As the title states, anyone done the Dave Ramsey program, The Total Money Makeover? Thoughts or opinions?

Glad this isnt GD, but you will get some GD answers nonetheless.

DR is good for people who need a plan, to get out of debt.  His plan isnt based solely on math, but also on human behavior and his experiences in what is successful over a long career of financial and debt coaching.  Because of the math issues - some people cannot listen to what he says - they find the "chink in the armor".... and that is their mission in life - to poke holes in others.

Some people don't like him because he sometimes can appear to have a condescending tone, especially when handing out the hard messages.  He doesn't sugar coat it.  To some, this comes across as arrogant.  I do see this side of his behavior, but it does not bother me at all.

Some people don't like him because he is a Christian.

Some people like his advice on debt, but hate his advice on investing.  (which is odd, because it is very boglehead-esque)

Some people think "this is just common sense he is selling"  People who say that, are idiots.

I read his book at the right time in my life.  I didn't have anyone who taught be about money.... so I learned a lot of things the hard way.  That was 12 years ago, and my life is VERY different today because of him, and I am grateful.

I didn't do everything the "Dave" way.... I still use credit cards, and I paid off my debts based on interest rate rather than amount smallest to largest, because I knew myself, and knew I was going to be successful.  I didn't need to remove the credit card temptation nor did I need the debt snowball to build psychological momentum.  I also was not in horrific amounts of debt.

He’s making millions off people who overspend by getting them to buy a program that “teaches them not to spend more than you make.”

He’s a modern snake oil salesman.

Dave reccomends actively managed funds, says load funds are fine if they “have a proven track record” of beating the market, says expense ratios aren’t a criteria you should concern yourself with, reccomends a odd mix of “25% growth, 25% growth and income, 25% aggressive growth, and 25% international” (large, mid, small cap, international) and no bonds, none of which are very bogleheadish principles. The rest of your post is pretty spot on.

His advice is fantastic if you don’t have good self-control or any financial know-how, and need to get out of debt.

If you understand interest rates and more than basic financial situations, then his advice is silly.

He teaches basic financial management that should be taught in schools. Stay away from interest, do not spend more than you make and use common sense. I took his class 4 years ago. I do not follow his plan 100%, I did tailor it to my needs and it has worked very well. I feel that I got my $ worth in information.

I have no direct experience, but it alwayse struck me as the equivalent of paying for advice to stay off railroad tracks.

Did the TMM program 10+ years ago. Helped get debt uner control. Adopted the basic principles of debt elimination by snowball methodology.  Am not strictly adhering to everything now, but never forgot the principles and keep things in check and in much better place than before.

Live like no one else, so later you can live like no one else.

Finance for retards!

I have applied his concepts to our family finances. We are nowhere neat a Ramsian but we are working to eliminate our debt while we take on the other things we want to do. The thing that has really saved our butts more than once is establishing our emergency fund. We did that to a dollar amount much larger than he recommended. But when an emergency roof replacement came up I paid cash and had savings leftover. Best feeling in the world. YMMV but I feel its a good starting place not the be all end all of financial advise.

Much of his stuff makes sense for anyone at any level of sophistication, like:
-- have an emergency fund
-- pay off your consumer debt
-- live within your means
-- for income replacement via death benefit, use term life insurance instead of permanent life insurance (but that's more of a slam on the insurance industry who suckers young dumb guys into selling it)

But once you've done all that, much of his advice isn't applicable to the person who has financial self-control.  It's mostly geared towards the people who need to change their spending habits permanently.

And he was completely full of shit those years he spouted off with "you can make 12% in mutual funds each year, every year!"

His advice on making a budget completely zero out each month is also good. If you don’t allocate every dollar somewhere, you’re bound to blow some of your extra money, when you could be putting it to good use. His cash envelope system is also smart.

I wouldn't worry about it. The way the country is going the dollar is going to be worthless anyway.

You can just buy my book and it will say to not spend beyond your means.

Or, you can help old Dave buy another jet.

the man provides a service that is of value to many people who are willing to pay for it.  I'm glad he's gotten rich off of it.  That's Capitalism 101, bro.

A lot of people dislike DR. But ive noticed that the people who are the most outspoken about how terrible he is are often the ones who are in massive debt. Sure there might be better strategies to pay off debt and invest that ae better than his but DR is a very common sense low risk approach to it that anyone with a moderate IQ can follow. Its very simple steps and no complicated math or formulas. Does he make money of his program yes, but if that really bothers you its possible to find his full program online for free it can be downloaded or just watch the videos he posts on youtube, you can get all of the content if you watch enough of his videos, he repeats his message a lot.

I did the plan and it works well but admittedly I was already paying off debt when I started looking for tips on repaying debt faster and found the program.

I found that the program and daily radio show gave me the motivation to keep moving forward even when it felt like I was making no progress.

My wife and I paid of over $200k in debt (including our mortgage) in 5 years. It started off slow, prob less than $10k in extra payments the first year, but the final year we paid off the remaining $100,000 on our mortgage! That final year we were literally eating beans and rice at every meal, didn't go out to dinner a single time, no movies, etc.... Since then our net worth has gone up significantly as many of the things we did to cut expenses to pay off debt we continue to do. We don't have cable anymore, we have the slowest internet package, we turned a closet into a pantry and shop in bulk when items are on sale, we cut back how much meat we eat. We also learned to be content with what we already have and to not use shopping as a form entertainment.

The dave ramsey program is more emotional than it is math. During the journey we cleaned our home looking for items to sell, in the process we discovered my wife had over 50 purses with tags on them still and literally tubs of clothes, her clothing budget has gone down drastically. I now make myself wait 30 days for any large purchases, Its funny I wil be obsessed with buying a new gun or piece of hockey equipment. But after a months I will completely forget about it. My hockey equipment I already own works just fine and I already have more guns than I have time to shoot. Im looking into reducing the size of my collection, I would rather have a couple really high quality guns I shoot all the time and am an expert at shooting that own a bunch of junk mil surplus rifles that i shoot once a year or less.

But most importantly it really helped my marriage. It gave my wife and I a common goal and for the first time in years we were on the same page. Once we started winning with money we came to enjoy conversations about money, it was no longer "oh crap how are we going to pay this off" to "should we invest all of this extra cash or take some of it and go on a fun vacation"

Yeah that was one of the few things that bothered me, there is no freaking way you can reliably expect to get 12% real growth rate every year, that's insane. 7% is considered the historical average and is much more realistic.

With that said he has addressed it to some extent and told listeners to pick a different value if they want and that even if he is completely wrong and you get no return on your investment, if nothing else you are saving money and will have at least SOMETHING when you retire compared to the avg American who has nothing saved for retirement. If you complete his program you will also be debt free which means your month to month expenses when you retire will be next to nothing and you can actually live off of social security and medicare if you are debt free.

Generally pretty common sense advice.
Wife and I pretty much lived the plan since before he was even on the radio.
IMO his take on debit cards being ok and credit cards being the debil is just not intellectually honest.  He claims credit cards make you spend more because there is no pain involved at purchase because it is just plastic.  But debit cards don't.
I don't doubt that some spend more when plastic is involved I just don't think there is a real difference in credit vs debit purchases.

Because of his belief many use debit cards.  I personally think debit cards are stupid.  You give up your money immediately vs. holding another 30 days and if there is a fraudulent charge you are left fighting with Visa or whoever to get it back.  When using a credit card they'd have to come to you for the fraudulent charge amount to get it.  
But then again we haven't carried a credit card charge in our 28+ years of marriage.

I think most of his advice is basically sound, like live under your means, have a budget, save for retirement etc.

I don’t agree that having a credit card is evil when you pay off the balance every month and you stay within your budget.

To me at times he treats credit like alcohol for alcoholics. Because some abuse it, he forbids it for all.

His market is people who chronically abuse credit. If he said "it is ok, if you can control yourself," then they would convince themselves they could control themselves and would be worse off.

Damn. This post nailed it.

I had to check the name to make sure I didn't write it and forget.

My wife and I did it started it about 6 years ago. Wanted to be debt free (except our house) before we had kids.

No shit, I paid our last debt payment in the hospital on the day my daughter was born. $60k in debt gone in 2 years.

We use the paid version of the "everydollar" app and think it's absolutely the best budgeting app in existence.

So here I sit, 6 years later. We have gone from $60 in debt having student loans, credit cards, and 2 car loans to today, both cars paid off and a net worth of $120k (just turned 33). I realize that's not a ton of money, but we have come a long way.

We are currently putting about 25% of our income in investments and with my gov retirement (fers) in 27 years we should be able to live a very comfortable life.

I'm not a dumb guy, have a math degree and 2 graduate degrees. When I graduated in 2013 I realized I didn't know the first thing about money... Dave changed my life.

I see his point wrt credit cards...

You do spend more when you use credit vs. cash, that is a known fact.

I don't think a single rich person in history is rich because of rewards points. I think of rewards points like diet coke... fat people will order diet coke to get the benefits of low calories but they've ordered 2 big macs in the process. Most people will spend more buying with credit than they will ever earn in rewards points, otherwise they wouldn't offer them.

I think the alcoholic analogies above are spot-on. I've always looked at his advice like that.

Alcohol is poison. No matter what anyone says, it's not good for you, and you don't need it to survive. Do some people drink responsibly?  Do a lot of people drink responsibly and never have any problems?  Sure they do. Do a lot of other people start out "drinking responsibly" and end up damaging or even destroying their lives, and maybe other people's?  You betcha. So, if you were going to make a program (let's say we'll call it "alcoholics anonymous") what are you going to base your program around, so that it will work for everybody?  Total abstinence.  If you follow that plan, there is no chance you will ever be an alcoholic.

You can replace all the "alcohol" terms above with some form of "debt" and the paragraph is still true.

Call me an idiot. He is selling common sense.

But this is 2018. That is something most people need to purchase.

How are your money habits? If we compare it to alcohol, are you the guy who can have 1 drink or do you drink 1 drink and next thing you know you wake up naked in the woods 3 days later?

DR is for the spending alcoholics. He has his place just like AA does.  He also has 0 to offer me.

Lol. I didn't read the thread until after I posted the alcohol analogy already.

Ramsey is teaching, what High Schools used to teach.

They are coming back.  40% of high schools across the country have taught Foundations in Personal Finance.  https://www.ramseyeducation.com/foundations-personal-finance-hs

He endorses using debit cards, which unless you’re retarded, I don’t see how psychologically it’s different than using a credit card.

I know each month that my CC bill is due in full, and that money has to come out of my checking account. A debit card takes it out now, vs later. If you mentally don’t make that connection, then CCs aren’t for you.

You can say all you want about millionaires not being excited about rebate checks or rewards from using CCs, but the wealthiest people I know are penny pinchers that also use leverage to get where they are financially.

I'm mostly familiar with what Dave teaches.  Could you give is the Cliff Notes on what you found most valuable but didn't learn in years of college?

Leverage and debt are not the same. Devt to buy a rental house or other income producing asset is legerage. Getting a loan on a $60,000 water ski boat os just debt.

Dave Ramsey doesn’t endorse debit card usage as your main payment source; he endorses the cash envelope system. He says to only use debit cards when cash payment is not available (such as plane tickets, car rental, hotel booking, etc).

My reference is that they used leverage, which is debt, to purchase things that generate them income. Leverage allowed them to get more, in a shorter amount of time. I know more people that have used leverage to jump several levels up than that set that have used debt to buy a $60k boat. Both of which Dave frowns I upon, because he failed at it once.

However, I've heard more and more callers as of late stating they're carrying debt on rental properties, and he hasn't once said to get rid of them. These are people purposefully becoming landlords, not the people that become landlords due to circumstances.

I find myself drawing a fine line between the Dave Ramsey way and the Mr. Money Mustache way.

I use credit cards because they are like  a condom to my checking account, a debit card is a direct IV line into your checking account, but I use mostly cash and I nowadays dont care about rewards points.  Mainly just a free card that has a good online system and a low rate (in case one day I do screw up and carry a balance).

He is right you DO spend more and do NOT remember previous transactions with plastic.

Speaking of carrying a balance, the CC companies say 7 of 10 carry a balance, yet 7 of 10 customers say they don't... who do you think is lying?  If you carry balances, you need to kill the cards.  If you dont, stick to just a couple cards and not worry about point systems, go for low interest rate cards.

Now, hes Mr. Mutual fund in a chorus of Index funds, so me personally I do 1/2 mutual and 1/2 index for each investment category.  I do believe in some bonds like most other sources, unlike DR.

I dont fully agree with "no student loan debt ever".  Going to a cheaper CC and/or public instate for a degree well known for having good paying career tracks are OKAY, provided you borrow just enough to go and subsist, work a job for the rest/fun money.  $15k for an engineering degree is not a big deal.  $75k for late-13th century bi-sexual Swedish poetry... is not okay.

I couldnt agree more on the stupidity of Car debt.  It takes considerable time and effort to rack up $60,000 in CC debt but you can go get $60,000 of car debt tomorrow. The "but muh 0%" being the ultimate "Dunning Kruger" trap for 'sophisticated' people who are not nearly as smart as they think they are.

I'll make one exception though.  If you have absolutely no money except for a <$1000 garbage pile, I would argue for instead purchasing no more than an $8-10k used asian reliable sedan on no more than a 24-36 month loan, provided the payments are not more than 10% take home pay.  any other car purchase beyond that should be CASH.  You do need reliable economical transportation, and Dave's way of saving a car payment and buying/selling less shitty cars every 10-12 months is fraught with risk of breakdowns, not being able to sell, and fraudsters selling shit and calling it gold.

Better to just take the small note one lump and buy the 3-5 yo econo-box that'll last you 3+ times as long as your note.  That is my happy ground between "all cash all the time, drive a shit box" types and the "I gotta have a $30,000+ car to be reliable or $60,000+ truck/SUV/Sherman Tank to be safe" (ie: will be in debt forever) crowd.

He believes in paying off your mortgage if you have the money, no exceptions

That's not exactly true.

I have heard him advise many callers who got an inheritance, and asked them about their upcoming obligations, plans.... and seen him recommend paying *some* of the windfall on the mortgage, while reserving money for other things, such as education, moving, a different home, business investment.  He is usually pretty good about asking the person a lot of questions to make sure he understands their full picture.

But yeah, in general, he advises getting out of debt.  That's no mystery.