Dave Ramsey offers valuable retirement advice focused on purposeful living and smart financial decisions. Key quotes include the importance of having a plan in retirement beyond just stopping work, and not cashing out 401k or IRA to pay off debt unless in extreme circumstances. Ramsey also advises against taking loans against retirement funds, emphasizing the need to keep retirement savings intact to ensure a financially secure future.

Transcript:

Dave Ramsey is a popular finance personality who’s helped millions of people get out of debt and put their lives back on financial track, so to speak.

He has great advice about saving, spending, investing, and retirement.

So Austin, I want to know from you, what are a few of his best retirement quotes that people can take away and just in a soundbite, help them live a better financial life?

Yeah, you know, Dave Ramsey has been a wonderful help to so many millions of Americans, particularly helping them get out of debt and provide wonderful financial advice. And for many Americans, the goal here is retirement.

So what does Dave Ramsey have to say about this new milestone and what people can expect and how they could live their lives in retirement?

One that I really like is “Retiring from work just to do nothing is a bad life plan.”

And I love this. And this echoes other advice that we’ve heard from Warren Buffett, where they’ve talked about retirement is not the end in and of itself. It’s a new life stage.

You need to have some sort of plan in retirement. And that plan might be to travel more or spend more time with family or live your hobbies more. But once you get to retirement, you need to have something to do because, you know, nobody wants to have worked so hard just to be idle for these last few decades of their life.

So, you know, Dave Ramsey, Warren Buffett really aligning here that when you enter retirement, you want to do it with some intentionality. You want to do something else.

Another quote that I love from Dave Ramsey is “You never cash out a 401k or IRA to pay off debt unless it’s to avoid a foreclosure or bankruptcy.”

And the reason I like this, it’s actually interesting because Dave Ramsey is Mr. Anti-debt and it feels like his first piece of advice that he always gives people is to get out of debt.

But here he’s saying you never cash out 401k or an IRA to pay off debt. And why is that?

I think this is important because these are such tax-advantaged accounts. And what Dave Ramsey is really showing us here is that you want to keep your eye on the prize. You want to keep your 401k and your IRA for retirement.

All the saving, all the getting out of debt in the first place isn’t worth anything if you get to retirement and you can’t afford it.

So I like that Dave Ramsey here is kind of going a little bit against his normal default advice of pay down debt at all costs, pay down debt first and reminding us that, hey, you need to keep these 401ks and IRAs for the whole purpose of investing, which is to retire wealthy. So don’t compromise that by cashing out these accounts here.

And then again, he actually echoes that with another quote that we’ve heard where he said, “Never take a loan against your retirement. When you pay interest against your retirement, you can cost yourself interest.”

Again, this is really wonderful advice because Dave Ramsey is Mr. Anti-debt, anti-loan. We know that. But again, he’s keeping his eye on the prize and reminding all of us that we never want to do anything today that could compromise that goal of retirement in the future.

Look, these quotes are no surprise coming from Ramsey, although most of these do focus on debt, which is his specialty.

But hey, again, he’s 100% right here, especially when you consider that most of the personal debt that investors might take on carries rates that will exceed that of inflation or either match or exceed what you could expect in a good investment year.

So these debt levels of 10%, 15%, sometimes 20% that you might see on a credit card will very quickly outstrip anything you’re going to earn in the marketplace and can nullify any gains as you get there.

So again, hey, Dave Ramsey nails it. He’s got a couple of great pieces of advice here for us to keep in mind for retirement.

Yeah. So we’ve got avoiding debt as always with Dave Ramsey, but some smart places where you could use it in extreme circumstances like foreclosure.

But also the big lesson around retirement is don’t have it as an end goal for its own sake, but be ready for a mission in retirement or some purpose. So I love it, Austin. I think those are a few great quotes that anyone could benefit from.

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