Emily learned how deep the hole was when a credit card was declined at a grocery store. She went to check the bank account and found the rest.
Her husband, she told Dave Ramsey on The Ramsey Show, had followed “the Robert Kiyosaki way” and kept telling her, “you get to get into debt to make money.” Three years on, the family owes just under $1 million. The 401(k) is drained. Two mortgages sit on the home, which has no equity left. They have four children, aged 13, 12, 10 and 6, and the household now runs on her $25-an-hour, 30-hour-a-week job and his brand-new base pay of $21 an hour.
The mechanics of the hole
Here is the catch with the leverage pitch. Borrowed dollars carry a fixed obligation whether or not the thing they bought earns anything. When the asset underperforms, the debt does not shrink to match. Emily’s vending machine business is the textbook case.
Even a clean exit leaves a gap. Selling both the business and the home would still leave about $350,000 in unsecured debt, accruing interest at 21% APR, on a household income below six figures.
Ramsey steered Emily away from Chapter 7 bankruptcy. His case was that unsecured debt can often be negotiated down to pennies on the dollar, without a decade-long credit scar.
Ramsey’s rule, two days earlier
On the September 2 episode, two days before Emily’s call, Ramsey had stated the opposite of her husband’s creed as an absolute: “If the only way I can do X or Y or Z is if I have to borrow money, I can’t do it. I don’t have enough money. Everyone in the world has to eventually go: I can’t afford that.”
Kiyosaki himself has since become a headline figure. On June 1, 2026, he said on the “Get Rich Education” podcast that he is tied to roughly $1.2 billion in debt, most of it linked to a real estate portfolio of about 1,500 apartment units held with investment partners. His former wife and longtime business partner, Kim Kiyosaki, told Vanity Fair in August 2026 that the figure is partnership-level debt spread across a group of investors, not one bill on his desk.
The distinction drew scrutiny anyway. On the same podcast Kiyosaki conceded: “I teach people how to use debt, and Dave Ramsey says don’t use debt. Most people should listen to Dave Ramsey.”
