People will often say, “Chris HATES Dave Ramsey!” But how do I REALLY feel about him and what he teaches? Where do I agree with him? And how do we differ? Join Cash Flow Expert, Chris Miles, as he explains where he and Ramsey agrees, where they differ, and who should be aware of this. Tune in now!
Chris Miles Bio:
Chris Miles, the “Cash Flow Expert,” is a leading authority on how to quickly free up and create cash flow for thousands of his clients, entrepreneurs, and others internationally! He’s an author, speaker, and radio host that has been featured in US News, CNN Money, Bankrate, Entrepreneur on Fire, and has spoken to thousands getting them fast financial results.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Do I Like Dave Ramsey?
I’m glad to be back loud that we’re now into the triple digits of episodes. I’m grateful for the feedback you guys have had. I don’t think I can keep up doing as many episodes as some of you guys are requesting. I have some of you say that you were almost caught up, and you have been going since episode one. I appreciate it, but I got to figure out other ways to keep it going. If you want other ways and you’re saying, “I love this stuff. I want to learn more.” Go check out our website, MoneyRipples.com.
Check out that we got events coming up. We got an event coming up on April 29th and 30th. It was going to be awesome. We won’t have another one until fall. There will be the last one of the year when we get to fall. I love to have you there. Be sure to check out or check out our blogs, events, and things that we got going on there.
In this episode, I want to talk about something that I hear often. I had probably heard it at least once or twice a week from people. It’s funny because I have people that will ask me, or things would come up, like today, I was at a networking event, and I was talking to this couple. I knew they were reading the blog. I knew the one guy who would read the blog. His wife that I was talking to, and I said, “What topics do you like? She mentioned a few, and she mentioned Dave Ramsey.
Her husband immediately said, “Chris Miles hates Dave Ramsey. Don’t say that word around him.” I had several people say, “That guy hates Dave Ramsey.” It might be because maybe I have done some episodes in the past that I have said that, but I want to set the record straight about what are my feelings about Dave Ramsey in what he teaches. I know it has been a while since I addressed it. It’s like a year. Every once in a while, it’s good to bring this back up but let me create more context.
How I Really Feel About Dave Ramsey
The question is, do I hate Dave Ramsey? Do I like him? What is my opinion of Dave Ramsey? Some people say, “Are you going to go toe to toe with him on TV or radio and call a show?” The answer is absolutely not. I’m not going to go on a show because he controls the button that hangs up on you. It wouldn’t be much of a conversation when it’s one-sided.
The thing I will say about Dave Ramsey is that I do like Dave Ramsey. He does and has done a lot of good for the people. I will even say, as of this point, he has even had a much wider influence than I had and done a lot of good that way. Do I hate him? Absolutely not. I like the guy. From everything I’ve heard about him, he seems genuine. He is a caring individual. Everybody I know that knows him loves him. I haven’t met anybody who says, “You don’t want to get to know that guy. He is a jerk.”
His Market Is Not My Market
From what I know about Dave is that he is a genuine guy. He does care. He wants the best for people. He is the guy that wants to help those that are especially broke. Those people that are stuck. Here’s where I see that he has the best niche because his market is not my market. His market tends to be people that are horrible spenders. They cannot stop spending. They are spenders anonymous or something.
He is great for people that are starting out that don’t know anything about anything when it comes to money. They don’t even know the first basics of that. He is perfect for those people. He gives them a great start. He is great at getting people to zero and getting people to the place where they can at least have a base or a foundation.
I will give you an example. I have had a client for about twelve years now. I worked at them a little bit. They were broke. They weren’t doing much. They came to me roughly about ten years ago, and they need to do a refinance. I said, “If we refinance and consolidate some of your loans, we could free up over $600 a month.” It is a good thing.
Nowadays, for $600 a month, I’m like, “That’s okay.” I’m usually trying to help people save, on average, at least $30,000 a year. That is typically my average. For this year, some people I have lately have been pushing anywhere between $30,000 and $100,000 a year. It has been incredible. With them, they were going to free up over $600 a month. I knew that made a big difference, given their income. We did the refinance, but here’s what happened. Within a matter of months, probably within about a year, all of a sudden, those same credit cards we paid off had charged it up again.
You can never be financially free if you come from a place of scarcity. Click To TweetNow back then, I wasn’t addressing cashflow. I was more of the traditional financial advisor, but it drove me nuts because I said, “This was pretty cool. We have found you money without any money out of pocket. That’s awesome,” but they still ended up racking up all their credit cards again. I heard a few years later I talked to their son. He said, “They’re doing great now.” I said, “Really?” He said, “They finally decided to do the Dave Ramsey program. They did his Financial Peace University. They got back on track. They started budgeting. They stopped the mindless spending. The next thing and another, they even put money away to savings.” I was blown away. I said, “That’s awesome.”
I used to teach a lot of things that Dave Ramsey taught. This is why I’m passionate about some of the things I teach now because I have seen a different way. For them, he is a perfect example. My market is not his market. The people I teach, and many of you that are reading this right now, are not people that he is focused on. He is focused on people that do not have a lot of money. They are usually paycheck to paycheck, but they are lower to low middle-class at best.
There are some people in other degrees that do listen to him. They find out that after a while of using his stuff, it doesn’t quite feel right. That’s where I come in. I focused on a different market and a lot of small business owners. I help a lot of people that way. I’m good with non-conformists. The people that aren’t conventional and the people that say, “I have been listening to conventional wisdom for years, and it has been working.”
Let’s face it. For the last 30 or 40 years, the things that you have heard, even Dave Ramsey teaches or people that are in the media, it’s the same old stuff. Nothing has changed. Even Dave Ramsey and some of the strategies he teaches are the same strategies, not principles, he taught twenty years ago, and he was stuck with it. It’s the same stuff, but has it helped people become financially free?
I’m not saying that their financial situation hasn’t improved, but I’m talking about people that don’t feel like they are paycheck to paycheck. People feel like they can live the life that they choose to live, and they have more than enough to do so. People that feel abundant. They feel free, not debt-free, which is not the same as being financially free. You cannot ever be financially free if you come from a place of scarcity. I didn’t mean that’s a rhyme, but this sounds like a Dr. Seuss book now.
We Teach Different Lessons
You can’t expect people to become financially free if you are in a bunch of scarcity. That is where I come in. I come from a different place where I’m focused on different people. People that do have control or want to take control of their finances. They want to do something different. They don’t want it to be the same old people that put their monies in 401(k)s, IRAs, and mutual funds like everybody has taught you for years and still hasn’t worked.
I don’t teach that. I teach about how to create abundance and cashflow today, how we create more freedom right now, and how we buy time back into your life. You feel like you have time, money, and options. Therefore, if you have more options, you have more freedom. I teach from a place of abundance. I’m teaching you how to have an abundance mentality around money. The perspective around money between Dave Ramsey and me is different.
There are some similarities and sometimes in the strategies we do because he does teach some good strategies, but the perspective you come from. When it comes to paying off debt, he says, “You should get angry and get mad.” Anger does not help you make more money. Scarcity only takes money out of your pocket. It does not put more money in. You cannot be in that state and expect to become financially free.
I get what he’s saying. He’s saying that you got to wrap yourself up a little bit and wake up. That doesn’t mean to get angry. It doesn’t mean to get mad and even depressed about your situation, which a lot of people do. They get depressed. The ones that tend to be hopeful, the ones that say, “In the next 10 or 15 years, I will be debt free.” They are not debt free yet. They were still having a struggle with that day after day, but there will become a fanatic saying like, “I’m going to be free someday once I pay off all this debt.”
A lot of people that go through Dave Ramsey’s program and become debt free come back to me later and say, “I don’t feel that much more free. Yes, I don’t have all these loans, but I’m at zero.” That’s what I mean, where he gets to zero. It’s great at getting you to pay off your loans, but after that, it gets a little fuzzy.
You cannot come from that place. You got to teach about stewardship, not about how to be a saver. Everybody in the financial world is teaching how to be a good saver, “Save everything. Spend nothing. Live cheap. Make sure you try to save forever and save as long as possible, live on as little as possible, be minimalists, and everything else so that someday you might experience some freedom.” I don’t believe in that.
I believe that you are here to, in some cases, invest in memories, families, education, personal growth, and happiness to invest in your lives, to create a life, not to be on a balance sheet or a budget. I’m not saying you don’t use those things, but it’s more than the numbers. It’s about your life. It’s got to come from a place of abundance. It’s about stewardship. The way I teach stewardship is much different than being a saver.
Savers don’t want to spend money. I teach people that as stewards, you do use your money. You’re using your money almost all the time. You might have savings, but you’re not saving the saving compound interest. You’re saving money in an effort that, in the short-term, you can create more money with it. That’s a big difference.
On Principles And Strategies
I have a different way, and I believe a better way to pay off debt. It’s a way that’s safer and can even be faster than the way he teaches. I have proven that time and time again with my clients. It blows our minds, and it has helped them in situations when real life happens. I have also seen that a lot of times, he mixes principles and strategies together.
Principles never end. They never change, always true and absolute. Strategies, however, do change and can change the circumstances in time. For example, when someone starts talking absolute best strategy, like, “You should always pay off your debt.” That is a strategy, not a principle. The principle is to live within your means and to produce more than you consume. The strategy of paying off your debt is not a principle. That’s a strategy.
You may not want to pay off your debt. There may be a time you might say, “I will pay the minimum payments. I’m not going to accelerate this at all.” There are clients that I have to say, “Let’s pay these things off as fast as possible, but these other ones, leave it alone. Keep paying the minimum payments. Do not accelerate it.”
Even if you’ve got the money, we rather put it somewhere else where we can make more money. We try to create more cashflow, whether it’s paying off the loan or making more money with it, whichever one ends up being better. That is case by case, person by person. No one person is a carbon copy. When you give blanket advice saying, “You should pay off the highest interest rate first or lowest balance first.” Not always. Sometimes, you shouldn’t be doing that.
A lot of times, you will say, “One of the first baby steps is to have a $1,000 emergency fund.”That’s one of those things. He says, “Twenty years ago, it worked. It still works today.” $1,000 is not enough. It’s not even close. I have some people who are trying to get over $10,000 before we try to aggressively pay off their loans. That’s not it. For some people, it’s $5,000, and for some people is a couple of thousand. It depends.
Every situation is different. If you try to blanket it, and I get why he does it because being in the position I’m in, it’s tempting to want to give you blanket advice. What happens if you teach the strategies and not the principles behind it, people miss the mark. They miss out on it completely. What I have seen is that sometimes people will call them with good questions. He will say, “No, absolutely not.” It is because it goes against something he taught about strategy. Part of that is ego. There was no doubt. If you have listened to his show, you know that there is some ego behind it. He puts a lot of stank behind that. Sometimes he puts a lot of negative emotions behind people, and you cannot do that.
I had a guy that is listening to his show. He called up and said, “Dave, this last year, I had to put about $5,000 into fixing up my car. This next year, I’m going to have to put another $5,000 into fixing up and keeping this car running. It is paid off free and clear, but don’t you think I should go and buy a car where I can have a payment being about $400 a month? I was spending that money anyways on repairs. When I get one that is more reliable, it can do me better.” Dave said, “Absolutely not. You never go into debt for cars or anything like that.”
If you keep doing what everybody's done, you will get the results everybody's gotten, which has not been good. Click To TweetThis is where the ego starts trumping common sense. Let’s admit it. That guy could have got a car that had a warranty. It’s not about the money and everything else. It’s not about this guy is a bad spender. I can guarantee you that if the guy had a paid-off car and was trying to make it work, this guy was not a spender. He was a saver. Dave is talking to spenders, but all the people that keep getting attracted to them are savers. Those are the people who are already doing the stuff he has been doing. All he does is make them feel more guilty and feel worse. He has gotten so sold on it is good because it has become popular. It is mainstream stuff.
He says, “It’s not the norm.” When is his teaching the norm when it comes to financial advice? He is teaching what’s popular, normal, and hasn’t worked. My challenge to you is to start questioning that and say, “Does that make common sense?” Especially business owners will say, “Chris, you have made me feel good. There are things that I have heard about or things that I have listened to his. I didn’t feel right about it, but I did it anyways because that is what everybody taught.”
If you keep doing what everybody has done, you’re going to get the results everybody has gotten, which has not been good. More people have followed his advice than not have listened to his stuff. A lot of people follow his advice. I find out that probably about half of the people I talk to have been good savers. They have done the things he asks. He says, “Everybody is a spender.” I don’t believe that. Everybody may be in his market has been a spender, but the people I have talked to are usually not that way.
Business owners, not usually. They usually have to have some knowledge, at least a basic understanding, even though they might not feel like they do. Every business owner, when they meet with me and say, “Chris, I’m embarrassed about my situation. I should probably be better off than I am but here it is.” I’m like, “That is what everybody says.” Entrepreneur or business owner thinks they should be better off than they are. That’s why they do what they do. That’s why we all do what we do. We want more control and freedom in our lives. We want control of our destiny. That’s why we go into business. I get that. I’m one of you.
To be able to give yourself that permission to say, “Maybe that’s not exactly true or that doesn’t quite work.” The thing is, strategy is strategy. Principles are principles. Principles are eternal. Strategies are not. If Dave Ramsey talks to people about basic “common sense life,” as he would say, he would say, “Don’t go jumping off cliffs.” You say, “Do not jump off cliffs. You will die. If you jump off, gravity will pull you down. You are dead.”
He doesn’t understand that there are principles. Gravity is a principle, but the strategy of jumping off the cliff can change the circumstances. How many people have we seen on videos or know that have jumped off of high places and survived to tell the tale? Whether it’s a bungee cord, paragliders, or whatever it might be, people jump off cliffs every single day and live to tell the tale. Should everybody not jump off a cliff? Should that be absolute advice, or should I say, “Jump off a cliff depends?”
What are you wearing? What are you doing? Are you jumping off without a parachute? If you do that, you might die. That’s probably true. You will go splat if you throw your body off a cliff with nothing else to have other principles and other laws in place, such as aerodynamics, to help you out. You can’t talk in absolutes when you give advice. This is why I don’t like to talk in absolutes. Never, ever do I like to talk in absolutes. I’m kidding. Principles are absolute, strategies or not.
If you want to make more money without increasing your time, getting that part-time job, or gambling your life way in the stock markets and crappy mutual funds that don’t pay squat, I showed one of my Canadian clients. I said, “If you want to retire in 12 years, even though you’ve got $200,000 saved up. If you want even a middle-class lifestyle, the equivalent of a $60,000-a-year lifestyle, you’re going to have to start putting away about $14,000 a month based on real rates of return and real rates of inflation.” Do you think he had any hope there? Of course not.
If you have somebody fluff numbers saying, “You will make 12% of you in the market.” Dave still says that. I taught that almost fifteen years ago. We proved it is not true. You do not make 12% in the stock market ever. Mutual funds have not ever done that over a long period of time, but we’re still teaching it. That’s the thing that drives me nuts.
Sometimes the advice he gave, I’m like, “I remember the stuff from the ‘90s and the 2000s.” He hasn’t changed his tune. The thing is that there is more knowledge out, saying, “Here is what has worked. Here is what hasn’t.” Mutual funds are broken. That’s the main thing he is telling you to put your money into. He is telling you the stuffed or 401(k)s or whatever it might be.
If you want a life of mediocrity and this is what it comes down to. If you want to be like everybody else, fine, do it. If you get an employer match, great, you might at best hope for mediocrity. You might have the best hope for the upper lower class or lower middle class if you do an amazing job doing that, but I’m not about that. I’m about creating freedom and cashflow today.
I love that in the last week, I had one person. We worked with her. We surpassed how she can save and make an extra $100,000 this year. I had another client. We were able to help her free up over $4,300 a month. It cost her no money out of pocket. It blew her mind. She was like, “I can’t believe it. I can put away almost $6,000 a month.” That was half of their income. They were feeling like, “We’re paycheck to paycheck. We’re saving a little bit, but we don’t feel great.”
For them, it was weeks. I don’t always get that result with people, but I love it when it happens in weeks or months. Within a matter of weeks, all of a sudden, they are in a different situation. Now their situation is crap. What do I do with all this money? How do we get our money working for us? That is the next step. How do we get you to retire from your job? I got a new client. That is what they want to do. They want to be able to quit the job so that she can have a business and be a full-time mom. That stuff excites me. Those are the kinds of people I love and the people I serve.
Some of the other people that like to do the same old, same old. Great, do it. Listen to Dave, and you will be happy with it. You probably won’t get great results. You will not get the results you thought you would get because I had a lot of those people come to me too, but if that’s what you want, it’s fantastic. He will get you in a better situation than not doing anything at all. I can assure you of that.
If you want more abundance, an actual life-changing today, more freedom, and cashflow. If you are a business owner and you want to be able to make money in your business and not feel like you’re strapped to a job, you own a job, not a business. If you want to be able to create some freedom, some time, and quality of life, this is what I teach. This is why you should keep reading the blogs. This is what I do.
My charge to you is to look for something and beyond it. If you feel you resonate with this, keep reading this stuff, check out our events, check out MoneyRipples.com, and reach out to me. If you want to have a consultation, say, “Chris, I would love to have that evaluation that you guys do. See if there is a way you can help me in making money for me or get my business doing a lot more.” Let me know. Feel free to email me at Chris@MoneyRipples.com. Everybody, have a great process week. I can’t wait to help you next week as well. Keep adding value. Keep the questions coming. Keep inspiring me so I can inspire you and be able to give you the answers you’re looking for. Have a wonderful and prosperous week.