How Dave Ramsey Becomes a Billionnaire: The interesting intersection of Cloud Technology & Personal Finance

Many corporations and even some medium-sized businesses have seen the incredible benefits of cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), and machine learning. The accounting departments in companies have seen the incredible benefit to having real-time journal entry transaction coding reviews, automated bank reconciliation, and auto-population of financial statements. A future wave of this will be incredibly beneficial to the average consumer and will help make Dave Ramsey a multi-billionaire.

First, most are well-aware of the statistics on personal finance. 78% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. Many Americans have “too much month left at the end of their money.” It’s also true that the vast majority of Americans don’t have sufficient funds saved for retirement. Why is this the case?

There are primarily three reasons: education, focus, and discipline. Banks, credit card companies, car companies and others have spent trillions of dollars on advertising trying to convince Americans that we “deserve” a really nice house, a new car, a boat, three credit cards, multiple yearly vacations, and Starbucks every morning. What most Americans have not learned in any formal way is personal finance and how it really works. Since many don’t really understand how personal finance works, they fail to focus on the correct activities that would help them to become “financially fit.” Focusing and executing on those activities over a long period of time is the discipline factor. 

So how does cloud computing, AI, and machine learning help fix that? There are a host of “personal budgeting tools” available in the marketplace but they are 100% reliant on the person to do the configuration, setup, maintenance, etc. Since there is effort involved, and due to the lack of knowledge about how important it is to focus on it, for many never leverage the tools. 

Imagine having a bot that simply sits on your phone, monitors your debit card, your bank account, and builds you your own monthly Profit & Loss statement, Cash Flow statement, and statement of Net Worth. Then it compares your historical statements to your current statements so you can see trends over time.

It can prompt you with several questions, for example, what do you want to focus on this month or this year, and then it can be a “mother hen” to help you stay on track. Imagine if the bot calculates you will have a $100 shortfall when you need to pay your rent in two weeks and so it says, we can pay the rent on April 30th if we cancel the Starbucks $10/day spent at the Starbucks for the next two weeks?

Before you make any purchase, you can review your phone, and it will not only give you a real-time cash balance in your account, but also show you the “projected” cash balance at the end of the month. If the number is $30 and you want to spend $25 on something, go ahead. However, if the number is $5, and you want to spend $10, then you are able to immediately check yourself before you buy it and make sure you either really need it, or have a plan where you can fill in the cash shortfall elsewhere.

Americans pay on average $329 in bank fees and about $8,000 on interest (including mortgages, cars, credit cards, and student loans) each year. If Dave Ramsey’s team develops this technology that saves the average American 30% of that number, say $2,500, and only costs the consumer $100/year in a Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) billing model, assuming 10 million households, Dave Ramsey makes $1 Billion dollars per year. Even if the technology only saves $1,000/year, it is still a 10-to-1 return-on-investment.