everybody's trying to fix their finances with a math formula and if you were doing math you wouldn't be in credit card debt [Music] hey everyone welcome back to on purpose the number one Health podcast in the world thanks to each and every single one of you that come back every week to listen learn and grow now you know that I'm on a mission to serve you and help you build incredible lives 360 degrees and one of those things is to focus on
areas where I can bring in experts who have incredible Insight research and years of experience so that I can share that with you and this person is someone who I've followed for a long time is someone that I've wanted to have on the show for a long time I feel extremely honored and grateful to introduce Our Guest today who is none other than Dave Ramsey an eight-time number one National best-selling author personal finance
expert and host of the Ramsay show Heard by more than 23 million listeners each week if you have not subscribed already make sure you do he's appeared on good morning America CBS mornings Today's Show Fox News CNN Fox Business and many more since 1992 Dave has helped people regain control of their money build wealth and enhance their lives he also serves as the CEO for the company Ramsay Solutions welcome to the show Dave
Ramsey and today we're talking about his new book baby steps millionaires which I highly recommend you go and grab a copy of we'll have the link to order it in the caption and in the comments Dave welcome to the show wow I'm on the Jay Shetty show this is awesome man you're a big deal thank you for having me it's the other way around for me to me you're the big dealer so I feel really grateful that you said yes and you know for me
supporting my community having great Financial Health is a really important part of my mission and who better to go to the news so you know I'm really grateful that I get to connect my community with you I'm sure many of them are already listeners anyway but Dave you know let's let's start learning a bit more about you and your journey I want to hear about when Dave wasn't the financial expert that he is like what were your mindsets what was your
relationship like with money when it wasn't where it is today I grew up in a household of entrepreneurs and so they taught us uh that you can do it that all you've got to do is leave the cave kill something and drag it home I mean there's you can go out there and make something in this world and that the free enterprise system is not broken and it's tough It's hard but you can do it and so uh I believe that and I still
believe it and uh I I went and got my real estate license when I turned 18 and when I graduated from college I started buying and selling real estate and starting from nothing I got rich at least by a kid from Antioch Tennessee standards I ended up with about four million dollars worth of real estate and a little over a two million dollar uh net or a little over a million dollar net worth I was making a couple hundred
thousand dollars a year that's 1982 20 000 bucks a month from the neighborhood I grew up in that's called Rich and so uh we were having a blast but I'd borrowed too much money and the short version of story is the bank got sold to another bank they called our notes we were doing flip this house before uh chip and Joanna were born and so you know we uh the bank called our notes and we spent the next two and a half years
of our life losing everything we owned we were sued and foreclosed on and with a brand new baby and a marriage Hanging On by a thread we had the opportunity to start over after bankruptcy and it was uh it was brutal it was brutal it was gut wrenching it was life defining um and it was at the time the worst thing that had ever happened to me at all the worst trauma uh the to not be able to keep your word to have your
integrity just crushed by your stupidity and um it was I come from an honor culture and it's just uh it's a horrible thing and so obviously now 30 years later I realized thing that ever happened to me because I learned a whole
new way of looking at money I realized that borrowing money was a bad plan and we've since been able to put lots of data to that and millions of lives to that idea that the idea of if you don't have any payments you've got money and
you can build some wealth and so we began a debt-free life at uh 28 years old and I'm 62. so uh it's worked out pretty well that's incredible Dave I mean you as you said you've been talking to people about that money for 30 years on the Ramsey Show you've given you know helped so many people over those decades are you hearing new financial problems today or is it the same ones repeated over and over again is there a new
challenge a new issue or are we stuck in a similar mindset over the last three decades there's the uh problem and then there's the symptom the symptoms are always new uh you know a Bitcoin a get rich opportunity right that's a new symptom uh you know there's been all kinds of symptoms pop up over the years that are different there's a period of time where credit card debt was the most awful thing on the planet then there was a
period of time where student loans are the most awful thing on the planet and uh you know the the thing that is holding down the middle class the thing there's crushing families and these kinds of things and then there was a period of time in 2008 when the mortgages were failing and the real estate market failed and so we've seen all these things but they're basically those are all symptoms and underlying all of that again very similar to to
your insights uh is the idea that principles have been violated when you violate principles you're going to get these symptoms they'll have all kinds of different colors and looks to them but they're the same root cause Dave you know you've talked about this a lot uh through your book through your work through a number of your books about how we don't really get educated on these ideas in school and you must find it
shocking that across 30 years that hasn't massively changed uh what is it that you think we're missing out on at school what are the key principles as you were mentioning that you need to learn at school or that you need to learn to start so that you can have a healthy relationship with your finances and money well there's a level of Mythology that has been spread about money in our culture that was spread
with an agenda frankly it was all uh if I was a bank I would teach everyone that they needed a credit score and the reason I would teach them they need a credit score and the way to get a credit score is to borrow money from me so and pay it back to me so that you can raise your score so you can borrow money from me so you can pay it back to me so you can raise your score so you can borrow money from me so you can pay back
to me so you can raise your score it's a great plan if you're a bank and uh so but then it was put out there that now the FICO score is like biblical truth or something and it's not it was a it's a banking program to get people to borrow money but now and so what's happened with some financial literacy programs in schools is they're they're going to teach you to build your FICO score because that's been accepted now as Norm
rather than as rather than actual well it's accepted as fact even though it's not a fact and so what we've done is what we have I mean our antidote would be to say okay we're going to teach people to live on a budget and how to do a budget we're going to teach them to live on less than they make concept Congress can't grasp we're going to teach them to uh to be generous outlandishly generous and we're going to teach them to save and invest in the
power of compound interest and these things are agnostic to the banking community and so we don't have to Infiltrate The Lending community and the people the pieces of the financial industry that have an agenda into this curriculum but basically a lot of teachers have been indoctrinated by the culture that this is the way you have to live you're always going to have a car payment you have to have a credit card you're uh you
know you can't be a student without a student loan and then they bring that into the classroom because they personally have been taught this but when you back it out and say well the teaching is with an agenda then you have to stop and go ah there's a villain in this story and so instead we need to be teaching the basic premise of Common Sense and good news is we've actually gotten our high school curriculum and
about 48 percent of the high schools in America so far so we're waking up a few people here there we're causing a bit of a Ruckus but certainly the banks and those kinds of folks are not happy about that because we're teaching people not to borrow money I actually had that experience so I grew up in a house where my parents never wanted us to be in debt so we I didn't even know what a credit card was quite frankly growing up and we
only ever used debit cards and so when I moved to the United States from London and I went to buy a car they they wouldn't give it to me because I didn't have a credit score now I had enough money to buy that car maybe even 10 20 times if I wanted to but they wouldn't let me because I didn't have the credit score and so I had to get into this habit of building up that credit score in the same way and that
was massively different for me because I just never been in that mindset So when you say that it it resonates with me very strongly because I just couldn't imagine ever feeling like I owed people or that I was buying things with money that wasn't mine uh because of the way I'd been raised around it I mean what's the craziest financial situation that you've ever heard on the show like what's what's something that really
blows your mind and you go even this is crazy for Dave Ramsey the line that we always use and it's true is I haven't borrowed money in 30 years so I don't have a credit score mine's undeterminable or zero uh and so the joke is and it's it's the truth I if I go down to a local apartment complex and there's a sweet little 26 year old apartment manager that is Corporate has told her what to do and they have they require a FICO score to rent I can't
rent an apartment there and I'm a multi-millionaire I can write a check and buy the complex but I can't rent an apartment there now that's that's just asinine that's just ridiculous and so that that illustrates the absurdity of this as far as the crazy stuff on the show oh my goodness I mean we do we do three hours a day for 20 for 30 years now I mean it's we've had crazy on on parade at times and you the thing I have
to try to do is laugh because I've done so many stupid things I've got a PhD in dumb so when somebody calls with something stupid we just laugh together I mean I'm not shaming them but oh my gosh I mean people with just I mean I had a guy with a million dollars in credit card debt one time how do you do that I mean that was like a full-time job to pull that off and we've had lots of people with with hundreds of
thousands of dollars of student loan debt and um they just get themselves in all kinds of stuff and so you know you get stupid on steroids and it just explodes it gets exponential and it's really you know it's it's crazy humorous because it's so absurd but you know also while you're talking to them it's just sad because they're completely trapped and how am I going to get this uh this young dentist that's in one of our documentaries it's
got a million in student loan debt and how am I gonna how am I gonna help him get out of that oh it's just heartbreaking yeah I mean those stories as you said like I love that you create this open welcoming space for people to feel heard feel seen and like you said we've we've all made mistakes uh but then at the same time I really value how you give very specific strategic advice for people to get out of those places
now your new book uh baby steps millionaire like what I really love about it and what I want to do on this podcast is I want to kind of touch on each of the chapters because whenever someone has a book out and I I deeply value books books have changed my life life I believe they're absolutely transformative they they start incredible Journeys I believe yours is going to do this for so many people it already has but with this book your
first chapter is called can anyone Be A Millionaire and I think a lot of people grow up with the feeling that they will never be one they're not planning for that and they don't even think about that I would say that I grew up with that mindset too uh because of the family that I was raised in and the people I was raised around tell us a bit about that question and why you take the approach you do to that answering that
question well it's an important place to start because it's one of the reasons we wrote the book um we've got a group of people in America I call them hope Stealers who are saying that it's impossible to win now it's impossible to win there's too many systemic problems there's too many things that are broken in the culture and in the economy that the the little it's the ultimate line the little man can't get ahead thing and yet I kept
running into millionaires everywhere who were first generation they started with nothing they did not inherit their money and then I started running into them that have followed our baby steps that's why we named it baby steps millionaires that became millionaires and so I thought I've got this all this data and anecdotal evidence both on one side that it is possible and I've got these hope Stealers out here telling people they
can't do it and stealing their hope and so I thought well you know the first thing we've got to do is we have to fix that because it's still Henry Ford line if you think you can or you think you can't you're probably right and so uh you know you you have to and I I'm if I think I can be in the NBA I'm wrong I can't okay there's not a chance I don't have the physical skills I'm an old guy with a pot belly it's not happening
right so that's ridiculous but but when it comes to over time can I have a successful marriage even though maybe in your past there's not one in your family tree over time can I raise good kids even though in most of your family tree No One turns out can you break that chain and if you don't believe you can you won't take the steps to do the hard work to be successful in that area that compartment that department of your life
and money's no exception to that and money's particularly weird in the spiritual in that uh in this area of belief because it just it will run from you you can't catch it uh you know if you don't believe uh because you won't do the you won't do the the sacrificial things you won't live like no one else so that later you can live and give like no one else there's no reason a farmer would ever go out and toil in the Sun and Pla and plow
the field and get the stumps out and the rocks out and then put corn in the ground if he didn't think corn was going to come up after he did that that would be absurd only a crazy person would do something that they don't think is going to turn out and so you have to believe first and so what we try to do is we try to bring in emotional Behavior Uh data of other people and math and any kind of a lens I can get you to look through to
make you believe that you can do it I know you can do it but I've got to convince you you can do it before we can move into the Tactical steps yeah and what are some of those what would you say are the mindsets or the traps that keep people broke where you are having to convince people that they can what are those things that keep us in that mindset I think we've become number one who we hang around with uh there's not any question about
that so you have to be careful uh and I'm not talking about being snobbish to someone we're not I'm nice to anybody I'll talk to anybody about anything I'm happy uh but but I'm talking about your crew the people that are your inner circle who do you hang with your income is going to approximate theirs over time uh your physical condition if they're all overweight you're gonna be overweight if they if they take care of
their bodies you're going to take care of your body if they have good marriages you're gonna have good marriage you're going to become who you hang around with you're even gonna have an accent like they do you know and you're going to read the books that they read and so you number one you need to get yourself in a community of people who are Achievers who believe it can be done who understand it's tough
and I'll encourage you when you're having a hard one because I mean some of us have had a hard couple years here a lot of us have you know and so you gotta have guys and gals in your corner that say go champ you got this you can do it I'm I got your back man and and so that's so much different than growing up in a neighborhood where my parents were saying you can do this but a lot of kids I ran around with their parents were
saying well the little man can't get ahead you're always going to have a car payment you're stuck People Like Us you know people that have a Southern accent their Hillbillies and rednecks we we don't get ahead we just we we just we just uh you know give them middle finger salute to the man and we move on and you can do that from any racial background any cultural background there's a group of people that that declare themselves
stuck then there's also a group of people within that same community and that same tribe it's a smaller group that declare that it's possible to be free it's possible to prosper it's possible and it's victims or Victors and the neat thing is that once you begin to kind of get that inside of you anyone can just make that choice I decide and here we go yeah I think you're spot on I think you're absolutely right and
you know I know what that feels like because that's the culture I grew up in I I grew up around that culture that didn't believe and that often saw money as evil or we always believed that people who had money must have done something sketchy to get it or they weren't really living a life of integrity and so that was the mindset that was built up for a long long time that had to be massively unlearned and unraveled and I wish I had you at that
time I I didn't uh but you know I'm glad that we do today I think you mentioned spiritual and belief and what I really appreciated about the book is that the book is filled with knowledge about how to handle your finances but at the same time it has Bible verses that can Enlighten the readers too and I wanted to ask you that why did you think it was important to talk about the Bible and you know the word of God as well as
talking about finances like what was the reasoning behind that I was fascinated by that now that's always a uh sometimes it's off-putting for some folks obviously uh and so I try not to be over the top it's not a a Christian manual on finance uh but the the books of wisdom in particular the Proverbs uh it can can be applied regardless of your faith uh regardless of your background or your belief system uh wisdom's wisdom if Ben
Franklin said something you know it's okay you you can you can kind of look at that and think that's possible right and he's not in the Bible but I mean you see what I'm saying so uh and but what we've discovered about personal finance and I discovered this years and years ago the hard way I kept when I was doing counseling and coaching with people when I first started I would go in and fix all of their budget and negotiate with
their creditors a set of payments that would fit within their income and I and they were about to file bankruptcy but we we stopped their foreclosure we got them on a plan with their bank right on the edge we pulled them back from the edge and said okay now work this plan and then I would see them six weeks later and say how's the plan going we filed bankruptcy what I did 90 hours of work to get that to where it would do
what do you mean you filed bankruptcy and I started realizing it wasn't math math wasn't the problem the problem with my money is the guy I shave with if I can get that guy to behave he can be skinny and Rich oh my gosh he's a problem and so we start realizing personal finance is 80 behavior only 20 head knowledge and behavior is a spiritual thing I'm an Evangelical Christian so for me I immediately gravitate to the Bible as a
as a spiritual instruction and there's 2500 scriptures dealing with money so whether you're a Christian or not doesn't matter to me the reason I'm bringing that up is it's an indication of this is a set of behaviors and a set of views a set of beliefs a spiritual walk that influences your behavior and your behavior creates your outcome it's everybody's trying to fix their finances with a math formula and if you were
doing math you wouldn't be in credit card debt yeah well said and I'm so happy that you do that as well I know you know from my work my the the Traditions I studied spiritual Traditions are such big Inspirations to me and I find so much uh validity and timelessness in in how they apply to today's modern day challenges Dave the chapter two in chapter three talk about what a baby steps millionaire is and how to become one can you define to us the
difference between a millionaire and a baby steps millionaire because I think this is something that a lot of people struggle with well first it's good to just say the definition of a millionaire is not a Dave Ramsey definition this is an accounting definition personal finance has been taught for decades before I was born this is a it's a math formula it's a very simple formula assets minus liabilities equals net
worth what you own minus what you owe equals your net worth when your net worth is one million dollars or greater when what you own minus what you owe is one may integrate you're a millionaire well I don't feel like a millionaire it's not a feeling I I don't believe anybody ought to be a millionaire it's not a moral construct I don't think that's enough it might not be but it's still a million it's still what's there
this is a math formula and when you reach that the way you're a billionaire a thousand million is if you your assets minus your liabilities it's not your income you can make a million dollars a year and not be a millionaire you can make thirty thousand dollars a year and be a millionaire so it's your it's a it's a net worth balance sheet transaction it's an accounting function it's not up for negotiation now we can
discuss all kinds of things about what a million is and whether it's enough and the moral construct around it those kind of that that's a that's a fair discussion to have but first you got to admit and just say that is a millionaire well I just don't feel I don't care you are a millionaire you know I talked to a guy today on my show he just paid off his house and it's worth nine hundred thousand dollars and it's gone way up in
value he's out of Denver and the Market's shot way up and he goes it doesn't I don't feel like a millionaire because he got several hundred thousand in his 401k so he's got a net worth of a million dollars and I said it's not a feeling and he goes I don't feel like I earned it it doesn't matter I don't care where you got it it's still a million it's still that's you got to really get back to that so once we do that then we
say all right now then where do millionaires come from and several years ago we did the largest study of millionaires ever done in North America my friend Tom Stanley who's passed away now did a book in 1992 um called The Millionaire Next Door and he studied millionaires in 1992 many years ago uh and he's his sample size in the research was 750 millionaires and the people who did not like the conclusions of his study used the sample
size to criticize and say it wasn't valid now those of us that know statistics know that's a valid sample size uh that you know that that that's a it fits the numbers but uh so we decided as a PR part of the study to do 7 500 millionaires 10 times what was necessary to be statistically significant 750 is statistically significant and then we just went overboard and ended up doing 10 167 before we were done so we've done
the larger study and here's what we found 79 percent of America's millionaires airtight research data not a feeling not a political agenda not your broke brother-in-law's opinion at Thanksgiving not how he feels about rich people none of this data 79 percent inherited precisely zero wow 8 out of 10. five percent more inherited a small amount like fifteen hundred dollars or five thousand dollars mathematically could not have possibly
made them a millionaire another five percent inherited substantial money like a hundred thousand two hundred thousand dollars after they were already millionaires so five and five and seventy nine we're at 89 percent nine
out of ten of America's millionaires did not become millionaires because of an inheritance wow so that's a millionaire and I'm running into these guys everywhere in 30 years of doing this and it's screaming at me this is possible
and and they're not rocket scientists they're not rock stars they're not one percent of the millionaires in America you would know their name meaning that they're on TV or they're a rock star or they're an NBA or MLB or something you know they're in that but one percent 99 are a teacher and a policeman you know and and they're a a a a number one cat category our number one career was engineer so then we started hearing from
people I've been teaching this stuff for 30 years getting people out of debt getting them on a budget so that they can invest in their 401K so they can pay off their house and they were following our baby steps and becoming millionaires so we had first generation millionaires everyday millionaires we called them and then we had millionaires that had become millionaires following our process and that process is called the baby stuff so
that's the it's a nuanced subset of what a millionaire is too much talk but that's that's the deal not too much talking at all that was brilliant I'm so glad you went there not too much talk at all I think you know that's fascinating first of all the fact that you did this study second of all I think when you hear that everyone's just surprised because you just assumed that everyone is a millionaire is either a you know a
tech founder or a celebrity or a musician and you know I think we have perceptions as you rightly said earlier around wealth what are some of those key steps if someone's in their 20s right now or in their 30s and they're like I want to be a baby steps millionaire I don't want to walk through the seven steps because I know they're beautifully laid out in the book what are some of the first things that they need to start
thinking about Dave let's go back to it and and say out loud the tech person or whatever the stuff we're teaching will not make you a billionaire it won't do it mathematically it won't these were millionaires one to ten million dollars worth of net worth okay and so it these are that's a lot of money but it's not a billion these people don't have private jets they don't have six houses they don't have a Lamborghini
those are billionaires that have that and a lot of those are people that that are household names the gates or the buffets or the whatever that kind of thing and that's but that's a different world in this world the way to get the first one to ten million ends up being 80 percent of them a little about 83 percent of them had two things that showed up almost every time number one they funded their 401K in good mutual
funds and their Roth IRAs and good mutual funds over an extended period of time 12 to 17 years that's not that long but that was long it's longer than five minutes this and it's not get rich quick it's the tortoise not the hair so 12 to 17 years during that time the average millionaire paid off their home in 10.2 years and so what we've got is we've got a guy that or a gal that's got a million five net worth and they of it as a in there
is a 500 000 paid for home and a million dollars in their retirement accounts and that's almost all it was those two things you know the power of compound interest building up your emerging or building up your mutual funds winning in your 401k and just steady steady steady never stopping never panicking when the Market's down just steady steady steady steady just keep doing it just keep doing it just keeps boring it's not sexy
see it all you're not going to be on the cover of Fast Company magazine you know paying off your mortgage nobody knows you did it it's just kind of book but here you sitting with a paid for house and a million bucks I think you're going to be okay so that that's what most of them did a few of them were Farm millionaires large enough to be uh to mention here meaning that they uh not inherited but they were a farmer that
bought land and then they bought more land and then they bought more land and that land in and of itself became worth over a million dollars that's that wasn't that unusual we saw several of those as well but what we discovered was process people are the ones that did this whether they were baby steps millionaires or just Millionaires and so the number one career was engineer number two is accountant number three was teacher
number three was teacher number four was an executive and number five was a lawyer MDS didn't even make the top five medical doctors made number six and now if you count even the MDS if you count every one of those okay engineer accountant teacher executive and lawyer every one of those are systems people they believe in a set of principles and when you follow those principles you get a result as you so so shall you reap if you plant corn don't
be shocked corn comes up and every one of those it's a cause and effect world that they live in they believe in systems they believe in processes figure out the system work the system you build a bridge this way it stays up you do a lesson plan this way the T the student learns you know every one of you know there's a you follow a set of decorum and laws and processes in court or the judge puts you in jail for contempt you
have to and so all of these are processed people so it turns out it's a process you spoke about something really brilliant it's not sexy it's not quick and it's not what it looks like on Instagram on social media in the pictures I feel like half the battle is building that discipline muscle that habit that pattern of consistent Focus what is taking us away from that how do we build that muscle because it sounds
like to me that that's what's blocking us we want it to be sexy we want it to be fast we wanted to look a certain way and you're like wait wait it doesn't look like that at all you know I think it's disturbing the the wonderful things about social media are obvious the wonderful things about the internet are obvious we're able to do this interview this way it's obvious that it's a fabulous convenience and everything the
downside is is that we're creating Generations now even up into mild generation of people who have the attention span of a gnat I mean they can't stick with anything and in order to do something of greatness it requires a steady application over a period of time the old days of a Craftsman going through years of apprenticeship in order to be world class at something now we want to just snap our fingers and instantaneously be able to do this
because we carry this magic wand around in our hand that if we push stuff push a button Stuff shows up on our porch I mean it's magic and anything we want you can do you can get anything you want on this thing in very very quickly it's you can't even have a good argument because you can get the answer to the problem out there and and you know we used to have to sit around have fights at dinner and our family and argue about whether
somebody was right or not now somebody goes and looks on the internet and finds the answer and well Georgia's just wrong Henry's right you know and it's just so this attention span thing is a problem and um and really what that is uh underneath without shaming someone or trying to shame a whole generation I'm not doing that because there's people within each generation that don't do this or that break free from it is it's emotional
maturity the ability to delay pleasure is a sign of maturity that's what grown-ups do children do what feels good YOLO you only live once quick instead of like I'm gonna sacrifice to get a greater outcome I'm going to live like no one else so that later I can live and give like no one else I've got to have the moment at this moment that is a childish expression of any area of your life it will destroy your marriage it will raise horrible children
uh you know it'll mess up your career and it certainly will mess up your money short-term thinking the get rich quick has never worked at any time in the world as an ongoing provable sustainable process it's always and that's where the tortoise and the hair esop's Fable comes from right and so we've got to stick with this idea and that even includes our generosity uh you know we're starting to talk about generosity and
the the generosity with these folks with these millionaires that we studied is a steady thing like their savings is a steady thing they're not trying to have this one big event that says look at me how generous I am instead they're fairly quiet about it almost absurdly quiet and Anonymous about it and they steadily give in to something that they believe in if they're a Christian they're going and giving a tie that their local church
if they're Jewish they might also be tithing at their synagogue um the the um you know regardless of your faith background there's not a a religious background on the planet that does not have a steady giving Rhythm as a part of its teaching every one of them do because it's how you build character and when you're giving it's almost impossible to not become grateful and as you become grateful the next
thing that happens is you become more and more content and the more content you are in a totally discontented culture the great Advantage you have to build wealth ah Dave that is such a fantastic answer I love how we're talking about money but we're talking about emotional maturity we're talking about you know character and developing character and developing patience and developing discipline and you told us earlier how you initially
came to wealth the first time around or what was considered rich where you were from the first time around how emotionally and mentally prepared do we have to be to even be wealthy because we talked about the discipline and the postponing of pleasure before we get there but then even when you get there to stay there requires a different level of mental and emotional maturity talk to us a bit about that because I think
that's often undervalued it's a different level of nobility not not in a uh not an aristocracy sense or a looking down on the Little People's sense that's not what I'm saying at all but this idea what happens is the people that do this they grow into uh they may be in the acquisition mode early and as it goes along but as the weight of the responsibility of the wealth starts to grow on them over time it doesn't seldom
happens quickly then it flips from acquisition to Servant to serving and they see their wealth as an opportunity to serve your spouse I can get her a nice car I can serve my children they can go to college and we can pay for it I can serve my community and we can open a homeless shelter or fund a homeless shelter I can serve uh the The World At Large and the more you start to realize then the more money you're managing the more people you can
help because at certain point that you can't ingest enough stuff you know if you eaten you know when I was a good kid growing up I never had Lobster that was the Red Lobster came to town it was a big deal right and if I got Lobster with that drawn butter on my mouth watering right now if I got Lobster with that drawn butter you know I thought that was rich people food and so you know I thought rich people ain't Lobster all
the time and and so once I had some money I finally figured out if you eat enough Lobster it tastes like soap you can't get enough cars to to be okay winning winning does not heal you becoming wealthy does not heal you it makes you more of what you already are and if you gain wealth gradually and build the character as you're doing it it will flip at some point and you will become a noble servant of your family
change your family tree of your community and that's really all money is good for after a certain point I mean again you can have some nice things and I'm not against having nice things uh but but your nice things will have you eventually they'll Eat You Alive if that's where you think happiness is because it's not while winning does not heal you that's that's definitely a powerful powerful message for you know each and every one of us to hear
especially because I think society as you said earlier has actually programmed that feeling is that if you win you won't even well actually we've been made to believe if you win you don't even need a healing and we end up seeing these folks that are in the celebrity in the spotlight whether it's sports figures or Hollywood figures or whatever and they become massively successful within their craft and financially
successful too but we we they prove out the concept of what we just said they're their lives are a mess many times and that they didn't get what they hope to get from all of it uh they didn't get healing they didn't get happiness they didn't get wholeness they didn't get contentment uh quite the opposite because what money does is it's a magnifier it makes you more of what you are and so to to the extent you are whole
it's going to make you Noble and serving and to the extent that you are greedy you're going to be unbelievably greedy to the extent you have a temper problem you're going to be a rageaholic I mean you're going to be more if you're crazy you're gonna get crazier I mean whatever it is it makes you more it magnifies whatever you are and so it it is it is a it's a powerful weapon it's a powerful tool to be used but it is very dangerous
because it's a magnifier yeah and that that links nicely to this really important question you ask and answer in chapter 7 which is Will well through in my kids right I think that's a very common again misconception it's a common question and you talk about how sometimes parents actually wait too long to talk to kids about money because we kind of things like oh they're not going to understand it they're not gonna get it they're not old
enough yet talk to us a bit about why we have that fear that wealth will ruin our kids and how early can you start and I know in the book you talk about the five behaviors to raise money smart kids but maybe if you can just touch on one or two of them that you really feel is the right time to start and where to start well if we go back to our earlier discussion understand that handling money is 80 Behavior
it's not different and so in the sense that our we have to teach our children to behave we have to teach them to have discipline self-discipline they don't have self-control that they're they're going to be a horrible spouse they're gonna be a horrible parent to my grandkid uh if they don't have self-control they're not gonna be a good employee or a good boss a good leader in their organization and so they have to
learn behaviors at home and we can use money as one of the things we do that we use to teach them to have behaviors and so one of the things we all use had used on us and we used on our kids was you know you have to do your homework and you have to get good grades well that's control self-control and we're gonna we'll walk with you we'll coach you we'll help you if you're struggling we support you but not doing it is not an
option you're going to learn to do you know you have to brush your teeth you won't have teeth when you're old you need to brush your teeth that's a good thing and so you can't just ignore this you have to bathe because that way you'll get a spouse later and leave and so you know you have to we want to teach our kids these things right so money is the same way and we teach them age appropriately you know when you pick up your toys
in your bedroom and your three what that really means is is that I picked up all your toys and you picked up two of them but I'm going to give you all the psychological and emotional credit and give you a high five as the best room cleaner that there ever was on the planet oh and I'm also going to give you a dollar bill to put in your piggy bank over here I want to put your P I want to put that dollar bill on you because I want you to
emotionally associate work with money work is where money comes from and that's absolutely vital and if you can do that then then you get the ability to teach them to save and to spend wisely you can participate but I'm not I'm going to send a five-year-old assault Minds we're not doing that you know but but we are gonna we're gonna when you're 14 you're gonna do some work because if you wait till they're 18 to
start teaching work ethic they don't know how to do anything yeah and then then some poor soul is going to hire them later and they don't know how to work yeah and so it's a gradual parenting is a gradual process like so many good things in life and so you know the the idea that that uh we're gonna gradually teach them to work give save spend uh and and if you can teach them to do those things age appropriately gradually over time then
they've got the character they have the the skeletal structure in their character's self-control self-discipline the ability to delay pleasure the ability to set a goal work towards a goal progressively age appropriately and with some help with some Grace when they fall down with some love but not helicoptering in and saving them let them let them feel the pain of the of the struggle it's good because that's
where it all comes from man you get a callus that way and so uh then they're ready to manage money oh by the way the last step then is that they move from this is how money Works to now it is a responsibility money is a responsibility you have to manage money for the good of others you get to participate in some good things by managing it but you're managing it for the good of your family your kids your grandkids you're changing your
family tree and that's what I did and that's why there's some for you in this inheritance and a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children Proverbs and so we're going to do that but you don't get that if it's going to harm you and it would harm you if you don't have the skeletal structure the muscle tenue in this area to carry it and so when you leave kids that were quote in the old days we used to say so
and so is a spoiled kid if you have a spoiled kid and you leave them a bunch of money well they're a reality show star later that's what they in that's their only skill and so they can't do anything and it's sad they're sad humans and they struggle and then they fall all down all over the place and everybody's watching them do it and they do it with big numbers around them it's awful and so instead what we want is we want you know
this is a family that that is a family of service and this money is a responsibility and if you view it that way you will have the opportunity to manage it for the good of others and and for the people of faith for God for the good of God we're going to manage it for God's good and so you know you can have these kinds of ethereal discussions but you had to build the built the character along the way yeah what a what a
fantastic and phenomenal answer Dave because I made I did an activity recently where I sat down and I wrote down all the jobs I've had in my whole life and I was writing down what I learned from each one of them it was a really fun thing to do and I realized that I when I was 14 I was a paper boy in my area so I delivered newspapers in my area and I got paid for it and I remember all the other boys would go and throw the papers
in the trash so the organizers started giving me more money to do all their streets as well and then I worked at Morrisons which is our version of Walmart it's you know a grocery store and then I and then I worked in retail and you know so on and so forth and so in the last 20 years I've had so many jobs since I started working and you're so right there I remember paying for my first ever phone bill paying for my car
insurance like my parents never paid for those things I had obviously lived in their home and uh you know was taken care of with shelter and food but beyond that any expenditure was personal and I'm so grateful to them for that because it set me up for this understanding of how hard it was to make money how hard it was to save money and how often as a kid I was a bad spender and saw Zero in my bank account and what that felt like
from an anxiety point of view they let you fall down but they never let you fall down hard enough that you were permanently harmed yes yes just that you learned the lesson and so that's a love that's a loving parent and it's not child abuse to teach a child that money is limited it's not child abuse to say no no is a complete sentence it's not child abuse to teach a child to work age appropriately so that they can be have a
sustainable life with dignity it's very difficult to have a sense of dignity if you don't have a sense of power over the controllables out there and people that don't know how to work have no power over those controllables yes yes very
well said chapter eight uh Dave you speak about something I mentioned earlier wealth and the wealthy are not evil you know that has always been a struggle and you had this beautiful sentence in the book which you say is
equal is not fair right equal is not fair and and I remembered I don't know if you've seen this there's this graphic on social media that's gone viral a few times it's I don't know who made it but it's a picture of like three people one's shorter one's a bit taller and then there's a really tall person and they're all standing on an equal sized block to watch some sports and it says equal is it's similar to that where it's like
equality doesn't work because each of these people need a different set of steps to be able to see this Sport and as soon as I read that line in your book equal is not fair I thought okay that makes sense to me but to a lot of people that's worrying a lot of people would rather wealth be distributed equally and and you know figuring that out and working from that perspective but walk us through uh your thoughts on why equal
is not fair and and how we should think about that differently if you throw the papers and you actually throw them and deliver them to the people's houses and you get paid the exact same as the guy who threw them away that's not fair you you provided a much more service to the community you had Integrity you didn't steal and the guy who threw them away took someone else's papers they weren't his and he threw them away that's stealing
and he didn't follow through on his promise and he was getting paid for a service he didn't even attempt to do that's also stealing so his lack of integrity and and lack of service in the marketplace and to say that those two people should be paid the same is an immoral statement equal is not fair it would not be fair for that guy to get the same money over time as you got uh now I I would never propose that two
people doing the exact same thing and providing the exact same level of service somehow got different because of their skin color or their sex or something like that no I we've got folks of every background every ethnic origin and everything else on our in our leadership team and we don't we're completely blind to all that we're all we want to know inside Ramsey is did you do the job and if you did the job you
get the money and that's how that works and so uh that that's that's the only measure and but to say that that we're going to spread it out across the people who did the work didn't do the work who who plowed the field or didn't plow the field who showed up in the when the storm came through and got the tree out of the road the other one just sat at home and what and you know and played you know some kind of game on the TV or
something what I mean that's just communism is what it is at its course and he economic system it's not name-calling this idea that things are equal so we have to eliminate that number one then once we eliminate that
then we start to understand what my friend Rabbi Lapin says Rabbi Lapin is an Orthodox Jewish rabbi we become really good friends because I just love his teaching um like I love yours he says that uh money comes to people who serve that
when you serve your customers give you certificates of appreciation with presidents faces on them and so you know this idea that evil people Prosper no they the percentage of evil people among the wealthy is about the same percentage of evil people among the poor because again money makes you more of what you already are you're magnified and so here's the thing you think about if you got a uh a guy that works on cars
he has a he has an auto repair shop and you go in there and he he Tinkers around on the car he says that'll be 150 and you drive away and the next day your car breaks down again you come back in there you go hey I'll give you 150 you can fix my car he goes I know but it'll be another 150 you know I'm not giving you another 150 and you go back finally you go okay this guy's a crook okay or he's incompetent one of the two
he doesn't know how to fix my car now what do you do do you keep going there and giving the guy money obviously not no you no more than that you go tell everyone you know this guy's a crook don't do business with him now does that guy Prosper at the end of the story of course not he goes out of business over time the marketplace will punish him for his crookedness now take the guy next door who's got an auto repair place you go in there he looks
under the hood and he goes oh there it is he goes you're okay what do you what do I owe you nothing just remember me when your car really breaks because I just fixed it it's no big deal and your driveway going I found a guy who fixed my car for free and he actually is honest this is a unicorn I'm gonna tell everyone about this guy and then this guy you know we visit this guy now 20 years later he's got a franchise
operation he's got this color of store fixing cars in 56 cities Across America he's worth eight million dollars and now he's evil what yeah that's absurd the line of thinking here the critical thinking skills that get you to that are non-existent it's impossible to be a crook and prosper in a free Marketplace long term or to use crookedness as a method of wealth building because it actually works against you so that
that's rabbi's you know that's his line of thinking on that and that that's where we go to so yeah there I know evil people that are rich but I know a lot more that are unbelievably kind generous grateful they got more time for you than than and they'll do anything for anybody I mean they're just unbelievable humans and that's the one I know a lot more of those than I do crooks money is a moral it's not about money it doesn't have
morals it's about the human being and when it touches that human it reflects who they are Dave uh this has been so much fun getting to know you I've always watched you from afar admired you uh you know a big fan follower in me and to sit down with you and to have this conversation with you and to hear about the the depth of these ideas right your highly strategic methodical people can actually get really functional advice on how to
change their lives financially but I love the depth and the gravitas with which you do I genuinely mean that and we end every on purpose episode with the final five these questions have to be answered in one word or one sentence maximum uh so they're a quick fire around uh Dave Ramsey these are your final five are you ready I'm ready okay awesome so the first question is what is the best financial advice you've ever
heard received or given be intentional second question what is the worst Financial advice you've ever received or heard you can borrow your way under wealth great answer very aligned all right question number three what do you believe is the best investment or spending that you've ever done in your life giving beautiful uh question number four what do you think was your biggest Financial mistake of an investment or expenditure
uh going deeply in debt to build wealth and Fifth and final question if you could make one law that ever in the world had to follow what would it be I would require them to be generous it's beautiful Dave Ramsey everyone uh if you haven't already got the book baby steps millionaires please go and grab a copy of the book If you don't subscribe to Dave's podcast the Ramsay show make sure you do uh his podcast lots of other
incredible podcasts as part of that Network as well uh please tag Dave and I on Instagram on Facebook on Twitter about what resonated with you what you took away there were so many nuggets of wisdom and insight I love the studies and resets that Dave shared make sure you tag us both to let us know because we'd love to see what you took away and make sure you keep coming back to on purpose for more insights into your
mental health which includes your finances which includes your Fitness and of course includes your friendships uh Dave thank you so much any final words for our community I'm unbelievably honored to be with you I hope we get to do this again and the next time we need to just hang out a little bit I would I would absolutely love that if you're in La let me know if I'm in Nashville I'll let you know and otherwise I'm going to
keep supporting from afar and we'll definitely do this again so thank you Dave and thank you to your whole amazing team as well who've been so helpful thank you sir thank you if you want even more videos just like this one make sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here I'm also excited to let you know that you can now get my book think like a monk from think like a monkbook.com check Below in the description to make sure you order today