What's the best financial decision you've ever made?

CaspianXI@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 226 points –
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I'd say investing in my 401k.

I'd recommend to anybody looking for sound financial advice to look into Dave Ramsey. You can watch his YouTube videos and gain all the knowledge you need free. I never went through any of his courses and do not have any association with him. I was already doing most things he recommends and it works.

Dave os okay for debt addicts to break that cycle but he's generally bad on basically everything else.

He's generally non-optimal on other things, but I certainly wouldn't call his advice straight up bad on anything. Overall most people are signficantly better off following his advice than doing average-person personal finance things - the average person is pretty terrible with money and Dave's plan is a huge step up from that.

It's kinda like calling one diet bad because it's not as optimized as some other diet, but really both diets are amazing when you compare them to eating McDonalds 3 meals a day.

What do you think is bad? Maybe I didn't see what you're saying. He tells people to invest in 401k and spread it out over multiple different segments. He recommends do not buy new vehicles. Buy used. Pay off all debt.

The general problems I've seen are the excessive aversion to debt and promotion of high cost actively managed funds. Now the first one is probably good advice for some, the second is just paying more for generally reduced diversification. That said, I'd have to dig back into his current advice to be up to date on it since I've generally been absorbing Boglehead propoganda.