7 Steps That Can Make You a Millionaire in 12 Years!

And what's become famous around Ramsey was because many, many years ago, decades ago, people came to me and they said, what do you do first? Do you do retirement first? Or do I do kids college first? That's very important. Do I have an emergency fund first? That's really important. I need to get rid of the stupid credit card debt. It's 22%. That's very important. Where do I start? And what we did at the time many years ago was we laid it out and then we adjusted it a couple of times in the early days. We only adjusted it in 25 years, but we laid out what to do first, what to do second. And we call them the baby steps. Cause if you eat an, if you want to eat an elephant, you do it a bite at a time. So if you want to get control of your money, you do it a step at a time, baby steps, baby step one is you save a thousand dollars quickly, little starter emergency fund. Once you've done that. And some of you just have that money. You just name it that just now. No, you've already did baby step one. You just reset that money in your mind over to the side. That's maybe step one. Maybe step two is you pay off all of your debt, except your home using the debt snowball. The debt snowball is where you list your debt, smallest to largest pay minimum payments on everything, but the little one, you attack the little one with a vengeance. You're not going on vacation. You're in debt. You're broke. You're not going out to eat. You're in debt. You're broke. You work all the time. You're in debt. You're broke. There's a great place to go when you're broke to work. Okay. This is what you do. And you bust your butt and it's scorched earth. No lifestyle, no, nothing. You sell so much stuff. The kids think they're next. You name the dog eBay and the cat Craig's list. Everything's going out the door. We're getting this mess cleaned up. We're sick and tired of being sick and tired. People that do it with that intensity, get out of debt in an average of about 18 to 24 months. Now average means that some of you have half a million dollars of student loan debt. Like Jay did took her seven years. Okay. And then average means some of you have $5,000 in debt and $10,000 in your bank account. When you heard me rant and you just went and paid it off. Now your debt free took you 13 seconds. Okay. But the average is 18 to 24 months. Then when you finish that with the same level of intensity, you continue. We call this gazelle intensity, the gazelle running from the cheetah for its life. When you get out of debt, you finish baby step three with the gazelle intensity. And that's three to six months of expenses. Then we turn off the intensity and we move from intensity to intentionality. And we do baby steps four, five, and six simultaneously. That's 15% of your income going into retirement. That's what's going to make you a baby steps millionaire in about 12 years following this plan. You're going to put money into kids college. If that's applicable and you didn't sell them off number baby step six is any other money we can find in the budget. We're going to throw at the house and the average person paying off their house following these baby steps is doing it. We've been doing this for 30 years is doing it in about 10 and about 10.2 years in our baby steps, millionaires study. We did have millionaires. Some of them had followed our stuff. Some of them they were doing it in about 11 years. Wow. So, but the point is there's an intensity for that first three steps to get out of debt and get your emergency fund in place. Cause until you do that, you're broke and you're walking around in a culture strutting around. Like you've got some money, you got no money, shut up. You're broke. Quit acting like you're something you're broke. And this putting on the crap has got to stop. And Jade, you've been hearing this thing baby step two where people are struggling with motivation. Yeah. You know, I get it all the time, Dave, they go in my, in my DMs, direct message, even in our financial peace university class, I get the same question, which is Jade, you guys did this for seven and a half to eight years. How do you stay motivated? And you know, at first Dave, I would kind of give like, like the nice answer, like, well, you gotta, you gotta connect to your why and all of this. And I really got to thinking about it. I was talking to Sam about it and the more people ask me, it kind of frustrates me because there's gotta be no other option. Y'all don't get Jade frustrated. When Sam and I were getting out of debt, there was no option to not do it. It's a must. I have to, my life will never be what I need it to be, what it should be, what God wants it to be. If I don't do this. So, so this idea that, well, maybe I'll do it and maybe I won't, that cannot exist. It's not an intellectual exercise. It's not an exercise. You've got to, it's an emotional, visceral decision. Yes, I must. It's got to, and nobody can do that for you. You know, you listen to this show or you come to a live event and we'll light that match for you, but you've got to like stoke your own flame. My buddy Lucas did a talk about this. He said, you could be a spark or you can be a flame and you can tell the difference by when the wind blows. If you're a spark, the wind blows, immediately you go out just like that. But if you're a flame, when the wind blows, you get, you get bigger, you get more aggressive, you get larger and more fierce. And, and if you're talking to me and you're asking me, how can I stay more motivated? I'm sorry to tell you, you're a spark. You're just, you're just a little fluttering spark and you've got to do what it takes. She just called you people names. She called you a little spark. You're just a little wimpy spark. And the moment the wind blows, man, the minute you have to dip into your emergency fund, the minute something happens, you're ready to go. Well, I don't know if I want to do it. I don't know if it's worth it. That Ramsey stuff. It doesn't work. What do you mean? What do you mean? You don't know if it's worth it to you. Do you want to change your life or not? It's that simple. Motivate. If you're waiting to feel motivated, you will be waiting forever because that is completely mythological. Motivation is not an external substance. No, it doesn't come from out there to take you in here. Yeah. And you know, one of the things I've kind of run into this over the years of me teaching it to the same frustration, Blake Thompson, our old producer, he now runs all of Ramsey networks. Yeah. He used to do these comedy bits and he created this comedy bit that we would play on the air called that's an all. And it was a pill you could take that would get you out of debt. If you just took this pill, you'd be out of debt. And that's what everybody's looking for. They're looking for a magic pill. You know, I was wandering in the vitamin aisle and I ran into my, one of my pastor friends who's kind of loud and he yells down the aisle, Ramsey, there's no pill on there. It's going to help you. You got to eat less. So good. It's so true. Y'all want the magic pill. That's going to magically make this easy. It ain't going to be easy. It doesn't exist. Let me tell you what easy is. Easy is when you finish. Easy is when you finish. It gets easier. But let me tell you this. I mean, there's other side of that where people go, man, this is hard, right? Paying off debt is hard. Working is hard. But can I just say it's also what is also hard is not being able to afford groceries, man. That's hard. That's hard. When you look up and you don't have the money to take care of your kids, you don't have the money to spend the gas to go visit a loved one in the hospital. I'm talking about myself. That that was hard. That's hard to stomach because that reflects back on you and you go, oh my God, I've been an idiot with money. And in comparison, just saying in comparison, it's easier to sacrifice to win so that you don't have to endure those other things and live like no one else so that later you can live and give like no one else. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, the Bible says, but it yields a harvest of righteousness. Listen, you're going to pay a price. You're going to pay a price. You're going to pay a price of mediocrity throughout the whole scope of your life and your life's going to suck perpetually. Yeah. Cause the time's going to pass regardless. We're still waiting on the government to fix your life. That's humorous. And you know, so you're either going to live a slice of mediocrity cause you have, but do stuff, or you're going to pay a price for a short period of time. And you're going to light yourself on fire and be a flame, not a spark. I love that. It's a good line. I like this. And a lot of you are going to look up, you know, Dave said the stats on getting through baby step two, most people who get through baby step one through three, it's two and a half to three years. That sounds a lot like a lot when you just say it, but man, that is just a drop in the bucket over time. And some of you who've been kicking your student loan can down the road for three years, you could have been done and finished. You could have been done. And let me tell you something. When this thing kicks back up, you are going to regret it. Start today. Yeah. Start today. So where does it come from? It comes in believing the best way to live your life is free and it's worth paying the price to get there. That'll give you the motivation. I want to change my family tree. I want to look in my kids' eyes and have a different set of values. A godly man leaves an inheritance to his children's children. Amen.