now? That's what you call going deeply in debt for a car you can't afford just because I wanted it right then.
The smell of toxic plastic coming off a new car. Rich Corinthian leather.
Yes, yes. What kind of car was that? Man, I've done so many dumb things.
The biggest one I did that was stupid was I bought a Jaguar. A Jaguar? In my 20s, yeah.
Because I was making money. I was in the real estate business, and I thought I was hot stuff, and I needed to prove it by what I drove.
That's a vehicle my mother had when growing up and you had to take it in and they had

to, I think, lift the engine

out to change the oil. I mean, the whole thing

was, and it broke every week.

It was,

yeah, it was a life lesson.

Was it a cool car though? It was a

great car. It was a beautiful car.
Yeah.

But, and I really thought I was

hot stuff and it was,

but see, what was broken there?

Was it the car industry? Was it the bank?

No. Dave.

Thank you. And I really thought I was hot stuff.
And it was, but see, what was broken there? Was it the car industry? Was it the bank? No, Dave. Dave was an arrogant little twerp who wanted to show somebody that he was somebody because of what he drove.
How shallow is that? You know, but that's Dave. And Dave signed up for that.
And that car took my freaking head off. Really? What happened? Well, it was part of the bankruptcy when we lost everything in our 20s.
That car was still sitting there in the middle of that and that car took my freaking head off really what happened well it was part of the bankruptcy when we lost everything in our 20s that car was still sitting there in the middle of that mess were you married oh yeah barely yeah yeah we got married the second child rachel was born the year we filed bankruptcy and so so with a brand new baby and a toddler and a marriage hanging on by a thread we got the opportunity to start over because doofus here signed up for so much debt, and it took me down. The car was the minor part of it.
How much debt did you have? We had $4 million worth of real estate by the time I was 26, starting from nothing, and $3 million worth of debt on it. So we were 70% leveraged, 80% leveraged.
That's not an unusual ratio, though. No, it's not.
It was a lot of it was short-term notes. We were doing flip this house before Chip and Joanna were born.
And so there was no cable TV to show you how. We were just buying and selling real estate.
And I had a million two in 90-day notes. And if I got rid of a house, if a house came up to the end of the 90 days and hadn't sold, we just paid the interest on it.
The banker renewed it because I was always making money on them. I was good at it.
But then the bank got sold to another bank and they called our notes because they looked down and said, 26-year-old owes us a million, too, on short-term notes on house flipping, whatever that is. And so then, yeah, the second largest lender heard we were in trouble so called another 800 so we had less than six months to come up with two million bucks and it was all in real estate had no cash it was all in real estate and that started the crash that um took two and a half years completely to unfold and then what did you say to your wife um i mean i had dinner with with her last night.
You seemed to have a really happy marriage. That was my observation.
So obviously it worked. This was 30 years ago.
This was 1988. So yeah, we did not have a happy marriage then, though.
She would have left, but she didn't have a car. I'm looking at her right now.
She's nodding. Yeah, we were.

But I mean, we were just scared little kids with little babies.

And, you know, we were just trying to.

The water got cut off at the house.

The lights got cut off at the house.

You know, we were just struggling.

So this was not a clean or pretty bankruptcy. No, this was not a politically correct bankruptcy.

This was a freaking disaster. Because, again, I'm old school.
I grew up hillbilly and you pay your bills. And so we were paying everything as best we could.
And we did everything. We sold everything in sight.
We sold a bunch of real estate. We almost turned the corner, but we didn't make it.
And we got sued so many times. It was unbelievable.
And they were all correct suits. I mean, they were lawsuits because I didn't pay the bill.

It was defaulted.

So we finally hit bottom.

What?

And you had two little kids?

Yeah.

And we were so scared, man.

So people call me on the air.

I can still hear that instantly in their voice.

Yeah.

I can hear.

I start looking at the numbers.

I go, you're really scared, aren't you?

And they start crying.

They're terrified. You numbers, and I go, you're really scared, aren't you? And they start crying.
They're terrified. And so, yeah, it's the worst thing that ever happened to me and the best thing that ever happened to me.
I met God on the way up. I got to know him on the way down.
Yeah. Well, that's right.
Yeah. So we started to decide we're going to handle money grandma's way and biblical, what the Bible says.
And it's all just common sense and live on less than you make, live on a plan, get out of debt. And we started doing it and people said, what are you doing? This is, y'all look different.
And so we started teaching a few people here and there. And all of a sudden, you know, here we are 43 years later and sitting on this this thing that has happened when we started this show we were looking for a very specific sponsor we wanted to find a company that could send us good meat better than anything you could buy in a grocery store they didn't have a lot of weird hormones in it or chemicals just good meat from the united states and we found one and we are proud to partner with them they're called Meriwether Farms and they produce all natural beef and we are proud to be in business with them we eat it our viewers have been buying it and loving it we've got all kinds of positive reviews again this is a sponsor we're proud to have so Meriwether Farms out with a new product in addition to the steaks that we have almost every night here and the burgers all shipped directly to your house, they have a new line of snacks including single serve beef sticks, one of which is right here on the table.
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I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto-friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a finger.
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Check responses for accuracy. It's the Smucker's Uncrustables podcast with your host, Uncrustables.
Okay, today's guest is rough around the edges. Please welcome Crust.
Thanks for having me. Today's topic, he's round with soft pillowy bread.
Hey. Filled with delicious PB&J.

Are you talking about yourself?

And you can take him anywhere.

Why'd you invite him?

And we are out of time.

Are you really cutting me off?

Uncrustables are the best part of the sandwich.

Sorry, Crust. so how did you how did you do it i mean just give me the cliff notes version of because that sounds like a true disaster what it get out of that i mean we filed bankruptcy we lost everything i mean and we just um first thing we did um was just I mean, I started doing real estate deals, but I didn't have any money, and I would just pitch them to one of my buddies and make a spread.
And so I'd tie up a property at, I don't know, let's make up a number, $100,000 that was worth $200,000. And then I would sell him, sell one of my buddies that used to be my competitor, sell him that deal for 15 grand.
I'd make a spread on it. And so he could go buy 100, pay $115,000, including me, for a $200,000 property because I was buying foreclosures.
And then I was one. So we know how to do real estate deals.
And so I had a real estate license my whole life just about. So we just started doing that.
I got back up in 1989 to six figures again. Well, that was fast.
Just dug back. It was income came up.
But, you know, we're still, there was no arrogance left. I bet that's right.
And very little confidence. And we just had a yellow pad.
And every night we would look at the yellow pad and go, okay, food's first. Feed the babies first.
Water and lights is second. And house payment's third.
And gas in the car is fourth. And we really do need to get her a better car.
We need to get her a better car. We got to start saving for that.
Oh, the air conditioner went out today. Oh, good.
And so we just started pecking down that list, pecking down that list, pecking down that list every dadgum month. And then the list got nicer

and nicer and nicer. And now on the list, there was a cruise.
And then on the list, there was a

better car. And then on the list, there was, we weren't worried about food anymore.
And we just

kept pushing our way through it and then started teaching people and wrote a little book.

How long did it take to go from the world is falling apart bankruptcy to thinking,

okay, now I've got it under control?

Under control is a weird thing for me, but away from terror, two years.

Wow.

Where we weren't terrified.

And, you know, we weren't worried about food or lights or water and that kind of stuff. That's what I mean by terror.
And then, but then to start to say, you know, to heal from that experience, probably never have completely. I don't trust a guy that doesn't walk with a limp.
I agree with that. Most of us have had something and that something formed who we are.
Amen. Dan, did you talk every step through with your wife? After it crashed.
Yeah, that's what I mean. Prior to the crash, I mean, we've owned real estate.
She didn't even know. Of course.
I wasn't hiding it from her. I get it.
No, no, no. I think most people, I mean, she had little kids, too.
She had two little kids. She's managing babies, and I'm managing real estate.
Of course. If I had asked her, she would have said, whatever you want to do, honey.
She's doing her job. You're doing yours.
You do whatever you want to do. And then later on, she goes, I had a bad feeling about that.
Well, I bet you did. But now today, and from that point forward, one of the things that we teach couples and that we've used, and I'm convinced it's one of the reasons we're where we are on the success metric, is Proverbs 31 says, Who can find a virtuous wife? For her worth is far above rubies.
One of the greatest sections of the whole Bible. Her husband safely trusts her, and he will have no lack of gain.
It's a wealth building principle to listen to your wife. That's the last proverb.
I think that's the end of the book. It is, exactly.
31 of them. You can do one a day like a vitamin.
And so she's got a home ec degree. She's been a full-time mom for 39 years and now a full-time grandmom and Mimi.
And so, but she has wisdom. And as she says, common sense.
And by the way, common sense is so rare in America, it's like having a superpower. I agree.
So, we don't make large charitable contributions. We don't make big real estate decisions, big estate planning decisions, big huge decisions at the office, at the company without Sharon.
And she looks it over, and 99% of the time she says, yeah, that makes sense. Let's do it.
And sometimes she goes, you know, I've got a bad feeling about that. And we always joke because she's from the hills of East Tennessee and say feeling is a seven syllable word.
A bad feeling. But if she has a bad feeling, if I go against it, it's a minimum $10,000 penalty from God.
So something bad is going to happen. I don't go against that feeling.
So that's a change that you made after bankruptcy and the council couples to make as well, which is make decisions. Don't come home and say, honey, look what I did when you bought a bass boat.
That's really smart. No, I agree with you.
And that's worked. It's huge.
Oh, guess what? It also works in your marriage. It's called communication.
And when you agree on your spending, you've agreed on your dreams, your fears, because all your money flows towards your dreams and your fears. You've agreed on your plan.
You have to agree on whose parents we're going to eat Thanksgiving dinner with to agree on your spending because you're going to have to buy gas to go over there. And you have to figure out if you're going to get a hotel or you're going to stay in their basement that week.
I mean, Thanksgiving planning. Here we go.
Get ready. So, you know, when you agree on your money with your spouse, it's massive for your marriage.
It'll heal a broken marriage because you start communicating about everything that's real immediately. Do you sense that that is a problem for people? Oh, definitely, definitely.
So how does it, in the marriages that you see, people you talk to about their marriages and their money, how does it normally go?

What are the unhealthy patterns that people get in?

Well, first, I'll tell you, I didn't know this when I started.

I thought I was telling them how to do it, what a mutual fund was so they could put it in their 401k.

Exactly.

And here's how you get out of debt, and here's how you do a budget.

I thought I was teaching them about money.

And they would come to Financial Peace University, our class, and then the class was over. They would go, hey, you saved our marriage.

I'm like,

Thank you. And here's how you get out of debt.
And here's how you do a budget. I thought I was teaching them about money.
And they would come to Financial Peace University, our class. And then the class was over.
They would go, hey, you saved our marriage. And I'm like, the sixth class was down the hall, man.
I'm not, I don't have anything to do with that. No, you made us work together.
Because I'm just so practical utilitarian that I forced them to do a budget together. And it forced them to deal with all their crap in their marriage.
And so, yeah, what are some of the breakdowns? It's a lot of different things. But sometimes the worst cases that we see, the most heartbreaking ones, are where one spouse is knighted the money person.
So you're to pay the bills. And then things get out of control, and they go into debt trying to keep the lifestyle the way it is and don't bother to tell the other spouse.
And so this other spouse, when they finally do get in the loop, there's $100,000 in credit card debt laying there to support a life that we could not afford. And so you've got deception now and shame and condemnation and all these other things mixed in that are really nasty.
And then sometimes I get the neighborhood I grew up in, a blue-collar neighborhood. It's not unusual in those neighborhoods for the wife to handle the money and the guy just goes to work and brings home the bacon.
Yes. And too often, relationally in those situations, what ends up happening is the guy who's working and bringing home the money in that scenario, it's a classic 1950s almost scenario.
Every electrician I've ever met has his wife do the billing. There you go.
Of course. Same thing.
What happens too often in that is he ends up having to ask his wife for money like she's his mommy. And this maternal thing ends up happening that's really weird in their marriage where he becomes increasingly adolescent and doesn't ever grow up and make grown-up decisions with good decision-making paradigms.
Instead, he just says, well, my wife, my mommy, mommy said I couldn't go out tonight because we don't have any money. And I seem like as much as I work, we'd have some money.
And then you get that routine. And he just...
I've seen that so many times. Yeah, me too.
And so I'm always yelling at those guys because they're my guys. I mean, that's who I grew up with.
And I'm just yelling, hey, man, be a man. You're not a little boy.
Your wife does not want to be married to her baby. She wants to be married to a man.
And quit being his mommy. Quit being his mommy and taking care of his little self.
My God. You two sit down like two dadgum adults and look at this thing and go,

we're stupid and we need to stop being stupid.

Look at this.

We bought you a truck you can't afford.

We've got $600 bass boat payment because you couldn't catch a fish with the other one.

You're killing me here.

And this is America. And it's me, too.

I was the same guy.

So I got a Ph.D. in DUMB.

I did it worse than all these people put together.

Think about it. So I know what stupid looks like because I looked at him in the mirror for a long time.
So, but yeah, you got to get on the same page and you both have to be grownups. And, you know, the opposite of that, I guess the inverse of that is the sweet little wife who the husband is domineering and takes care of everything.
And she has no idea what's going on, which was really, in a sense, where Sharon was when we went broke.

She was just doing her thing over there and assumed I had a brain, which was a bad assumption.

So, you know, it's, and then here's a horrible situation with that one.

That could go on for 40 years and never really have a problem. He dies, and she is an infant in terms of her ability to even write a check.
She has no idea where their investments are. She has no idea how to pay a light bill.
In some cases, I've met him, she's not even pumped her own gas into her car. He's always done that.
And she's left in this infantile state emotionally. And then her grown kids are having to come along and we're having to train 52-year-old mom how to be like a grown-up woman now because she's been a kept woman, you know that saying, you know, in that sense.
And that's not good for her. That's not good for her.
She needs to grow up. And he's not doing her a favor by taking care of the little woman.

Or whatever bull crap is going on in their emotions there.

So these two thoroughbred horses in the marriage that both step up.

Lock into the same harness at the same speed.

Both with their different giftings.

But both with the level of responsibility.

These are the people that build quality families, quality legacies, and build wealth almost every time. It's incredible to watch.
So you're saying that the relationship with your spouse is a key part of your investment strategy, basically? All our data says that. When we did the largest study a millionaire has ever done uh 10 167 of them we found 84 of them say that they the that one of the keys to their building wealth was a spouse that worked with them and they did it together in unity dragging a princess for 40 years and still becoming a millionaire is very mathematically difficult.
Dragging a little boy with a bass boat that's stuck in a 37-year-old body into wealth is very difficult. And again, I'm not against bass boats.
I got three boats, okay? So, boats are not the thing. I'm just picked on that metaphor for some reason today.
But, you know, yes, yes, to answer your question. Couples that can work together.
And sometimes when we find that, you ask how we get that $37,000 couple, $37,000 debt out of debt, maybe what we're doing is teaching them to work together for the first time in their 12-year marriage or their 18-year marriage. And sometimes we're forcing them to work on these relational things, which we didn't even understand when we first started doing this.
But it's such a key part of it, working together. And, well, I'm going to be independent.
We need separate everything. Well, then why the flip did you get married? That's just the worst marriage ever.
It's a joint venture. It's not even a real marriage.
I agree with that. And like, how common is that for married couples to have separate accounts? Very.
Really? Very. And we get hate mail by suggesting that that's dumb.
Yeah. Hate mail.
Lots of it. Lots of negatives in the comment sections.
Yeah. Big time.
So you did this enormous study of people who've been successful um what are the key qualities apart from a functional communicative marriage you know we focused more on what the uh the tactical money things that they did were okay so where what kind of wealth do you have and what are your components of your net worth and that kind of thing not necessarily what their character qualities were. What we did find is that they're almost always the tortoise.
They're never the hare. They're slow and steady.
They oftentimes pick a series of mutual funds for their 401k, almost never change them. And the mutual funds sometimes, most of the time, are less than the best.
They're like in the top 70% of mutual funds maybe, but not the best ones. So picking the exact perfect fund turns out not to be the secret sauce.
The secret sauce is doing the investment every single month for 30 years or actually 17 years was the average to hit the first million. So um so just doing that and then and the steadiness with their the frugality they the number of them when i talk to them on the air and when they have a one to a five million dollar net worth we do a millionaire theme hour and they call in and tell us about their lives in that case and the number of them that drive a toyota is like staggering we need toyota like as a sponsor on the Ramsey Show.
Why Toyota? I don't know. Because the vehicles don't wear out.
A Highlander, a Tundra, a two-year-old Tundra, a four-year-old Highlander, a minivan. And it's like that's the car of choice.
I get a few Hyundais every now and then. But Toyota is the vehicle of choice for self-made millionaires.
And F-150s, yeah. What about Silverados?

I don't hear as much on that.

I just don't.

I'm not against Silverados.

I'm kind of a Chevy guy, but that's just what I'm seeing.

So, yeah, we're seeing some of that kind of thing,

but most of them, it's a fairly simple thing.

It's kind of boring, actually, but the numbers were staggeringly complete statistically. So it's like in the 80 percentile on most of these numbers uh and it kind of blew our minds that it was that extreme that that um like 80 of them work together with their spouse okay 80 of them um steadily invest for a period of time 80 of them had to bought a new car in 10 10 years.
A brand new car because of the loss in value. 80% of them.
And in the 80 percentile, 84, 82, 89, 89% of millionaires, nine out of 10 in America, are not millionaires because of an inheritance. Now, that's one you hear from the leftist group is the wealthy quality garbage that you hear out there that were stuck in America.
There's no opportunity in America, but 79% inherited precisely zero, 5% inherited a large amount after they were already millionaires, like they had a million two net worth and they got 200,000 from mom after that, she died, or they got 5,000 bucks from grandmother and it was not mathematically anything that impacted them becoming a millionaire and so eight 80 or 79 five and five is 89 so we've got nine out of ten are not millionaires because of inherited money so that's just complete hogwash and this study tucker is we knew we'd get criticism on it from the lefties and the Antifa garbage and all that stuff. And some of the press even, you know, they're, well, I don't know.
I've always heard. I don't give a crap what you've always heard.
Here's data, okay? So our research methodology on this was freaking airtight. As a matter of fact, we had an outside firm look over our shoulders, so we didn't do confirmation buys.
And because we knew if anybody really dug into the white paper on the thing, if we had just screwed around and gathered up a bunch of people that did what I said to do, this is not all Dave tribe. The 70% did not know who I am.
And so these are people that went out and they just, you know, they're 42, 46 years old, 51 years old. And that's the template.
And they've got a paid for house at six or seven hundred thousand dollars. And they've got six or eight hundred grand in their 401k and Roth IRAs.
And that's pretty well their first one point seven or one point eight. Now, you don't get to 50 million or 100 million doing that.
You're not a billionaire and and a billionaire is 1,000 million. That's a different formula, and much fewer of those out there.
But I'm talking about can Joe and Susie retire with dignity, leave an inheritance, change their family tree, not have to count on the government for support, not have to pray that they can vote a savior into the White House because they can't fix their own life. Can they exist and live the American dream, get up, leave the cave, kill something, drag it home, and make it? You dadgum right they can.
We proved it with data. And it's exciting.
Keep their finances commingled. Absolutely.
100%. Why don't people do that? You said earlier that you see a lot of people who don't, who have separate accounts.
Modeling from the last generation, for one thing, their mom and dad didn't. Because they don't trust each other, obviously.
And, you know, if they've been divorced and remarried, then the scars of the other one, you know, you're superimposing upon your new spouse the idiocy of your last one. As one guy said, my starter wife, you know, messed this thing up.
Your starter wife. Okay, that was your first one.
Okay. And, I mean, that thing is, and, you know, it probably has something to do with this idea of misogynism or this idea of equal rights that women need to be able.
Hey, man, we have equal rights. Sharon gets the same vote I get.
And 100% of the income since our first child was born and she's 39 has come into the house because of me. Sharon doesn't earn an income.
Hasn't. Not because we're jerks.
It's just what we choose to do in our life. But I don't have an income.
We have an income. Here are the pronouns.
And so Sharon has as much right and much vote, as much say. And so there's no misogyny here.
It's quite the opposite. It's an equal vote.
And if we can't come to an agreement, we don't do it, which sometimes pisses

one of us off. But we need to be in agreement.
We need to be in unity because there is safety in that unity. There's wisdom in that.
And, you know, if you want to be independent and not have anyone ever tell you anything that you should do wrong, then please don't get married. It doesn't go well because, I mean, it's immediately there's going to be friction the first day on that basis or you complete me or some kind of bull crap like that.
It's not. You better get in that marriage to serve the other person and that together we're going to serve the next generation.
And beyond that, the next generation and we are going to serve the community. And let's get in this idea where there's some meaning to life rather than this what can I get out of it.
You better get in that marriage to serve the other person. I love that.
It works. Are married people more likely to be in better financial shape? Yes.
Yes. There's all kinds of research and data called the marriage advantage.
And it started with that the husbands in the 60s or 70s, the first time we started seeing this type of research pop up, it's not true today because it's not exactly how the socioeconomic fabric is today. But if you take 1965 or 1970, husband goes off to work with a little briefcase, wife stays at home with two kids, we're bored and doing Cleaver, right? Whatever.
Then that guy had an advantage in the marketplace and ended up with a better career path, higher income, and higher likelihood of building wealth than his single person peer did. And it really was because of support from home is what it amounted to in those days.
It was he didn't have to worry about cooking. He didn't have to worry about kids.
I mean, he didn't have to. And the fact that he felt the responsibility back to them drove him to further things rather than, you know, what's my responsibility? I need more beer on Friday night.
I don't have anything to come back home to that I need to be better for. And so being better for the family drove the man in those days.
Today, we're still seeing the marriage advantage, but of course, we don't live in a society that has that very often. The vast majority of couples today both work or have worked at some time.
The vast majority of couples today are on a more equal playing field in terms of in the career space. We see a lot of times nowadays where the lady's outperforming the man income-wise in the marketplace, not unusual at all, and perfectly cool with that, but still we end up with that couple having a marriage advantage.
And I think it's got to do, my friend Simon Sinek wrote a book called The Infinite Game. And the thesis of the book is that when you play a game with a set of rules and there's an end to the game, you move the pieces around, you make the decisions in the game to get to that end.
When you are playing a game that there's not an end to, that is going to go beyond your life, then you're playing long ball. You're making decisions that are long-term based rather than short-term.
Example of that in the marketplace would be the publicly traded company who lays off a bunch of people just to make quarterly stock numbers. That's short-term thinking.
You can artificially run the profitability of a company up by laying off half your payroll, having a big layoff. And you didn't need to lay them off, but you needed to make your numbers for the stock market.
right and so but a company that's not doing something like that long ball is they'll take a

deep breath and kind of go through a hard period of time and keep their high quality talent because you're going to need your high talent in the long ball game. You know, you're going to need them five years from now, 10 years from now.
But if you're only thinking about one quarter at a time, you make different decisions than if you're thinking about 10 years, 20 years, 30 years out. Privately held companies make different decisions for that reason in the handling and the strategy of their businesses.
Same thing's true in our personal lives. So what ends up happening is, is the guy, the couples that are married have, are playing long ball.
They're playing infinite game. They're saying, I want to change my family tree.
They're looking at a baby being born. By the way, that's an impotence, probably number one thing that we've run into that causes people to stop the stupidity, get off this crazy cycle, and say, we're going to get out of debt.
We're going to get on a budget. We're not going in a restaurant.
We're going to do whatever it takes to get free. We're going to change everything.
We're suddenly going to grow up and quit spending money we don't have is when they have their first child. Oh, absolutely.
That first child comes in the world. It's like, dadgum, this is an adult thing now.
I'm not a baby anymore, and I got to quit acting like one. And your emotional calling to nobility goes way up.
What are the main things? You've made a couple of references to restaurant spending. Is that one of the big? It is.
Okay. And I'm not against restaurants.
I love good food. Oh, me too.
One of my favorite sports is fine dining, you know. Definitely.
But, you know, 80% of what you spend in a restaurant is entertainment. You can make the same meal at home for 20 cents on the dollar.
Yeah. And, it is not necessary for nutrition.
It is entertainment. And you don't go buy Broadway play tickets for 400 bucks a piece when you're broke.
You know, you stay home and play cards. So you don't do entertainment when you're broke.
That's expensive and entertainment. And that's what eating out is.
And Americans have moved again, partly because both of them in the workplace, they both get home. They're tired.
They don't feel like cooking. You know, they don't feel like getting out the dadgum frying pan and doing something.
But you can start eating from home. By the way, it's healthier in general to eat from home.
And when you start looking at it, it will open your eyes what you're spending on out to eat. What you're spending on your car payment, out to eat, and on vacations when you're broke.

Those three things are what we find in a budget that we can change immediately.

And it helps the math to make that turn real fast.

So it's car payments, eating out, and vacations.

And vacations.

So you addressed eating out. Let's get to vacations.
How much do people spend on vacations and vacations so you address eating out let's get to vacations how much people spend on vacations um i don't i don't have numbers memorized but i mean it's your impression that that's a big spend we know it is i mean it's it's the it's again the eighty thousand dollar family uh what a trip to disney costs for four for four days. What a trip to the beach for five days costs and rent an Airbnb.
You grew up different than I did, but I was never on an airplane until I was 15 years old. Air travel was not normal in my generation for middle classclass and lower middle-class people.
Air travel for almost every American is normal now. It's very normal for people to jump on an airplane.
And it costs a lot of money to buy an airline ticket. We're going to fly to New York.
We're going to fly to Disney. We're going to fly to the beach.
We're going to fly to Cancun or Cozumel or Cabo, which is great. I'm not against doing those nice things.
I do them, but you live like no one else so that later you can live and give like no one else. And so you look up and you go, we're dropping, we make 80 grand.
We're dropping seven, eight, nine, 10 grand a year on a vacation and then stuck with credit

card debt and then we can't figure out whoa oh christmas i surprised us it's in december this year caught me off guard and so dadgum what are we gonna do now well we got to put that on a credit card because we just used up what little money we had the savings to go on this beach vacation during fall break.

And it just,

and there's a sense of

waking up then in January after the holidays with a financial hangover, and the average American is paying on Christmas until May. And so because there's no Christmas club savings account at any local bank anymore, hardly.
I mean, about 1% of Americans don't have a Christmas club account. Some people do save for Christmas, thank God.
What's a Christmas club account? It was a thing, again, 50s and 60s. It was a big deal, and it's just kind of deteriorated with some of the good banking practices.
But the idea was in January, you would open an account, a savings account, that had Christmas written on the outside of it. It's called the Christmas Club.
And you put enough in there, 112. So when December got here, you had the money to pay cash for your Christmas.
And you'd take your little money down there, put your cash in at each payday and like layaway. Remember layaway? Yeah.
Yeah. It's the same kind of concepts, except the old ideas that have now died in a new digital world.
And it's okay that they've died,

but the idea behind them, I'm going to save up and pay for it?

Well, that's genius.

Car payments.

That's a huge expense for people.

Largest item we buy that goes down in value.

And they go down in value like a rock. That's where Chevy gets that.
They lose 70% of their value in the first four years. So you're going to lose $21,000 in four years on a $30,000 car purchase.
You need to be making some money to lose $21,000. Oh, wait a minute.
We're going to pay payments for the opportunity to lose $21,000 in value and pay extra interest and payments on that too. Oh, and there's insurance on that too.
So what we have figured out is that, and it's horrible for me because I'm a car guy.

I love cars.

And, man, driving junk cars for me when we were broke was the hardest.

We already established that.

The Jaguar when I thought I was rich.

What happened to the Jaguar, by the way?

It got sold two days before they repoed it.

I got it sold.

So it didn't get repoed, just barely.

But, you know.

And, well, obviously, we had to write a check to get rid of it because we were upside down in it but um the uh uh so if you'll drive like no one else later you can drive like no one else if you build some wealth then you can afford to lose money on cars but a hundred percent of us that have anything with a motor in it or wheels, it goes down in value. Like I said earlier, I've got boats.
They go down in value. I've got cars.
They go down in value. And that's in and of itself not evil, but when it is a large percentage of your income or your net worth that's going down in value, then of course you're going to be broke your whole life.
So if your entire investment strategy is $30,000 cars instead of putting $30,000 in a 401k, you're going the wrong way. Or instead of saving up the money and getting the house, you're going the wrong way.
House is going up in value. 401k is going up in value.
Makes you a millionaire, like we said earlier. But no one buys cars to become a millionaire.
Quite the opposite. So our rule of thumb is don't buy

vehicles. Everything you own that has motors, put it together, and it should be less than half your

annual income. And if it is, then you've got plenty of room.
It's not going to destroy your net worth. But I talk to people making $80,000 that are driving $70,000 worth of cars.
Oh, yeah. And then they go, one more day.
We're so stressed out. And I'm like, man, you're not going to do what I say, probably.
But if you do what I say, I'm going to set you free. Let me help you with this.
Here's your really good idea. Sell two cars.
And the silence on the other end of the phone is deafening well if you sell your cars how do you drive well you get two two thousand dollar cars with the payments from one month of not having eighty thousand dollar cars right you got make eighty grand you got seventy thousand dollars worth of cars oh my god there's no chance to just drive beaters for a short period of time yeah drive like no one else so later you can drive like no one else so after the jaguar

we um we had no car and uh a friend of mine uh helped me i think he helped me a lot of ways probably he loaned me his 1978 Cadillac that had 478,000 miles on it. And it had, the predominant color was Bondo.
Oh, yeah. And the vinyl roof across the top was broken.
So when you drove, it filled up with air. So it looked like a parachute, a Bondo buggy with a parachute on top.
So I went from Jaguar to Bondo buggy. I went from arrogant to humiliated, not just humble, but humiliated.
I mean, cops would follow me in that car, right? What are you doing in this in a town? And so you stop at the stoplight and the top would settle, you know, it's like going down the, uh, and, but you know what? I drove that car, what felt like 10 years, one three month period. And I saved up enough to buy a $2,000 car in three months because I wanted out of that thing.
I gave that blessing back to my friend, right? And I said, thank you. Thank you very much.
And got a $2,000 car. And then I saved up and got a $5,000 car.
What kind of car was it, the 2000? Do you remember? It was some kind of like Chevy Impala. Yeah.
It was ugly, but it was reliable and a lot nicer than the Bondo buggy. It was, I mean, the difference in a $2,000 car and a $400 car is dramatic.
Yes, it is. And the difference in a $2,000 and a $6,000 car is dramatic.
The difference in a $6,000 and a $16,000 car is hardly discernible. That's a good point.
And a $20,000 car and a $40, forty thousand dollar car ninety percent of people can't pick it without looking it up on the internet how rich do you have to be to buy new cars uh we tell folks to have a million dollar net worth if you're going to buy brand new because you take such a hit in the first 12 months i don't i don't buy new cars i do but i've got the money so um i'm not ashamed of that but i don't i wouldn't

tell people uh to do that again until you've got at least a one million dollar net worth don't buy a new car unless you have a million dollar net worth buy a one-year-old let somebody else take the butt whipping on the depreciation and again at the millionaires we're talking to they're driving three-year-old four-year-old toyota still i kind of tell them hey need to upgrade. Because I oftentimes find one driving a 93 Camry and, you know, still, and they're a million six.
And I'm like, dude, buy your wife a car. Come on.
That's awful. You're not proving anything at that point.
What about leasing cars? Leasing is a method of financing on a car. And so a lease payment is basically a car payment, which is wiser.

It's so confusing,

the leasing. Lease is the most expensive way to operate a vehicle.
Oh, it is. Okay.
Borrowing money at the bank is better, actually. Paying cash, obviously, is the only thing you should do,

ever. I'll ride a bicycle before I get a car payment again.
Knowing what I know now,

with the data that I've got and the life I've lived,'s no way and i'm a car guy man i like a muffler i'm a redneck i like a muffler running you know i can hear it i love something fast but i'm still i'll ride a bicycle before i have a car payment so a car fleece we call them is basically the the math on it is you've got the msr manufacturer sticker price, right? And that's what the lease is based on. And you've got a monthly payment where you're renting the car.
You're leasing the car. At the end of a closed-in lease, which 98% of the leases in America are closed-in leases, there's a buyout number.
You can buy the car if you don't turn it in for that number. So you pay payments

and the buyout number. And the buyout number might be $9,000 and you paid $30,000 for the car, whatever, something like that.
And you got a five-year lease. So you're paying payments for five years and then you get a buyout number.
So it's much like the payoff on a car if you paid it off early. And so you can buy that car for $9,800 in our example here.
And if you run it in a financial calculator, you put it in your back and you say, okay, my current value of the car is the one number. The series of payments is the other number.
And the end number is $9,800. We can ascertain that the average car lease in America is a 14.2% interest rate.
And it's not technically an interest rate, and it's not disclosed by truth and lending laws because it's not borrowing money. So you don't get the little sheet that says your APR is that's mandatory by the federal government.
If you buy something that has an interest rate on it, they have to give you that sheet, truth in lending. But you're not borrowing money, so you never know.
The cost of capital is what it's called in lease. But it's a math formula that works exactly like interest.
So you're borrowing money at 14% interest when you lease a car on average. As compared to eight.
Oh, wow. In today's world.
It's almost double. Yeah.
Yeah, it's a subprime rate.

But it's a lower payment, less down, and the car companies make more money on it, so they push it like crazy.

The number one most profitable square footage on the car dealer's lot is the finance office.

They make a lot more money on the sale of that contract, that leasing contract, back to Ford Motor. They give them a check back to Toyota Credit, back to Chrysler Credit, whatever.
They give them a check back to that dealer, and they make more money on the spread on that contract than they do on the actual spread on the inventory item of the car. So cars are an excuse to sell financing.
This is so sick. Wow.
You can see why a normal person, maybe with less knowledge than you, could see this all as like a vast conspiracy to enslave us all with debt. No? It is.
I mean, it's everybody just doing the best they can at their business and they figured out. But I mean, Victoria's Secret figured out that they weren't in the underwear business.
In to keep your job at the underwear store you have to have you have to issue so many victoria secret credit cards a month if you're the little girl selling underwear at the underwear store seriously yeah they fire them because they're not they're not in the underwear business they're in the credit card business sears but when it was open made more money on credit cards that would be you better or your little wait your little waitress your little attendant there is not going to get to keep her job the uh sears in the old days made more money on credit than they did on anything else of course they're broke they had discover card later and they sold it off for a profit and then they still went broke but should have stayed in the credit Yeah, they should have. Okay.
Can we zoom out a little bit from the personal to the national? To the macro. Yeah, to the macro.
So our national debt, is it as big a problem as the personal debt that we carry? It's a different problem. Yeah.
It's harder to, for me anyway, it's harder to grasp exactly what to do with it. It's harder to figure out where there's an end game.
I have pledged, for some reason in my space, Tucker, there's always a guy, it's typically a guy, not a lady, because ladies don't, for some reason, don't make this mistake. But in the financial world, people there in the financial world, when they get old and they write books, they almost always take a negative that the end of the world is coming.
So I've read 10 or 15 books that the end of the world is coming due to the national debt uh peter grace the grace commission studying the national debt under uh ronald reagan wrote a book called bankruptcy 1984 that in 1984 the government was going to go so far in debt that the government that they were going to bankrupt themselves it was going to hockey stick and he makes a legitimate case with math that the world is going to come to an end, as we know it economically, in 1984. Did it happen? Yeah, and there's a whole bunch of others that are noted smart people, but it's just something about the genre that I'm in that people go negative when they get old, and they always write the end of the world book, and I promised I'm not going to do it.
So no matter how old I get, I'm not going to fall for that. Instead, I'm going to write the optimism book.
So the answer to your question is, I do not understand why it is not having more of a negative impact than it is. In my mind, because you know I hate dad, obviously.
We've had a whole discussion around this subject today. But I don't understand how we've gotten so far.
Such a large percentage of our budget now is just to maintain the interest. The trillions upon trillions, and there seems to be no end to the appetite for both parties to just choke us to death on overspending.
the deficit is, I mean, people don't even understand what deficit means in the real world out here. It means that's how much you've overspent that year only.
It's not how much in debt you are. It's how much more debt you took on that year because you're still as stupid as you were the year before.
You know, it's like, God god it's out of control so the the ability for somebody to be a statesman on one side of the aisle or the other to actually look at the american people and say no we're not going to do this we're going to bring this spending in it's beyond me uh so that i that's that's political capital. I don't see anybody even talking about intelligently.
It's a dirty little secret. But there are people smarter than me that think it's okay.
I've got a good friend in Nashville that's a world-class economist named Art Laffer. And he helped President Trump with his tax code that he wrote, which was a great tax code.
And he was famous under Reagan for the Laffer curve, that as you decrease tax rates, revenues rise because you stimulate the economy. And it's no longer a theory.
It's a proven fact. Super lefties don't like it because it's associated with Reagan.
But if you just look at the actual data, it actually happens. Under the same theory, Clinton almost balanced the budget.
He lowered tax rates and was the closest we've come to not having a deficit in modern times. It was Bill Clinton.
Because revenues went way up under Clinton. The economy was booming, and people paying taxes like crazy as a result with a lower tax rate.
So Art says, he and I argued about this at dinner not long ago, because I'm like, Art, I don't understand. You're going to have to help me, because I'm a hillbilly, and you're like a Cambridge PhD, okay? So you're going to have to teach me.
Why is this not a problem? He goes, it's not a problem. I know, but that's not the answer.
It's like, I'm saying why, and you say, because I said so. It's not.
Tautology. So yeah, you're going to have to really talk down to me a little bit and teach me.
And he tried to explain it, and I'm still, bless his heart, he's just so smart. I can't, I couldn't get there.
I do not understand why it's not a problem. But he really believes it's not, and I really like him, and he's really smarter And so I'm there, maybe it's not, I don't know.
And I'm not going to write the end of the world book anyway. So I, I do know that it represents, uh, from a person like me, a person of faith perspective, this lack of, uh, personal discipline, this inability to deny self in order to have a greater gain, to say no to something today so I can say yes to my grandchildren's generation, that lack of nobility, this just avarice and greed, this just every dollar, and everybody just milking the American public with their spending, that to me, that's just, it's just sick.
Repulsive. It's repulsive.
It is. And so, to me, it's a spiritual disease.
It's an indicator of where we the people are, because we could stop it. We the people could we just vote some different people in if somebody stood up and said no but no one wants your congressman or your senator to say no to something you care about I mean I mean my grant you're gonna cut my grandmother you're gonna kill my grandmother you know no we're not but the word no in an an entitled culture is an evil word.
Why are other people responsible for your grandmother? Yeah. She's your grandmother.
Yeah, but she's on the program. And you cut the program, she's going to die, which is not.
She's not. It's all hyperbole.
But, you know, if, but I mean, what Vivek's saying, you know, turn the bowl over and dump out the alphabet soup up there. Start closing a bunch of these 464 agencies that we have.
You know what payroll is? Number one thing on any business P&L, any government P&L, number one item, largest item when you go down the list of expenses is always payroll. And you got alphabet soup up there.
So that means we've been open 200 and something years, and we've averaged two agencies a year. And in the first 100 years, we had no agencies.
So that means we've averaged four agencies a year being formed, and they've never closed one yet. So alphabet this, alphabet that up there.
And those people can spend some stinking money, man. They make the rest of us look like geniuses.
I know. And yet they blame us for everything.
Oh, yeah. So we are a couple weeks out from the presidential election.
How do you expect, and please go in order, Kamala Harris first, Donald Trump second, how do you expect the economy to change if one is elected or the other is elected? Kamala Harris is elected, what changes? Well, as a friend of mine says, it's hard to say without knowing. That's never stopped me, Dave Ramsey.
Again, this is worth what you folks out there listening are paying for, which is nothing. So, and I'm an expert on my opinion, but the economics, I am sure, and I'm a student of economics.
I've got a degree in finance. And so I've spent my time on that.'ve spent my whole life on the subject, micro primarily, but macro is implied.
But economics, for sure. We see it in the stock market.
We see it in the stuff after the pandemic with supply chain. We see it with oil energy movement, that kind of thing.
It's as much psychology as is mathematics, because it's about expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies. So, in other words, if I believe, as a small business guy, and 54% of the gross domestic product is small business produced, okay? So, people that have 500 or fewer employees are making the decisions on over half of the economy.
And so this heating and air guy or a guy that's got a financial planning services business or a lady that owns a chiropractor office, okay, are they going to invest some of their profits in growing their business? I'll rent a little larger space and hire another person to work on their team. They have to believe in order to do that.
So it is self-fulfilling prophecy. If they think things are bad, then they take actions that make them bad because they don't invest.
They don't hire the next person. And instead, they pile that cash in the bank account because they're looking over their shoulder like death is coming over over the corner right around the corner and so when people don't believe under any president that things are going to be good they take actions to make it worse when they do believe then they create actions that make the person look like they caused something in the white house and really the small business guy is the one that caused something to happen when i was interviewing president trump the the other day, I said, you know, when you politicians, and so you've been a businessman, President Trump, and a politician.
And when you people say, I created jobs as a politician, it pisses those of us that actually create jobs off. Because you don't create any jobs.
All you do is create an environment where we'll go create jobs. I'll hire people at Ramsey if you give me more of my tax money back, Art Laffer, right? And I'll hire more people at Ramsey and grow what we do if I think I'm safe, if I'm in a predictable environment.
That's right. And that's what scares me about Vice President Harris is I don't think there is a solid program.

Even if I didn't agree with the program,

I can't tell what it is.

And so as a businessman,

her ambiguity is more scary

than my disagreement with her policy.

And you think that's true for most businessmen?

Oh, I guarantee you it is.

But if you're a solid Democrat

and you believe in the Democratic Party, okay, and that's your thing, which you're probably not listening to this podcast, but if you are, you know, at least then you would believe that the, let me try to find one in the past that was proactive. Kennedy, okay? Of course, Kennedy's economic policies are more Republican than

our Democrat in today's world. But find a Democrat that you disagree, that you agree with, and even if their policies are something, I wouldn't go along with.
I wouldn't do that if I was him. But at least I know what it is.
I know what the rules of the game are, and I can tell, then I'll be more likely to invest.

But when you take away my sure footing, even if it's treacherous footing, the ambiguity causes the economy to slow down. And that's what we're sitting in right now.
The lack of leadership out of the White House today, as sad as it is, and as many things, We can joke about can joke about it, we shouldn't, but it's easy to do. We can, we can do, but just the sheer silence and the frozen like a deer in the headlights for the last, at minimum, 14 months, 15 months has frozen the freaking economy.
It's just sitting and looking at us. And so that's what scares me more than anything else.
Even if you disagree with Trump, at least by God, you know what he's going to do. For sure.
Drill baby drill, lower taxes, blow up the thing. He's going to, I'm not in agreement with President Trump on personally.
I didn't discuss this with him, but I think the tariffs thing he's overdoing, I think the tariffs are going to cause some inflation. I agree with some of the economists that have come out against it.
Conservative economists come out saying don't do that, but he's going to tariff up because he's all about the behavior thing. I think it's a bad idea.
But at least you know. You know, if I'm buying goods out of Vietnam right now, and my business, my cost of goods sold as a businessman, if I'm buying goods out of Thailand right now, I'm doing some production there.
I'm not. But if you are, are you buying stuff out of India right now? You better get ready if Donald Trump's in office for your cost of goods sold to go up.
And we know that. But that's a predictable environment, even if it's going to harm my personal little business over here.
At least I know it. And still, now I at least know what the rules of the game are, and I can act.
And you can still stimulate the economy on ideas you don't agree with because they're predictable. The lack of ambiguity.
Ambiguity is what kills the economy. I understand that.
It's called lack of leadership. Now, that's what the White House can actually do.
The White House cannot create the economy. They can create an environment where the economy grows.
but they cannot create an economy. They do not have that power.
So don't vote for somebody because Donald Trump's going to make you rich. He's not.
Kamala Harris is going to make you rich. They're not.
The laughable thing when Obama was elected, these people, now where's my free car? You know, because these people went completely nuts thinking Obama was going to actually hand out candy from the White House. And that entitlement stuff is whacked.
But from a business perspective, a business man's business woman's perspective, you know, the advantage Trump has over Vice President President Trump has over Vice President Harris is that he has a very clear exacting thing that you can choose to agree with or disagree with, but it's an environment you can function in because it's predictable. That'll cause prosperity.
Here's my last question. I was having dinner with someone the other night and your name came up.
Actually, I didn't bring it up. This person just brought you up and said, the thing about Dave Ramsey is no one I have ever seen treats his employees better than he does.
And you have a lot of that. Oh, that's nice.
I thought it was really nice. It was a memorable compliment.
It wasn't just Dave Ramsey's a good guy. It was Dave Ramsey goes way out of his way to treat his employees well.
And this was unsolicited. He just said that.
I didn't forget it. So I think that's true.
I've asked other people and I think I've verified that as true. I've reported this out.
But it raised the question and bless you for doing that. But what are an employer's obligations to his employees, do you think? Well, I mean, there's legal obligations that are obvious.
I meant moral obligations. Yeah, and there's ethical, moral, and then there's spiritual.
And so our HR manual comes from Jesus's word that just says, treat other people like you'd want to be treated.

And so I've got a guy on my team right now that just had a horrible accident

and he's in the hospital

at this moment of this taping.

And so, okay, if my little brother worked for Tucker and he had a horrible bike accident and couldn't come to work probably for a month i mean he's had surgeries and you know he's all tore up um how would you treat how would i want my little brother to be treated if he worked for you i want my daughter to be treated um and so that's the way we look at it. And so it's real simple then.
If we have the money, and lately we have had, in the early days we didn't, but if we have the money and we can take care of somebody that needs to be taken care of, we simply do it because it's what I'd want somebody to do for my kid or for me if I was in trouble. And it's caused us to do some pretty wacky things at times.
Like what? Well, I mean, like we had one team member that had cancer and they didn't work for two years. And they got paid the entire two years.
And now they're back on our team. Wait, this person recovered? Yeah.
She made it and she's wonderful. She's a fabulous person, by the way.
And everybody loves her. And there was no way we weren't going to take care of her while she's going through that.
And if she had passed away, we would have helped with the final arrangements because she's been with us 15 years, and she's like a sister, so we have to take care of her.

It's what we do.

and the greatest now running a business for 30 years

the most fabulous experience I've had

is to get to walk along shoulder to shoulder

with these warrior poets

and fight through the things we've had to fight through to win and to become successful and meanwhile got each other's back doesn't always work sometimes people lie and cheat and say things about you they shouldn't say and sometimes they make up stories and put them in impressed and that's happened to me and it breaks my heart but um makes me mad um but we're always going to be caught i don't i'm not going to be on my deathbed and look back and go i wish i had taken care of so-and-so when i had the means to do it my life doesn't change too so i mean how selfish would it be not to do that? And the byproduct that ends up happening, and it really wasn't the motivation for it, but from a leadership perspective, the byproduct that ends up happening is this fierce loyalty and this fierce desire to come to work and actually work while you're at work. And they take care of each other.
So if somebody's in the hospital, the number of people that, you know, on our team will cut their grass or make sure they've got food, the family's got food, you know, the team shows up. When a new person comes on board, they've never seen anything like it.
Five or six people from that team will show up and help them move the stuff out of their U-haul and who does that we do because that's the

way we treat each other and uh it's other service and there's just tremendous uh spiritual psychological

and end up being financial reward because we don't have anywhere near the turnover

who wants to leave ramsey nobody we don't i mean if somebody leaves because they have a family

situation like they got one got married the other day move decided they want to live with their

husband in oklahoma kind of a problem so you know it's a problem we lost that one you know

Thank you. because they have a family situation.
Like one got married the other day and decided they wanted to live with their husband in Oklahoma. It was kind of a problem.
So, you know, it's a problem. We lost that one, you know.
So we have some turnover like that, but we don't have normal turnover like anywhere near anybody else. And we're in the types of world with broadcasting.
I mean, it's a high turnover world. Oh, yeah.
It's a gypsy world almost. Yes.
And, I mean, my producer, Blake Thompson, has been with me almost 30 years. And one of my best friends.
And so that's, I mean, I get choked up about it. Yeah.
But he'd do anything for Dave Ramsey and Sharon Ramsey. I got to tell you, man, if something happened to me, I don't have any worry about somebody taking care of one of my kids my wife um those people will be there you built an amazing world yeah god's good david ramsey thank you thank you brother

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