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Originally Posted by mtgordon
And yet there are tons of people that are in huge amounts of people in debt and not making good financial decisions. Why do you think that is? My guess is it's because they've never put any effort into learning which seems a lot like laziness/apathy to me.
I'm sure you're right though. It has nothing to do with motivation. They should just go with the most EV plan and stick to it. I'm sure it will take for everyone.
People have limited amount of time in the and do not want to put effort into being experts at everything. You do not have to be lazy to neglect certain aspects of life. You simply need to be more focused on other areas. Or simply you need to not even realize you are making a mistake or that better options are even available. There are thousands of things you do in your life suboptimally because the effort it takes to improve isn't worth it (as far as you know). When you are raised with a mentality of spending every dime in your pocket, you don't even realize there's another way. Personal finance isn't something that people tend to talk to in great detail with others as well. Plus, it's not something that is taught very well in schools and most people do not have the intellectual curiosity to seek it out. This has nothing to do with laziness. It has to do with prioritization.
I absolutely think this has to do with motivation. Motivation and having resources on learning. Most people are not good self-learners. That has nothing to do with motivation or apathy. Motivation to improve yourself combined with the resources to know what to do is a huge factor. Which is why people who follow Ramsey tend to do well- they are sufficiently motivated (if they weren't, they wouldn't seek it out or be attracted to it), and it gives them some tools (even if they are flawed). That puts them in a better spot than they were before. I'm not denying any of that.
Continued motivation is the other factor and it's very hard to achieve this on your own. Fitness is a great example of where it's super easy on New Years to get motivated to lose weight, but a lot of plans burn you out and you stop caring, and eventually fall off the wagon. This is why some of the best fitness plans are not the most optimal ones, but the ones that make it the easiest to keep doing them. They need to have some value in themselves, but if you want to measure a fitness program's successfulness, measuring how many people stick with it and are better off after a year or 5 years, you'll see that how enjoyable it is and how convenient it is for people is a far better factor than the technical aspects of it.
And for that, Ramsey seems to do well. He keeps people motivated by changing them psychologically in many ways, turning their addiction to debt into an addiction in hating debt. And I'll give him credit for that, it will help out a lot of people. But that does not mean he is immune from criticism, or that his plan could not be improved (even with the same target audience!). There are certain aspects that are extremely helpful. There are certain aspects he addresses that not many do (the structure and rigidity of it can help a lot of people with motivation, just like having specific workout plans and measurements along the way can keep people motivated to keep going to the gym). But there are some very obvious mistakes in it that make it seem silly to people who actually can understand the logic behind it rather than the emotions.
To put it another way, say there was a fitness plan that was super popular and people loved it and stuck with it a lot. But it had some clearly inferior techniques in it that could be improved without sacrificing the amount people like it or how it motivates people. It would be really dumb not to correct those holes. For example, say there was a fitness program where they used three pieces of equipment every time. But say it was actually harmful to use one of them, and you could replace it with a different one that was just as easy for people to access and just as enjoyable to use. It's a no-brainer to fix that.
Of course, such a plan might also be completely foolish for a lot of people who are already motivated to work out but just don't know what to do. An athlete training for a sport might have enough motivation to get better at his sport, he would be able to do a more technically correct workout, even if it was less fun. A bodybuilder would take an even different approach.
The same thing goes with personal finance. Different approaches for different people. But even when accounting for that, some methods are better than others and almost all can be improved upon. Ramsey has some very obvious holes for very dubious reasons that may work for some but in no way work for all, and may even be inferior for almost all people.