I’ve seen clip of that financial advice show “The Ramsey show” on YouTube and the things that old man say are shocking to me. According to him I shouldn’t give a single cent to my parents… That’s so against my culture. I would be seen as downright evil if I do that.
Hell I’m unemployed for like a year by now and still sent 200 euro a few months ago to my father that still lives in my home country that I haven’t seen in 17 years.
Are you really Americans like that? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t see it as cold hearted but I see it as unnatural, and I’M a “socialess” cold person in essence.
It really should be contextual. Every family is different, and each familial relationship is different.
I’ve heard him say children don’t owe their parents money just because they’re their parents, and I’d agree with that statement. The parents are the ones who decide to have the baby, how to raise them, etc, so i think it’s wrong if parents think they’re entitled to their children’s money.
But that doesn’t mean a child should never help their parents out financially. Morally, if you love your parents and can swing it, I think the right thing to do is help your parents if they need it. But there’s a big difference between asking a child to help and feeling entitled to a child’s help.
There’s no one right answer. It totally depends on you, your parents, and your dynamic. Did/do your parents treat you like shit? Did they blow through their all of their retirement money in 5 years? Are they in a 800k empty house but refuse to downsize for no good reason?
No most Americans do end up supporting their parents. On the other hand, I think most Americans would agree that their parents don’t deserve financial support merely for being their parents. You support your family because you like them and not because it’s a requirement.
Also, I think a lot of younger people begrudge their parents for not handling their own financials better, especially as the younger generations see how much harder some things are than they used to be.
For example, my in-laws collectively make over 6 figures and inherited a house decades ago that’s worth almost a million dollars due to housing inflation. They absolutely could have a reasonable retirement plan, but they don’t. They spend money as fast as they get it and won’t be passing their house down like their parents did because they have multiple large loans against the house. They use this money to go on vacations every other month and own more vehicles than they really need. They also mentioned to me recently that they would like it if we could try to buy a house with extra rooms for when they get old and need to be taken care of.
I’m not going to let my wife’s parents be homeless when they inevitably can’t work, but I do find it somewhat infuriating that their lack of planning is going to cost me potentially a huge amount of money.
Last, just to add more confusion to this, there are a number of US states which have familial responsibility laws. These laws mean that you can be found legally liable for certain debts accumulated by your parents. This is the exception rather than the norm but it does demonstrate that Americans aren’t actually as independent as they would have you believe.
Dave Ramsey is typical right-wing evangelical cult leader, but instead of dipping directly into religion, he is a conservative financial coach. He’s the human manifestation of “stop eating avocado toast” and “get a third job.” He has fired employees for being gay, being pregnant, being non-Christian, and for having premarital sex. He forced his employees to remain in office during the pandemic.
So it should be no surprise that his advice involves becoming a selfish, heartless jackass. He wants his working class followers to be good boot lickers who are self-sufficient and satisfied with their economic ceiling, and not believe in the potential for progress that would benefit society but may be detrimental to grifters like himself. That means his followers need every one of their hard-earned pennies to pay their bills and grow their nest egg, rather than waste any bits on generosity or compassion.
TLDR: If you’re poor and you support mom, you might become too poor to perceive success from Ramsey’s advice. That’s what it comes down to. Fuck him.
Middle, upper-middle, and upper class=wealth flows down.
If you’re poor, and sometimes just not white, wealth flows where it’s needed. Coworkers were very confused why I’m trying to save money to help my parents – who do and have always rented – when they’re too old to work.
Like they literally struggled to wrap their minds around the idea that a) not only can my parents not afford to retire, b) they can’t afford care when they can no longer work, c) they currently take care of my grandma who is in that position right now, d) I don’t, haven’t, and won’t be receiving some sort of windfall in the form of property or money when they die, e) the best off of me and my siblings are who tries to help out financially for the siblings that are having tougher times, not our parents.
They looked at me like I had grown a second head, but I work around almost exclusively upper middle class white people.
Don’t listen to that right-wing idiot Dave Ramsey. He says stupid shit all the time, like never ever go into debt for anything ever, which is just unrealistic.
For example, according to him it’s preferable for you to get a 500$ clunker that you will undoubtedly have to continuously repair over a reasonably priced reliable used car that you take a small loan out for. There’s a middle ground with debt, even credit cards.
People should learn how to assess whether they can afford a debt or not. The math is not intuitive and requires prepwork that most aren’t willing to do.
Not going into debt is almost always the right choice though. Especially for cars. It’s not about driving a $500 car forever, 6 months of average car payments saved and a $500 car can become a $2500 car, six months to a year later it can be a $4500-$7000 car.
I think I have an interesting perspective here, as someone who did kinda get their finances under control thanks to a Dave Ramsey course, and later had the unpleasant experience of discovering how much of a right-wing idiot he is during COVID.
Something I’ve noticed is that a lot of his advice seems targeted towards people who are crushingly bad at navigating debt. One of the most viral things they do is called “the debt free scream”, where people share their stories on his radio show after getting debt free, and just… do a victory scream, essentially. Kinda fun, not really a bad thing, but it shows how most of the people he deals with directly and the ones that make the best marketing are people with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of debt despite making very average money. Just absolutely no self-preservation instinct around available credit.
And for these people I think his advice makes sense. Absolutely no debt, debt is the enemy, it will crush you. And stuff like how he pushes you to chase paying debt with high intensity, get multiple jobs, etc. Because otherwise it’s impossible to even manage to put money on the principle of a debt that large.
For the average person though? His best advice is basic budgeting, focusing on paying your debts one by one so you can celebrate each victory quickly, and building an emergency fund so you don’t need to go backwards as soon as you have a car problem. Also, yeah, ditch the brand new truck, it’s burying you in debt you didn’t need.
But absolutely, I’d highly recommend modifying his recommendations for most people, and I don’t doubt someone out there is doing a better job of teaching this stuff than Ramsey is. My advised tweaks:
- Find a budget you can live with, paying your debts a couple months faster isn’t worth being miserable, and makes it more likely you’ll be able to stick to a budget for as long as it takes.
- Zero-based budgeting (budgeting every dollar at the start of the month) isn’t really necessary, leaving a little loose change that you can allocate later once the month is actually happening is pretty helpful. It’s ok to shift things around so long as you aren’t spending money you don’t have.
- Actually do keep “fun money” or “restaurant money”, so long as you’re capable of including it in the budget without hamstringing your ability to pay debt. If you’re giving more to debt than these things, then you’re probably fine.
- Ultimately just… think for yourself, and make your own decisions, based on your own income and expenses. Ramsey is a decent, if aggressive, starting point (and again, not the best person, he seems to have lost the plot somewhere).
I think you give a fair explanation of Dave in this comment. I definitely think much of his “baby steps” needs to be updated. Just for example, $1000 in savings is just going to cause someone to get further into debt when an emergency comes up.
I like the 20/30/50 rule for budgeting (20% saving, 30% fun and 50% needs). If you have bad debt (consumer debt, bad auto loan, etc), then minimize your fun spending the most you can in order to wipe out that bad debt as quickly as possible. But of course also save up at least on month of needs or your largest deductible (whichever is greater). Then once the bad debt is gone save up a 3-6 month emergency fund (according to your personal risk/comfort level).
I also think it’s important to not be too hard on yourself. Some months you’ll be over budget and some months you will be under. That’s why I think it’s important, like you said, to leave some room in the budget and not get caught up in zero dollar budgeting.
I’m not sure they need updating as much as there needs to be a second set for the absurdly in debt. The steps as written work well for 2-3 years at most, which if you follow them can pay off around 50k+ in that timeframe. If you have so much debt that it would take 5-7 years or more of that level of intensity, it’s probably worth relaxing it a little to be debt free and taking 6-9 years. Anything forecasting longer than 10 years to get debt free probably requires going back to an even more intense effort to escape debt.
Mmm, excellent addendum to my proposed changes. 1000$ is better than nothing, but it hasn’t really kept up with inflation, and circumstances really change things. For example, if you have a house, the potential opportunity and cost of an “emergency” goes up immensely.
But yeah, for us personally we pretty quickly went up to a 2000$ emergency fund, despite the relative stability of renting and driving a fairly new car. We’ll be working on our 3-6 month expense emergency fund soon. I definitely think it’s better to view the baby steps as flexible guidance on a starting point, rather than the concrete law they frame it as.
Congrats on making it that far! I’m sure you’ll have a fully funded emergency fund before you know it. I hope no emergencies come up while you build it, but if they do, don’t let that discourage you!
The best analysis I have to Dave Ramsey’s advice to debt is like talking to an alcoholic about alcohol. If you have known issues dealing with debt, especially credit card debt, his advice will probably prevent some serious harm. However, for someone starting to deal with finances, it may not be the best advice.
The main thing rubbing me wrong is forcing to support the parents - parents decide to have a child, so they do owe the child support during its live. The child didn’t have a choice in this, and therefore owes the parents nothing. Now if the parents were decent people there’s a high chance the kids want to help out because of that - and that’s a perfectly good thing to do. But there should not be a forced obligation by society.
Americans are not a monolith, but instead all over the place with regard to a cultural practice like care for the elderly. If you had to summarize it might be fair to say that there is more of a sense of freedom from obligation to care for elders than in some other places, which is also driven by the baby boomer generation being so entitled and the current younger generations encountering ever worsening economic prospects which the boomers are stereotypically blind and unsympathetic towards. Also, there is a greater recognition of abuse and sometimes that leads to the recognition that ones elders have been abusive and therefore can go fuck themselves.
Finance Bros are not normal people. They tend to be pretty sociopathic.
Completely depends on if your parents are in your life, if they’re good people and treat you with love and respect.
Also depends on your parents financial status, as well as your financial status.
Most people my age (Millenial) are not as well off as our parents so it wouldn’t make sense to support them.
There is no single answer to your question other than “it depends”
In America, the older folks tend to have more money than the younger folks. So culturally speaking, we don’t really think to send money to our elders.
The first way is pensions used to be common, so older folks get that. There are also retirement accounts that people would pay into their whole working life. (These are very commonly offered and are pretty set and forget.) Cost of living used to be a lot lower too, so they also had greater opportunity to save up as they aged.
Another way is that established people tend not to have to spend as much money. If you live in your own house and have for a while, your home goods are typically handled and you only need to replenish as needed. (I’m talking things like furniture, small fixtures… Stuff that would be a pain to move or replace if you are not as established.)
Also in the United States, current working age people pay into social security, which older folks can draw from. (There are rules and exceptions, but for the most part, this is how it works.)
So here, the older folks are in a better financial position overall. (There are of course exceptions, and with their advanced age it is harder to dig themselves out.
For myself, I am doing well. But even though I’m ahead of many of my peers, I’m still not doing as well as my parents when they were my age. The cost of my schooling was much higher than that of someone that graduated 30, 20, even 10 years before me. (But it did allow me to get a very good job.) The cost of living rose quite a bit higher than wages, so I wasn’t able to save and invest like they did. I’ve had to take on second jobs to pay for healthcare. (My parents did not have to.)
I might be a bit biased though, because I was also told I would get no financial help from my parents after I became an adult. I would be far more inclined to help if they invested in my education, which would have made me be way more far ahead financially.
However, I do help my mom when I can. I visit. I help her fix things. I don’t help her financially though.
You are basing so much on a YouTube video.
Jeez this is a good reminder of how people get influenced by media.
Ramsey has some views that don’t align with everyone. The important thing to keep in mind is that America is so diverse, your neighbor could be a different religion and most of us (despite what media will lead you to belive) don’t give a fuck.
If I were to re-work the advice to be less extreme, I’d say don’t put your self in a finacial struggle trying to help your parents.
Ramsey himself is pretty good at explaining edge cases, more so than his other personalities. He’s generally applying the same ideas used in rescue scenarios to money, putting yourself at risk generally isn’t worth it and just means more people need help now.
I’ve seen clip of that financial advice show “The Ramsey show” on YouTube and the things that old man say are shocking to me. According to him I shouldn’t give a single cent to my parents…
A youtuber that is being a narcissistic, uncompassionated asshole? I’m shocked, shocked!
Well, not that shocked.
I don’t think the guy started as a “YouTuber” he’s very old, just cashing on the podcast trend and the channel is highly followed and the comment section seems normal
Dave Ramsey got famous for teaching an educational series and books focused on getting financially illiterate folks out of debt and onto a path of relative financial security using his “baby steps.” While not bad advice per se, he’s not regarded as an expert if you are already able to self regulate your finances. It gives folks a decent starting point and some reasonable first principles, but he should not be considered to be the gospel of financial advice.
You went off to a different country and things are much different.
In the US, generally, parents by retirement age have paid for their homes by then, have retired with benefits from their employer that will give them some money every month, have social security that also pays them every month (both of these are taken out of each paycheck throughout their career lives) and don’t have many bills.
So by the time they’re old, if they were responsible and held ok jobs, they should need money less than you need it. Our US system is basically set up to make you work hard for 40 ish years and then you’re taken care of when you’re old, for the most part. If your parents need money and you have money to give, there’s nothing wrong or against it. It’s still a common thing. But ideally, doing that shouldn’t be needed.
