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 true figure could be considerably higher. In a late 2025 interview on “The School of Hard Knocks” YouTube channel, he said Ramsey Solutions generated a record $300 million that year and claimed he owns roughly $850 million in real estate accumulated without taking on any debt. The Ramsey Show also ranked as the second highest-paid podcast of 2025, according to the RSS platform FeedSpot. Anyone who has built that kind of enterprise is, at minimum, worth paying attention to.
His core message has not changed: debt is the 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 worth $200 million and sit on $850 million in real estate, avoiding debt is considerably easier than it is for the average household. Still, the underlying logic that debt diverts income away from saving and investing is difficult to dispute.
His bottom line: the only good debt is paid-off debt. As he has been quoted saying, “Trying to save and invest while you’re still in debt is like running a marathon with your feet chained together.” That analogy resonates more sharply today given that total U.S. household debt hit a record $18.8 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The average American now carries $105,444 in total debt, with credit card balances alone reaching $1.28 trillion nationwide.
How to Get Out of Debt Using the Debt Snowball Plan
Millions of Americans are already deep in debt, and telling them to simply avoid it is not particularly actionable. For those households, Ramsey advocates the debt snowball method: pay off your 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 knocking out small debts quickly keeps people motivated in a way that an interest-rate-optimized payoff sequence often does not. Critics note that a “debt avalanche” approach targeting the highest-rate debt first would save more money in interest over time, but Ramsey has always argued that behavioral momentum matters as much as the math.
Editor’s note: This article was updated to reflect Ramsey’s own 2025 disclosures, including record $300 million revenue at Ramsey Solutions and $850 million in self-reported real estate holdings (revised from the prior $600 million figure). Current household debt figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Experian were also added.
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