I took the Dave Ramsey class, listened to his podcast every day for seven years, called into the show twice, and taught the class with my husband.
Then I found MMM and realized that I wasn't really a Ramsey person after all. The thing is, I have never had any debt. The people calling into his show who had paid off all their debt--I could never relate to that. Who would have debt? Why in the world would anyone do that? Has always been my mentality.
Well, if you're not a debt person (I realize now that I'm kind of a weirdo), there's never anything that addresses the OTHER side of the money equation--instead of "digging yourself out of the hole" as Ramsey calls getting out of debt, you could be amassing a giant pile with your shovel. The giant pile is sort of nebulous in the Ramsey world, and it's littered with hilariously terrible investing advice.
I'm not congratulating myself on a quirk of my personality that I now understand is rare and also not really of my own doing--upbringing and biology had more to do with it, in my opinion--but I, like most MMMers, am very disciplined with money. Like, seriously disciplined. Watching every penny like a hawk. And for people like us, Ramsey will prevent us meeting our full potential.
We use credit cards like crazy! Miles! Miles! We live in Hawaii and have to travel to see family. Putting every expense possible on the credit cards allow us to do this for free. There is ZERO temptation to overspend. We're just not that kind of people. We invest like maniacs because we expect 5%-7% return on our Vanguard index funds. We kept my husband's student loan because mathematically it is cheaper than paying it off and we find no psychological benefit in having no debt just for the sake of having no debt. (The student loan...my husband got it before he met me and it will be forgiven in four more years; it just about tripled his income, so as much as we wish that he had done some kind of impressive financial gymnastics to avoid it, it hasn't really been a bad idea, financially. And Dave would have said no way.)
So anyway, I never listen to Dave Ramsey anymore. And we are actually profoundly religious Christians. I don't hate the guy, but his investing advice is bordering on unethical, in my opinion. And most of the rest of his advice doesn't apply to the small niche group of people who are intensely rigorous about their personal finances.