Dave Ramsey Reveals How Much Money He Made In 2025

In a recent interview with James Dumoulin of the YouTube channel School of Hard Knocks, financial commentator and investor Dave Ramsey revealed that his company made $300 million in 2025, and that overall, he accumulated as much as $850 million worth of real estate holdings. Ramsey, a former Fox Business News host, is the founder and CEO of Ramsey Solutions, a company that provides financial advice through podcasts, books, and live events on subjects such as what percentage is considered a good pay raise and when people should start taking Social Security. When asked by Dumoulin how he made his fortune, Ramsey replied that he was an entrepreneur his whole life. As for his real estate holdings, Ramsey said he obtained them by being patient, paying cash when the price was right, and not borrowing money. And his advice to want-to-be millionaires is this: Avoid debt when buying property.

"Obviously, I'm going to tell you to pay cash and move slow," Ramsey told Dumoulin. "The interesting thing about real estate is when you don't have any debt on it, is it cash flows. Like crazy cash flows... And if you get one or two properties, pretty quickly they'll throw off enough cash to buy the third one. And then you get this positive snowball working in your favor."

For that cash to truly flow, Ramsey added that an investor must "buy good properties" and "know how to manage them properly." How that would exactly generate cash flow, Ramsey didn't say in his interview with Dumoulin. However, per Moneywise, Ramsey recently said he owns about 20 houses, commercial real estate, and mutual funds.

Ramsey said much of his current real estate holdings were obtained in 2008 after the crash, when real estate was cheap. "I had a bunch of cash then and I bought a whole bunch of stuff, 15, 20 cents on the dollar, and I was buying a lot of really nice properties for nothing," he told Dumoulin.

Sometimes he bought property and figured out what to do with the land later, such as when he acquired 48 acres of land in Franklin, Tennessee for $10 million. "...We didn't have the money to do anything with it. We just bought the dirt, and we said someday we'll put a building on it when we got the money," he said. Over time, as his company made money, the Ramsey Solutions campus was built out. Today, Ramsey Solutions' campus is a six-story, 204,000-square-foot office complex, per architecture and planning firm Gresham Smith; Ramsey says it's worth about $650 million.

Some may consider Dave Ramsey's advice to pay off debt before investing to be his worst financial advice. Nevertheless, Ramsey has made avoiding debt his central mantra, which he learned the hard way while house flipping in Nashville in the 1980s. Back then, Ramsey said he flipped a vast number of houses using short-term loans until the day a bank called in a note's debt before he had the money.

"I was doing a lot of flips.... Some of them I was doing in 24 hours," Ramsey said on The Iced Coffee Hour Clips YouTube channel. But those deals were 100% financed. After his crash, Ramsey reflected on what went wrong and concluded it was using "other's people's money" and none of his own.

"There are people who intelligently ... use debt, and so there's a spectrum there but even those [investors] are taking on risk," Ramsey explained. And while it takes longer to build up a portfolio without debt, Ramsey said that paying with money on hand gives greater flexibility in a business-ending event such as the COVID-19 pandemic. "Debt equals risk, and the borrower is slave to the lender," Ramsey said.