50 pages • 1 hour read
Dave RamseyThe Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: Self-Help and Personal Finance
Personal finance books are popular, and because of this, the market is saturated. Therefore, Dave Ramsey tries to make The Total Money Makeover stand out from the crowd. In general, his remarks on the personal finance genre are somewhat deterring. His claim is that while many books in the genre are dazzlingly complex but uninspiring, The Total Money Makeover is plain and unoriginal in its content but inspiring in its message. He situates his book against the rest of the personal finance genre in several places. For example, in the first chapter, he says:
If you are looking for something easy or fast, you have the wrong book. If you are looking for a book to help you pass your CPA exam in the area of financial knowledge, you have the wrong book. If you are looking for a writer who has intricate academic theories (that don’t work in the real world), you’ve got the wrong guy (4-5).
Ramsey explains that his book isn’t a compendium of financial tricks or an aspiring scholarly assessment of investing, debt, or the economy. In plainer words, The Total Money Makeover is not just information, but transformation. “Personal finance is personal” (144) succinctly expresses Ramsey’s conviction that financial wellbeing comes when a person’s entire life is positively changed. The Total Money Makeover is a self-help book in disguise, a personal finance book that works across genres. This careful positioning is realized in one of the book’s dominant themes, that Financial Improvement Is Self-Improvement.
Social Context: Debt as the Norm in Middle-Class America
The intended audience of The Total Money Makeover is financially diverse; those on the verge of bankruptcy and those whose net worth exceeds six digits can all take something from the book. But geographically and culturally the audience is constrained to the United States and its capitalistic culture. When Ramsey asserts that poverty is usually the result of bad decisions, he is not thinking of impoverished populations, but of statistically average middle-class Americans, whom he says make around $2 million in their lives and yet live in constant financial distress under heavy debt.
“Normal is broke” (76, 171), Ramsey repeats throughout his book, and he represents his Total Money Makeover plan as countercultural, even revolutionary. This is seen most clearly in his attacks on debt. Debt is normal for Americans because consumption is normal for Americans, and going into debt allows for extravagant consumption: “We live in a culture that quit asking, ‘How much?’ and instead asks ‘How much down, and how much a month?’” (35). Ramsey’s ultimate criticism of debt is not economic or political, but moral: It allows the debtor to be indulgent and foolish (instant gratification and short-term thinking) and it allows the lender to oppress (greed and disregard for the suffering of the debtor). Ramsey motivates his readers throughout The Total Money Makeover with hope, but also by making them feel like courageous crusaders for a good cause: “[Y]ou take on the entire American culture by declaring war on debt. By paying off your debt, you make a statement about your stance on the issue of debt. By paying off your debt, you show that the Total Money Makeover of your heart has occurred” (132). Ramsey’s book is not a text isolated from its social context, fixated on making numbers increase for the sake of reaching bigger numbers; it is a book for real people with real, culturally informed desires and beliefs about money, a personal finance book.
Critical Context: The Total Money Makeover and Survivorship Bias
While Ramsey’s financial principles are proven and practical, they are not necessarily actionable for everyone. The claim that anyone can “liv[e] right financially” (53) discounts factors that interfere with employment such as disability, mental and behavioral health challenges, addiction, neurodiversity, experience with the justice system, systemic inequality, natural and humanmade disasters, and other uncontrollable factors. For this reason, The Total Money Makeover has the same shortcomings as other self-help books that promise clear paths to improvement: Since the method is foolproof, if one fails, it is their own fault. On one hand, the book’s many testimonies prove that ordinary people in dire circumstances can indeed use Ramsey’s seven “Baby Steps” to achieve financial freedom, but this dataset suffers from survivorship bias, in that it only accounts for those who succeed at this challenge while not accounting for those who do not. This type of selection bias is a convention of books in the self-help and financial genres because their goal is to inspire and persuade. For example, Ramsey argues that the “hundreds of thousands” of success stories of people who have applied his principles prove their validity: “[T]his stuff simply works” (xvi).
A more balanced account that shows as many failures as successes does not raise readers’ confidence in their ability to make the life changes they desire. For this reason, Ramsey emphasizes the simplicity of his financial principles: If only “meganerds” can understand and apply the principles of The Total Money Makeover, then only they will benefit from it—but Ramsey wants everyone onboard: “The exciting thing is, anyone can do this—anyone” (223). Emphasizing simplicity is a sales strategy as well as a rhetorical one. While not exactly disingenuous, the assertion that literally anyone can benefit from The Total Money Makeover does not mean that everybody does. Ramsey downplays his status as an educated, successful, wealthy individual and emphasizes that he started from humble beginnings (which is true) in another rhetorical move that makes the exception prove the rule.
