The Ramsey Show - App - How Do I Prepare for Upcoming Expenses? (Hour 2)

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

Девочка-пай Live from the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, it's the Ramsey Show, where we help people build wealth, do work that they love, and create actual amazing relationships. Open phones here at 888-825-5225. George Campbell, Ramsey personality, is my co-host today. He is the host of the new extremely popular YouTube channel, The George Campbell with a K YouTube channel. You've got to check it out.

He's also the co-host of the very popular podcast and YouTube show, Smart Money Happy Hour with Rachel Cruz. And so both are happening right now, and you can check them all out. Open phones here, 888-825-5225. Michael's in Washington, D.C. Hey, Michael, how are you? Hey, Dave, doing great. Thanks for having me. Sure, man. What's up?

So about a month ago, my son had an asthma attack and ended up getting airlifted out by helicopter. And we're trying to figure out if he's doing fine now, but we're trying to figure out if we stop paying on the car we were going to have paid off in September or put money into a savings account to kind of prepare for the bills that we know are starting to trickle in, but we don't know the exact total yet. Life flight covered by your health insurance? It's still pending, but they think it's going to be. There's no reason it shouldn't be covered. Sometimes it doesn't. And when the bird flies, it's $10,000 minimum.

Yeah, yeah. That's what we're kind of waiting on. We have an out-of-pocket maximum on the health plan, um, at 8,500. So I talked to the insurance company. They, they think it's going to be covered, but we don't know until we get the actual explanation of benefits in. So what's the worst case on this? Is your out-of-pocket max? It should be, yeah, it should be 8,500. How much money do you guys have right now in savings? About $11,000. Okay, so this thing's covered completely either way, but you've got the car to pay off.

What's left on the car? $15,000. And that's all of the debt? Yep. Okay. So we're going to throw the $11,000 at the car, most of that at the car very soon, and that's what we're going to pay it off in september but now with this yeah i think i think you're going to cover the 8500 i mean you got a bill you know is coming and so we're just going to we're going to earmark

your savings 8500 uh and then we're just going to attack the car with cash flow and as long as as long as it doesn't come in over 8500 then that'll be a perfect plan, right? Yeah. Yeah. It would just delay the car a little bit, but that's, that's, yeah, but that's, you know, if you had to make that choice, you'd make it cause you, and you did take care of your child, right? Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. And so, uh, was he out, was he remote or something and couldn't get his breath?

What was the story? Yeah. He, we just kind of found out that he had some asthma issues recently within the last like probably four or five months, and then he got a cold, and it turned into a pretty severe asthma attack, and we took him to the local hospital, and they transferred him to the children's hospital pretty quickly by helicopter. So it all happened pretty quickly, yeah. Wow, scary.

It's good that he's okay. How old is he? He's five. That's super scary then. It was super scary then it was very scary yeah very scary so well i'm glad he's okay i'm glad he's okay i'm glad it's only that you got good health insurance in place um and uh yeah this was not an er thing this was not where you were in a remote setting and they had to fly a life flight to you. This was hospital-to-hospital transfer. So that may fall in the insurance differently in a good way. Okay, yeah.

Because I've run into over the years too many times that health insurance did not cover life flight flying to a rural situation to pick someone up and then flying them, you know, 50 miles out of town or something like that where you can't get an ambulance to them, right? That kind of thing is a different thing. But I'm so glad everything's okay. What's your household income? $130,000. Okay. All right. Yeah.

So it's just a speed bump, a bump in the road that delays everything, and it's one you didn't choose, uh but we're glad the baby's okay and yeah you just just play it through yeah take set 8,500 aside out of the savings and then attack the car as fast as you can after that and just be thankful that you're able to do all of it and wow yeah i'll be debt free either way in a few months so yeah there's nothing um it's one thing to get sick it's another thing for your kid to be sick. You feel so helpless. I'll tell you even worse. Grandkids sick because you're not even allowed to raise hell.

I mean, you have to have the parents raise hell. I mean, where's the nurse? You can't do that, right? You just have to stand back. Because of dad, you can't do that. Papa, dad, be quiet. That's called boundaries, apparently. That might have happened.

It might have happened. Is that Rachel? I can't tell whose voice that was. Yeah, you got to stay. Papa Dave, be quiet. That's called boundaries, apparently. That might have happened. You know, it might have happened. Is that Rachel? I can't tell whose voice that was. I'm not going to say. I'm not going to say. Because they were right and I was wrong. So we're not going to throw anybody under the bus but Dave. Smart man.

Yeah, it's just this. But it's, man, it takes. Health stuff is scary. I was going to say it takes your breath away. You cannot say that. This kid had asthma. But, yeah, this is. You can't um

and it's you're known for those over 30 years i've done this repeatedly anthony is with us in new jersey hey anthony how are you hi thank you for having me sure how can we help all right so i had a situation was looking to get some advice um basically when i was 18 or 19 years old, I'm 22 right now. Um, I had an online business and I was able to accumulate a good amount of capital. Uh, and with the help of my parents, I invested in two real estate, uh, ventures. I got a, a little house that I rent out. And then I got a shopping strip. Um, the house pays about three thousand dollars a month and the shopping strip pays about ten thousand dollars a month um so you're 22 you have a thirteen thousand dollar a month rental income yeah good god how much money did you make with your online business

uh about i would say about two to three million. Wow. So impressive. And bizarre. Yes. Wait, say it again. Sorry. Impressive and bizarre and wonderful. Thank you. So my situation comes where next year, the mortgage I got, it was about. You got two to three million dollars and you took out a mortgage?

No, no, no. So right now, we paid about $850,000 for it. I put $400,000 down, and then the rest we did a private mortgage. Where's the rest of your money? Hold on. I'm going to get to that. Okay. So, like I said, we paid $400,000 for it.

Down. Yeah, down. And then we put the rents in the mortgage, and the mortgage will be paid off next year. So after that, like I said, the $13,000 will be completely no payments, no debt, no nothing, because the house I mentioned, we paid full in cash. Okay. Now, when I was talking about the $2 million to $3 million, I was just taking into account all my assets

because from 2019 when we bought the property to now, it's gone up that much just looking at... But your online business, how much did your online business make? Okay, online business, it was about like $800,000 to $1 million. Okay, and you used $400,000 for the down payment here, and you used some for the other. Where's the rest of that money? Taxes? I have $100,000 in cash. I have about $50,000 in stocks. And what's your question then? What are you wanting to do? So my question would be, since I'm very young, you know, I'm very grateful for the, you know, guaranteed monthly income.

But I was wondering if it would be a good idea to maybe, you know, once the private mortgage is paid off, to take out another mortgage on it now and try to do something else. No, no, no. You've got good money. You have a brain, an unusually good brain. Use it and keep your properties paid for and let that be your base of operation. Do not take out another debt. Thank you for joining us, America. We're so glad you are here.

We're constantly asking you guys, and a bunch of you have, we appreciate you to leave a five-star review on the show. It helps with the algorithms. And also, of course, we invite you to share the show. Click the share button or share a link or tell people where you listen to it on the radio or whatever it is. And it's always a good idea, too, to follow the show. Click the follow or the subscribe on YouTube or on the podcast. All three of those help us a bunch. And we got a five-star review in.

We've gotten a bunch of them in. But this one caught our team's attention. I must admit, being left-leaning from the West Coast my entire life, listening to the Ramsey Show came as quite the culture shock. That's funny. It was hard for me to not immediately associate the tone of the show with a laundry list of cultural values i've been conditioned to avoid i kept listening anyway because i love dave straight talk it was super refreshing and after a while it was obvious he's

in fact in fact a really kind brilliant person that just wants to instill some fiscal common sense back into our society what i love most is how he talks about the importance of stewardship and how it's not just about the money. It's about how your money can help the world. Amazing stuff. Jumping past some of the personal story, then listening to these episodes makes me acknowledge that I just need to be accountable for my poor decisions and stop feeling helpless.

I can get myself out of this situation and it shouldn't even be that hard. I just have to make some common sense, tough choices and go without for the next few years. Hi, my name is Eileen and I am irresponsible with money. I'm ready to put the work in and be accountable for my own actions and I will win at this game of life, passing these values down to my young kids. Thank you to the bottom of my heart for Dave and the entire team for achieving what my parents have failed to do my whole life, getting me to be fiscally responsible. Wow. That's very nice, Eileen.

Thank you, Eileen. Thank you. Yes. Very kind. I love that. We appreciate it. You're bringing both sides of the aisle together, Dave. That's me.

I'm all about unity. That's me. That's amazing. I'm honored. I'm very honored. Very nice. I'm glad we are honored it's the whole the whole team here it's a team effort open phones at 888-825-5225 dj is with us in baltimore hey dj what's up hey hey guys um so i wanted to see if you had some suggestions on

how to approach a situation um that my husband and I are trying to tackle. So I'm about two years away from going to veterinary medical school, and I also was diagnosed with an illness last year that kind of limits me quite a bit. And it also means that I have to renovate our home in order to make it work for my condition. So we're trying to figure out what's the best way to approach paying for those two very high-cost things without putting ourselves into a bind when we're not currently in one. So sorry. What's the nature of your illness? So I am highly susceptible to bacterias and molds

to the point where it causes my body to go into paralysis. Why does that sound extremely incongruent to vet school to me? Because it can be. So there's one option for vet school. It's a brand-new school being built in New Jersey that would be preferable for me to be in during fun school. But I can't think of anything that has more bacteria and mold than animals. Animals actually, outside molds, it's not the same as the type of molds that would grow,

like in your home, due to water damage. So they're two different kinds. So it's basically issues with water-damaged buildings. I got you. Okay. So you've got a mold problem in your current home? Yes. So, and we didn't know about that.

We bought our home in 2020 and it was about... How expensive to eradicate it to be ready to sell? It would cost like about $ hundred thousand dollars no that five hundred thousand dollars for mold remediation no yeah not to make you healthy to be ready to sell to sell it yeah i mean you can't as far as I understand it, you can't. It doesn't take $500,000 to remediate mold in anything except an office tower. No, but it's a great need. I just did it. I just did it at my lake house.

I spent three grand. Yeah, that's definitely not the bids that we were quoted for sure. I don't know. What's this house worth? Is the whole house eaten up with mold? Yeah, so basically any of the water-sourced areas, so all of the bathrooms, the kitchen, and the basement. You need to get three more bids.

Because let me just tell you, the mold world is full of drama queens, not you. I'm talking about the contractors that do eradication, and they'll come in and go, you're all going to die! They do this, and it's part of their sales pitch. You've got to completely start from scratch. I got like five bids on the lake house, and they were everything from $1,000, which wasn't credible, up to $35,000. In this case, it was only mold under the crawl space.

Do what now? Yeah, so like the bids are upwards between 40 and 60 per area that we're looking at in our home to remediate and then to renovate them yeah i wouldn't stay there if i had your condition i love i love you and as your brother i'm telling you to move you shouldn't stay there if you have a condition that paralyzes you this house has got real mold problems and so i don't i don't know if we i don't know if we're going to burn it down or if we're going to sell it as is to some investor who remediates it or we find a better remediation thing but i don't think this house is renovated for you you need to move yeah i don't know i could move can you guys go

rent somewhere for now while you deal with the selling of the home? This creates paralysis for you, you said. Yeah. It scares me to death. I know. It's really frustrating because each, especially this region that I live in, like the Baltimore, D.C. area, it's quite wet, quite humid. So I really don't know where we would go. But you also you're going to go to vet school in New Jersey. So it sounds like you need to move to New Jersey if you're going to do that?

So it's a part of New Jersey that's closer to where we live. So it's commutable for me. So you've established here if you're going to go to this vet school you're going to stay in the area. Yeah. And every house in Baltimore does not does not have mold you know that right i would hope not oh come on dj i would hope not come on it's mainly i you know we love we love our home yes i i understand what you're saying but we do love our home i wouldn't want to move if we didn't have to because we just got to move a long ago. You have to move.

You are not going to spend a half million dollars to stay in this home. Your health is at stake. And this place is apparently rotting down with mold. I mean, you can't stay there. And there are other houses in the Baltimore area that don't have mold. We live in hot, damp Tennessee, which is worse than cold, damp Baltimore for mold. It's like mold is a way of life in our area. It's everywhere, and it's not everywhere.

It's not in every house. My current home does not have mold. My lake house got some underneath, and it was $3,000 to eradicate it. So, I mean, it's, yeah, but you've got to get, and I've got a bunch of rental houses, and we've had a couple of those we had to do some work on. But I've never had one that was completely rotted down with mold. That is not, so, and I have had some contractors and some tenants that thought that it was, because the drama around this is never-ending.

And I'm not suggesting you have the drama, DJ. If you've got an illness that is mold and you have an extreme mold situation in your house, and that is in conflict with your health and in conflict with your ability to go to vet school, sell the house for what you can get for it and go rent something and go to vet school and have your health. It's a real simple program. I would not be in the mold renovation business if i had an extreme illness related to mold it's the last thing you want to do because the more they tear into it the more it stirs it up you can't live there while you're doing it anyway if it's a massive thing we fog it you got to leave you got to do all this stuff and so yeah yeah you can't have too

many things conflicting for one goal. We have three goals. Health, housing, and vet school. What takes priority? Health. What's next? Vet school. What's next? Stupid house.

This is the Ramsey Show. Hey, you guys. Health insurance costs are only moving one way, and that way isn't down. And if higher costs aren't enough, the wait times to see your doctor are longer, and it's harder than ever to get anything approved through the bureaucracy. So if you feel like the system is working against you, try a biblically-based alternative to health insurance, Christian Healthcare Ministries. CHM is a health cost-sharing ministry that's helped hundreds of thousands of families like yours take care of over $11 billion

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Solutions on the debt-free stage. Sarah is with us. Hi, Sarah. Welcome to the Ramsey Show. Hi, Dave. Good to have you. Where do you live? I live in Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to Nashville. And how much debt have you paid off? $26,750. Love it. How long did this take you? Eight and a half months. Good for you. And your range of income during that time? I started with $42,000 and then I ended with $50,000. Good for you. What do you do for a living? I was in investing communications and now I'm in digital marketing. Good for you.

Very good. What kind of debt was your 27,000? It was in a car. Bad decision. Yeah, it was a lot of money and I totally regretted it when I got into that debt. So did you sell it or did you pay it off?

I ended up paying it off. Okay, you kept it. All right, good for you. Fun. What kind kind of car it is a toyota rav4 2015 of course it is okay good very good cool so how'd you get connected to all this ramsey stuff i actually am a ramsey baby my mom and dad followed your plan um i didn't take their advice at first i wish i did um they failed as parents but they did get me on the right track no they didn't they told you knew what to do you knew they weren't gonna like what you did oh yeah they were not too happy about it what was that conversation like um you know i just took out a 27 000 car payment he goes yeah they told me i should get

a beater until i can you know know, really pay cash for it. But, you know, I didn't listen. And, you know, they helped give me advice to dig me out of the hole I was in. Yeah, and no money. Just advice. Yeah. They didn't give you any money. No money, no.

Good for them. I like it. These are great parents. Yeah, they are. Very cool. How old are you? I'm turning 26 in June. Okay.

Did you learn your lesson? I did. Never a car payment again. Never again. You I'm turning 26 in June. Okay. Did you learn your lesson? I did. Never a car payment again? Never again. You're going to be a millionaire. Exactly. If you stay away from car payments, you'll be a millionaire. I will. What was your car payment? It started off around 600. Oh. Yeah. So then I ended up putting my savings down on it, kind of followed the plan in the book. And then I brought it down to 300, around 300. Okay. That's a significant portion of your take-home pay at that point.

Yes, it was really bad. And that's when you went, this is, I did dumb. Let's undo this. Yeah. I did have a good bit saved up because, you know, my parents really instilled in me that I need to save, save, save. I graduated college debt-free thanks to them following your plan. And then, so luckily i had some savings to put down on it to really drop the payments how much did you have in savings 23 000 wow okay all right very good that's so eight and a half months later we're done

yeah yeah that's very good so you actually had enough cash to pay for a decent car i did you had the savings muscle there i know but you went i'm gonna finance you just got the fever i know i talked to too many friends and i was like yeah you kind of got a great car for 20 grand in cash i know well it was also when the cars were really overvalued too so it was really a bad time for me worst time ever yeah what did you what were you driving at the time uh 2012 chevy cruze Yeah, and it just blew up on me one day. Oh. And then you went to drama mode and said, I need a new car today.

Yeah. I got to finance a $30,000 car. Yeah, I made some bad decisions. Hey, I'm proud of you. Thank you. We're giving you a hard time, but everybody's done a whole lot dumber things than you've done. Yeah. The good news is you did it at a very young age, and you learn your lesson.

You never go back, and you have parents who didn't bail you out no helicopter blades in the background here right no one no one uh you know you let you lay in your mess and clean it up and you did you became like a full-grown woman and did your stuff way to go how old are you again i'm 25 turning 26 you're smart way to go i'm so proud of you thank you very well done how's it feel to be free it feels amazing i actually had to get a new tire the other day and i wasn't freaking out because i had money to pay for it yeah like one car payment i'll buy tires yeah yeah one of the old car payments anyway yeah good for you very cool okay now that you've gotten out of debt uh you've got a 24 year old listening that all of these uh 23 year old listening 24 uh that that their stupid friends are telling them to go buy a car on car payments what when they got the money in savings to buy a 15 or 20 000 car what would you tell that person that was you back then

i would say do not go into debt why we'reating asset. Why? Because it's a waste of money. Okay. Yeah. It'll drain your bank account. And it stole your peace. Yeah. What little bit of fun it was, was all taken away by the weight, wasn't it? It was, yeah.

The weight, the heaviness, that weight. Not having to wait patiently in line, but the heaviness of it. Way to go. Wow. Very good. And the secret to getting out of debt is what? A lot of side jobs. I found a lot of side jobs doing like walking dogs, pet sitting, house sitting.

I did some freelance work in addition to my full-time, sticking to a budget and paying cash. Wow. Good for you. Well done. done well done now mom and dad are smiling now they're smiling oh yeah yeah now now it's gone it's all going good now well most people listening are going gosh i wish i figured this stuff out when i was 25 and you're feeling like i wasted all this time and there's no you got so much time left to make good decisions that will far displace the 37 year old listen that we've still not listening that we're still not convinced they're about to go get a new car they're gonna be 42 before they catch on yeah way to go good job very good job very good job hey we've got a copy of the baby steps millionaires book for you because that's your future that's where you're headed i promise you you are six hundred dollars a month you know how fast you'll be a

real fast just investing that. It's serious money. And Total Money Makeover book as well. Hand that out to one of your friends and go, don't do it. And, you know, the same stuff your parents did. But, yeah, that's okay. So it's smart, very smart. And a Financial Peace University membership.

Have you been through the class as an adult yet? I have not. Good. Take it and go through it. Okay, I will. Go through the nine lessons and uh because it'll help you accelerate your process into millionaire now because you got the basic debt stuff figured out and the budgeting and the hard work and the extra jobs part so now we just blow

through make sure you get the emergency fund in place and let's let's get that compound interest working for you at 25 years old you could be worth 10 or 15 million dollars at retirement you really could it's very very doable uh mean, because you got the right start. You got this in the financial peace, baby. You got everything going. 40 years of investing in compound interest. Yeah. It's very much possible.

So the two books and the Financial Peace University membership is the live and give bundle. That is, people buy it all the time. It's a box that comes, and you can take a book out for yourself, give a book to a friend, take financial peace, or give it to a friend. So it's live give it's for both things and so we'll give it all to you thanks for making the trip over from raleigh you're inspiring you're a wonderful young woman thank you for having me very well done and your mom and dad are over there grinning like they

know you're not going to move in your their basement yeah it's great it's amazing so very cool very cool stuff good stuff all right it's's Sarah from Raleigh, North Carolina. She paid off the car. She shouldn't have bought, and she learned a lesson in the process. $27,000 paid off in eight and a half months, including using some of her savings and walking dogs. $42,000 to $50,000 income. Count it down.

Let's hear a debt-free scream. All right. Three, two, one. I'm debt-free! Yeah! Wow! Wow! Let's hear a debt-free scream. Three, two, one. I'm debt-free! We love to see it. I think we need to do an informal survey on how many Rev4s. Just something about a Rev4, right? That's come up a lot lately a lot of calls i've taken a lot of very popular vehicle for young broke people

and it's one they go well it's worth it's a safe reliable great car i'll have a long time i'll finance it you know that's the theory the center of gravity on that thing is really high. I watched one do a flip. Oh, really? That's scary. A forward flip. Wow. Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, I'm not against RAV4s. I just am seeing them. Well, your truck will eat a RAV4. I know, but. You want to be in a monster truck. Yeah, but that's not the point. It would also eat your Tesla, but it would spit it back out. Ouch. It can't handle the battery, Dave.

It can't eat that thing. I'll gag right on the battery. That battery will last forever in a landfill somewhere. Get a little battery acid in your throat. But it's true. People, we justify car purchases all the time, especially the younger you are. Oh, we all do. We all do.

I deserve. Even old people do it. It's safe. It's reliable. I work hard hard i don't want to drive the beater around but listen freedom on the other side of that let me just tell you fifteen thousand dollars is not a beater that's not fifteen hundred is a beater yeah okay so wow but she's she's she's great she's amazing she's gonna do so good big thanks for i hope she

inspired a lot of other people out there to go, I'm going to be like her. I don't want a car payment. That's right. I mean, people who will stand up and look in the mirror and go, done, that's inspiring. That's inspiring. This is The Ramsey Show. George Campbell Ramsey personality is my co-host.

Okay, let's clear something up if you listen to the show for 10 seconds you know we hate debt and some people for some reason don't understand that I don't know why they think you need debt and credit cards to build your credit yeah well you do why would you want to build your credit so you can go into debt and why would you go into debt so you can build your credit and then why would you go into debt so you can build your credit why would you build your credit so you could go into debt because you need a good credit score to buy a house right no you do not the truth is living a debt-free lifestyle eventually you won't have any credit score and you got to find a good lender like churchill mortgage it can do what's called

manual underwriting george and whitney did that for their home and uh they have survived zero credit score and you got a uh the same rate as someone with a good credit score when you did it. So you don't have to pay more. And you need to get a real estate agent who will actually help you find a house that you can afford on a 15-year fixed rate with a good strong down payment and a payment of no more than a fourth of your take-home pay. All of that can happen at Ramsey Trusted. We'll hook you up with a good real estate agent that knows what they're doing, high octane, high protein that gets it done. I meet them all over this nation when I'm traveling.

We were just in Salt Lake City. We talked to a bunch of them, good quality people. I'm always inspired by the fact that our team has done a good job to put the quality of person they put in our ELP program. So you want to find out who's Ramsey trusted to help you with your real estate transaction? Click on that at ramseysolutions.com slash agent. Our question of the day is brought to you by Neighborly, your hub for home services when you're trying to get things done around your house.

Sometimes you need to run into a problem or a project that's more than you can handle yourself. Neighborly.com is your source for the best pros in your area to help with home improvement projects. Great company, Neighborly. Today's question comes from Zach in Alabama. He asks, I'm reading more and more about de-dollarization and countries moving away from the U.S. dollar as their basis of international trade. Will this affect the strength of the dollar,

and should I be concerned about how I'm saving and investing as a result of this okay number one zach you're spending too much time on the internet first and foremost okay because you've gotten into the conspiracy theory blanks here now what is really going on okay i, I'm concerned with how it's going. Let me see. Moving away from the U.S. dollar as their basis of international trade. Let me just tell you, China and Brazil and Russia are the three main players in this. They already don't use the U.S. dollar as their basis of international trade russia has its own currency so does china and so does brazil and there's a conversion rate between that currency

and the u.s dollar so many dollars equals so many yen okay and uh you know when you go to mexico a whole bunch of pesos equals a dollar right like 20 of them so um that's you know, when you go to Mexico, a whole bunch of pesos equals a dollar, right? Like 20 of them. So that's, you know, you've got a conversion rate from one currency to another. What these particular, the three largest countries, and they're talking about bringing in some of the oil countries as well in the Middle East, are doing is they're trying to come up with one currency that they all use. And then that would be an international trade converted back and forth to dollars, much like Europe did with the euro, which, by the way, kind of didn't work. We had this exact same crap when France did away with their own currency.

The Brexit was the big deal, whether the U.K. was going to get involved or not. And the euro was traded all over Europe. And they did away with their basic currency. And now the U.S. is just going to have, we're going to, it's a one world currency. It's the end times of revelation. And this is what comes up, right? Okay. But all it is, is these countries, if they did all agree to use one currency, it'd be

much like when Europe went to the Euro, and then that's going to exchange for the dollar back and forth. Are those countries going to be able to devalue the dollar by doing that? No. Because while they do take up a lot of landmass, they do not take up a lot of the gross domestic product of the world the united states still is the vast majority of the gross domestic product of the world still china is big russia is basically horrible and brazil is in a failed economy like times 10 and it's tiny as far as economics go

in other words like i i suspect i haven't looked it up but i suspect texas has a higher gdp than brazil as an example for real i'm not kidding i haven't looked it up but i bet you that's true look it up i know it's got a higher gdp than egypt because i looked that up one time i know it's got a higher gdp than uh sweden and about five of the other countries that were talking about natural gas crap a few years ago, because I looked that one up, and that was going to be the end of the world, and they were going to take over. But they're tiny but little countries.

And so when you put them all together, they don't have the muscle to take down the dollar. They just don't. Mathematically, it's arithmetic. You know, you can't, they just don't have it. Now, what they are going to do, if they all do put it together, it's not a de-dollarization. It's not doing away with the dollar. They've created their own currency. They're still going to have to trade with the 800-pound gorilla, which beat us.

Okay? And you're going to have to trade with us in dollars. So you're going to, whatever little currency you create over there in your little fantasy world that you live in, you're still going to have to trade it for dollars. So it's not going to take down, the dollar is not going to be worth anything and i don't know how to invest because it's going to collapse because freaking brazil brazil seriously brazil i mean when you look at the math it's humorous i mean and russia we always think of is like you know in the rocky movies

or something like they're going to come bomb the united states or whatever and all this stuff but they're when you look at their even though it's a huge landmass their economic production is pitiful it's pitiful because communism sucks and so it just doesn't create a lot of gross domestic product but you know and and so really when you get into it, that's what you're going to find. So am I worried about this? Absolutely not. Absolutely zero. Because Russia is pitiful.

China has no labor force. Their labor force is aging out because they stopped having babies legally. And so they have no young labor force coming on so about several economists are predicting that their economy is really going to be in deep doo-doo in 20 years because there's going to be nobody to work nobody do the work and so all the stuff that they're china's creating right now they're not going to have anybody to do it and so this is a lot of just fear-mongering and it gets clicks and views and so the media loves it gets a lot of just fear mongering. It gets clicks and views. And so the media loves this. It gets a lot of clicks and views.

But should you be concerned about how you're saving and investing? No. No. I wouldn't change a thing. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

Nope. Nope. Nope. I wouldn't bet against America. Long term, it's a bad move. And it's not arrogance. It's math. It's not like I'm blinded by the flag or patriotism.

That's not it. America does some stupid butt stuff sometimes but um but even when we do we do it on scale i mean it's like you know it's like come on man oh so no no no listen i'm old and i'm getting tired uh because when i first started there was like a conspiracy theory that the world was you've seen them all at this point you know there's a guy here's one this I was telling a friend of mine a friend of mine was asking me about this the other day and I said my answer to him was I read a book in 1982 called bankruptcy 1984 it was predicting the end of the U.S. economy in 1984 it was written by an economist that was brilliant named Peter Grace. He was

in charge of the Grace Commission in the Reagan administration. And they were studying the increasing national debt and that the national debt was going to cause the economy to collapse, which I think the national

debt's stupid and out of control, okay? But this guy said it's going to hockey stick and the the monetary policy is going to turn upside down we've sucked all the cash out used it for government stuff and the economy's got no cash to operate on and so it's going to collapse in 1984 apparently wrong and then another friend of mine wrote a book called coming economic earthquake didn't happen and then another friend of mine wrote a book called Coming Economic Earthquake. Didn't happen. And then another guy wrote a book, talked about the collapse of the economy. And then another guy wrote a book. Well, then we had Y2K.

There's a lot. Oh, and the Y2K was going to collapse the economy. And then when the planes hit the towers, the economy was not going to recover because 3,000 people died and two towers fell in New York City, so the entire U.S. economy was going to collapse as a result of that. And that went around for a while. And Silicon Valley Bank. The economy's going to collapse.

That tiny little bank over in San Francisco that no one knew what it was except venture capitalists has the power to bring down the entire U.S. economy. It's just asinine. At some point, it's like, okay, George, if I ever write the book on the end of the economy, would you please smack me? I'll do that. Just make sure you plan it long after your death so we can't blame you for it in person and go, na-na-na-na-boo-boo. We're wrong. You would anyway. You would.

There you go. I know he's dead, but he was stupid. No one's going to say that about you, Dan. Yes, they will. They say it while I'm alive, so probably won't. This is The Ramsey Show. Hey, it's George Camel. If you like what you heard in this episode and want to know more about getting started on the Ramsey Baby Steps,

go to RamseySolutions.com and click on the Get Started button. We'll help you figure out the best next step for you based on your specific situation. That's RamseySolutions.com and click Get Started.