Dave Ramsey says greed, fear and pride are the 3 things that will make you broke

He says he's done all three.

Aug 31, 2023 - 10:30

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Dave Ramsey says greed, fear and pride are the 3 things that will make you broke

Author and radio host Dave Ramsey generally appears perfectly happy to tell people exactly what's on his mind.

And truth be told, it's pretty apparent that he doesn't seem to care much whether they want to hear it.

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The personal finance personality often gives people advice on specific financial situations and dilemmas they find themselves in.

These often include questions about when to buy a house, when to buy a car, which debts to pay off first, and so forth.

These are all concrete concerns and they depend on developing a quick understanding of the specific details regarding the challenges with which the people seeking his advice are dealing.

Sometimes, however, Ramsey takes a step back and looks at the broader picture. Perhaps one might call it a more philosophical approach to dealing with finances.

He often refers to a saying, for example, that goes like this: "If you can control the person in the mirror, you can be skinny AND rich."

The 3 things that will make you broke

With thoughts such as these in mind, Ramsey took to Twitter Aug. 30 with a bold statement about the three things that will make a person broke.

It wasn't a set of financial principles, investing strategies or mathematical equations. It wasn't a religious sermon, a quote from a famous person or the words of a historical figure. And it certainly wasn't borrowed from some intellectual musings out of a book at the business school of a prestigious university.

Instead, Ramsey's list of the three things that make you broke amounted to three simple words: greed, fear and pride.

"It's the trifecta," Ramsey said. "And I have done all three. And all three will make you broke."

Ramsey explained each one in a crisp and relatable fashion that was straightforward enough to avoid any misunderstanding.

"See, 'pride' is, I buy a car to impress someone at a stoplight that I will never meet," Ramsey continued. "Would I buy this if no one ever saw it? That's your test on the pride button, right?

Dave Ramsey in his Nashville studio.
TheStreet

Then Ramsey took a moment to discuss the greed element of the three preoccupations.

"'Greed' is, I'm just money motivated to the exclusion of other things that are healthy," Ramsey said. "You can have a money motivation to the exclusion of other things. But if your only button to push is money, that's greed."

The next subject Ramsey addressed in his concise philosophical discussion was set up to be "fear." But interestingly, he changed the word to a more nuanced version of fear. Instead, he used the word "desperate," which he called the worst of them all.

"And the third one... is 'desperate,'" Ramsey said. "That's the worst one. When you get desperate, just about twenty seconds later after I get desperate, I get stupid. And right after I get stupid, I get broke, right?"

"It's a progressive, causal thing," Ramsey explained. "Desperate leads to stupid leads to broke."