Dave Ramsey's Financial Coach Master Training FULL REVIEW

become a coach program financial coaching Feb 24, 2022

<<Read my 2023 UPDATED review here>>

In today's blog I’m going to go through a full review of Dave Ramsey’s Financial Coach Master Training as well as his ongoing membership known as the Ramsey Preferred Coach Program.

Toward the end of the blog I’ll also reveal why I ultimately chose to leave the program and why I wouldn’t recommend it for someone who is wanting to build a full time, online financial coaching business. PLUS what I recommend instead.

This blog is going to be very polarizing and you probably wont agree with some of what I say and that’s ok. I really want to take this moment to encourage you to read all the way through the review. I don’t want anything that I say to be taken out of context. This blog post is long because I have a lot to say and I want to help others make an educated decision about this program and if its right for them. DO NOT make a decision about this program until you’ve read the whole blog post.

What is included in Financial Coach Master Training?

Financial Coach Master Training is under the larger umbrella of Ramsey Solutions. The branches of this organization are HUGE. They cover “Ramsey Personalities” such as Rachel Cruze, Christy Wright, Ken Coleman, and more. These branches also cover k-12 money curriculum, the college curriculum, as well as Financial Peace University.

Another huge aspect of Ramsey Solutions are their live events like FPU live, Smart Conference, Entreleadership Summit, … I could go on and on. The point that I’m making is that this company is HUGE and has really exploded over the last decade and has helped millions of people work toward becoming debt free.

I say all this to clarify, you don’t get taught by Dave Ramsey live. I’ve had many people ask me questions like “so how was it learning right from Dave?” or “aren’t you in Dave’s inner circle because you’re an Ramsey Preferred Coach?”

There’s a few videos of Dave in the training. It’s mostly not him, and NONE of them are live. Dave Ramsey is a CEO… he’s not teaching this course.

Now that I’ve cleared that up, here’s what the program IS: 15 lessons that fall into 4 categories: Establishing your foundation, navigating financial crisis, planning for the future, and launching your business.

You also get 5 interactive coaching sessions. These coaching sessions are spread out throughout the program and it’s essentially a group coaching call with other’s going through the program to check in and see what progress you’ve made, as well as give you some practical feedback through role playing practice.

The website also states that “Once you have successfully completed the FCMT online lessons and attended the live training sessions, you will earn the designation of Ramsey Solutions Master Financial Coach. This is a designation you can use when promoting your coaching services.”

Legally, it’s not a certification because financial coaching is unregulated but they give you this official designation in place of that. (truthfully it doesn't mean anything though)

Other than that, it’s a pretty straight forward self paced course model with an upsell at the end to become an Ramsey Preferred Coach.

What is the Ramsey Preferred Coach Program?

Becoming a Ramsey Preferred Coach is the membership upsell they have at the end of FCMT. When I became an RPC in Oct 2018 the monthly fee was $79. When I left the program in May 2020 it was $150/month.

What you get when you become an RPC:

RPC Community: at the time when I left the program there was a little over 700 RPCs currently within the membership. This is a resource to ask questions and get feedback.

Monthly Development Calls: These could be on topics like mindset, hosting guest speakers, or troubleshooting common coaching problems, etc.

2 zipcodes for your listing: Every RPC gets two listings on the Dave Ramsey website so when someone is looking for a coach, they put in their contact info and are connected to 3 coaches that are closest to them.

I know people are going to ask me how many Ramsey referrals did you get each month? The answer is IT DEPENDS. When I left the program I was getting maybe 2 a month (and usually they ghosted me after putting in their info) but at other times in the program I could get around 10. It depends on how many coaches are in the program, how many coaches are in your area, and just flat our how many people are submitting their info.

What’s more important than the number of leads that came through is the quality of the leads. I found the leads to not be a good fit for coaching at all. There’s not much info on the webpage when they put their contact info in to the form and some didn’t know what they were doing, they didn’t know that it was a paid coaching program, etc. I literally had people ask to speak to Dave Ramsey himself so I don’t think it’s super well communicated what the form is when people hit submit.

Another aspect of RPC is the “Ask a Coach” feature. Inside FPU are links so that people can literally ask a nearby coach a question and the coaches are required to get back to them in 24 hours.

Benefits

Now that I’ve summarized the program itself, I would like to highlight the benefits and pros of the Financial Coach Master Training and what I found exceptionally helpful.

Within the training, Chris Hogan and Dave Ramsey have recorded some of the videos. These two are very engaging teachers! The stories that they tell and the way they explain things are very memorable and honestly they are just great communicators and you wont get bored with their videos in particular.

Second, the content is very well laid out and organized I’ll show you a short clip of what the FCMT dashboard looks like along with the lessons.

Third, there are group coaching calls to check in and make sure you get some practical feedback about how you are progressing. I think I like the IDEA of this more than how it actually played out. To be honest, they were very awkward with the role playing and there were usually about 5 of us on the call and it was hard to not compare yourself to how someone else was doing… just kinda pit us against each other from the very start.

Since that one was kinda half a pro half con I have one more highlight that I thought was above and beyond for this program and that was the progress rewards in the dashboard. At certain intervals throughout the program you would receive prizes like FPU, every dollar Plus, different Ramsey Solutions books, which was a really nice, personal touch.

Downsides

I bought FCMT in September 2018. I was not impressed by the content itself. I grew up in a family that strived to be debt free, and I was familiar with Financial Peace University and had already gone through it twice.

The program was so disappointing because it wasn’t THAT MUCH MORE than FPU, Dave Ramsey already gives away so much info for free and if you follow him at all you pretty much know where he stands on every issue and the training was summarizing that information.

I think a lot of that info is either common sense or free on the internet so I was disappointed by that. I was wanting less Dave content and more marketing/building a thriving financial coaching business. After all, Ramsey Solutions is one of the biggest companies when it comes to personal finance.

I wanted to learn from the best, I wanted to learn How did Ramsey Solutions build it’s empire and what can I learn from how they do business? They have such an opportunity here… and I was just devastated because it was NONE of that info and very little marketing or business expertise at all.

They go through the philosophy behind Donald Miller’s Building a Storybrand which I’m a huge fan of BUT I had already bought and read the book several years prior so again not new info fore me.

I was excited about learning about all the ways that Ramsey Solutions has grown and how they utilize social media to get their name out into the public eye… but there was no social media specific training. Nothing specific on Instagram, Canva, Youtube, running Facebook ads, TikTok, managing Facebook groups, or even content management systems like Later.

That was a big hole that I had to get more coaching on later and something that I was adamant about putting in my own Become a Coach program because that is VITAL to running an online business.

I was also looking forward to learning about CRM software or customer relationship management software and there was nothing on this either. They have since rolled out their own CRM within the Ramsey Preferred Coach dashboard but it's EXTREMELY limited and obviously can't be used outside of RPC which hamstrings the coach in my opinion. This is a little behind the times because there are amazing CRM softwares out there already that we could have been trained on like Dubsado, Hubspot, Google streak, even task management sofwares like Asana or Trello.

Another disappointment was the downloadable resources available to the coaches as well. THEY ARE ALL PDFS! How can I use this with a client and let them keep something that we have filled in together? how can I assign this to them and then we can come together and talk about it? how can I make this my own and tweak it to my ideal client??

They told us specifically that they didn’t want them altered or changed and I could see maybe a few being that way if it was proprietary information but it wasn’t... and it was basically all unusable because of it being in a pdf format.

SO frustrating.

The training does do some mindset and motivation work with the DISC profile. I was familiar with DISC but didn’t/don’t use it with my clients. I think there are more updated/relevant personality tests like Myers Briggs or Enneagram. I personally use enneagram with my clients because it’s more thorough and most gen z/millennials are already familiar with it.

When I joined the program in 2018 coaches within RPC were JUST starting to meet with clients online through zoom... This shocked me. I had started an online business in 2017 and this seemed very behind the times for me. All of the trainings talked about meeting with clients in person and a big point of contention within the community among the coaches was where to meet clients.

Again, very behind the times when it came to online business and the efficiency, privacy, and profitability that an online financial coaching business offered. I will say that when I left the program in May 2020 more and more people were using zoom but… again, I’ve already been doing that for 3 years at this point… that should be a a no brainer.

What was my Return on Investment with FCMT?

With FCMT I don’t really have data to give you on the ROI because I had to take more courses and pay for more coaching AFTER taking FCMT because it just wasn't relevant or cutting edge. I spent thousands of dollars after taking FCMT to get my coaching business to where I wanted it to be.

And who wants to invest $3,495 now AND thousands more later?? It’s so much harder piecing together information and relearning and unlearning and it’s all a huge headache!

This is why I created my own program for teachers-at-heart who want to become a financial coach. I saw the need here for a cutting edge, innovative financial coach program so I started working with coaches toward the end of 2019 after I had established my own business and was making 4x what I made full time teaching…. And I was doing this from home.

I’ll talk more about this at the end of the blog so keep reading and there’s also a link below to learn more.

Toxic Culture

This is something that I wanted to touch on because the coaching philosophy inside of the Ramsey Preferred Coaches community could be very toxic and I found it to be full of broken money mindsets.

You might be surprised that the industry standard for 1-1 coaching is $200-$500 a month. (this is taken from adjacent industries as well so fitness and life 1-1 coaching)

When I was an RPC, I ran a 6 month program and charged $400/month. There were several public polls to survey how much everyone was charging and I didn’t see anyone come close to that number I think the next highest was in the $300 range and everyone else was way below that.

And I don’t even think I answered those polls because the vibe was very much self sacrificing, cheaper is better, it’s selfish to charge more, etc.

But like I mentioned earlier, I took other online coaching programs and had mentors that helped me see the low ticket vs. high ticket truths. If I’m doing 1-1 coaching, its going to be very high ticket, and my coaching philosophy was already moving away from what FCMT/RPC was teaching. Building a business based on undercharging was frustrating for a lot of the coaches in the community.

My background is in education and I know what’s its like to stretch yourself thin with so many people and get paid $10/hour and I knew that that wasn’t the best way and I wasn’t interested in doing that.

And that’s also what I teach my coaches. I want them to be motivated, I want them to work with motivated clients, and I want it to be a win for EVERYONE involved.

I did an entire pricing workshop specifically for coaches because THIS is the #1 thing that DESTROYS financial coaching practices.

Coaches that charge $150/month work with sub par clients, get burnt out, their clients don’t listen/don’t see change, and they quit. I hope you’re starting to see how this is not sustainable and that there is a much better way.

Heavily Censored Coaching

So I’m about halfway through my time as an Ramsey Preferred Coach at this point and I run into another issue that I was very frustrated with.

I posted on Linkedin/Facebook/Instagram a graphic about my investment strategy. I started investing when I was relatively young and so time and low expense ratios are going to work for me.

I shared in the post what target date index funds are, some of the differences between index funds and mutual funds and that you can invest on your OWN. A lot of people I had been talking to were not aware of this, and they thought you HAD to go through an advisor so my intention was to educate and clear this up.

Now, let me start with what Smartvestors or ELPs (endorsed loval providers) are. These advisors pay a monthly fee very similarly to RPCs to be listed on Dave Ramsey’s website, and if you’re familiar with Dave’s investing philosophy, he really only supports paid for real estate and mutual funds.

This is interesting because most mutual funds have much higher expense ratios than index funds. I personally think it’s a conflict of interest that Dave promotes these funds that are run by these advisors that pay him a monthly fee.

I'm not saying that Smartvestors and ELPs are bad. I bet most of them are very helpful and I've met with some that I really respected. However, the day that I posted about index funds, I got a message from a Smartvestor that was concerned that using a Target Date Index Fund or not using an advisor conflicted with what Dave taught.

I replied that I had recently had an influx of questions and wrong assumptions when it came to this and that my goal on social media is to educate my followers about ALL options and not just what Dave recommends.

He was not super happy about that.

The lightbulb really went off for me on a separate occasion when I got a message from Jeremy who was the head of RPC that I needed to schedule a call with him because of a concerning complaint about me from a Ramsey referral.

On the call he explained that a referral had come through the Ramsey website and had been in my zipcode and had checked out my website after putting in her information.

He said that he had gotten a strong complaint that she had met with me and was angry that I didn’t follow the baby steps.

I was like WHAT. I have literally never spoken to this woman! and then I asked what she had been referring to specifically and he said he didn’t know and that’s kinda what he was asking me.

Pretty blindsided and a little annoyed I explained that I had reached out and never heard back from her (which is what happens probably 90% of the time with Ramsey referrals) and to Jeremy’s credit he was super chill and wasn’t angry through any of it.

But… it was just the fact that I felt like people were looking over my shoulder and knew that I HAD to abide by EVERYTHING that dave said to a T or they could basically snitch on me and that didn’t sit well with me at all.

I didn’t start my own business to have someone tell me what I could and could not tell my clients, or teach, or post on social media and that was a major deciding factor with my decision to leave the Ramsey Preferred Coach program.

As a result I really want to caution anyone who is thinking about going through the program, and becoming an RPC: if you don’t align with everything that Dave says on EVERY issue… you wont be able to speak openly or speak at all about those things.

As I grew into my own brand that was a dealbreaker for me.

As I mentioned before, while I was an RPC the monthly membership price jumped from $79/month to $150/month. Honestly, it was becoming harder and harder to find reasons to stay!

Overall, would I recommend the program… no. Although I am glad I went through it JUST so that I could see what a need this was in the online space and create my own Become a Coach program.

Here's what a coach says that went through my Become a Coach program:

It is 100% possible to build a thriving business where you attract BOMB clients that you absolutely LOVE working with. Coaching shouldn’t be a self sacrificing act. You shouldn’t do financial coaching out of guilt or shame. The root of a lot of this is a twisted mindset when it comes to wealth.

Here is a link to more info on my Become a Coach Program, this program is for you if you want to help change lives while working from home and make more than your day job.

Here's what another coach said about my program:

I teach you how to build an audience, how to sell out of integrity, and how to launch like a boss so that it’s a no brainer YES from your future clients. These are the exact same systems and procedures that I use in the my business that have generated over $350,000 in total revenue.

You can also find my curriculum on my website that walks you through all of the topics that we cover in my program like target market, offer definition, business finances, sales calls, lead magnet, funnels, branding, batching content, analytics… There’s not many programs out there for financial coaches and this is the ONLY one that offers ALL of those things.