Comments by "wvu05" (@wvu05) on "Does Christian Dave Ramsey Give Good Financial Advice?" video.

@Zap Brannigan It is, but the crowd that Ramsey is courting doesn't want to hear that. I remember a conversation I had about 12 years ago with my former pastor's wife. She asked how seminary was going, and I said I liked the classes, but joked that it seemed like there were more things that I realized that I didn't know. Her response: "So, learning too much can be a bad thing, huh?" I tried to gently point out that I was only talking about looking at some of the paradox involved.
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David was critical of not paying off the highest interest first. Interest costs you money, and paying off high interest debt first saves money.
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I think that he is someone who focuses too much on the idea of getting rid of debt. Sometimes, debt can be a tool. Sometimes, emergencies happen, and with stagnating wages, more and more are living in financial insecurity that frugality alone won't solve.
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@bleuwater9629 I think that her point was to look at the total price of a car. I bought a car 7 1/2 years ago for about $2500. Got a warranty and everything. Ended up having to pay over $2000 to get a new transmission because the warranty had a clause that it wouldn't cover the repair because of the timing of it. Would I have been better off getting a $4000-5000 car and making payments? Probably. It certainly would have been much lower interest than I ended up having to pay on the repair.
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@pvmvertigo7095 I guess that just depends on how your brain processes things. I had some debts where the disparity between the two just meant that I paid off some low-dollar accounts first just from the minimum payment, but I used the snowball to add to the higher interest ones, and seeing the interest drop significantly helped me a lot more than the number of places I sent it to.
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In Money Makeover, he argued that lower debts should be paid off first regardless of the interest rate, and against any investment until debt could be paid off. It seems like he started by borrowing from David Bach, and now he's borrowing from Suze Orman. Oh, and his advice on spending down once you retire was ridiculous, saying "the market grows at 12%, and inflation is 4%, so you can spend 8% a year and be fine." Maybe if you don't expect to live 10 years after retirement, and the S&P average is 9%, which would be even lower with his advocacy of high-load mutual funds, and that bad idea is all him.
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High-load mutual funds are a worse investment than whole life insurance.
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