The Oregon Faith Report - Faith News from Oregon

November 10, 2008

By Dale Fulton,

Dave Ramsey spoke to the Rose Garden in Portland on November 1st.  His faith based advice on financial stewardship runs counter to culture but yet is immensely popular.  ‘If you live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.  In America, debt is normal… dare to be weird!”  These are the tag lines that embody the thrust of Dave Ramsey’s philosophical tenets at the foundation of his financial advice.  He is an intelligent man who is grounded in the Christian faith and, like everyone else, has made mistakes in his life.  He suffered through some profound financial hardship, but happily he found his faith in the midst of it.  Applying Biblical principles and hard work, he was able to dig back out of his distressed situation and rebuild his financial life on a solid debt free foundation.  Today, he shares his wisdom with millions through his nationally syndicated talk show and newspaper column.

He started from modest beginnings and as an ambitious young man decided that he was going to make his fortune in the buying and trading of real estate.  By the time he was 24, he had a portfolio valued at $4 million and a net worth of $1 million.  That simply meant, he says, that he was $3 million in debt.  This was in the mid 1980’s, when the U.S. experienced a severe economic down turn.  The financial crisis caused the banks to call in Ramsey’s mortgage contracts which caused him to go bankrupt.  He was dead broke at the age of thirty.

Through all of this he was forced to reevaluate his strategies and seek a better way of managing his finances.  He came to the realization that he had to forever eliminate debt from his life and live without credit.  As a result, he developed a system of techniques and disciplines  that have enabled him to secure his financial position.

Dave Ramsey contradicts the popular notion that credit is the thing that greases the wheels of our economy and points to the crisis in the our nation’s housing market and the world economy as proof of what he says.   He takes a fundamental approach to finances.  He does not believe in credit or borrowing, and insists that people should only buy what they can afford.  He is devoted to sharing this message with everyone who will listen and has built an entire organization to do it.  His company’s mission statement proclaims:

The Lampo Group, Inc. is providing Biblically based common sense education and empowerment which gives HOPE to everyone from the financially secure to the financially distressed.

You can listen to his call-in show daily on 1190 KEX or visit his website at daveramsey.com