Dave Ramsey says this is how you get wealthy

Not everyone agrees with Dave Ramsey. His blanket opposition to credit cards and mortgages has drawn plenty of criticism from financial planners who see nuance where Ramsey sees recklessness. Even so, his track record is hard to dismiss.

Ramsey's net worth is most commonly estimated at around $200 million, though his own disclosures suggest the figure is considerably higher. In a late 2025 interview on "The School of Hard Knocks" YouTube channel, he told host James Dumoulin that Ramsey Solutions generated a record $300 million that year and that he owns roughly $850 million in real estate, all accumulated without debt. He went further, stating he is "probably a billionaire." His Ramsey Solutions headquarters campus in Franklin, Tennessee, which was built out over decades on land he paid cash for, is valued at approximately $650 million on its own. Anyone who has assembled that kind of enterprise is, at minimum, worth paying attention to.

His core message has remained consistent for decades: debt is the single biggest obstacle standing between ordinary Americans and genuine wealth. As he put it on his Instagram page, "Your most powerful wealth-building tool is your income. And when you spend your whole life sending loan payments to banks and credit card companies, you're making everyone else wealthy, and you end up with less money to save and invest for your own future."

Ramsey lumps credit cards, student loans, car payments, and borrowing in general into one category he calls "stupid." The counterargument is obvious: when you are sitting on $850 million in real estate and a media empire reaching 20 million weekly listeners, avoiding debt is far easier than it is for the average household. Still, the underlying logic, that debt diverts income away from saving and investing, holds up regardless of net worth.

The numbers behind that logic are striking. Total U.S. household debt closed 2025 at a record $18.8 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Credit card balances alone hit $1.28 trillion by the end of the fourth quarter, up 5.5% from a year earlier. With the average credit card carrying an interest rate near 20%, and roughly 60% of cardholders carrying a balance from month to month, the wealth-transfer Ramsey describes is playing out in real time across millions of households.

How to Get Out of Debt Using the Debt Snowball Plan

Millions of Americans are already deep in debt, and telling them simply to avoid it is not particularly actionable advice. For those households, Ramsey advocates the debt snowball method: pay off debts in order from smallest to largest balance, regardless of interest rate.

The mechanics are straightforward. List every debt you carry, from student loans and car payments to credit cards and a mortgage. Then, as explained by Ramsey Solutions, "Make minimum payments on all debts except the smallest, throwing as much money as you can at that one. Once that debt is gone, take its payment and apply it to the next smallest debt (while continuing to make minimum payments on your other debts)."

Repeat that cycle until every balance is gone. The psychological appeal of eliminating small debts quickly keeps people engaged in a way that a purely math-driven payoff sequence often does not. Critics point out that a "debt avalanche" approach, which targets the highest-rate debt first, saves more money in interest over time. Ramsey's response has always been the same: behavioral momentum matters as much as the math, and a plan you actually stick with beats an optimal plan you abandon.

His bottom line is captured in a quote he has repeated for years: "Trying to save and invest while you're still in debt is like running a marathon with your feet chained together." Given that total household debt has grown by $4.6 trillion since the end of 2019 and credit card balances are at an all-time high, the analogy has rarely felt more relevant.

Editor's note: This article was updated to include Ramsey's own on-air statement that he is "probably a billionaire," as well as the approximate $650 million valuation of the Ramsey Solutions headquarters campus. Credit card balance and average APR data were also refreshed to reflect Q4 2025 figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

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