Respectfully, Dave Ramsey Is Wrong, and Americans Deserve Better

Dave Ramsey said:

“They’re just awful”

about Millennials and Gen Z living with their parents and followed it up with the claim that they

“can’t buy a house because they don’t work.”

Respectfully, that’s nonsense. And more importantly, it’s dangerous.

Dave Ramsey is wrong (and dishonest). When someone with a platform as large as Ramsey’s chooses willful ignorance over honest context, he’s not offering financial advice, he’s performing nostalgia. Advice like that doesn’t empower younger generations. It shames them for problems they didn’t create, offers solutions that no longer apply, and pretends that if everyone just tried a little harder, they’d be fine.

Ramsey built his brand on tough love and common-sense discipline: work hard, get out of debt, save your money, avoid the traps. On the surface, none of that is wrong. The problem is that it’s incomplete and when delivered with contempt, it’s completely useless.

Let’s talk numbers, not feelings.

In 1980, the average cost of a home was $47,200, or about 7 years of full-time minimum wage work. In 2025, it’s $410,000, closer to 27 years of full-time minimum wage work. And that's before we get into interest rates, down payments, or insurance.

In 1980, a four-year college education including room and board could cost $9,438 total, around 1.4 years of minimum wage labor. Today, a degree averages over $108,000, and that doesn’t even include food, transportation, books, or medical expenses. For young people today, just stepping onto the starting line of adulthood often means carrying a debt load that would have seemed unthinkable in Ramsey’s early years.

From November 2020 to September 2024, nominal wages rose by 19.2%, but consumer prices rose 19.6%. That means for all the headlines about wage increases, real purchasing power actually fell.

So no, Mr. Ramsey, it’s not that young people don’t want to work. It’s that the math doesn't work.

I have no doubt Ramsey helped a generation of Americans get serious about their money. He brought discipline to a country swimming in debt. But he comes from a different era, and his refusal to evolve with the economy is exactly why so many people are tuning him out.

Here’s something no one seems to be saying: People grow. They change. They learn.

Many Millennials and Gen Zers made financial decisions in their teens and early twenties with little guidance, bad options, and no room for mistakes. Today, many are trying to learn, trying to recover, trying to build something better. That deserves real advice not recycled scorn from someone clinging to 1980s economics.

This generation isn’t broken. They’re not lazy. They’re operating in a reality that has changed faster than the rules they were told to follow.

They are paying more for less opportunity. They’re working multiple jobs and still falling short of the basics: housing, healthcare, food, transportation. And after all that, they’re told their real problem is Netflix and breakfast choices.

It’s out of touch. It’s tired. And frankly, it’s lazy.

If financial education is going to be worth anything today, it has to be grounded in truth. It has to reflect the realities people are actually living in and not the ones some of us wish were still true.

What younger generations need isn’t another angry voice yelling at them to budget harder. They need guidance that respects where they are, not where someone else was forty years ago. They need strategies that fit the economy they're actually in and not one built on cheap tuition and $40,000 houses.

Dave Ramsey is wrong. He may still be chasing applause from his generation. But the rest of us? We’re chasing solutions. And it’s time the conversation caught up.