Mac Dave

dev arc

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

Stop telling young ppl to “build wealth in their 20s” when they’re still trying to build a budget.

Cars cost $42,000.

Degrees cost $65,000.

Rent swallows half of their paycheck.

What exactly are they supposed to invest after paying for gas, groceries, and a shoebox apartment?

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

BOOMER: “Nobody wants to work anymore.”

ME: “The warehouse nearby pays $18/hour.”

BOOMER: “That’s decent.”

ME: “Average rent is $2,200.”

BOOMER: “Get a roommate.”

Funny how every solution asks workers to sacrifice more.

Never employers to pay more.

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

Gen Z won’t really believe this, but there was a time you could walk into a job interview with no CV, shake a hand, and start work the following week.

Now the entry checklist for a simple $25/hour role often looks like:

- A university degree
- 3+ years of experience
- 5 professional references
- Multiple interview rounds
- A personality or aptitude test

for work that used to be considered straightforward hiring.

What’s usually missing from this conversation is the uncomfortable truth: the bar didn’t just rise because companies got “picky” it rose because applicant volume exploded, automation filtered out humans early, and employers shifted risk onto candidates. The result is a system that looks like merit on paper, but often functions like gatekeeping dressed up as process.

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

Caller: “My husband and I earn $95,000 a year, and we bought a $950,000 house.”

“My in laws put up $350,000 for the down payment, but there was a catch.”

“When the house is eventually sold, they get their $350,000 back plus a percentage of any profit.”

Dave Ramsey: “What a complete mess.”

“You bought a house you couldn’t afford.”

“You never should have signed up for that deal.”

Caller: “I just want to know how much financial input my in laws should have going forward…”

Dave Ramsey: “That question is years too late. They don’t just have input they have ownership. Sell the house, untangle the arrangement, and move on.”

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

Just chatted with a guy who has 3 kids, a great marriage, earns $420k before bonuses, runs 8 miles every morning, owns a 5-bedroom home in the West Village, just bought a sailboat, and is genuinely funny, thoughtful, and kind.

He still can’t find a girlfriend.

Modern dating is absolutely broken.

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

CALLER: “Our 27-year-old son is out of work and carrying about $14,000 in debt. We’ve got $165,000 sitting in an account under his name, but we won’t let him touch it because he’s terrible with money.”

DAVE: “Whose account is it?”

CALLER: “Legally? It belongs to him.”

DAVE: “Then you’re controlling money that isn’t yours. You can’t claim ownership when it’s convenient and deny it when it’s not. That kind of arrangement can unravel fast—and one legal challenge could put the entire situation under a microscope.”

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

There’s a 27 year old right now earning $85,000 a year.

Drives a seven year old car. Splits rent with a roommate. Invests $2,200 every month. Never talks about money online.

Most people assume they’re struggling to keep up.

What nobody sees is that in 15 years they’ll likely have over $700,000 quietly compounding in the background while their friends are still making payments on cars, vacations, and lifestyles they can’t actually afford.

No flashy purchases. No validation from strangers.

Just patience, discipline, and time.

That 27 year old is already ahead.

Agree or disagree?

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

A Walmart cashier told me she’s worked there for 8 years and has never once been scheduled for full time hours.

Always 34. Never 35. Never 40.

$17 an hour. About $2,400 a month before taxes.

Her rent is $1,650.

No guaranteed benefits. No paid sick leave. No affordable health coverage.

She showed up to work with bronchitis this winter because calling out meant falling behind on bills.

Walmart made over $15 billion in profit last year.

She can’t afford to get sick.

Somewhere along the way, we decided that was normal.

I think about that every time the self checkout screen asks if I’d like to round up for charity.

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

A friend of mine buys cars from CarMax for around $11,500.

Then flips them to Carvana for $15,200.

One deal a day.

About an hour of actual work.

That adds up to roughly $110,000 a month in gross profit potential.

No boss.

No office.

No fancy degree.

Just arbitrage.

The opportunity was never in the cars.

It was in the gap between what one company was willing to sell for and what another was willing to pay.

He spotted the spread and acted on it.

Most people drive past CarMax every day on their way to a job they can’t stand, never realizing that sometimes the biggest opportunities are hiding in plain sight.

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

CALLER: I make $165,000 a year but somehow I’m still living paycheck to paycheck.

DAVE RAMSEY: Show me your budget.

CALLER:

• $3,400 rent
• $1,150 luxury SUV payment
• $540 gym memberships and subscriptions
• $1,100 dining out and takeout
• $850 credit card payments

DAVE RAMSEY: Your income isn’t the problem. You built an expensive lifestyle before building financial security.

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

Starting a family in 2001:

• Get married young
• Buy a starter home
• One income could cover most of the bills

Starting a family in 2013:

• Get married
• Rent for a few years
• Two incomes made life a lot easier

Starting a family in 2026:

• Get married when you can afford the wedding
• Rent indefinitely
• Two incomes are required
• Childcare costs more than a mortgage payment used to
• Hope neither of you gets laid off
• Spend your evenings comparing grocery prices across three different stores

People keep calling it a change in priorities.

A lot of it is just a change in math.

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

My uncle told me to just “get into real estate” at Thanksgiving.

He bought his first property in 1989 for $62,000.

That same property is worth about $1.3 million today.

He didn’t renovate it.
He didn’t flip it.
He didn’t build a real estate empire.

He just held it long enough for the market to do the heavy lifting.

I make $74,000 a year.

A typical down payment in my city is around $95,000.

He said, “You should really start investing in property.”

I smiled and said, “Yeah, maybe.”

I have not started investing in property.

Mostly because step one appears to be owning $95,000.

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

Boomers: “Why don’t Millennials have any generational wealth to pass down?”

Also Boomers: Spent decades voting against unions, backing pension cuts, and supporting policies that shifted trillions of dollars upward while wages barely kept pace with the cost of living.

Also Boomers: “You kids just don’t save like we did.”

Also also Boomers: “Have you tried making a budget?”

Right.

Because the problem clearly isn’t housing prices, healthcare costs, student debt, or stagnant wages.

It’s that someone buying $4 coffee a few times a week hasn’t unlocked the secret to building wealth in an economy where assets rose faster than paychecks for decades.

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

The cruelest part of what happened to Gen Z isn’t the debt.

It isn’t the impossible housing market, the rising cost of living, or the endless competition for decent jobs.

It’s that they inherited all of those problems while being told the same playbook would still work.

Go to college.
Get a degree.
Work hard.
Buy a house.
Save for retirement.

Those weren’t bad ideas.

They were instructions written for an economy that no longer exists.

An economy where tuition was affordable, wages kept pace with costs, and a single income could realistically build a stable future.

Yet the people still handing out that advice often built their lives under conditions that no longer exist today.

They followed a map that led somewhere.

Gen Z was handed the same map after the roads had already changed.

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

Caller: “Our two sons just finished college. We helped them through school with student loans. We still owe about $210,000 on our mortgage, and I’ve got roughly $275,000 sitting in a brokerage account. My wife and I are wondering if we should cash it out, wipe out the student loans, and throw the rest at the house.”

Dave Ramsey: “How much student loan debt are we talking about?”

Caller: “About $145,000 between the two of them.”

Dave Ramsey: “And you’ve got $275,000 invested?”

Caller: “That’s right.”

Dave Ramsey: “Then I’d sell those investments tomorrow.”

Dave Ramsey: “You can’t tell me you’ve got a quarter-million dollars invested while carrying $145,000 in debt and call that a winning strategy.”

Caller: “So you’d pay off the loans immediately?”

Dave Ramsey: “Without hesitation. Then the only debt left is the mortgage.”

Dave Ramsey: “After that, rebuild your savings, fully fund your emergency reserve, and start attacking the house. Too many people try to play the spread borrowing money at one rate while hoping their investments outperform it. On paper it sounds smart. In real life, eliminating debt gives you certainty, flexibility, and peace of mind.”

The math might work in a spreadsheet.

But being debt free works in real life.

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

Five years into my mortgage, I finally sat down and looked at the numbers.

I’ve paid almost $118,000.

My loan balance dropped by just $38,000.

That means roughly $80,000 went to interest, taxes, and insurance.

Money I’ll never get back.
Money that built almost no equity.
Money that disappeared the second I paid it.

Nobody explained that part when I signed.

They showed me the house.

They showed me the neighborhood.

They showed me the monthly payment.

They showed me where to initial.

Nobody looked me in the eye and said:

“By the way, for the first several years, the bank gets most of your payment.”

Because that’s how the system works.

You’re not really buying a house at first.

You’re renting money from a bank while slowly earning ownership of the place you’re already living in.

The bank gets paid first.

Every month.

Year after year.

And it takes more than a decade before a larger share of your payment finally starts going toward principal instead of interest.

More than a decade.

Read that again.

More than a decade.

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

How am I supposed to pay:

• $1,850 rent
• $310 electricity
• $120 water
• $240 internet
• $165 car insurance

Every single month…

on less than $22 an hour?

By the time the bills are paid, the paycheck is already gone.

And somehow the advice is still:

“Budget better.”

Budget what exactly?

The $17 left after rent, utilities, insurance, groceries, gas, and taxes?

At some point, this stops being a budgeting problem and starts being a math problem.

[D A V E @0xDavecryps]

Boomers: “Just negotiate a higher salary. That’s what we did.”

Also Boomers: “I can’t believe how much they’re taking out of my Social Security check.”

Sir.

You negotiated your pay in an economy where employers fought to keep workers.

Pensions.
Affordable housing.
Health benefits.
Actual job security.

I’m negotiating in an economy where a $52,000 job gets 700 applications in three days, and the hiring manager picks whoever is willing to accept the lowest offer.

And the Social Security you’re upset about?

I’ve been paying into it since my first paycheck.

For a retirement age that keeps moving further into the future.

For benefits that politicians constantly argue about cutting.

For a system I’m repeatedly told may not be there when I need it.

The salary negotiation advice that worked in 1989 doesn’t work in a labor market where workers are treated like interchangeable parts and loyalty is rewarded with layoffs.

But sure.

I’ll just ask for more.

Apparently that’s the magic solution.