Comments on: 6 Things I Don’t Agree With Dave Ramsey On

By: sinisa karabatkovic

sinisa karabatkovic — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 22:15:50 +0000

In reply to Todd. Dave Ramsey, himself, wrote in his books that you should not take everything he is saying to the heart. You should read and listen to other sources, as he does, to make a decision. Fake news. A lot of omitted stuff. Man has $ 200 million in the bank. The man become a legend in short period of time. What is up with that?

By: Joel

Joel — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 17:47:51 +0000

In reply to modviz. Yep. This also slowly teaches people how to invest, which is important because once their debt is gone they'll already be familiar sumwhat with putting money into investment vehicles. 401k matching = free money!

By: modviz

modviz — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 01:01:58 +0000

I agree with you on the 401(k) contributions. If someone is in debt and their company has a match, put in a least enough to get the full match from the company and use what’s left to pay down debt.

Matching contributions are basically a risk free rate of return.

By: David Mann

David Mann — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 21:32:49 +0000

To truly find out where the break-even point of paying off the debt vs continuing to fund the 401k is you need to run a time value of money calculation using the number of years to retirement as a guide. For someone who said “I always advise my readers to avoid oversimplification of this topic and look at the actual numbers” it seems you might be doing just that in your example. Straight-line math does not account for the compounding effect of money growth in later years.

By: David Mann

David Mann — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 21:23:28 +0000

Like most people that have studied DR, I understand that his advice is very specific to a group of people. My main issue is when he says people that don’t agree with him are not smart. I would like to invite Dave to please look up the word “arbitrage,” If a car loan is at 1% and according to Dave you can make 12% on your money. If you take out the car loan and investing the rest of the cash Dave wants you to spend on the car you make 11% a year on the money you borrowed “arbitrage”. It seems smart to me to help your money work for you. This idea also works for home loans and a reason the 15-year loan might not always beat a 30-year loan. But as Dave would say “I am not smart,” Hopefully, math and a time value of money calculation will prove me right. It will also work if you only average a 6 or 7% gain on your money.

I fully agree Dave does help many people with some good advice around overspending, Unfortunately, It is also obvious his main focus is to sell his product, not give his clients the best possible advice he can on their whole financial picture.

By: Keelan Muscara

Keelan Muscara — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 22:09:05 +0000

In reply to Murdock. HUGE J.L. Collins guy! Makes it so easy now to recommend investing books to friends. It's a no brainer.

By: Christine Luken

Christine Luken — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 13:43:25 +0000

In reply to Paul Strauss. I'm not against buying new cars, Paul! I've bought two brand new Hyundai Sonatas and they've been amazing cars for me. I did save up and pay cash though. :)

By: Christine Luken

Christine Luken — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 13:41:11 +0000

In reply to Paul Strauss. I agree Paul! The extreme financial crash diet approach is why the vast majority of people don't stick with his program. It's teaching people binge-and-purge financial behaviors, rather than teaching people how to be financially healthy. They only know the 2 extremes! I knew there were shortfalls to his approach when my first wave of coaching clients were people who had complete Financial Peace University but fell off the wagon. And some of them were worse off than they were before they took the course!

By: Christine Luken

Christine Luken — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 13:37:43 +0000

In reply to Devin. You're welcome, Devin! It's important to learn from the experts, but not to blindly follow their advice as gospel.

By: Paul Strauss

Paul Strauss — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 19:35:35 +0000

I also seriously don’t understand why on the one hand he says cars depreciate 30% the day you drive them off the lot (actually, they don’t– it wasn’t even really true during the height of the popularity of this notion in 1975) and on the other hand tell you to pay cash for a car? I got .9% (point nine percent) financing in June of 2012 on my Honda Civic EXL. At the time, the DR’s of the world would have said “pay cash for a used car” or “fix the old one”. My options were $15,000 cash for a 2010 with just shy of 30K miles on it, repair the 1997 with 213K miles on it for $3,800, or sell the 1997 to a tuner for $5K (Honda Civics are in HIGH DEMAND if you know how to find the niche market that loves them) and finance a brand new, ain’t nobody ever broke the leather in it but me, 0 mile 2012 in June of 2012. I went with the last option. Still have it– now has 117K miles on it. Every dollar I paid on that 60 month .9% simple interest loan was worth less than the dollars I borrowed. I still had my $15K cash to invest- which I did. In fact, I even speculated with some of it buying gold and bitcoin– nothing I couldn’t afford to lose– and I used the proceeds of both to pay off all other debts and buy a REALLY nice car, but that’s another topic. The point is that I would NEVER come cash out of pocket for a crap purchase like a car. I look at it like this: if you wouldn’t sell $30,000 worth of your retirement fund to buy a car, then you shouldn’t pay cash, either.