George Kamel - 8 Lessons From the Bible That Kept Me From Going Broke

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

📙 Check out my book, Breaking Free From Broke!   Biblical money principles work regardless of what you believe about the universe. And today, I’ll be sharing eight of the most timeless.   Next Steps: • 🎥 Watch my video Harvard Professor Reveals the Worst Thing to Do With Your Money! • 💵 Start your free budget today. Download the EveryDollar app! • 📈 Are you on track with the Baby Steps? Get a free personalized plan.   Connect With Our Sponsors: • Get up to 20% off Cozy Earth with code GEORGE. • Get 20% off when you join DeleteMe. • Go to Boost Mobile to switch today!  • Go to FAIRWINDS Credit Union for an exclusive account bundle!   Explore More From Ramsey Network: 🎙️ The Ramsey Show 🍸 Smart Money Happy Hour 💸 The Ramsey Show Highlights 🧠 The Dr. John Delony Show 📈 EntreLeadership   Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This might be the most controversial video I have made to date. And it has nothing to do with credit cards, withdrawal rates, or selling horses. Nay. It's okay, buddy. It has to do with the book that has the best money advice I've ever heard. And no, it's not the Total Money Makeover or my book, Breaking Free from Broke, available now wherever great books are sold. I'm talking about the B-I-B-L-E.

Now that's a book. Two Corinthians, right? Two Corinthians. Now, before you bail or run to the comments section to create some brouhaha over your feelings about religion. Listen, I'm not here to proselytize, evangelize, or traumatize. You can be agnostic, atheist, Buddhist, nudist, I don't care. Anything but Scientologist is fine with me. Boom, roasted. The point is, biblical money principles work regardless of what you believe about the universe and dinosaurs. And today, I'll be sharing eight that changed my views on money and

help me build serious wealth. And shout out to delete me for being a good, good sponsor. It's who they are. I knew Alex would love that. We'll hop right in with Luke 4. 1428. For which of you intending to build a tower does not sit down first and count the costs whether he has enough to finish it? Now, this is apparently a revolutionary concept because half of America is out here starting towers they can't finish. They're not counting the cost. In other words, they spend without figuring out how much they actually had in the first place. Now, luckily, the solution here is simple, making a budget. And all this is is looking at how much money is coming in and then making a plan for the money that's going out. And if you do

that right, you're going to have money left over. And I call that margin. And margin is magic, because it's money you can use to fund your goals, whether that's paying off debt, building an emergency fund, saving up for a house, investing for the future, you name it. And think about this in the construction world. A contractor would never start building a house without a budget, and you shouldn't lollygagged through life without one. Now, if you don't want to call it a budget, that's fine. You can call it an intentional spending plan, a cash flow document. I don't care. As long as you're sitting down before the month begins and deciding on paper or with an app how you're going to spend every dollar you plan to make. Because if every dollar doesn't have a job,

it's going to float away. And you're going to go, where do I, I should have a thousand bucks left over, but it disappeared. DoorDash has it now. That's who has it. They got it. So make a budget. If you want an easy way to do it, there's an app called every dollar that I love. I'll drop a link in the description below. Up next, one of my favorite books of the Bible, Proverbs. Proverbs 2120, to be exact, in the House of the Wise are stores of choice food and oil, but a fool devours all he has. We see, living on less than you make creates margin, and margin gives you something magical called peace. When you're not stressed out about money, when you have money left over every month, you can use that money to save for the future and feel good about it. And while it's great to save for retirement, your kids' college, even vacations, the real impact comes from saving for emergencies.

This is your never-going-to-dent insurance plan once you have a fully funded emergency fund of three to six months of expenses. And the truth is, you will never win financially without a buffer between you and the chaos that is life. life will throw you some curveballs. The fridge is going to go out. The H-Pack is going to break. Little Johnny is going to sprain an ankle. Your 2008 Chevy Cobol, mercifully will breathe its last one day. Well done, good and faithful servant. Love that little thing. So you need a pile of cash ready to absorb the blow sitting there to protect you. This is insurance. It's not an investment. So do not invest your emergency fund. Put it in a high-yield savings account so it can at least grow with the rate of inflation. But you're not looking to have this go up and down with the market.

You need it ready to serve you. And that's the ancient wisdom here. Store up resources when things are good, so you're not destroyed when things inevitably go sideways. And let's stick around in Proverbs for this next one, Proverbs 227. The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.

3,000 years old and still the most accurate sentence ever written about personal finance. Think about that car payment, the credit card balance, the student loan bill that shows up every month, that money you borrowed from mom or dad. Did that make you feel free? Of course not.

That's exactly what this Bible verse is describing here. And it's a feeling I know all too well. Back in my early 20s, I was 40 grand in debt. I had 36 grand in student loans, four grand in credit card debt, and I couldn't do all the things I wanted to do with those payments hanging over my head. And that debt was robbing me of options.

And the moment I realized that, everything changed. I got angry at my debt, and I got out really fast. In 18 months, I was completely consumer debt-free. And it's why I teach people to get out of debt and stay out. You just have more ownership and autonomy in your life if you don't owe other people money. And believe me, I understand taking on a car payment is far easier than saving up and paying for it in cash

in the short term. But being debt-free comes with a level of peace that money cannot buy. And that's what my family and I get to experience every day because we've followed these principles. This next one is one of my all-time favorites as it pertains to wealth. And it's Proverbs 13-11.

Wealth gain hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it. Now, that verse was written around 900 BC, And it describes every get-rich-quick scheme in history. Beaniebababies.com stocks, NFTs of Caitlin Clark dunking on Joey Fitone. That last one is real. And every single one of them failed the test of this proverb. Now, there is such a thing as building wealth too slowly.

Lookin to choose, savings bonds. The name's bond. Savings bonds. The name's bond. Railroad bond. One of my favorite bonds is railroad. It was time for Thomas to leave. But in general, the business.

best investments are the boring ones, things like mutual funds and index funds. And in the word fun is in there, but they're not super fun. They're not as exciting as the latest meme coin or buying a bar of gold from your local Costco, but it will set you up to retire with dignity and margin, potentially with lots of zeros on the end. So avoid the get rich quick schemes. If it sounds too good to be true, it is, if it feels like quick money, run. And we know this from lottery winners. Think about it. They make a lot of money really fast and it disappears even faster. We see this was celebrities and athletes. They sign a big contract, get $5 million, and it's gone.

As soon as their career is over, their money's gone with it. That's a very scary scenario. So I like to build wealth very slowly because the longer it takes, the more likely I am to hang on to it. Next on the list, we have Hebrews 12-11. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

The hardest part about discipline is that the reward doesn't always show up immediately. You skip the upgraded car. You have to stay in the apartment a little bit longer than you wanted to. You're cooking at home while all your friends are getting pampered at the rainforest cafe. And all you get for it is nothing. At least for now, you don't see it right now. That's what makes delayed gratification so hard. You're making decisions today to benefit your future self, but your current self just feels left out and inconvenienced. And the truth is, most people can't handle that gap. But real wealth, real financial peace, it requires waiting. And that's what my family experience. We paid off our house in our early 30s because we're willing to forego

other things. It happened because we had to say no to a bunch of things. While we piled up cash, we needed to ditch the mortgage, save up a big down payment, all of that. Even though it wasn't pleasant, it paid off big time with peace it delivered. Now before we get to the next one, let me tell you about delete me, a sponsor of today's video. You see, your personal information isn't just online. It's being packaged, sold, and resold across hundreds of sites. And spammers and scammers are getting access to your email, phone. number, address, even your family's information, all without your consent, which can lead to spam, scam, phasing, fraud, and more. So what Delete Me does is they go in and remove your info

from hundreds of data broker sites and make sure it stays gone. They have real data privacy experts working behind the scenes all year long to do this, and they send you a custom report of what they've done and how much time they've saved you. And right now, you can get 20% off their annual plans at Join DeleteMe.com slash George. Now getting spammed and scammed is uncomfortable, but your Clothing doesn't have to be. And that is why I love Cozy Earth, another sponsor of today's episode. Their jogger sets are made from viscos from bamboo. And what is viscose, you say?

Well, I could Google it, or I could just tell you. It's super soft, it's lightweight, it's breathable, and it just gets better with time. Kind of like me. And they don't stop at joggers. They've got bedding, bath, sleepware, loungeware, and my personal favorite, clogs. And if you want that luxury at a sweet discount, you can get up to 20% off at cozyEarth.com slash George and use promo code George at checkout. Up next, we're going back to Proverbs 1322.

A good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children. Now, this one's about legacy. A few years back, I met a couple who paid off nearly a million dollars in debt over 10 years. And they came to the Ramsey Solutions headquarters to do their debt-free scream live on the Ramsey show. And it would have been an incredible story on its own. I mean, a million bucks, 10 years, that's impressive. But then they dropped the bomb on air.

Without telling them, the couple had secretly paid off both of their children's mortgages, and they surprised them with it live on camera at the end of the debt-free screen. And I was standing there in the lobby, and I'm not afraid to admit that my eye started sweating a little bit. And in that moment, I remember thinking, I want to be like them one day. I want that kind of legacy from my family. And that's what this verse is about. It's not about hoarding money or getting rich for the sake of it. It's about building something real so you can hand something forward.

I want to be able to leave an inheritance to my children's children, which by the way, grandchildren, that's what that is. So covering their college fund, being able to help fund their wedding, creating generational wealth, this is a privilege that I hope to create for my family one day because of my sacrifices that I'm making right now. The financial decisions you make today are writing a story that will outlast you. So the question is, what kind of story are you wanting to write? What do you want people to remember about you?

And I hope for me, it's about legacy, character, and generosity. nobody cares about your net worth, they care about the impact you had on them, on their community, and on the people they love. All right, next up on our list, we head to Galatians. Galatians 522 and 23 says, The Fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And I put this verse at the front of my book, Breaking Free from Baroque, right under the title, because it's the whole point of everything I teach. And you might not think this is financial. But the reason I talk about money, so that we can stop talking about money. Because when money moves from an obstacle in your life to a tool, you don't have to think about it as much.

You can just use it as a tool to create the impact you want to have and become the person you want to be. So you know what you need to get out of debt? Self-control. You know what it takes to build wealth? Patience. You know what we're all after in this life? Love, joy, peace. It's on every TJ Max cross-stitched pillow. And I love the way the message translation puts it. But what happens when we live God's way? He brings gifts into our lives much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard. Things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity.

We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely. So the danger here is that you can win with money and lose it life if you're not careful.

And so you want money to reflect the kind of person that you want to be, the values that you have in your life, the character in you. That's what this is all about for me. I want to be the kind of person who can commit to things, who has an exuberance about life. I mean, that's what we're all after. Regardless of your religious affiliation, everyone would go, yeah, these are good things that we all should have. And if we all have these things, the world would be a better place. So this is what to aspire to, and money often is an obstacle in the way of that. And last but not least, Proverbs 11.

1125. A generous person will prosper. Whoever refreshes others will be refreshed. Now I know what you're thinking. Georgia had me until this prosperity gospel section. This is not what this is and I rebuke that. I'm not about to tell you to mail a check to Kenneth Copeland so the universe will make you rich. This verse is simply pointing us to a truth that science has repeatedly confirmed. Generosity is good for your brain. It's good for your mental health, your sense of purpose. And yes, your overall sense of prosperity. And it's exactly what Harvard professor and best-selling author Arthur Brooks explained, the first time he came on this channel. And if you want to see that video,

you can click here to watch it next or use the link in the description. It's one of the most popular videos on this channel for a reason. That's it for today. Thank you for hearing me out. Be sure to hit like on this video. Subscribe if you learned something today. Thanks for watching.

We'll see you next time.