The greatest system that the world has ever known for the little man to get ahead is the current state of America.
Dave Ramsey's Best Advice For Young People Who Want To Be RichToday, Little Man has a better chance. I’ve been a millionaire twice. I’m so dumb. I had to do it two times. You know you got two shots. I mean shots at it. But it’s all about me taking responsibility and making decisions. We understand that you’re going to reap what you so if you put corn seed in the ground, don’t be shocked. The corn list is technically only one real definition. Some definitions have agenda. For instance, you hear politicians say that millionaire is someone who makes $1,000,000 a year. That is not the definition.
There’s an accounting finance definition for million.
Dave Ramsey’s
IT’s fairly simple. Assets minus liabilities, what you own minus what you owe. When that equals greater than $1,000,000, you are by definition a million. Oh, that’s exactly what occurs. There are somewhere around 13 million millionaires in America today. We completed a couple of years ago, and our research department an airtight piece of research, the largest study of millionaires ever done. Over 10,164 of them were surveyed and we get in-depth discussions with them to find out. Exactly. They are demographically who they are.
Where did their money come from? Water, their careers, all those kinds of things.
Here’s what’s interesting. We have proven now, statistically again with the largest study ever done by a millionaire, that 89% of the millionaires in North America today did not become millionaires because of inheritance. Matter of fact, 79% received zero here. If it’s 5% received a very small inheritance, $5000 from the grandmother or something like that, not enough to make them a millionaire. And another 5% received substantial money after they were already millionaires. Like a friend of mine, you know, you got $1.2 million net worth his parents passed away. Africa is already making our electric 250,000 more, so now it’s 1.45.
The definition of the middle class has completely changed.
In 1960 middle class was 1100 square foot brick homes with 1.2 cars in the driveway. Today middle class is 2800 square foot two-story with 2.3 cars in the driveway being they’ve got on average. So, we define the middle class by what 1960 we would have called it. At least the upper middle class might be the lower upper class and so we’ve changed our standards of living so high across the board in America that we have the richest poor people in the world. I’m hopeful it comes under control for multiple reasons. I think part of the reason for the inflation is this ridiculous government policy of just. Pretty funny right there.
Rolling it out everything and paying people not works. But the other thing that’s caused this particular piece of inflation is very unusual. And I didn’t see coming, but looking back on it, I kind of feel like I should have seen it coming. Anytime there’s an earthquake can see following that there’s a tsunami if it’s a major earthquake. So, you’ll get a 10-story wave. That gets the short days later or hours or whatever later after the earthquake. And see, there’s Quaker City was the pandemic.
We shut down all production and most consumption, but not all of it.
And then we put people back to work, sort of. But we paid them to not work. So, we disrupted the supply chain, we disrupted the supply-demand of goods and services, and we disrupted the labor markets with this ridiculous policy coming out of Washington continuing to pay people out of work. And so, we’ve had this perfect storm that has resulted in unbelievable spikes. In almost every category, the only category is not caused by this oil, and that’s caused by shutting off pipelines and ridiculous policy again out of shutting down some lot this of item enter anytime there’s a shortage, you see a jump in price shortage of toilet paper, jump in price shortage of gasoline, jump in price, shortage of Labor, jump in price. That’s a Spiderman from 7th grade.
So, I hope that two things will occur over the next 5 to 10 years to do away with this. One is after the tsunami the waves go out and we repair and get back to a fairly normal capitalistic society again. And my hope is, is that we change administrations and spend money. Like a drunken sailor, right? So, we have to do away with the source of their addiction. The government’s help is out of control because we’re helping people that don’t help, meaning they’re paying people to not work that are able-bodied. That could get work and there’s plenty of work out there to do right now. Tremendous labor shortages in several. Right now, I’m running a restaurant ohm gosh.
Trying to get a hotel bed made it ridiculously hard. So, people in the service industries, the first ones that got hurt the most by the pandemic quarantine, and the shutdowns, it was the lower socioeconomic runs. They’re the ones that haven’t come back and they’re the ones that are holding up. You know the economy from moving again and it’s all caused by these extended. Out-of-control government programs and it’s not being helpful. They’re trying to be double, but that’s not helpful to that person 10 years from today to teach them to.
Not anytime you get desperate right after that. Financially, you get stupid. I’ve done it. And you know, if you start getting desperate and you’re freaking out over the spike in inflation and you’re freaking out over all these disturbances in the economy and you go to some kind of desperate move to get rich quick and some unproven process that’s just not wise again. So, I can tell you what I’m personally doing, I continuing to do. What I’ve done for 30 years. I buy mutual funds, long track record mutual funds in my 401K and outside the 401K, and I buy real estate that I pay cash. It’s very simple and very boring. Nothing about it.
I don’t get to tell my golfing buddy some story that made me look brilliant, but you know, it’s resulted in several 100 million.
Dollars on net worth. So, it’s working out so baby steps that we have taught for almost 30 years. But what we found out was that now that we’ve been doing this so long, there are 10s of thousands of millionaires that are millionaires because they work this plan that we caught them ten years ago, 12 years ago, 18 years ago, and they’re coming into ours. Office to do those debt-free screams that we do on the radio and they’re saying, oh by the way, when I paid off my house the other day, it’s worth 450,000. I’ve got a little over a million in my 401K so I’m worth a million and a half. I’m up baby steps millionaire and that’s where it comes from.
They follow the baby steps. Baby steps one through three are getting out of debt and building your emergency.
But 15% of your income into retirement now the average household income is 60,000 if you put 15% of 60,000 away from age 30 to age 65. You have to. Make sure people see. . That’s a lot of the best of all, it means that’s like it works so hard gets. Fast, secure and alive. Out of 60,000 away from age 30 to age 65, you’ll have between 5:00 and $10 million in your mutual funds. And so, if I’m 10X5X wrong, which I thought you’d still be a millionaire, you know, and that’s how ridiculously simple this is. Now, that’s not a billionaire. You’re not gonna have seven Lamborghinis. My private jet, a billionaire, is 1000 million.
There’s a lot of difference in Elon or you know, some of the other guys out there that we talked about the Warren Buffett’s of the world.
There’s a lot of difference in those guys. And a millionaire living in a middle-class house got two cars, got a nice four pickup post for the time. About ratios, I could take a swing with an amount, and the way I always visualize it is if I put that amount of money in the middle of my kitchen table, and set fire to it, meaning the risk goes poorly, and we lose the whole thing. Does it affect my life? This is a major setback. And if the answer is no, then you can take a swing with that amount of money. And so, if you want to invest in Beanie Babies or Bitcoin or gold or you got this itch to start a business and you don’t know what the flip, you’re doing is all.
You’re not betting the whole farm on it, sliding all the chips forward like James Bond in the poker table, going all in, you know, that’s the people that. Lose everything and then they get this opportunity to start again, so don’t do that.
But if you’re going to take a risk, for instance, I don’t buy single stocks and I don’t recommend single stocks, but you can make a lot of money in a single Stockholm. No more than 10% of your network. So, if you’ve got $2 million net worth, you got $200,000 in single stocks and they all go belly up, you’re still OK. You got $1.8 million. That part you’re going to be alright. You know you’re OK, everything is fine. But where everybody gets crazy when their whole thing is based on the pay? Ridiculous high-risk groups. Well, here’s what’s interesting.
Grateful people are generally generous, and those who are generous are generally grateful.
And by the way, those are two personal character qualities that make you highly attractive. Everybody wants to be rented not because they’re trying to get money off of you, but generous people are just generous. They’re generous in conversation. They’re the ones that hold the door for you they’re not above. Picking up flight after dinner and tucking into the dishwasher when you’re at someone’s home, you know, generous people aren’t givers that are not takers. And we all know both kinds of people. And here’s what’s interesting.
That’s a decision you can just decide today. I’m a generous person, not a Gina, not born with it. It’s not DNA, it’s not an amount of money. I’m just going to be a person who adds value. Situations do not take that you’re not a parasite. I’m someone that adds value and is so generous, oddly enough, changes the person’s appearance.
He’s that guy who is generous and they tend to move into tremendous opportunity in their lives and they tend to prosper more than the takers do. Odd thing is, the taker, the greedy person is trying to prosper by climbing over people’s bodies and that’s the very thing that holds them back. And worse than that, they’re going to tell everybody they know. Stay away from it’s not just you lose the one customer, you lose their entire tribe, you lose everyone.
They influence my friend, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, he says. If you go to the auto repair shop and they got. It was a 25% part.
Don’t worry about it. Just Remember Me. You will remember that guy. But if you go to the guy and he messes you over, he’s not even business into many cousins’ auto repair guy who does a great job. And so, Unicorn, everybody’s going to send somebody there, you know? And I’m gonna tell all my friends I found one. You know, I found a good one. And the opposite is true if he messes me over. And so, this idea, somehow capitalism without a moral component to it works is ridiculous. It doesn’t work. That’s not how capitalism works. Capitalism is an active service, and when you serve someone well, you know, another buddy of mine says.
Blanchard says the Prophet is the applause your customers give you and they say thank you. This wonderful digital world was not available for five years money they could make for the podcast, the money they could make with digital application content of any kind.
Right now, there are all kinds of ways to deliver products out of your garage. It just simply wasn’t. Possible, and then had a lot of work. Opportunities are infinite out there if your brain is screwing right. And here’s the thing, there are all kinds of jerks out there that do people wrong, that are immoral, that don’t function properly in our culture today. Bring toxicity to these discussions and it is a system. It is the system you live in. So, you got to decide, am I going to ride the wave of negativity into victimhood and entitlement, or am I goanna rise above whatever the thing is that’s coming at? And it doesn’t matter where you come from. All that matters is where you’re going.