By Susan Drury
Cornerstone Church in Madison is the perfect place for a revival. The sanctuary is huge, with a great sound system and stadium seating. Out front, there’s a flag rivaling that of an ambitious car dealer and a parking lot that looks like it should be attached to a mall. And it’s a good thing, too, because even an hour before the event begins, cars are flooding into the lot, directed by teams of parking attendants waving them into orderly rows.
The 4,000 souls who have come out this Saturday have come for a certain type of quasi-religious experience. They’re here to be a part of Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover event, to get a good five-hour look at the man. They certainly didn’t need to part with $29 each to hear what Ramsey has to say about personal finance—he has 15 hours every week on WWTN 99.7 to impart his ideas to thousands of Nashville listeners. They have come to see Dave Ramsey preach the gospel in person.
From the moment Ramsey gets onstage, he is clearly just as comfortable as he is behind the microphone. He is your daddy, your accountant, your minister all in one. He stalks the would-be altar, shouting out to the audience, making jokes, hawking the merchandise for sale in the lobby. He tells the crowd they are going to have fun, that they will find the financial information and motivation they came looking for. “You will not leave here,” he says, “saying, ‘I don’t understand.’ ”
And then, as he has done tens of thousands of times, he diagnoses the audience’s problem: they are shackled by their inability to plan, by their jumbo mortgages, by the loans on their SUVs and by the indulgent lifestyle reflected in their monstrous credit-card debt. He doesn’t just feel their pain. He’s there to deliver them from it.
He stands in the middle of the altar and demonstrates their plight. He puts one loop of heavy metal chain over each shoulder, one around his neck and one through the legs of his jeans. Dave Ramsey may be a radio guy, but what’s got the audience laughing is the look on his face: a full-on, doped-out, panicky expression complete with wide-open mouth. “Dude,” he says, like the toked-up slacker that he’s never been, “dude, can you get me out of this mess?”
This June will mark Ramsey’s 15th year on the air in Nashville. He is from here, has grown his media empire here, and has been around so long it seems like he is simply a local fixture. But it’s been quite a few years since Ramsey was strictly a Nashville phenomenon. Over 300 stations around the country now carry his show, and nearly 3 million listeners tune in every week. His audience has long been concentrated in midsize red-state markets like Lubbock, Sioux Falls and Paducah, but you can now catch Ramsey on the air in such Whole Foods-loving cities as Atlanta, San Francisco and Portland.
And Dave Ramsey does more than radio. He has drawn over 400,000 people to his live events. He’s written five books for adults, three of which made it to the New York Times bestseller list. He’s also written six books for children. About 340,000 families have gone through his Financial Peace University, and he is so well known in places like Grand Rapids and Louisville that he can’t go out to dinner or board a commercial flight without being harangued by his listeners.
Ramsey does have detractors—people who think he’s arrogant, who critique his financial information as overly simplistic (or wrong), who note his generally right-wing views. He has largely avoided scandal, the exception being a 2004 episode in which several Gannett papers (including The Tennessean) dropped his newspaper column because the names of letter writers were fabricated.
But even then, there was no Dave Ramsey backlash, mostly because of the way he handled it. (The staffer involved had already left, and Ramsey took responsibility and offered to refund the papers’ money.) The truth is, for a person as opinionated and exposed as Ramsey is, he attracts relatively little vitriol. Ramsey is on a different kind of crusade than most of talk radio, and while religion and to a much lesser extent politics are a part of it, his evangel is mostly a platform of commonsense penny-pinching, applicable to all.
With all his talk of making money and pleasing God, Ramsey is the consummate Nashville talk-radio host. But with his cache of listeners and his down-home persona, the media moguls of New York and Los Angeles have taken a lot of interest in him. In 2004, Lesley Stahl did 20 glowing minutes on Ramsey for 60 Minutes. Ramsey now appears every other Monday morning on The Early Show, and CBS signed Ramsey up to do a reality show. Last summer, Ramsey taped a pilot and six episodes, all of which are in TV limbo at CBS. The Dave Ramsey Project may end up as a summer replacement, or it may die a quiet TV death.
But in any case, Ramsey is easing into television. He has a development deal with Paramount and has fielded interest for his own show from ABC, PBS, NBC and FOX. While Ramsey says he has a day job, loves radio and has a million other projects, a national TV deal is likely on the horizon, one way or another. “It does feel inevitable,” says Beth Tallent, Ramsey’s PR hand.
Ramsey is in many ways unremarkable. There are thousands of personal finance experts (or “experts”). There is even a competitive industry of Christian personal finance experts. Yet there is only one guy—one bald, middle-aged Christian money guy—who’s a favorite of both 60 Minutes and The 700 Club.
In person, Dave Ramsey is gracious, if wound a little tight. His eyes sometimes wander while he’s still talking to you, like his mind has finished with the answer even as he’s completing the actual work of saying the words. He moves fast. He is so practiced at talking about his ideas and himself that it takes some time to get him out of his sound-bite-dispenser mode.
Ramsey’s office is on the first floor of his Cool Springs office building, a.k.a. Financial Peace Plaza. His monthly schedule is displayed on a huge flat screen monitor on the wall, and every day is scheduled to the hilt. Ramsey takes time so seriously that he apologizes profusely for being—no kidding—a minute-and-a-half late for a phone interview.
He hits the gym most days at 5:30 a.m., which he started doing, he says, after seeing himself on TV and on the Jumbotron; he was fatter than he had thought. He realized he needed to quit sermonizing about self-discipline if he couldn’t get the weight off. As a result, he’s lost about 30 pounds in the last year. His new physique helps him with TV, which he says makes him look “10 times fatter and 10 times uglier.”
On days when he’s in his office, he wears khakis or jeans and a button-down shirt, along with beige Crocs. In the mornings he does his regular off-air job as the CEO of The Lampo Group, his company that employs over 200 people and houses the show, the books, the classes. And then, after lunch, he does the radio show.
Fifteen minutes before the start of the show, a handful of staffers meet in the hall outside the studio. They stand under the press clippings on the wall: Ramsey with Pat Robertson, Ramsey with James Dobson, Ramsey in People magazine circa 1996 wearing a gold chain and a pinkie ring—a photo his press person calls his “used-car salesman” look. The staff has a short prayer, asking for God to guide them in their work. The studio is spotless and cold, with a Nashville skyline backdrop for television feeds and a round desk for Ramsey.
As the clock counts down to airtime, Ramsey pops into his chair, looks over the ads and promotions his staff has prepared for today’s show, and banters with his producer. The opening bars of Gerry Rafferty’s 1978 hit “Baker Street” kick in. A taped announcer comes on over the music:
It’s about life…it’s about love...it’s about the pursuit of piles of cash…it’s the show that permanently changes lives…
Just as the sax starts to soar, Ramsey jumps in:
Live from Financial Peace Plaza, it’s The Dave Ramsey Show, where debt is dumb, cash is king, and the paid-off home mortgage has replaced the BMW as the status symbol of choice....
As he speaks, the calls are already lining up: Pat from Tucson, Trudy from Houston, David from Rome, Ga.
Every couple of weeks, Ramsey gets a really amazing call, one that surprises or interests or touches everyone who listens. Like the father of a critically ill child whose finances are shaky because his wife has stayed home to care for the child. Or the woman who wants to make more money so she can escape her abusive boyfriend. But most of the callers have similar problems and questions—so similar that if you listen for a week or two, you will know almost exactly what Ramsey is going to say. I asked Ramsey if he ever feels like he cannot possibly answer the same question even one more time. He laughs.
“Yeah,” he says, “then I know I’m just tired.” He is not going to complain. The show is the lifeblood of everything he does. His audience is his customer base and his congregation. The repetition is fine with him.
Typical is Amy in Pennsylvania. She has a question about her mortgage. Can she and her husband and three kids move up to a bigger house? She goes on a bit about the details, more than he usually lets people. Often he drops his voice into the just-give-me-the-facts register to get the call moving. She and her husband have an atypical mortgage with the housing authority through a home-buying program. She’d like to sell the house to get rid of their other debts, but because of the mortgage restrictions, she’s wondering if she can do it. He then does what he does with just about every call: he gets the lurid details of their debt. They start with the $40,000 home equity loan.
“What’s the forty-thousand for?”
“Oh, you know—remodeling and...you know...different things came up…car stuff and...”
“You mean it’s a consolidation of a bunch of crap where you overspent.”
This is not a question. He is speeding her along to her confession. She gets it. “Well, yeah,” she says. As long as she gets it, they can move on. Otherwise he’d have to bludgeon her with this truth. Ramsey asks about the rest of the debt; they owe $10,000 on their car and $7,000 on credit cards. “It is rough every week,” Amy says. “We basically don’t have anything left.”
Amy is like most people who call in. They are either not making enough or spending too much, often both. That these two aspects of financial trouble are so basic doesn’t escape Ramsey. Nor does the fact that he repeats his most basic advice over and over again: make a budget, work harder to get out of debt, never take on more debt, save money, invest.
Ramsey readily acknowledges that his financial prescriptions are more or less common sense—the financial equivalent of eating less and exercising more. “It’s insane,” he says, of the notion that he’s been able to squeeze so much airtime, so many books, out of such simple principles. But it’s not exactly surprising to him, because one of his most deeply held beliefs about human nature—and certainly about our relationship with money—is that knowledge is not usually the problem. It’s not that most of us don’t know what to do, it’s that we just don’t do it. Or, as Ramsey puts it, “If I can control the idiot in the mirror, I’ll be rich and thin.”
Ramsey tells Amy that selling the house is not a solution to her problem. Her problem is her (and her husband’s) behavior. Ramsey tells Amy that they can pay off their car debt and their credit cards in a year if they live cheaply.
You’re going to have to get on that dreaded B word, the written budget. You’re going to have to get mad about this situation. I think you’re disorganized and you’re spending more than you make and that makes you normal…it doesn’t make you evil, it just makes you kinda like an American. You’d like to move up in house, but right now you’re broke.
This is harsh, but he says it in kind of a nice way. He can tell that she is ready to do what he tells her. He reserves his sneering tone for those whom he can already hear are not going to do what he tells them to do. This isn’t Amy.
“Right,” she says, “Right. Right.”
Ramsey says what he is really selling is transformation. “I’m convinced of the unstoppable potential of people when they get on fire for something,” he says. But transformation is a tricky business. It requires gearing people up for not just a tinkering of their lifestyle but a full-scale marshaling of their interest, discipline and stamina. Ramsey believes that changing your behavior with money is not complicated, but it is difficult, painful and ultimately an act of redemption. This is his sermon, one he preaches over and over and over again.
But a good preacher needs more than a message. He needs a story. He needs testimony. And if there’s one thing Dave Ramsey understands perfectly, it’s the power of personal testimony.
Ramsey is never reluctant to tell his own story. Here’s the short version: In 1986, he was 26 years old. He was on top of the world. He was married to Sharon, his college sweetheart. They had two small kids. He was buying, rehabbing and flipping residential properties in North and East Nashville. He aimed to get into commercial real estate and get very rich, and he was well on his way. He had a Jaguar, custom-made suits, the whole bit. Then it all fell apart. He declared bankruptcy and eventually climbed his way out of it.
But to understand Ramsey—to understand how much of a fall from grace this was—you’ve got to go back a bit further. Ramsey’s parents were invested in self-improvement in more than the usual American way. They were successful real estate agents and developers, and they were so into positive thinking and goal-setting that they made Dave and his sister listen to motivational tapes in the car on the way to family vacations—speakers like Dale Carnegie (“Develop success from failures”) and Zig Ziglar (“If you can dream it, then you can achieve it”).
When he was 12, Ramsey says, he asked his dad for money. “You don’t need money, son,” his dad replied. “You need a job.” Dave’s dad took him to the print shop, got some Dave’s Lawn Service cards made, and within a few days Dave was in business. Ramsey’s joke about this is, “Uhh, Dad, I just wanted an Icee.”
But this is false reluctance. Ramsey was an ambitious entrepreneur from then on. At Antioch High School, he was an enthusiastic hockey player but not an academic standout. He says he was a nerd “not in the pocket-protector sense. I was a nerd in that I was entrepreneurial and I had my own yard-cutting service and I did all the accounting and I was a detail person.” When he turned 18, Ramsey took the real estate exam and started selling real estate. All through his four years at UT-Knoxville he worked full-time; his goal was to have a Mercedes by the time he graduated from college. He was so driven that being a millionaire wasn’t his goal, it was just his assumption.
So by the time Ramsey got his finance degree, married Sharon, moved back to Nashville and got deep in the real estate business, he was firmly in the grip of the idea that he was the master of his own fate. He was also, then as now, expert at self-promotion. He writes in his book Financial Peace that he had an “unusual ability to finance everything.” He impressed bankers with his business plans, his confidence and his consistently successful deals. He had no problem securing short-term real estate loans and lines of credit.
Into this tidy world of his own creation dropped a force larger than he: the Banking Act of 1986. The Banking Act changed the rules for bank ownership, in effect causing a wave of buyouts and consolidations. The local bank where Ramsey had obtained his loans was bought, and the new owners didn’t know him and weren’t impressed. They called his loans and his lines of credit.
Suddenly, Ramsey had 90 days to unload $1.2 million of real estate. He couldn’t unload the property fast enough and he defaulted on the loans. He faced numerous foreclosures. He was sued repeatedly. It took three years for his finances to fully unwind, but at the end of it he and Sharon declared bankruptcy.
In this story of himself—which he weaves into everything he does—Ramsey leans heavily on the emotional component of that time in his life. He remembers crying in the shower. He remembers rage and thoughts of suicide, and the look of absolute terror on his wife’s face.
He does not, however, go much into the details of how he went broke. Details do not make great radio, for one thing—emotions do. But there’s another reason he doesn’t get into it: the way Ramsey went broke is not too much like the way many of his callers do. He didn’t lose his job, or have huge medical bills, or dig himself into credit card debt or gamble his money away. He was an overleveraged dealmaker, a hotshot who stretched himself too far and who got caught in a change of federal banking regulations.
Ramsey is a fundamentalist by temperament, though, and to him this is all the same. His instinct is to reduce things down to rules and absolutes, right and wrong. And to him, his situation was just like that of so many of his listeners. Sometimes, this perspective makes him sound downright cold: in the aftermath of Katrina, he referred to some financial mistakes being the kind of thing that would, to paraphrase, leave you on your roof waiting for somebody to save you. He also called those Enron employees who left all their retirement in Enron stock “stupid.” Ramsey says he is just like his listeners, just like these other vulnerable people because, ambitious as he was, his debt made him vulnerable to outside forces—forces beyond his control.
Unlike many of his listeners, however, Ramsey was spectacularly qualified to get up off the mat. The mother’s milk of the self-help movement has always been adversity (there’s not exactly a huge market for books advocating picking yourself up from the near-top), and Ramsey was exceptionally well schooled in the mantra that it is the ability to conquer failure that shows your character. The way Ramsey tells it, he was rising from the ashes of his failure before the fire had even cooled off.
After Ramsey went bankrupt in 1990, he took a few months to rage against his pain and loss. Then, he says, he decided he was going to become an expert in a different way to handle money. “I went on a quest to find out how money really works, how I could get control of it and how I could have confidence in handling it,” he writes. “I read everything I could get my hands on. I interviewed older rich people, people who made money and kept it.” He also searched the Bible and its numerous references to money. It turns out, he says, that “old rich people and God say the same things about money.” Within the year, he was offering financial counseling for a handful of families at Christ Church in Brentwood.
In 1992, Ramsey self-published his financial ideas in a book called Financial Peace. He gave most of his 1,000 copies away and sold some out of the trunk of his car. He was asked to appear on WWTN 99.7 as a guest on a show. The station was going through its own bankruptcy at the time, and they asked Ramsey if he wanted to do a show for free. Ramsey and his friend and business partner Roy Matlock decided they would do it, and together they started The Money Game, the predecessor to The Dave Ramsey Show. (Matlock split from the show in 1998.)
Radio has turned out to be a perfect medium for Ramsey. For one thing, he was a terrible one-on-one counselor. “I just get bored too easily,” he says. “I’m impatient.... It’s hard for me to listen to people go on and on...” For another, commercial talk radio is a terrific stage for the qualities that attract people to him. Ramsey’s chief attraction, like that of the political radio jocks, has always been certainty.
It’s that certainty that explains Ramsey’s allure to so many people. He tells people exactly what to do in exactly what order. Get $1,000 in an emergency fund. Cut up your cards. Make a budget. Pay off all your debt, starting with the smallest. Save three to six months of expenses. Etc. Etc. It’s transparently non-huckstery, and here’s the thing: it works. Kim Barton, from the Mt. Zion Baptist Church, says the 200-odd people from her church who have done Ramsey’s Financial Peace University program have paid off a combined $900,000 in personal debt in the last two years, and have saved an additional $200,000. Ramsey’s program isn’t easy, she says, but “it makes a lot of sense and it has a wonderful effect on your life.” Rob Ickes, a professional Dobro player who lives in Franklin, says the same thing: “It’s totally worked for us. It just makes your life so much simpler.”
Ramsey’s financial advice is rooted in his version of Christian moralism, and he cites not just the content of scripture (“the borrower is slave to the lender” and “you cannot serve two masters, God and money”) but the fire and brimstone of right and wrong. These are rules that God gave us, he says, and they work. His way of talking about money in moral terms, even when he’s not being explicitly religious, makes for better radio. It’s also one reason he connects to people who would never watch Suze Orman or CNBC.
Ramsey would certainly say he doesn’t serve at the altar of money, but he is definitely comfortable with money—and with business. Indeed, business was Ramsey’s first love, and he revels in the culture of it: the goal-setting, the accountability, the money that helps you keep score of success and failure. He is comfortable with shilling for mattresses, windows and insurance companies. It doesn’t feel complicated or dirty to him. He quotes the old bromide that “there is no ministry without a margin,” and says that business allows him to spread a message that he considers both biblical and practical. “I just have a lot of grace about it,” he says.
Ramsey gets irritated when he gets emails and letters directing him to the scripture, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24). Ramsey believes in the inerrancy of the Bible but says such calls for poverty are “doctrinal nitpicking.” Ramsey contends that the Bible says the love of money (as opposed to money itself) is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:9-10), and that God asked rich men (Moses, Solomon) to work on his behalf. “The Bible does not say that you’re supposed to be poor,” he says. “Most of the patriarchs in the Bible were wealthy. You’re managing money for God.”
Ramsey acknowledges the innumerable “toxic” examples of the love of God being used as a smokescreen for the love of money. He also distances himself from the so-called “prosperity gospel,” the idea that your faith will make you rich. “I don’t believe that,” he says. “I don’t find that true. I know a lot of people with no money and I do not doubt the depth or the reality of their faith.”
Increasingly, Ramsey talks more about the virtues and pleasures of giving money away. And while he is always up for a prolonged tirade about individual personal responsibility, he can occasionally give a good ass-whipping to some of the businesses that make a living off poverty. He’s always had it in for the credit card collectors, whom he calls “scum.” But he can sound like a Ted Kennedy liberal when he gets going on payday loan operators. “They oppress the poor,” he thunders. “They are scum-sucking bottom-feeders and it’s just wrong.”
He is, of course, not a liberal. He usually votes Republican. He thinks taxes are way too high. He calls Social Security, “Social Insecurity.” He sneers when he sees John Kerry on FOX News. Though he does have the makings of a world-class cusser and makes liberal use of the words “freakin’ ” and “flippin’,” he doesn’t actually curse. His list of things he tells his children you don’t do “no matter what” include sex before marriage and drugs—and of course, credit cards.
Many things have happened to Ramsey on his way up. He’s gotten thinner and balder and somehow younger, looking less these days like George Costanza. He’s stayed married to Sharon, raised his three children and sent his two oldest off to UT. He’s made a lot of money. He’s got himself a lake house and a fancy little silver Lexus.
Success has some predictable effects, and you could expect Ramsey—driven, aggressive and confident to begin with—to become increasingly self-satisfied, cocky and shrill. (Think Bill O’Reilly with a calculator.) These qualities have never hurt anyone in talk radio.
Instead, Ramsey’s moved in the opposite direction. He would reject the idea that he’s softening, but there’s no question that he’s letting some gray seep into his black-and-white world. Ramsey is still as certain as ever about how you should handle your money, and doubtless about a bevy of other things as well. But he has developed more of a compassionate streak on the air over the last few years. He gets a call from a woman whose son just died or a woman whose husband is beating her up or a kid whose mom is dying not because he can answer their financial questions, exactly, but because he talks to them with both authority and compassion. This mix is not as common on radio but has proven to work spectacularly well—hello, Oprah!—on television.
It may be that Ramsey has long been softer and more open in person than he sounds on the radio. Ron Doyle, who knows Ramsey through a Bible study group, says he was surprised when he met Ramsey how “open, frank and personal” he was. “On the radio, he’s the dominant person,” Doyle says, “but in the Eagles [the study group] he’s also very adept at hearing and receiving. We have political discussions...there are lots of points of view. He can be a very good listener...he welcomes challenges.”
Maybe Ramsey’s just showing more of himself on the radio, but it is also clear he has changed. For example, he once held tightly to the idea that the mainstream media was unfriendly, if not hostile, to Christians. Rush Limbaugh said it and he believed it in full. But now he knows some of the “media elite,” he’s been covered by a bunch of them, and he hasn’t found this to be true. When a producer at The Early Show asked him to do a segment on “holiday” presents rather than “Christmas” presents, he didn’t do what she wanted, but he says her motivations were good. “She just didn’t want to leave people out,” he says. “She wasn’t anti-Christian.”
Similarly, when an acquaintance forwarded him a bulk email complaining that CBS canceled Touched by an Angel because the network was anti-Christian, Ramsey had a fit. He emailed her back curtly, explaining that he had talked to CBS entertainment chief Nina Tassler himself, that she was a friend, that CBS was not anti-Christian, they were just pro-ratings: they had run Touched by an Angel for nine years and canceled it because it was 97th in the Nielsens.
This ability to see a little more gray in the world has made Ramsey more nuanced and reflective. But his appeal may be much simpler than all that. It may simply be that—not unlike Oprah—he is what he seems to be. There is no wink-and-a-nod to him. He is a salesman, but he is clear and unashamed about what he is selling, whether it’s financial prescriptions or salvation through Jesus Christ or the Dave Ramsey Deluxe Envelope System Budgeting Tool. His friend Jeff Moseley, head of INO Records, says, “There is no man behind the curtain with Dave.”
Ramsey knows this integrity is a huge asset to him. He is also acutely aware of the penalty for hypocrisy for those who cling tightly to the moral high ground. “If I get a DUI, this thing is done,” he says. “People look for a letdown...it kind of scares me into behaving,” he laughs.
In the meantime, there are plenty of calls from Judy in Kansas City and Dave in Elkhart, Ind., to keep Ramsey busy. He loves hearing from people who have turned their lives around by following his plan, and these are the callers who make Ramsey so tuned up he can hardly sit still. They usually call on Fridays, when people are encouraged to tell their stories about how they became free of debt. One day a few months ago, a woman named Sunny from Sioux Falls called. Sunny is in her 60s. She had paid off $51,000 in debt in the last few years. She makes about $39,000 per year. She drives a truck and she’s been rehabbing a house on the side. Dave is delighted with this lady, whom he calls “darling” and who sounds like a tough broad. “You’re willing to do what it takes, Sunny,” he says approvingly. She tells him she listens to him for seven hours a day in her truck. Dave tells her that’s ridiculous, but plainly he is thrilled.
“That’s what it takes, people,” Dave Ramsey says as he leans into the microphone, “a spirit that says I will not be denied.”
